[Plura-list] Plutocrats firehose money on primary challenger to AOC; FCC will spend $9B to improve broadband...without an accurate broadband map; Buddhist monk covers western pop songs

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Plutocrats firehose money on primary challenger to AOC: Michelle
Caruso-Cabrera, a former Reagan Republican who wants to dismantle Social
Security and Medicare

* FCC will spend $9B to improve broadband…without an accurate broadband
map: Reality's left-wing bias makes accurate data the enemy of
conservativism.

* Buddhist monk covers western pop songs: He's like a male, solo version
of Shonen Knife.

* Apple hunters recover ten "lost" varieties from forgotten farms: The
Lost Apple Society needs help.

* Finding the Money: A fabulous new documentary on Modern Monetary Theory

* Evangelical pastor denied quarantine, now he wants your stimulus
check: Tony Spell's death-cult has a business-model.

* Zombie movies teach us all the wrong lessons for pandemic: Not only
would a zombie plague be easy to contain, but people don't turn into
monsters during crises.

* Building a "web of books": What would a federated alternative to
Goodreads look like?

* The Facebook Political Ad Collector: Exposing targeted advertising's
fraud and conspiracy

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🗿 Plutocrats firehose money on primary challenger to AOC

Dozens of the richest bankers and private equity plutes on Wall Street
are funding a primary challenge to AOC: their candidate is Michelle
Caruso-Cabrera, a former registered Republican who wants to kill
Medicare and Social Security (which she calls "pyramid schemes").

Her major donors include Glenn Hutchins, billionaire cofounder of Silver
Lake Partners, the notorious vulture capitalist who engineered the
impending collapse of AMC (even in PE circles, Silver Lake is notorious
for debt-loading businesses to death).

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/12/mammon-worshippers/#silver-lake-partners

Also: James Passin of Firebird Capital; Bruce Schnitzer of Wand
Partners; Jeffrey Rosen of Lazard; and Bradley Seaman, managing partner
of Parallel49 Equity.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/15/aoc-primary-challenger-cabruso-cabrera-wall-street/

Virtu Financial CEO Doug Cifu says he donated to Caruso-Cabrera because
she "understands financial markets" while AOC "does not."

Caruso-Cabrera's other donors include Vantis Capital CEO Steve Holzman
(a major Mitt Romney donor) and former Dick Cheney aide Ron Christie.

Caruso-Cabrera has not articulated a single official policy she
supports. In her 2010 book "You Know I'm Right: More Prosperity, Less
Government," she lionizes Ronald Reagan and calls for eliminating the
Department of Labor.

She also viciously attacks efforts to bring transparency to offshore
tax-havens, writing "Freedom and democracy are best secured when banking
secrecy and tax havens exist."

As to AOC's understanding of the finance industry, it has been on fine
display throughout her tenure in Congress. Like that time she grilled
pharma exec about why the HIV-prevention drug Prep costs $8 in Australia
costs $1,780 in the USA:

https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1129046536418144257

Or her cosponsorship of an anti-loansharking bill:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/why-you-should-back-the-sanders-aoc-plan-to-cap-credit-card-interest-rates-at-15-re-launch-the-postal-savings-bank.html

Her spectacular evisceration of the Equifax execs who doxed America:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/11/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-takes-aim-equifax-credit-scoring/

Her notorious and brilliant "Lightning Round" game about corruption in
American lawmaking:

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/c-span-aoc-ocasio-cortez-hearings/

Her wildly popular plan to impose a 70% income tax on the country's
highest earners:

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/425422-a-majority-of-americans-support-raising-the-top-tax-rate-to-70

Oh, and those Twitter threads mocking bank lobbyists that terrified the
industry so much they were afraid to even try to meet with her:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-aoc/banks-weigh-whether-to-embrace-or-avoid-progressive-firebrand-ocasio-cortez-idUSKCN1PV27N

And who can forget her debut Congressional speech, which is still *the
most popular CSPAN clip of 2019.*

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1085737193564504066

So yeah, the plutes are afraid of her and they should be, because she
has their number.

I just gave $200 to AOC's re-election campaign.

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/aoc-ads-google-q4

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🗿 FCC will spend $9B to improve broadband…without an accurate broadband
map

The FCC is about to dole out $9B in subsidies to bring broadband to
underserved communities.

Also, the FCC has no accurate maps to tell them which communities are
underserved.

Also, the process is dominated by the monopoly carriers, who sabotaged
broadband maps for years.

The FCC knows this. Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, knows
it. That's why he refused to release 2019's Broadband Deployment Report,
burying a 1-page summary in a Friday press release (and then later
retracting it due to gross errors).

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/ajit-pai-says-hes-fixed-giant-fcc-error-that-exaggerated-broadband-growth/

The GOP has been the party of shitty broadband since forever. The GOP
FCC Commissioners sought to solve the problem of terrible rural
broadband by redefining "terrible" as "great." No, really.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe-americans-dont-need-fast-home-internet-service-fcc-suggests/

26 GOP states banned cities from deploying broadband, despite the
popularity of muni fiber (the excuse: "It violates the 1st Amendment" –
this, despite the fact that 1A would force municipal providers to be
MUCH more permissive than private carriers).

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/kzmana/report-26-states-now-ban-or-restrict-community-broadband

This is the GOP serving its donors, rather than its base. The 750 US
municipalities with muni broadband are primarily rural and conservative.
They're also virtually the only places where people are satisfied with
their ISPs.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3np4a/new-municipal-broadband-map

To be fair to the right, reality does have a consistent and entirely
unfair left-wing bias, which is why things that measure reality – say,
studies of gun-related mortality, or accurate broadband maps, or data on
chloroquine and covid – are bad for the Conservative agenda.

Back to the FCC and its $9B to "improve broadband." The Competitive
Carriers Assoc (representing the marginalized, tiny non-monopolist
telcoms sector) have pointed out that the FCC has no idea where to put
this money to do the most (or any) good.

https://www.ccamobile.org/cca-statement-on-the-fcc-s-working-toward-the-5g-fund-for-rural-america-option-a-eligibility-analysis

Yes, the newly passed Broadband Data Act finally makes it illegal for
carriers to lie to the FCC about their coverage (yes, this wasn't
already banned…), and relies on external, independent data-sources,
rather than taking the carriers' word for it.

As Karl Bode wrote in Techdirt: "Bad maps not only help hide a lack of
competition and high prices (two subjects the current FCC can't even
acknowledge, much less fix). But they help obscure the billions we've
thrown at carriers to build sometimes duplicative network assets that
often don't fix the problems the money was assigned for."

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200414/07290544296/fcc-still-doesnt-know-where-broadband-is-as-it-eyes-9-billion-new-subsidies.shtml

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🗿 Buddhist monk covers western pop songs

Kossan1108 is a Japanese Buddhist monk and musician who likes to cover
western pop music on Japanese instruments (Kottke calls them
"delightfully earnest").

https://www.youtube.com/user/Kossan1108/videos

Here he is covering Queen's "We Will Rock You."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqfT6zwJWUE

The Ramones' Teenage Lobotomy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8A1dqsiNSI

And Yellow Submarine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLELtdrRyhs

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🗿 Apple hunters recover ten "lost" varieties from forgotten farms

The Lost Apple Project is a nonprofit that scours rural woodlands that
were once farms, looking for apple trees whose varieties were thought to
be extinct. They just had their best year, ever.

https://apnews.com/4b08b6e30cbe37697120466d56f294a5

They confirmed 10 pioneer-era varieties, previously believed to be lost.
Lost Apple's founders relied on "old maps, county fair records,
newspaper clippings and nursery sales ledgers" to locate them. Many of
the trees they harvested from were dying – they were just in time!

Oregon's Temperate Orchard Conservatory did analyzes the cuttings that
Lost Apple discovered last October and November "from 140-year-old
orchards tucked into small canyons or hidden in forests that have since
grown up around them in rural ID and WA."

http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org/

Overall, the group has recovered 23 varieties. This year's batch
includes the ancient Turkish Sary Sinap, the Streaked Pippin (possibly
from NY state, 1744) and the PA Butter Sweet (earliest known origin 1901).

Temperance Orchard relies on old USDA watercolor illustrations and old
botany textbooks to make their identifications.

Alas, Lost Apple is threatened by the closure of the fairs where they
sell lost varieties to fund their shoestring operation.

If you want to support them, they're accepting checks payable to WCHS
(Whitman County Historical Society)

Attn Lost Apple Project, PO Box 67, Colfax, WA 99111

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🗿 Finding the Money

Finding The Money is a new documentary about Modern Monetary Theory, a
heterodox, exciting, and fascinating way to think about where money
comes from and what it means for governments to run "deficits."

https://www.findingmoneyfilm.com

It features the work of Stephanie Kelton, a brilliant economist whose
lectures illuminate the subject of money as a public utility that can be
used to address existential crises like the climate emergency and (as
we're seeing), the pandemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9nP-BKa3M

(Kelton also has a new book about this, "The Deficit Myth": "Deficits
can enrich a small segment of the population, driving inequality to new
heights, while leaving millions behind. Or they can be used to sustain
life and build a more just economy.")

https://stephaniekelton.com/book/

The pandemic is validating MMT's core hypothesis: that governments don't
build capacity by saving money (governments create money by typing
numbers into spreadsheets).

They build capacity by spending money.

No amount of government cash reserves can make more ventilators
available for sale.

But if we hadn't cut the budget that maintained California's stockpile
of ventilators, masks, and *entire transportable hospitals* in 2008,
we'd have them today.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#austerity-kills

As Kelton says in the documentary: finding money is the easiest part.

"Instead of asking 'how will you pay for it?' we should ask 'how will
you resource it?' This debate can change everything about policy from
the health of our pocketbooks to the health of the planet."

The trailer makes this look like an amazing project. The trick of the
finance sector has been to surround its work with performatively dull,
shitty math and jargon to exclude the public from the debate. This kind
of debullshittification is crucial.

https://vimeo.com/387886793

Meren Poitras, the director, is seeking donations to finish the film:

https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/finding-the-money-documentary1

(I gave).

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🗿 Evangelical pastor denied quarantine, now he wants your stimulus check

Tony Spell is an evangelical death-cult leader who defied
shelter-in-place orders and held packed Easter services

https://www.tmz.com/2020/04/14/pastor-tony-spell-church-packed-easter-hand-out-food/

Now, he's ordering members of his death cult to donate their $1200
coronavirus stimulus checks to churches that deny the science of
coronavirus.

https://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/615568544674037760/coronavirus-defying-pastor-tony-spell-wants-people

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🗿 Zombie movies teach us all the wrong lessons for pandemic

Anthropology prof Clare Sammells teaches a class on the social subtext
of zombie movies; in a beautifully wrought and extremely timely thread,
she explains how zombie movies teach the wrong lessons for the pandemic
crisis.

https://twitter.com/csammells/status/1250087269777707010

It's not merely that zombie plagues would be very easy to contain: "you
would immediately know who was infected. There would be no moral
ambiguity about how to handle the situation…There is no asymptomatic
incubation period."

It's "the assumption that if institutions such as the police, prison
system, federal government, and military fall away, that people would
turn into the worst versions of themselves. E.g., the Walking Dead
motto: 'Kill the Dead, Fear the Living.'"

Anthropologically speaking, it's nonsense: "societies without
centralized governments, etc (what in anthropology we call 'acephalous'
societies) actually have less conflict than we do…there are mechanisms
for how to resolve problems in ways that actively curtail violence."

"What we are actually seeing in the COVID-19 pandemic is not a collapse
of society, but its strengthening from the group up. People are creating
neighborhood networks. They are reaching out to friends to offer help.
They are showing care and concern for each other. "

"That desire to reach out and help people during a crisis is often
missing in zombie films, which tend to assume that we will all descend
into Aggressively Individualistic Survival Mode unless forced to do
otherwise. But that's not really how people are, most of the time."

It's a lesson borne out by history, as is so beautifully illustrated in
Rebecca Solnit's "Paradise Built in Hell," and elaborated in her
must-read commentary on the crossroads of our pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/08/non-fiscal-payfors/#solnit

It inspired my 2017 novel "Walkaway" and its theme of "covered dish
people" – people who, during a crisis, visit their neighbors with a
covered dish rather than a shotgun, thus increasing their neighbors'
likelihood of doing the same.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/02/be-the-helper/#paradisebuiltinhell

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🗿 Building a "web of books"

Last September, Tom Critchlow proposed a federated, decentralized "web
of books" as an alternative to Goodreads, the monopoly platform of
booklists owned by the monopoly platform of bookselling.

https://twitter.com/tomcritchlow/status/1170340177702785024

Now, he's elaborated on the idea in a post with a lot more technical
detail about how to build an extensible system for allowing friends,
fans, and strangers to exchange booklists, reviews, and recommendations.

https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/

Critchlow wants an "RSS-like" mechanism to tie it all together. But Matt
webb makes a convincing case that RSS can do it all:

http://interconnected.org/home/2020/04/16/rss_for_books

I love this stuff.

Also: Goodreads was a perfectly cromulent standalone service that was
gobbled up by Amazon as part of its acquisitions strategy of
establishing massive vertical monopolies, and that this was only legal
because we've been nerfing antitrust for 40 years.

Big Tech critics often indulge in the same tech exceptionalism that they
(rightfully) condemn tech leaders for, insisting that Big Tech got big
because of "network effects" and "first mover advantage" (which, ofc, is
why we all search Altavista with our Crays all day long).

When you look closely, you see tech's growth strategy is the utterly
unexceptional playbook that dates back to Rockefeller, Carnegie and
Mellon: buying (and killing) nascent competitors, merging with major
competitors, and using vertical monopolies to control prices.

By the same token, tech leaders aren't 100-foot-tall supergeniuses. They
are completely ordinary mediocrities, no better than you or me, with
howling voids where their consciences should be.

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🗿 The Facebook Political Ad Collector

The Facebook Political Ad Collector is a collaboration between Quartz
and Propublica: it's a browser plugin that scrapes all the Facebook
pages you view and harvests political ads for inclusion in an open database.

https://qz.com/in/political-ad-collector/

The most pernicious part of tech exceptionalism is the bit where we
unquestioningly accept Big Tech's sales literature, in which they claim
that Big Data and machine learning can be fashioned into a mind control
ray that can convince anyone of anything.

I don't think it's true. I think, rather, that Big Tech's nonconsensual
dossiers on our interests and social context allows for targeting that
allows advertisers to say things in private that they aren't allowed to
say in public.

For example, they can locate racists, and then show them ads that
promise that Trump will be super-racist in his governance, without
having to publicly announce this in ways that would alienate moderate
Republicans.

And they can lie, saying things that would violate consumer protection
and election laws, and since the lies are only shown to a targeted
audience, they stand a better chance of getting away with it.

This isn't mind-control, it's fraud and conspiracy.

Plugins like the Political Ad Collector are important because they erode
the secrecy that allow fraud and conspiracy to thrive.

I'm a zuckervegan and have no Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram accounts,
and I think the world would be better if you didn't, either. But if
you're going to use the services, running this plugin is an important
service to society.

Here's Propublica's open repository of political ads that have been
retrieved to date.

https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/

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🗿 This day in history

#15yrsago WIPO's $50 million bribery scandal
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/16/world/europe/swiss-investigates-possibility-of-bribery-in-un-contract.html

#10yrsago Sign for the US Border: unprovoked beatings ahead
https://web.archive.org/web/20120128002129/http://i44.tinypic.com/2dv77f8.jpg

#10yrsago This means war: Big Content's war on democracy
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/apr/16/digital-economy-act-cory-doctorow

#10yrsago UK LibDems pledge to repeal the Digital Economy Bill
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1240561

#5yrsago $17 radio amp lets thieves steal Priuses
https://jalopnik.com/thieving-teens-likely-used-17-gadget-to-break-into-ny-1698036188

#5yrsago Arcology: cutaways of the future city-hives that never were
https://boingboing.net/2015/04/16/arcology-cutaways-of-the-futu.html

#1yrago Your kid's "smart watch" lets anyone in the world trace their
location. Again.
https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/tic-toc-pwned/

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🗿 Colophon

Today's top sources: Kottke (https://kottke.org), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Cynthia Seelhammer
(https://twitter.com/cynseelhammer), MMT Podcast
(https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/), Mister Jayem
(https://twitter.com/MisterJayEm).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation

Currently reading: I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about
tech, "Uncanny Valley" and Jo Walton's forthcoming novel "Or What You Will."

Latest podcast: Podcast swap: Wil Wheaton on Little
Brotherhttps://craphound.com/podcast/2020/04/13/podcast-swap-wil-wheaton-on-little-brother/

Upcoming appearances:


* Apr 16, Stories are Super Weird. Here's Why They Work, Clarion Teen
Writing Classes
https://www.clarionwest.org/workshops/online-workshops/cory-doctorow-april-16/

* Apr 22, Flatten The Curve Summit https://flattenthecurve.tech/

* Apr 23, Canada Reads Q&A;
https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/ask-the-canada-reads-authors-your-questions-live-on-facebook-1.5512394

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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