John List had this same code of ethics and killed his family than take a ''handout''

Mike Rowe is effectively a shill for the student loan industry.  The vicious irony is that people who go to trade schools are wrecked by these predatory loans.  https://studentloanjustice.medium.com/mike-rowe-is-shilling-for-the-colleges-and-big-government-216652264ed2

YOU HAVE TO PAY MONEY FOR THE FREAKING PLEDGE?????????????    Wow!

Working class? Rowe has a BA in Communications and he was an opera singer at one point. Shadoe Stevens (who was once the TV pitchman for the Federated chain of audio video stores in the 1980s, "Fred Rated") is less of a shill today than Mike Rowe.

Romney, he is there to pitch Vo-Tech over college. If college was free, Rowe would shrivel up and blow away.

Mike Rowe is a fake blue-collar variation of the Koch Bros. guru, Robert LeFevre, who was also a shill, but LeFevre dressed middle-class and was the Libertarian's Libertarian and not a mutating anti-union guy who is moving toward the Trump GOP thuggishness.

I hate this man. I boo this man. I feel refreshed.

Thanks; this dude has been grating on my nerves for years now. 

Federal-Mogul inherited a lot of asbestos liability from acquiring companies that produced asbestos-containing brake pads (that they were fully when they bought the companies), and they've tried to escape that liability through lobbying Congress and bankruptcy protection. Those brakes literally poisoned and lead to the painful deaths of countless blue collar mechanics and auto workers. Federal-Mogul wants the assets from the acquired companies but none of the liability. Very pro-working class, Mike.

These are the times we live in now, the real wars are all in the mind. finely tuned propaganda dispensedto millions.

“Among these central ranges of continental mountains and these great companion parks…lies the pleasure-ground and health-home of the nation,” wrote journalist Samuel Bowles in 1869. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life,” mused naturalist John Muir in 1901. “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst,” opined writer Wallace Stegner in 1983.

North American and European traditions of conservationism, especially those in the U.S., are endlessly celebrated in Western media, with figures like Teddy Roosevelt and John James Audubon placed at the forefront. They’re not without their merits, especially at a time when some of the world’s most powerful countries refuse to take action on climate change. What often goes underexamined or ignored, though, is the deeply racist, settler-colonial history–and very much still the present– that has informed the “conservationist” movement in the US and much of the North Atlantic.

What have been and still are the ecological and human costs, particularly for Indigenous and Black people in the US, of this settler-colonial ‘conservation’ movement? Why, in the American collective memory, is the ‘conservation movement’ often credited to powerful white figures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the extreme environmental and social destruction that they helped caused? And why should there be a need for a settler-driven conservation movement when the original inhabitants of, what we now know as the US and Canada already very often already had systems of ‘conservationism’ in place?

On this episode, we study the racist origins of Western conservation movements, primarily in the United States; how the conservation movement and romanticization of nature have served the settler-colonial project; how these histories continue to inform certain currents of the mainstream climate activism of the present; and what an inclusive, decolonial understanding of environmental conservation can look like.

Our guest is UConn professor Prakash Kashwan.

Ep 155: How the American Settler-Colonial Project Shaped Popular Notions of 'Conservation'

"Let the Culture Wars Begin. Again," The New York Times announces. "How the ‘Culture War’ Could Break Democracy," warns Politico. "As The Culture Wars Shift, President Trump Struggles To Adapt," NPR tells us. "Will Democrats Go on the Offensive in the Culture Wars?" Vanity Fair wonders.

Over and over, we’re reminded that so-called culture wars are being waged between a simplified Left and Right. Depending on who you ask, they tend to encompass issues under very broad categories: “LGBTQ rights,” “abortion,” “funding for the arts,” “policing,” “immigration,” “family values.” While there is some validity to the label of “culture war issue” – say, Republican opposition to an art installation, or tantrums over the gender of M&Ms – most of the time, the term is woefully misapplied.

Despite what much of the media claims, LGBTQ rights, police violence, abortion, and so many other issues aren’t just “culture war” fluff in the same league as the latest Fox News meltdown about a cartoon character. Nor are they both-sides-able matters of debate. They’re matters of real, material consequence, often with life-and-death stakes. So why is it that these are placed under the “culture war” umbrella? And what are the dangers of characterizing them that way?

On this episode, we discuss the vague nature of the term “culture war”; how this lack of clarity is weaponized to gloss over and minimize life-and-death issues like police violence and gender-affirming healthcare; and how the only consistent criterion for a “culture war” seems to be issues that impact someone other than the media’s default audience, i.e., a white professional-class man.

Our guest is The Real News Network Editor-in-Chief Max Alvarez.

Episode 157: How the "Culture War" Label Is Used to Trivialize Life-and-Death Economic Issues

“Follow The Data” is the name of a Bloomberg Philanthropies podcast that debuted 2016. “How Data Analysis Is Driving Policing,” a 2018 NPR headline read. “Data suggests that schools might be one of the least risky kinds of institutions to reopen,” an opinion piece in The Washington Post told us in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the last 20 or so years, a trend of labeling concepts as “data-driven” emerged. It applied, and continues to apply, to policies affecting everything from education to public health, policing to journalism. Decisions affecting these areas will be more thoughtful, the idea goes, when informed and supported by data. In many ways, this has been a welcome development: The idea that a rigorously scientific collection of information via surveys, observation, and other methods would make policies and media stronger seems unimpeachable.

But this isn’t always the case. While gathering “data” is a potentially beneficial process, the process alone isn’t inherently good, and is too often used to obscure important and requisite value-based or moral questions, assert contested ideological priors and traffic in right-wing austerity premises backed by monied interests. When our media tell us a largely unpopular, billionaire-backed idea like school privatization, “targeted” policing, or tax incentive handouts to corporations have merit they’re backed by “the data,” what purpose does this framing serve? Where does the data come from? Who is funding the data gathering? What data are we choosing to care about and, most important of all, what data are we choosing to ignore?

On today’s episode, we’ll look at the development of the push to make everything data-driven, examining who defines what counts as “data,” which forces shape its sourcing and collection, and how the fetishization of “data” as something that exists outside and separate from politics is more often than not, less a methodology for determining truth and more a branding exercise for neoliberal ideological production and reproduction. 

Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with two guests: Abigail Cartus is an epidemiologist at Brown University. She focuses on perinatal health and overdose prevention in her work at The People, Place & Health Collective, a Brown School of Public Health research laboratory.

Episode 162: How the "Data-Driven" Label Sanitizes Cruel Austerity Politics

Popularly known as "one of the worst movies ever made," Ed Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953) was a pioneering attempt at progressive cinematic treatment of trans issues. It's also a film at war with itself. We're joined by special guest Valerie Faye to discuss why this extraordinary film is cinema's greatest depiction of "closet mindset."
Join Michael & Us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

Check out Valerie's podcast The Odd Pod - https://anchor.fm/theoddpodd/episodes/ODD-PODD-CLASSIC---Missing-feat--Chris--Kurt-e1lt39g

On Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/oddpodd

Valerie on Twitter - https://twitter.com/StealingValerie

Watch Glen or Glenda? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVR1JmmvGiA&ab_channel=BloodyVengeance

Michael and Us

#363 - Pull the Strings! (w/ Valerie Faye)

We offer some thoughts on where the tech sector is heading right now, how the markets are performing amidst a down turn, and what big trends for tech and capital are looking strong in the new year.

Stuff we reference
••• A new era: the end of cheap money https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0f6b
••• Silicon Valley start-ups race for debt deals in funding crunch https://www.ft.com/content/d12a4baa-53c6-4256-b125-d25622f9555f 
••• Silicon Valley staff rush to offload start-up shares as valuations plummet https://www.ft.com/content/7178364f-1f0d-46e4-9692-b648ea258d06 
••• Private Markets Don’t Like to Go Down https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-04/private-markets-don-t-like-to-go-down#footnote-1 
••• Forecast: Startup M&A Could Pick Up In 2023 As Fundraising Tightens Further https://news.crunchbase.com/ma/startup-forecast-2023-fundraising-venture-valuations/ 
••• A New Area of A.I. Booms, Even Amid the Tech Gloom https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/generative-ai-chatgpt-investments.html

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Grab TMK gear: https://www.bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

223. Money for Nothing? In this Economy?

Pat Daugherty (@RotoPat) joins Charles, Alex, and the all-knowing AutoCritic A.I. to learn the true objective worth of every Radiohead album.

147 - Every Radiohead Album Ranked! (ft. Pat Daugherty)

Ed takes us on a guided tour of Odin Intelligence, SweepWizard, CloudFactory and other tech bullshit that sounds like embarrassing nonsense while also contributing in their own way to monetizing, mobilizing, and heightening the eschaton.

Stuff we reference:
••• Police Contractor That Promised to Track Homeless People Hacked https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgyjnq/odin-intelligence-hacked 
••• Crime App ‘Citizen’ Fires Overseas $2 an Hour Workers https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkg5nk/citizen-fires-overseas-kenya-nepal-workers-cloudfactory
••• CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23564311/cnet-pausing-ai-articles-bot-red-ventures 

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Grab TMK gear: https://www.bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

227. Don’t Bootstrap the Eschaton

Part 1 –– We welcome returning champ Nick Chavez – mechanical engineer, marxist political economist – for a long conversation about his new essay examining the real nitty-gritty aspects of production and labor, knowledge and management. Time to step down from the ivory tower and onto the shop floor. We talk extensively about different modes of manufacturing and the stratification of technical expertise within capitalist production – and what needs to be kept, changed, and abolished in a transition to communist production. 

••• Nick’s essay: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/Technical-Expertise-and-Communist-Production 
••• Nick’s new blog: https://designformanufracture.wordpress.com/ 
••• Nick’s new twitter: https://twitter.com/DFManufracture

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Grab TMK gear: https://www.bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

229. Capitalist Manufacturing // Manufacturing Communism – Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez)

Kurt Feldman (@icechoir) joins Charles and Alex to remix songs by Weezer, Zeppelin, Radiohead, and more. Fortune Kit on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fortunekit

149 - The Insane Mixing Geniuses (ft. Kurt Feldman)

In this week’s episodes, we dig into an excellent (and very long) new law article, which is crucial for understanding the history, mechanics, constraints, and consequences of venture capitalism. How did this very particular model of investment, which is guided by its own idiosyncratic interests and structural imperatives, come to hold the reins of our global innovation system? And what does that mean for how key decisions are made about technological development?

Article we discuss:
••• Enhancing the Innovative Capacity of Venture Capital | Peter Lee https://yjolt.org/enhancing-innovative-capacity-venture-capital 

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

238. Ventures in Capitalist Innovation, Part 1: History and Mechanics

In recent years, television personality Mike Rowe has amassed a wildly popular following due to alleged working-class straight talk about topics ranging from the affordability of college to reasserting a culture of pride in craftsmanship and labor. From his 5.2 million Facebook followers to his cable programs, his everyman schtick, on its surface, can be very appealing: after all, who doesn’t love a hard day’s work and loathe detached, ivory tower eggheads? 

But hiding under his superficially appealing blue-collar façade is dangerous ideology, one funded by the Koch Brothers and other far-right, anti-labor corporate interests and specifically tailored to pick off a certain constituency of Home Depot Democrats while pushing political impotence, anti-union narratives and anti-intellectualism. Through a clever combination of working class affectation and folksy charm – often exploiting real fears about a decline in industrialization – Rowe has cultivated an image that claims to be pro-worker, but primarily exists to line the pockets of their boss.

Our guest is Street Fight Radio's Bryan Quinby.

Episode 64: Mike Rowe’s Koch-Backed Working Man Affectation

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Episode 64: Mike Rowe’s Koch-Backed Working Man Affectation

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