October 23

Labor shortage or employers not wanting to pay? I thought it hypocritical when all of the powers that be hailed as heroes the medical personnel, the retail clerks and such who showed up to work throughout the pandemic but have now decried the lazy wretches who don't want to work. When I was young I absorbed the message "If you work hard you will succeed." After years of working and succeeding--sort of--I realized the old strategy wasn't working. But I didn't abandon it; I simply shifted the goals. Later I had to recognize that working hard simply let me stay in place and a tenuous place it was. Over the last 20 years the old mantra completely broke down. Instead of working hard to make a living we are working ourselves to death without ever making a living. A large number of us are experiencing the industrial economy's version of a subsistence economy and it isn't at all satisfying.

David Kaiser asks "does democracy depend on literacy?" He makes an interesting point about the inability of modern Americans to  engage in real intelligible debate on complex issues. In a world of sound bites and tweets who spends much time in critical reading on our modern problems. Using that term, "critical," and I remember a piece on the controversy over "critical race theory" which noted that many people hear the word and think it is a negative evaluation of our institutions and people. One of the people interviewed accused the reporter of "telling lies about my ancestry." 

Charles Hugh Smith just coined a new mash-up word: kleptocrapocracy. It goes along nicely with Yves Smith's notion of "crapification." In other words, what isn't stolen is going to shit rapidly.