October 6, 2023

DEMENTED ARE GO - Bodies In The Basement (2012) (Psychobilly)

Demented Are Go are a Welsh psychobilly band that was formed around 1982 near Cardiff, Wales. They were one of the earliest in the initial wave of bands to mix punk rock with rockabilly, and as a result, are considered to be highly influential to the psychobilly scene.



Label: People Like You Records – 468248-1
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Green
Country: Germany
Released: 2012
Genre: Rock
Style: Psychobilly

October 6, 2023

Ashley O vs Nine Inch Nails - On a Roll vs Head Like a Hole

October 6, 2023

Nirvana - Heart-Shaped Box (Director's Cut)

Label: Geffen Records – GFST 54
Format: Vinyl, 12", Single, 45 RPM
Country: UK
Released: 1993
Genre: Rock
Style: Alternative Rock

October 6, 2023

Newsweek Embraces the Anti-Democracy Hard Right

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/11/04/newsweek-embraces-anti-democracy-hard-right



November 04, 2022

Although opinion pages in ostensibly nonpartisan, mainstream publications promote political opinions, sometimes controversial ones, Newsweek stands alone among such brands in its willingness to elevate such figures as Jack Posobiec, known for promoting the Pizzagate disinformation campaign, and Dinesh D’Souza, whose film 2000 Mules researchers roundly debunked for spreading conspiracies about the 2020 election. Under Hammer’s leadership, Newsweek has also aired bigoted views, like appearing to call for the state to deny adults access to trans-affirming medical care and supporting a ban on all legal immigration into the U.S. They have also spread baseless conspiracies about COVID-19, with one of Hammer’s collaborators describing vaccines designed to fight the virus as a “bioweapon.”

Newsweek has also failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest emerging in the content published through Hammer’s opinion section and his Newsweek-branded podcast, “The Josh Hammer Show.” Hammer donated to the campaign of Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters and at least four times published the work of a man who ran one of Masters’ fundraisers. On his podcast, Hammer told Newsweek’s audience to “go ahead and vote for Blake Masters.” Hammer also promoted hard-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán in a Newsweek dispatch authored from Hungary, without disclosing that he arrived there in collaboration with a group directly affiliated with the Hungarian government. Hammer also claims membership in a number of reactionary activist groups, and regularly publishes people who are also affiliated with them. He will appear on behalf of the New York Young Republican Club alongside Posobiec and QAnon influencer-turned-congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene in December.

Hatewatch reached out to Newsweek for comment about the reporting published in this analysis. Newsweek first introduced Hatewatch to a representative of the journalism-focused non-profit Poynter, whom they contracted to advise them on ethics in 2019. Hatewatch had three different conversations with Poynter about Newsweek and their relationship, which are detailed later in this analysis. A representative from the public relations agency LBG PR replied asking for our questions. Hatewatch responded by emailing 19 different specific questions inspired by the reporting in this analysis, and LBG PR issued the following statement in reply:







Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, has emerged as a favored candidate of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other admirers of fascism. (One of his major donors, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, has said he no longer believes freedom and democracy are “compatible.”) The notorious white supremacist website American Renaissance has republished versions of stories about Masters’ controversies from other outlets, drawing cheers from their notoriously racist comment section. White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who praises such fascist dictators as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, also supports Masters. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin of the hate site The Daily Stormer wrote to his fans about Masters in June:



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October 6, 2023

PAU places vaulted glass structure in shell of Brooklyn's Domino Sugar Refinery

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/10/02/pau-domino-sugar-refinery-glass-vault/







Local architecture studio Practice for Architecture and Urbanism has installed a glass office building with a vaulted roof inside the shell of the 19th-century Domino Sugar Refinery on the waterfront in Brooklyn. Called the Refinery, the 12-storey building is the conversion of an industrial factory into a contemporary office, reflecting how the borough's architectural needs have shifted.







The structure is the centrepiece of the redevelopment of the Domino Sugar Refinery site, developed by Two Trees Management with a master plan by SHoP Architects and Field Operations. For the Refinery, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) wanted to create a functioning office space that kept the facade of the Romanesque Revival structure.



"We're not shortchanging today for some nostalgia," PAU principal Ruchika Modi told Dezeen. "What was really important was this idea of palimpsest and embracing what was on the site without becoming slavish to history." Because of the floor configuration, the original building could not simply be adapted. The floorplan was industrial with large cavernous spaces inside, so the studio opted for keeping the historic building's facade intact while putting a whole new building inside of it.



"It's not a conventional adaptive reuse project in the sense of going into a warehouse building and adapting it," Modi continued. "There was no building to adapt. And if we were to just go in and fill in the missing floors, it would lead to a really weird, idiosyncratic, completely bizarre, you know, interior configuration."

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October 6, 2023

The notorious "union avoidance" law firm Littler Mendelson and U.S. labor law

https://prospect.org/justice/2023-10-05-lawyers-not-persuaders-littler-mendelson/



It’s a scene replayed endlessly at countless corporate events: a bunch of old white men, clad in either business casual or their finest Tommy Bahama shirt, launching into a crappy dadcore cover of some old rebellious anthem. As Littler Mendelson, the notorious “union avoidance” law firm, celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2012, the top brass hit the stage as the Littler Mendelson Garage Band, to mangle the Talking Heads’ 1977 single “Psycho Killer,” while lanyard-wearing attorneys in the crowd bopped along in the least rhythmic manner imaginable. The opening line: “I can’t seem to face up to the facts.”

https://twitter.com/4315pod/status/1573817258584965123
San Francisco–based Littler Mendelson ranks among an elite crop of about a half dozen law firms that have riled labor organizers for decades, alongside names like Jackson Lewis and Ogletree Deakins. But Littler is the largest employment and labor law firm exclusively representing management, with more than 1,700 attorneys in offices around the world. Since 1942, its sophisticated counsel has helped clients navigate America’s changing workforce, from the postwar labor boom to the civil rights movement, and later through the Great Recession. In one of the few profiles of the secretive firm, a union lawyer explained, “It’s not just that they play hardball, but they’ll do [just] about anything to accomplish their ends. They push the line as far as they possibly can and eventually step over.”

Littler Mendelson’s notoriety supersedes its competitors not just because of its ruthless reputation. (A previous generation of labor lawyers and organizers snidely referred to the firm as “Hitler Mussolini Fascist,” a nod to the firm’s previous name, which included other partners: Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff, Tichy & Mathiason.) Littler’s reputation is built upon the firm’s insistence that no anti-union employer is unworthy of their services. In other words, they aren’t just chasing high-profile cases, they’re scraping from the bottom of the barrel.



The firm has reportedly worked for 70 percent of the companies on the Fortune 500, and is the legal muscle for the largest current union-busting campaign in the United States: Starbucks’s bid to stall its more than 350 unionized coffee shops from getting a first contract, and to thwart any of its other thousands of stores from winning a union election. Other clients in the last decade have included Apple, Nissan, Trader Joe’s, Amazon, and McDonald’s, as it attempted to fend off the Fight for 15 campaign. But Littler was also retained by the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC), a nonprofit with ten employees at the time of its union election and only four members in the bargaining unit. The union won 3-1, prompting SEACC, under Littler’s guidance, to seek to delay and challenge the election results based upon the risk of “national ramifications” from a small nonprofit organization unionizing. (The National Labor Relations Board rejected this; then SEACC filed another challenge.)

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October 6, 2023

WillemsenU submerges house under the ground in the Netherlands

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/09/27/willemsenu-the-house-under-the-ground-eindhoven/







Dutch studio WillemsenU has completed a house that is partially buried underground to blend in with its rural surroundings in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Appropriately called The House Under the Ground, the home is designed by WillemsenU to "enhance the beauty" of its site and act as a retreat for the couple who own it.









Its design also offers privacy to its occupants, with the sleeping spaces lowered six metres into the ground and the protruding living spaces blanketed with a hill covered in wildflowers. "The surrounding bocage landscape with its small height differences was a huge inspiration," project architect Marrit Winkeler told Dezeen.









"The house is designed as part of this landscape, being part of a hill," added Winkeler. "It is playing with visibility, alternately shielding and opening the view of the nature reserve, creating privacy and shelter from the elements." Located in a meadow on the edge of a protected nature reserve, The House Under the Ground fits within the parameters of a former goat shed.











The part of the house that is visible above ground is defined by its arched shape, which is designed to limit the building's height and merge with the landscape. Its structure is built from concrete cast in situ, while the facades that are left exposed are clad in vertical timber boards.

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October 6, 2023

Swedish gang criminals 'branching out into healthcare sector'

https://www.thelocal.se/20231005/swedish-gang-criminals-branching-out-into-healthcare-sector

https://archive.ph/95SQq



"We can see early signs that they are starting to enter into the healthcare sector, run healthcare centres and vaccination centres," Sara Persson, crime prevention specialist at the Economic Crime Authority, told Sveriges Radio. The authority predicts that potential profits from healthcare welfare fraud amount to almost six billion kronor, around twice as much as profits from the drug trade.

It can see evidence of welfare fraud within the Foxtrot network, whose members often commit multiple different types of crime. "We've seen that they are involved in the drug trade, of course, and that's what they're charged for. But we can also see that the same people have run companies which we have charged with tax crimes, where, for example, they are listed as providing support to foster homes, and have received money from municipalities for looking after unaccompanied refugee children," Persson said.

The Economic Crime Authority, warned in a report it released earlier this year along with other authorities that there were a number of problems with the way Sweden's healthcare system was set up, which left it open to abuse by criminal actors. Firstly, there is no need to secure any sort of permit before starting a healthcare centre or similar centres such as residential care homes for young people (HVB-hem). There is also no national register of these centres, with everything done on a regional basis, making it difficult to spot fraudulent companies setting up healthcare centres in different regions.

It is also difficult for regions to get rid of a company once they have a deal in place. According to a separate report from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), released last year, this is especially the case if the company is good at filling its leadership positions with people who appear trustworthy, or if those running it swap out their board of directors whenever they’re accused of committing fraud.

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October 5, 2023

The Gaping Hole in the Center of the Electorate

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-gaping-hole-in-the-center-of



What does American politics look like? There is a widespread view among political scientists and political consultants that the electorate has become inextricably polarized between Democrats and Republicans and there is a very small group of swing voters that decide national and some state elections. Barack Obama's former political advisor David Axelrod told Yascha Mounk recently on his podcast, "There is a less and less sort of moveable vote because party has now become a cultural identity."

My view, based on covering elections and looking at American political history, is that the electorate is becoming, if anything, more fluid and volatile. There are partisan extremes in both parties that espouse consistent ideologies and that often dominate the public discussion of politics—for them party is a cultural identity—but there are growing numbers of voters who are uncomfortable with these extremes and with the parties in so far as they are identified with these extremes. I ordinarily like to leave polls and polling analysis to my co-author Ruy Teixeira, but in this case, there are several polling results that I would cite in favor of my view of the American electorate.

The first is the rise of "independent" voters. Gallup conducts regular surveys that ask respondents: "Do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?" As late as January 1, 2008, the percentage of Democrats exceeded that of independents as well as Republicans, but since then, the percentage of independents has been growing at the expense of both parties. In March 2023, it hit an all-time high (since Gallup has been asking the question in 1988) of 49 percent. Republicans and Democrats were tied at 25 percent. Of course, when these independents are asked what party they lean to, Democrats and Republicans split the vote, but that's not the point. The point is that growing percentages of the electorate are alienated from both parties. They might "lean" to one rather than the other, but that is not the same as being hardline partisans that are culturally identified with one party rather than the other. If anything, the cultural identification with the parties is diminishing.

The second poll has been done recently by the Wall Street Journal. It found that if Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the presidential nominees in November 2024, 26 percent of the electorate has not made up its mind whom to vote for. That is more than a slice of the electorate and suggests again that there is a large segment of voters who are not strongly committed to either party or to the political views of the party's candidates. According to the poll, more of these voters identify themselves as "moderate" than either "liberal" or "conservative." A majority support abortion rights. Almost three-fourths of them have unfavorable views of Trump and Biden. They disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy and the border, but they think he is the more likeable and caring of the two candidates, and by a wide margin they think Trump did commit illegal actions after the 2020 election. They are younger and somewhat less white and less-college educated on average than the overall electorate.

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October 5, 2023

A Broken Congress Is What MAGA Always Wanted

https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-broken-congress-is-what-maga-always-wanted



There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago. In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized the idea within his party that government was actually the enemy. His joke that the scariest words one could hear were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” has metastasized from being a pitch for smaller government into a movement to blow the whole damn thing up.

What happened in the House of Representatives this past week, as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) led the anarcho-moronic wing of the GOP in a successful effort to unseat Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, was a continuation of the MAGA riot Donald Trump incited in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president. The goal was the same: to stop the government from functioning. The rationale was the same: if we can’t have our way, then fuck everyone and everything.

The only difference was that the stench left in the well of the House of Representatives this week was from the overheated, lie-laden rhetoric of a parade of smarmy politicians rather than from the steaming remnants of what the Trump rioters had for breakfast on Jan. 6. (Which, come to think of it, might be a distinction without a difference.) It might have seemed like chaos to the unschooled observer. But the historic and yet somehow tedious dramedy that played out during the past few days wasn’t just the logical consequence of the GOP’s descent into being a nihilistic mob that stands in opposition to everything and in favor of nothing.

It was also the culmination of the destructive tendencies of a long line of GOP leaders—from Newt Gingrich to Tom Delay, from the Tea Partiers to the Freedom Caucus, from Sarah Palin to Lauren Boebert. In fact, given their true goal of literally bringing down the House, what ended up happening was even better than the government shutdown they had hoped would begin last weekend. That would have likely been a brief interruption of government operations. Now, not only is Congress paralyzed, but it is virtually certain that the next Speaker of the House will be even weaker than McCarthy, the slim GOP majority will be even more fractious, and even less will get done from now until a new Congress is installed in January 2025.

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