"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge

Since 2012, the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) has compiled rankings for nine major manufacturing economies – including China and the US – in terms of scale, quality, structural optimisation, innovation and sustainability. In 2012, China scored 89 points, lagging the US (156), Japan (126) and Germany (119). In 2023, China was still in fourth place but had significantly narrowed the gap; the US, Germany, Japan and China scored a respective 189, 136, 128 and 125.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/03/08/two-sessions-china/

A new analysis has found that nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the richest 1 percent over the past 50 years, as neoliberal policies have come to roost and billionaires are poised to use their vast power to worsen wealth inequality in the coming years.

In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion was redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent — enough to give every worker a raise of $32,000 per year, per the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who highlighted the new analysis in a release this week.

In 1975, RAND found in its most recent report, the bottom 90 percent of Americans received about a third of all taxable income in the U.S. That share dropped to 47 percent by 2019, with over half of income going instead to the top 10 percent.

Indeed, analyses show that Trump’s policies are set to widen the wealth gap even further. According to a recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, President Donald Trump’s tax proposals, like the extension of Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts and reducing the corporate tax rate, would provide $36,320 yearly in tax savings to the richest 1 percent, or people with incomes of over $914,900 a year. Meanwhile, the bottom 95 percent of Americans would see a tax increase.

https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-1-percent-has-sapped-79t-in-wealth-from-bottom-90-percent-since-1975/

Last year, seven large banks reaped more than a quarter trillion dollars by using higher Federal Reserve rates to jack up interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards — all while those same banks paid low interest to depositors, according to new letters from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jack Reed (D-RI). One of many examples the lawmakers document: the Fed pays JPMorgan Chase 4.4 percent interest on its deposits, but “customers continue to earn a negligible .01 [percent] on their savings” at JPMorgan Chase.

In all, banks have used this scheme to reap more than $1 trillion in new revenue over a two-and-a-half-year period, according to the Financial Times — and new federal data show net interest income is rising.

The process of switching banks to get better rates is often an annoying rigmarole (by design). When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year finalized a rule to simplify switching banks, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon vowed a “knife fight” against regulators and deployed his lobbying group to file a lawsuit against the rule.

Donald Trump’s administration stalled that rule, tried to dismantle the CFPB, and dropped the agency’s lawsuit alleging that Capital One cheated depositors out of $2 billion in interest payments. Trump’s regulators also repealed guidelines aiming to slow bank mergers (like Capital One’s), which tend to reduce competition to offer better interest rates. One recent study found “a 35 percent reduction in deposit interest rates” in counties that experienced such mergers.

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/federal-reserve-banks-interest-rates/

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has promised to establish AI factories within the first 100 days of her term. AI factories will give companies and researchers access to the EU's supercomputers, tailored to AI needs. AI factories bring together three essential components: supercomputers, data and human capital. The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking plays a pivotal role in this initiative, providing the necessary supercomputing infrastructure and covering half of the acquisition and operation costs of AI-optimised supercomputers as well as half of the cost of the services provided by AI factories. Seven consortia across the EU were selected to establish these factories, in Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2025)769492

While the Left has a vibrant sphere of publications, Substacks, and niche podcasts, these overwhelmingly cater to an already highly engaged, college-educated audience. The Right, meanwhile, has dedicated much more effort to reaching working-class communities and audiences beyond conservative elites.

Left politics must be presented in ways that make working-class experiences central, using storytelling that is dynamic, accessible, and engaging. This media can’t be boring or overly wonky — it must speak in popular vernaculars with style and panache. More than just informing, it should create pathways for weak partisans and nonideologues pathways to feel connected to a broader left community. This is a media-movement strategy that is fundamentally oriented toward democratic persuasion.

As the Right’s best propagandists intuitively understand, much of the real persuasion happens before the policy debates even occur.

It is a game of creating long-term cultural and emotional bonds between media and audiences. This can happen through a political talk radio program, a Fox News morning show, or even ostensibly nonpolitical spaces. After all, some of those who appear to have been Trump’s most potent messengers this past election came from outside traditional news media — video game streamers, YouTube pranksters, anti-woke comedians, and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters. When the moment for arguing Trump’s case arrived, vast portions of the online public were already pulling for the Right to win the exchange of ideas. The goal wasn’t just to win debates; it was to position Trump as the champion of pink- and blue-collar workers, farmers, multiracial small business owners, Christians, young men, and any other group the Right could claim to represent.

The most successful right-wing media outlets —Limbaugh, Fox, Breitbart — did more than push ideology. They blended tabloid aesthetics, populist narratives, and “authentic” personalities to cultivate a loyal audience. More than just a news source, they presented themselves as champions of their viewers’ dignity, the only voices that truly respected their communities.

This was not a claim rooted in objective reality, but it was compelling because it largely went unchallenged. Beginning in the 1970s, mainstream media moved away from working-class audiences.

Yes, vibes are important. But what makes the conservative media ecosystem influential in a sticky, durable way is not just virality or contagious affect. What really matters is when partisan media are able to influence common sense, speaking to inchoate frustrations and desires and offering overarching “deep stories” that frame the ongoing conflicts at the heart of political life.

Consider a conservative podcaster who draws in listeners with an approachable style. Emotionally gripping stories depict the people as under siege by them — elites who condescend and see the audience as trash. A curated set of claims and information (whether true or false) reinforces conservative positions as obvious, logical conclusions. Political loyalties and preferences take shape through these relationships.

Casting left values as the natural end point of rational thought and human empathy might be flattering to our self-image, but we know that’s not the way it works. We all exercise moral agency of course, but not in conditions of our making. We all need help. We all depend on social networks and media sources to help make sense of the world around us. Right now, most Americans won’t encounter the stories and arguments that might inspire commitment to left projects.

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/left-media-working-class-right/

That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?

While previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn’t pay off, their bet on cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly – $3.44 trillion dollars, at the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air. All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency almost exclusively. This isn’t just about utility, it’s about aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their adoption of AI.

If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody.

I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of reaction, something probably best termed ‘postmodern conservatism’. The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish, playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” and to ‘post-liberal’ ‘intellectuals’, that is in fact a good thing – if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.
The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’ The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone – unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit – in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.

The right is a libidinal formation; it is, for many of its proponents, especially those who aren’t wealthy enough to materially benefit from it, a structure in which to have fun. A hobby, almost. Sartre’s injunction to remember that antisemites are primarily “amusing themselves”
is true of most – perhaps all – right wing discourse, no matter how serious it seems or how terrible its real-world effects. As such, the right are strongly averse to any sort of reality-testing. It is, to them, beside the point whether anything they say stands up to the tests developed by the sciences and humanities, including those which determine (insofar as such a determination can be made) whether a piece of art is ‘good’, or at least serious. When they do invoke objectivity, it is misplaced, and as deeply naïve as their artistic output, premising their objection to the existence of trans people on ‘basic biology’, when not only can biology not define ‘woman’, it is having difficulty deciding what a fish or vegetable is. Serious engagement with the world as it is – with the facts that emphatically don’t care about your feelings – doesn’t often, if ever, yield the simple explanations that the right require. In the face of this complexity, most people will conclude that it is best to be humble: What is a woman? No idea, don’t really care, but let’s act in a way that causes the least suffering. But the right seem incapable of doing this. Despite all their absurdist posturing, they struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories. They want to assert, simultaneously, that unambiguous laws govern all aspects of being, while acting as though ‘truth’ is whatever they want or need it to be at any given moment.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

"Despite promising a fight, Senate Democrats are reportedly considering a vote swap. In exchange for providing enough votes to end debate on the GOP spending bill, Senate Republicans would allow a Democratic amendment to continue to fund the government at current levels for the next month to come to the floor, known as a continuing resolution, or CR. The Democratic amendment is almost certain to fail.

Democrats opposed to the GOP bill would then be allowed to vote “no” on the broader spending bill, allowing them to seem like they’re voting against the GOP measure despite providing the needed support to bring it to the floor. Democrats have criticized the GOP plan, which would give Musk and Trump more power to slash the federal government and also cut $1 billion from Washington, D.C.’s local budget.

Nina Smith, a Democratic strategist, said this kind of wheeling and dealing is exactly why Americans have lost faith in the party."

https://theintercept.com/2025/03/13/senate-democrats-vote-government-shutdown/

A company making wooden wind turbine blades has successfully tested a 50-meter-long prototype that’s set to debut soon in the Indian and European markets.

Last year, the German firm Voodin successfully demonstrated that their laminated-veneer timber blades could be fabricated, adapted, and installed at a lower cost than existing blades, while maintaining performance.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/worlds-first-all-timber-wind-turbine-blades-are-cheaper-recyclable-fire-resistant-and-stronger-than-carbon-fiber/