A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Someone did. For the USA see https://wid.world/country/usa
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
It would be interesting to see how this stacks up against the US in relative terms. We tend to think of countries with extreme wealth gaps as being places like ... Nigeria, for example. But the US could be just as bad, in relative terms.
In any case, I couldn't find equivalent figures for the US with a quick search, just for example, the minimum income one needs to squeak under the 10% threshold. It would be nice if someone did those calculations, or found them.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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global inequality income
top 10% = 52% of income
US inequality income
top 10% = 46% of income
Canadian inequality income (second highest inequality of developed economies)
top 10% = 41% of income
Russian Federation
top 10% = 47% of income
global inequality wealth
top 10% = 75% of wealth
US inequality wealth
top 10% = 71% of wealth
Irish inequality wealth (second highest inequality of developed economies)
top 10% = 66% of wealth
Russian Federation
top 10% = 74% of wealth
https://wid.world/
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https://wir2022.wid.world/executive-summary/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Robots Replace Roughnecks (Texas Roughnecks will be bitter about being replaced when they vote)
A new drilling rig put into service by the Houston company Nabors Industries recently completed its first well in the Permian Basin, drilling to a depth of nearly 20,000 feet.
That might not seem like a big deal. But in this case, the task was accomplished without a single worker on the rig floor.
Nabors’ Pace-R801 is the world’s first fully automated land rig, and its introduction in West Texas marks a milestone in the automation of the oil and gas industry. Robots, such as the robotic arm that lifts and connects drill pipe on the new rig, are transforming the industry, promising to save billions of dollars while further shrinking a labor force that has shed tens of thousands of jobs in recent years — particularly oil field laborers.
Nabors, the world’s largest land drilling contractor with 10,000 employees, began developing its autonomous rig technology about five years ago to improve drilling efficiency and safety. In 2017, Nabors acquired Robotic Drilling Systems, a robotic drilling company.
The rise of robots has raised concerns about the future of roughnecks on drilling rigs. Rystad estimates robotic drilling systems can speed the time it takes to drill a well by as much as 40 percent. The efficiency gains mean oil companies will need fewer rigs to drill wells and consequently, fewer workers.
The number of laborers on U.S. drilling rigs could decline by as much as 30 percent, or 140,000 workers by 2030, according to Rystad, saving U.S. oil producers more than $7 billion in wages.
“It will take time to replace the whole fleet of rigs,” said Audun Martinsen, Rystad’s head of energy service research. “Since these rigs still have to be proven, we don’t expect this technology to really take off until closer to 2030.”
Texas has about 183,000 oil drilling and production workers, below the 297,000 workers at their peak of employment in December 2014.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20211217030337/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/could-robots-replace-oil-drilling-roughnecks-gas-16707413.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says
If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own.
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.
Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war (six points in three years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter writes. “A country standing on this threshold — as America is now, at +5 — can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”
Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report last month. “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself," the report said. And a new survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17 percent of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39 percent favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.
The question
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says
You'd better settle down there, boy.
You're not going to want to see the outcome of that. Your side loses every in every alternate timeline.
It's time for you to just Netflix and chill, buddy. Don't poke the bear.
--------------------------------------------------
Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:What could happen, without any provoking by Democrats, would be a series of Oklahoma City bombings of Federal Buildings. You do remember those, right?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says
You'd better settle down there, boy.
You're not going to want to see the outcome of that. Your side loses every in every alternate timeline.
It's time for you to just Netflix and chill, buddy. Don't poke the bear.
The last Civil War started with a failed assassination attempt on Lincoln before he arrived in Washington D.C. and ended with a successful assassination. The path of the Civil War was decided by the bad guys. It is obvious in retrospect who the bad guys were, except to the bad guys who obviously believed they were the good guys. This bizarre confusion about right/wrong and good/bad in the heads of bad guys usually gets called hypocritical, but I think it is more serious. Calling them crazy would be more accurate.
Here is an example of bad women acting crazy rather than hypocritical (I strongly suspect 6ix can't understand who are the bad women in this story because 6ix is crazy):
A former abortion clinic employee says that there are 'tons of women' who 'claim to be anti-abortion' but come in to end their own pregnancies — and do a 'neat mental trick' to justify it.
Twitter user @AnnoyedCicada detailed her own experiences in an unspecified abortion clinic, recounting several stories of vocally anti-abortion patients who were nonetheless at the clinic for their own abortions.
She said that in addition to considering their own abortions justified and others' unjustified, many of the women were hostile, telling the doctors they were going to hell or should be in jail while ranting against the other patients.
'Anyone who has ever worked in an abortion clinic knows that tons of women who claim to be anti-abortion get abortions. They do a neat mental trick where *their* abortion is justified,' she said.
'At the clinic I worked at, we used to put a pink sticky note on their charts to give a heads-up to the back office staff. That way you'd be prepped for the hostility.'
She faced that hostility herself.
'I had a woman tell me I would burn in hell as I held her hand during her abortion,' she recalled.
'Another woman refused to wait in the same waiting room as the other patients because she didn't think she was "irresponsible" the way they were. We obliged to protect our other patients from her hostility.'
'Yet another woman laughed and told the doctor performing her procedure that she thought he should go to jail. After he had performed the abortion, of course,' she went on.
Another woman 'became furious when we told her we needed consent to perform the abortion'.
'She threw magazines from our waiting room at our staff after we told her we wouldn't do it without her signing consent forms. She tried to schedule with us several times. We kept referring her out.
'My years working in the clinic made me realize that a lot of "pro-life" people are willing to make exceptions for themselves or their loved ones. They just lack the empathy to understand that everyone seeking abortions has the same need that they do.' (In my opinion, it is not empathy they lack; it is sanity they lack.)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8769269/Former-abortion-cli
nic-worker-recalls-pro-life-women-justify-procedures.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I don’t know why Senator Joe Manchin apparently decided to go back on an explicit promise he made to President Biden. Naively, I thought that even in this era of norm-breaking, honoring a deal you’ve just made would be one of the last norms to go, since a reputation for keeping your word once given is useful even to highly cynical politicians.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/12/1
9/statement-from-press-secretary-jen-psaki-4/
The letter Manchin released to explain why he said what he said on Fox News doesn’t read like a carefully worked-out policy statement; it doesn’t even read like a coherent ideological manifesto. Indeed, it feels rushed — a grab bag of Republican talking points hastily trotted out in an attempt to justify his abrupt betrayal and to portray himself as a victim.
https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-stateme
nt-on-build-back-better-act
Manchin is Manchin. But what kind of healthy democracy is structured in a way that can allow one man elected by 290,510 voters in one of the least populous states to thwart the agenda of his party and the President who was elected with 81 million votes??
https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_West_Virginia
,_2018
Joe Manchin: A man you can’t trust.
"Look, I moved the goalposts a dozen times and you kept giving me what I asked for."
"At this point, I’m just going to have to say it’s due to secret reasons that I can’t discuss."
"That will make sure you can't find the goalposts and then meet my demands again!"
Joe Manchin accepted over $1,500,000 from GOP & corporate interests bent on killing Build Back Better.
He & his wife earn $1.1 million a year in coal dividends from his son’s coal company.
His daughter, former Mylan CEO, jacked up the price of EpiPens by 500%.
A family of grifters.
5:53 PM · Dec 19, 2021 from Philadelphia, PA·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/lindyli/status/1472716842942750728
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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BBB was wildly unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever been done in American history.
There were three things that made it so.
1) First, depending on how you count, it created seven or eight big new programs in a single bill.
a. Child care.
b. Pre-K.
c. Climate.
d. Obamacare.
e. Paid leave.
f. Long-term care.
g. Expanded, work-free child tax credit.
h. Hearing and vision in Medicare.
In the past, any one of these would have been a major victory for liberals. The prospect of getting half a dozen of them in one go was breathtaking.
2) Second, it was expensive. The initial version of the bill probably would have cost more than $500 billion per year, though that number depends a lot on what assumptions you make. Even the cut-down final bill, using realistic assumptions instead of smoke and mirrors, probably would have come to $300 billion or so. This amounts to 1-2% of GDP compared to less than 1% of GDP annually for FDR's New Deal during its first decade. So the plan was to pass a bill that was astonishing in scope and cost more than the New Deal.
3) Third, this was to be done in a Senate with precisely 50 Democrats, not FDR's 60 in 1933 (soon to be 70 in 1935). In the end, just as political science and common sense suggests, it was brought down by the two most conservative Democrats in the Senate. By any reasonable standard, if this bill passed, it would make Joe Manchin quite a liberal senator.
This was crazy! What on earth convinced liberals that they could pass something like this? Bernie Sanders understands this. After campaigning on the promise of a progressive revolution, he's been Mr. Pragmatic during the tortuous journey of BBB. He knew from the start that Joe Manchin would be the eventual bottleneck, and despite the occasional outburst it's obvious that he accepted this.
Long story short, we should all stop feeling like the world has collapsed around us—and drop all the circular firing squad crap while we're at it. Manchin says he's open to further talks in January, and I wouldn't be surprised if they finally produce a compromise of three or four fully funded programs along with enough offsetting tax hikes to make the bill more-or-less revenue neutral.
And if this happens? "Only" three or four programs? Then pop the champagne. No other president in recent memory has done anything like this.
https://jabberwocking.com/bbb-was-always-unprecedented-its-no-surprise
-that-its-getting-cut-down/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why is the US paying more for the military after the Afghanistan war is over?
In 2021, despite the US mostly leaving Iraq (2,500 troops remain) and Afghanistan, not even a slight peace dividend has materialized. “As we drew down from Afghanistan, we should have been having a real debate about whether there were opportunities to shift funding and make cuts,” said Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight.
A conflict with China will NOT take on the conventional forms of previous wars. Defense experts, like Smithberger, say that investment in education, technology, and supply-chain security will protect Americans much more from 21st century conflict than an arms race.
Congress last week approved what is by some measures the biggest defense spending bill in history, to the tune of $768 billion. It’s bigger than those passed during the Vietnam and Korean War years, and bigger than Ronald Reagan’s military buildup. The only time this bill has been larger, adjusted for inflation, was in 2011, at a moment when the US had a peak in troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
88 senators voted in favor of the defense authorization for fiscal year 2022, and only 11 voted against. Over the past 60 years, the defense spending bill has passed each year with bipartisan support.
The military-industrial complex has been shaping Washington for almost a century. “Contractors are the biggest winners,” says William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, who pointed out that about half the budget goes to contractors, who are outsourced to do everything from logistics to office support, intelligence work and private security. According to the Congressional Research Service, there are 464,500 full-time contractors working for the Defense Department.
Even those Senators acting in good faith could be swayed by persistent myths, like an overly strong belief in defense spending’s ability to create jobs. Yes, every dollar does create jobs somewhere. But because military investments are capital-intensive and much of the money is spent abroad, that defense spending creates fewer jobs than money going to other industries.
All of this, progressive critics say, leads to a budget process that looks like a Christmas Tree, with Congress members pinning on goodies to satisfy constituents that don’t fit into a larger, cohesive defense strategy.
“When something is set in motion it is often very hard to unseat that, and we have what I have called the military normal,” said anthropologist Catherine Lutz of Brown’s Costs of War Project.
One analyst explained in 1995: “The most glaring weakness of the Clinton administration is that it is living with the defense budget of the now-dead Cold War era.” Now, Biden is living with the defense budget of the now-dead war on terrorism.
More at https://www.vox.com/22840615/us-defense-spending-increase-afghanistan-
withdrawal
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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