Self-described "magic realist" filmmaker @fer_liv and his small Argentinian production house Black Sheep films are a font of superb, thrilling short movies.
The latest is ANYWHERE CAN HAPPEN, a description-defying 60-second short that seamlessly combines computer graphics, stock footage, and VFX in a montage of surreal, dizzying scenes.
As @kottke writes, it's part of the democratization dividend that we get when the power to turn your vision into a shareable reality is put into more hands.
All of Livschitz's work is purely amazing - there were moments that made me laugh and others that sent bolts of pure, atavistic anxiety through me, packed into an unimaginably compact form.
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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Remember Howard Dean, the progressive champion who campaigned on equitable health care and other desperately needed policies?
He's dead.
He's been replaced by Howard Dean, the not-a-lobbyist who won't tell anyone what he does for the giant lobbying firm Dentons.
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The old Howard Dean supported single-payer healthcare. The new Dean opposes it.
But then, that new Dean works for Dentons, the largest law firm in the world, alongside Newt Gingrich, as a "senior advisor" to the firm's lobbying arm.
Dentons lobbies for pretty unsavory characters, including Big Health. Dentons owes its world-beating scale to a 2015 merger with the massive Chinese law-firm Dacheng.
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Biden rightfully calls the $2.2t stimulus package a "once-in-a-generation investment in America," but as @AOC points out, it's not nearly enough - the $40b for housing nationwide would barely cover the bill for NYC alone.
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The country and the Democrats can't afford to smallball this one. The REAL debts we've racked up - infrastructure, health, education and climate - matter far, far more than the "national debt" that goldbug bedwetters never stfu about.
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As @StephanieKelton writes in the @nytimes, the US can't run out of US dollars; debts do not constrain federal spending. Instead, the US government is constrained by resources: available workers, idle factories, raw materials.
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"Gig economy" is a polite term for "worker misclassification" - a way to violate labor law by pretending that your employees are actually independent contractors.
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Unsurprisingly, the companies that cheat their employees also cheat their other suppliers. Doordash spent the entirety of the crisis preying on beloved, endangered local restaurants with a string of outright frauds:
By colluding with Google, Doordash was able to interopose itself between restaurants and diners, making it nearly impossible for us to transact together without giving Doordash a cut that exceeded the restaurant's margin, making every order a money-loser.
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In New York City, the summer 2020 #BLM uprising became a grotesque spectacle, as legions of ultraviolent cops committed mass-scale, criminal human rights violations, spawning a new subgenre of viral video: the NYPD BLM violence video.
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During and after this period, public attention focused on the systemic nature of the NYPD's lawlessness, like the fact that the cops' disciplinary records were held secret, obscuring the repeat offenders.
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Indeed, @Propublica's brave publication of these records demonstrated that the force is riddled with violent, habitual sadists.