The pond was startled to read the other day that More than one in ten Amazon employees in Ohio is on food stamps ...
It wasn't just Amazon ...
The Policy Matters Ohio study, compiled from Ohio Department of Job and Family Services data, ranks the state’s employers with the most employees in families that receive SNAP benefits. Fast food restaurants and discount stores dominate the list’s top spots. Walmart leads the rankings, with 11,560 employees in households dependent on food assistance.
But Amazon is one of the fastest-risers through the ranks. As of the August 2017 data, Amazon ranked nineteenth in the state, with 1,430 employees in families receiving SNAP benefits.
At the same time, a fierce argument broke out as to whether Jeff Bezos, with a humble US104 billion, was the richest man in history ... what with Bill Gates having had a touch of the guilts and given some of his loot away ...
A lot of this is attributed to the digital age, and it's true that the gig economy has devised many new and admirable ways for screwing people ... but greed is greed, and the state facilitating greed has been around for a long time, as the pond was reminded when reading about Seneca in Nero's time ...
Sadly A Stoic in Nero's Court is inside the NY Review of Books' paywall... but these lines caught the pond's eye ...
Having survived Caligula:
"... In a ministerial career known through the histories of Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius, but about which his own writings are silent, Seneca spent some fifteen years at Nero's side, advising the young and unstable new ruler after Claudius's death in 54. Seneca wielded immense power in Nero's name and got fabulously rich off his handouts. All the while he continued to publish treatises - two long works, De Ira ("On Anger"), urging control of one's tempe and De Beneficiis ("On Benefits"), illustrating proper ways to give and receive, along with a variety of shorter works. Aware of the paradox of an imperial aide preaching Stoic tenets, Seneca's enemies labeled him a tyrannodidaskalos, "tyrant-teacher", and publicly decried his tactics for increasing his vast fortune (some of which may have sparked the revolt of Queen Boudicca in Britain in 60 or 61 AD). Modern assessment - Vasily Rudich, a classicist at Yale, has called Seneca an "immoral moralist" - have sometimes been equally harsh."
In the end, it didn't work out too well for Seneca, but now we have the Donald, and the greedy gather round the trough to fill their gourds, while there are plenty of tyrannodidaskalos, immoral moralists doing the rounds, distracting with race baiting and culture wars while the looting proceeds apace ...
... which naturally brings the pond to this day's essential work by Moorice ...
It was as vile as might be expected, and the reptiles tagged it with a link to their fresh outrage, which dominated their tree killer edition ...
That's the way it works. Publish outrageous race-baiting reporting, remember to ignore the data, then when anyone might suggest the emperor's absent clothes lack some statistical support, double down with fresh horror at any denials ... repeat this cycle endlessly until hopefully a fomenting of the anger produces a riot on a Cronulla beach, so that "told you so" can fill in another month of tree killing ...
Sadly the reptiles and Moorice never pay any attention to, or feature any news which goes against the agenda, with Moorice no longer the world's top class climate scientist, as he once was, and so BOM annual climate statement shows 2017 was Australia's third-warmest year on record ... has passed by the reptiles in silence ...
Better to feature Ridders on how a new ice age is just around the corner ...
But Moorice, with his opening casual joke about climate science, did produce a first class obscenity ... by dragging Bob Dylan into it ...
Well, with that lengthy introduction over, it's time to simply lie back and get Mooriced ...
Is there something rich about a loon scribbling about a "patchwork of incoherent foreign values", as the reptiles, busy working for a foreign owner, import a rabble-rousing patchwork of ideas from white nationalists, neo-fascists and greedy folk in the United States?
Well yes, and when it comes to race-baiting and inciting the culture wars, our man Moorice is a master of the art ...
After all that, the pond feels well and truly Mooriced ... and meanwhile the real looting goes on, as the culture wars are stoked, and resentment is used as a priceless distraction ...
At least this keeps the cartoonists happy and busy in their work ... but it did occur to the pond that there are fresh job opportunities opening up all the time, and the pond did wonder if the world's climate scientist might yet become one of its prime cultural exports ...
And a few more in honour of Seneca ...
One could spend a pleasant hour or five duscussing and debating what Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" means to her and to us, but the "banality of Moorice" is bleedin' bloody obvious. Here's an example:
ReplyDelete"When Australian taxpayers pay the equivalent of $43,000 a year for every First Australian ..."
Well, do we (remembering that a fair number of "First Australians" are also "Australian taxpayers" too) ? Strangely enough the Productivity Commission agrees ! [ https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-is-30-billion-spent-every-year-on-500-000-indigenous-people-in-australia-64658 ]
But it also applies this qualification:
"Mainstream services accounted for $24.7 billion (81.4%) of direct Indigenous expenditure in 2012-13… with the remaining $5.6 billion (18.6%) provided through Indigenous-specific (targeted) services (a real decrease of $0.1 billion (1.2%) from 2008-09).
What’s the difference between Indigenous-specific and mainstream services? According to the Productivity Commission:
Mainstream expenditure includes outlays on programs, services and payments that are available to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous Australians on either a targeted or universal basis.
Indigenous-specific expenditure includes outlays on programs, services and payments that are explicitly targeted to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. These programs, services and payments can be either complementary (additional) to, or be substitutes (alternatives) for, mainstream services."
So there we have it: Moorice's "banality of evil" just amounts to being too lazy and too disseminatory to actually bother to do even minimal fact checking.
Moorice, who neither started swimming nor sunk like a stone but just hung around floating on an ever expanding pool of his own excrement, is still with us.
PS: "ABS has then projected the Indigenous population to be around 669,000 in June 2013 (the year the Productivity Commission data relates to) and around 750,000 in 2016." So that $5.6Billion works out to be around $8000 per head.
Moorice’s call to arms…
ReplyDeleteThe Times They Are Re-Arrangin’
Come slither round reptiles wherever you roam
And admit that the lefties around us have grown
And accept it that soon we will be overthrown
If our values to us are worth savin’
Then we’d better start swingin’ or we’ll soon be dethroned
For the minorities are rampa-a-gin’
Come whingers and cynics let’s poison our pens
And spread the hate wide the chance won’t come again
To incite the righteous to ethically cleanse
Our world of this PC contagion
If we don’t do it now then the leftards will win
For the minorities are rampa-a-gin’
Come ordinary Aussies throughout the land
Rise up and destroy what you can’t understand
These blacks and these Muslims are beyond our command
And our white law is rapidly aging
Let us march to our war cry of “Liberty be damned!”
For the minorities are rampa-a-gin’
T'rrific Kez. Now I'll just have to wait patiently until he, or somebody, quotes Mr Tambourine Man. :-)
DeleteWonder what Dylan would make of Moorice? Conservatives seem completely clueless when it comes to cultural references.
DeleteCheers GB. Indeed BF, Dylan's early protest works were aimed directly at reactionary bigots like Moorice, whose use of this song in his ridiculous proposal that the "silent majority" are under attack is, as you say, clueless.
DeleteIt's bizarre how Herr Neumann can laud the US civil rights movement then pour scorn on our own indigenous citizen’s hapless attempts to gain some kind of political voice.
Moorice is so impervious to popular culture he seems to think he can quote a Dylan song about beneficial social change and then cite a religious nutcase like Pat Buchanan’s hatespeak about "irretrievable divisions." For me this proves that the only division worth noting here lies, as usual, in Moorice's herptilian brain - where it's always "us versus them."