Missive #4

Read Will Rogers column 88 years ago: December 9, 1934

My Books I’ve Read link project has some technological limitations. I wanted to use Text Fragments, also called URL Scroll-To-Text Fragment. This new (now 2 year old) Application Programming Interface (API) for navigating to the specific part of the webpage is slowly starting to be part of the browsers. In many cases, it may replace anchor linking, which has been part of web development for decades. The replacement of anchor linking is what I wanted to do. However, the slow adaptation by browsers is a problem.

When I added the Text Fragment coding to the page address that I wanted to link to I found that Brave and Vivaldi browsers do not recognize the address. The only desktop browsers that are compatible are Chrome, Edge, Safari and Opera versions released after April 2020. Chrome for Android has the best chance of working with mobile devices.

I have decided to use the Text Fragment coding and let technology catch up with me. I’ll be on the bleeding edge but there are very few people that ever access Books I’ve Read and probably even less that click on the Title that will link to the book cover and review in my Peregrinating pages. This will still mean editing 700 links but I will not have to add 700 anchors.   

This book is based on the lecture series on finance capitalism Michael Hudson presented for the Global University for Sustainability. The book explains why the U.S. and other Western economies have lost their former momentum: A narrow rentier class has gained control and become the new central planner, Hudson has a one trick pony and he rides it hard in every chapter of this book. If you have read any of his earlier books you need not read this one. using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West.

The book explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems — not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels. Professor Hudson endeavors to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution. — Book promo @ goodreads.com

Financialization of basic needs for housing, education and health care has raised the cost of living so high that even if all Americans were given their physical consumer goods for free &,dash;their food, clothing and so forth — they still could not compete with China or other countries that have minimized the rentier charges that burden finance capitalism. — The Destiny Of Civilization by Michael Hudson

2.9 million people died of influenza and pneumonia in 2018. 98% decline in influenza cases in 2020.  2.8 million “die of covid” in 2020. It’s not that hard to figure out what they did. The 2022 cold and flu season is marked by the return of covid and the hue and cry (again) that we’re all going to die.