Is the US a dystopia?

no worries OL we all get that way sometimes, it wasn't about you personally

Billionaire CEOs didn't just reach Mayor Adams in a private chat urging him to arrest pro-Palestine Columbia students, they also offered PRIVATE staff to help NYPD. The Mayor accepted.

Members of the group also coordinated with Israel's war cabinet, UN ambassador and former PM. pic.twitter.com/r54yv87eqy

— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) May 17, 2024

Go Bernie... I've felt this way for years

A bill introduced by the US senator Bernie Sanders would dramatically expand access to oral healthcare by adding dental benefits to Medicare and enhance them in Medicaid, public health insurance programs that together cover 115 million older and lower-income Americans.

Despite Americans’ reputation for the flashy “Hollywood smile”, millions struggle to access basic dental care. One in five US seniors have lost all their natural teeth, almost half of adults have some kind of gum disease and painful cavities are one of the most common reasons children miss school.

“Any objective look at the reality facing the American people recognizes there is a crisis in dental care in America,” Sanders told the Guardian in an exclusive interview. “Imagine that in the richest country in the world.”

An extraordinary case of police "psychological torture" in Fontana, CA: When Thomas Perez reported his elderly father missing, cops brought him in for a 17-hour interrogation + coerced him to falsely confess killing his dad.

His dad was alive.

🧵https://t.co/3WLOUQ3lnB

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) May 24, 2024

absolutely horrifying. one especially dystopian part: they settled out of court because the victim feared the case would not ultimately succeed due to the qualified immunity doctrine.

From another article.

Perez agreed to the settlement rather than take the case to trial out of concern that a jury award could be overturned on appeal on grounds of qualified immunity for police. Generally, qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers unless they violate clearly established law arising from a case with nearly identical facts, according to the Legal Defense Fund.

So essentially they can get away with anything as long as it's bizarre enough?

yes - the "clearly established" thing comes early in a string of bad Supreme Court decisions on this. ime the episode of the 5:4 podcast on Qualified Immunity was an informative and sobering listen.

The scale of the US military-industrial complex's grip on higher education is just staggering—if you want to understand why schools went so ballistic over calls to divest from war, start here https://t.co/PDb64wGUPP pic.twitter.com/BwLP7zPV2y

— Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson) May 29, 2024

The M-I complex has had a death grip on US universities and colleges for most of the past 70 years. It started seriously gearing up in the 1950s and was unshakably entrenched by 1970.

reminds me of the Cyber Patriot program in grade schools, which is available thru LAUSD for example, and while it's not explicitly military-industrial complex it's sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, Air Force Reserve, American Military University, and founded in part by CIAS (not to be confused with the CIA but still....)

7th graders should just be in chess clubs.

it's not a *direct* pipeline to the MIC, and school districts don't invest in it afaict, but it's amazing how that stuff just trickles all the way down in education.

The Cyberpatriot (mobile) site is even datedly creepy like something produced for a Starship Troopers deleted scene.

The M-I complex has had a death grip on US universities and colleges for most of the past 70 years. It started seriously gearing up in the 1950s and was unshakably entrenched by 1970.

I think I ranted about this on the Oppenheimer movie thread, but American academia wasn't exactly pushed into this - it should be M-I-A, the invisible partner. By the beginning of '43, every physicist in America knew that the Manhattan Project was a science Skull & Bones - whoever got the tap on the shoulder was going to be part of setting the direction of american physics - which leads to the UC running Los Alamos and Livermore, electrical engineering school partnerships with corporate towns like IBM in Kingston, and the o.g. Silicon Valley. All the M & I hired from the A like they were pro football teams. When I entered UC Irvine in 1983, the number of corporate partnerships the university had was front and center as advertising.

FWIW, in 1981 General Dynamics took my entire high school to Disneyland for free. All of the rides were free. Way more effective propaganda than Cyber Patriot

i recently went to a book fair where the author of this book happened to be and i meant to check it out -- has anyone read it?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61108472-palo-alto

I read his first book, but the length of Palo Alto put me off.

yes it is HUGE! i would only read as ebook

I kinda lost a bit of interest in that book after reading this review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/grieving-redness-in-the-west-reading-malcolm-harris-after-mike-davis/

I guess this could go into one of the general COVID threads but running an anti-vax psyop in the middle of a global pandemic as part of Cold War II: The Coldening seems pretty dystopian.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/