Kepler-186

An estimated 3,898 people slept rough in 2023, an annual increase of 27% – the largest annual rise since 2015 and more than double (120%) the number of people recorded as sleeping rough in 2010, when records began. 29 Feb 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/29/number-of-people-sleeping-rough-in-england-rises-for-second-year-running#:~:text=An estimated 3%2C898 people slept,in 2010%2C when records began.

Liverpool homeless café feeling squeeze of cost of living By Marc Waddington BBC News 2 April 2024 Michelle Langan said the homeless charity was feeling the impact of the cost of living crisis A cafe set up to help homeless people in Liverpool is feeling the strain the cost of living crisis has put on people's ability to support it. The Paper Cup Project's cafe in Liverpool city centre runs a pay it forward scheme for customers to donate food and drink for rough sleepers. But founder Michelle Langan said as customers had been feeling the pinch, donations had suffered. She said the cafe's utility bills had risen 300% since it opened in 2022. Demand, however, was increasing. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-68688259.amp

All Together Now? by Mike Carter One Man’s Walk in Search of his Father and a Lost England Journalist and travel writer Mike Carter retraces the Peoples’ March for Jobs in 1981 in 2016 after the death of his father who’d abandoned his family but was very politically active at the time. Liverpool features as the march began here, as do other places left behind and hollowed out by the Thatcherite civil war of the 80s. There’s an excellent passage on page 246 with a mental health nurse and social worker. If you’ve read Stuart Maconie’s retracing of the Jarrow crusade this is an equally engaging book.

The last 14 years are all coming to a head. They’re not all addicts imo and there’s a lot of young women there, too.

A homelessness outreach group ( not PaperCup project) posted on FB couple of Saturdays ago that they provided hot food and drink to 80 people on a Saturday night. That’s just town, as there are overspill areas now.

From The New Republic magazine. The Billionaire Mattress Salesman Funding the Far Right in Texas Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale likes making viral videos and huge bets on Houston sports teams. He’s also spending big to push the state even further right. By Sam Russek In late December, I drove to Club Westside, a 17-odd-acre athletic facility in west Houston, to see the giraffes. I grew up coming here with family friends who were members back when it was mostly just tennis courts. Today, the club has expanded its offerings, including a lazy river and water park, a gym, an indoor driving range, a solid maple basketball court, saunas, steam rooms, something called “HydroMassage beds,” pickleball, a tiki bar, and—the main attraction—a collection of more than 40 exotic animals. This club is a lesser-known endeavor of one prominent local family, the McIngvales, founding owners of the regional retail chain Gallery Furniture. The family’s 73-year-old patriarch, James McIngvale, is better known as “Mattress Mack,” the Crazy Eddie–style persona he’s donned for local TV ads since 1983. His wife, Linda, is the animal lover: In 2021, when a Bengal tiger escaped from a residential property, prompting a weeklong neighborhood search mission, she helped facilitate its safe transfer to authorities. (She had also previously given the rogue tiger owner a couple of her Capuchin monkeys.) Together, the McIngvales leaped into the national spotlight in 2022, when Mack won what is believed to be the largest sports bet in history—an estimated $75 million—after the Astros won the World Series. Many were taken with this eccentric multimillionaire, slight yet boisterous, a seeming everyman whose existence recalled the ’80s-era Sun Belt boom. Few outlets reported that he was one of the region’s most influential right-wing figureheads. Indeed, for nearly 40 years now, Mack and Linda have been Houston royalty, less endowed than some of the oil-rich financiers who prefer to burnish their names on Houston’s museums and think tanks, but far more prominent in the public imagination. One recent mural depictsMack next to Beyoncé, another Houston native. He claims to be one of few men to have fought both Muhammad Ali (at a promotional event) and the WWE’s “Stone Cold” Steve Austin (for charity). After 9/11, he gifted George W. Bush an American flag–themed couch; more recently, he stockedMar-a-Lago with mattresses at Trump’s request. He’s today’s front man for the city’s right-wing—more immediately palatable than, say, his longtime friend Senator Ted Cruz—but equally haunted by “the radical left.” Harris County, the most populous county in Texas and home to the city of Houston, is newly solid blue, and, as such, a major battleground in the state. Leading up to the 2022 midterms, Mack appeared on local TV to talk up rising crime. He threw nearly $900,000—his largest ever local political contribution—into an upstart campaign to unseat Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a young Democrat who had ridden the blue wave in 2018, eking her way into the county’s most powerful office. Rather than go quietly when his chosen candidate lost in 2022, Mack bankrolled a quixotic legal battlequestioning the validity of the election before backing John Whitmire, a conservative Democrat and his longtime ally, who ran a “smart on crime” campaign for mayor and won by a landslide. “My generation, the ’60s hippies, Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, and all that, has been an abysmal failure,” Mack said on the right-wing education nonprofit PragerU’s YouTube channel last year. “So before I go out, we’re going to change it.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a Houstonian who won’t whisper rumors about Mack, but more publicly the ugly bits of his story are often obfuscated—or rather, drowned. The secret to Mack’s success has been his incessant barrage of advertising. “I like television to establish presence and I like radio as a device to close the sale,” he once wrote in a business memoir. (As for newsprint, he uses it to “make a lasting impression.”) “And I don’t like media where I can’t dominate.” In recent years, he’s taken the lessons he’s learned and applied them to right-wing politics. With all the attention the Koch brothers, Harlan Crow, and oil magnates like Tim Dunn receive for their political spending, families like the McIngvales tend to slip through the cracks, but local fiefs like theirs have a long history of tipping the scales in the South. While not as large as their nationally focused counterparts’, the firewall that they preserve comes down hard on workers’ rights and other local reforms, maintaining the unequal system they’ve benefited from the most. Mattress Mack once compared his political work to that of our country’s Founding Fathers: “Those were not just citizens, those were people who were landholders, who were all very prominent and had so much to lose,” he said. He’s fighting to keep it that way. Mack was never the everyman he claims to be. His father was, Mack says, an “entrepreneur/finance wizard” and philanthropist who owned and managed an insurance company. His mother came from the Alabama Shoals, where her father ran a cotton ginning company. He was born in Starkville, Mississippi, but raised in a wealthy suburb of Dallas. Shortly after Mack abandoned his studies at the University of North Texas, he expressed interest in starting a health club. In 1974, his father then purchased the rights to market Nautilus exercise machines in the Southwest for around $210,000 (more than $1 million today) and gave him and his five siblings a stake. With the help of his father’s contacts, Mack quickly accumulated 100,000 members in Dallas by promising steep group discounts. The only problem: Many of the discounts never materialized. Texas sued Mack for deceptive trade practices in 1978. As part of the settlement, he had to post $40,000 in escrow to pay off former members. He declared bankruptcy and left Dallas with his wife, Linda, a former health club employee. Deception, bankruptcy, a lawsuit—none of it mattered. During Houston’s oil boom in the 1980s, he sold “aspirational furniture,” to borrow from Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz, “furniture for all the blue-collar workers who made Houston what it was.” Mack regularly inflated his sales figures by 10 percent or so to the trade press; he insists he took $5,000 and produced $1 million in the first year. In less than a decade, he created and ran two large companies with his family’s help, bouncing from bankruptcy to unimaginable wealth in a matter of years. But it’s exceedingly unremarkable for a child of a wealthy magnate to become one. Mack’s story was hardly inspirational on its own, so he started spending big to gain the public’s attention—and sympathy. Mack first learned this lesson thanks to a court order. In 1988, after a 300-pound (but still malnourished) lion on one of Mack’s subsidiary properties mauled an eight-year-old girl, fracturing her skull, a judge ordered a series of public service ads. If this was meant to draw penance, it backfired. Through these ads, Mack was able to cultivate a “good-guy image,” per Forbes, and his annual sales rose nearly 70 percent in two and a half years. There were obvious benefits to maintaining this new persona. “Once you start spending advertising money, you can never spend enough,” he once wrote. “There is no reservoir of public goodwill that maintains itself when you are not there in front of them.” Over and over, Mack spent big in charity auctions, gave away furniture and food, and rushed with supplies into communities ravaged by hurricanes. These charitable gestures created their own local news cycles, what Mack has termed “accidental marketing.” For decades, Mack has been one step ahead of bad press, using his vast wealth to his own benefit and occasionally helping others along the way. But these efforts ring hollow when their ancillary benefits are taken into account. They’re part of Mack’s larger marketing apparatus and feel especially hypocritical, given his political spending on politicians hell-bent on punishing the poor. Nor does this charity extend to his employees, whom he once compared to “starving refugees” because they hid food in little corners of the store to eat in rare free moments. He once fired 20 percent of his workforce just before Christmas for flunking drug tests, and in 1990 he was sued for overseeing a hostile work environment, where at least one woman claimed she faced sexual harassment. In another lawsuit, one former employee alleged he was fired for testifying on behalf of his wife, who faced sexual harassment. The lawyer who represented Gallery Furniture is today’s mayor of Houston, John Whitmire. As Mack’s profile within Houston grew, so did his political ambitions. He began calling himself a “capitalist with a minor in social work.” In the 2010s, Mack fell in with the Tea Party movement, appearing to speakalongside Andrew Breitbart and Laura Ingraham to decry “handouts” from the Obama administration. A flashing marquee in his flagship channels Ayn Rand, reading: WE NEED FREEDOM TO SHAPE OUR FUTURE.… WE NEED PROFIT TO REMAIN FREE! More recently, in a belligerent ad targeting his current foe, Judge Hidalgo, Mack declared he had a “humanitarian legacy rivaled by none,” which “won the hearts and minds of millions.” He called Hidalgo “Biden-esque” (derogatory) and lambasted her “penchant for social justice and equity”—all because she referred to him as a “furniture salesman” in her victory speech. Mack’s political spending is part of an effort to prove he’s more than that. In 2019, on a local right-wing radio station, Mack said he was “more interested in legacy now than” he was at age 20, which might explain his increased interest in local politics, where he can have the greatest impact. People will remember his unconventional ads, at least for a time. The politicians he bankrolled would sing his praises, too, until they’ve found a new financial backer. Mack’s growing political influence is a tale as old as time: a rich man trying to shape a world that will live on without him. But morbidly, as I strolled through Club Westside, I wondered who would inherit the giraffes when he’s gone—his wife? One of his children? And those people who relied on his flashy charitable gifts—who would help them then? When the next hurricane inevitably hits, whose store will people sleep in? Why does it have to be a store, anyway? (I didn’t, at this moment, remember that a Texas Republican had run the state agency that denied $1 billion in flood relief to the city.) Houston was built on a swamp; it wouldn’t be the first time that someone’s little fiefdom sank, disappeared, became the stuff of memory. As Mack well knows, without constant preening, a popular image can only last so long.

“They’re fresh!” https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3i3bC5SxHp/?igsh=emw0ZGF0a3Fsd3g0

Thames TV doc on Spain in late 60s under Franco. If you go to the Thames TV page on YT there’s the playlists and an absolute treasure trove of short reports and docs organised by subject.

Or lock you up without trial in Belmarsh

Had a quick look at them-something about emerging as a sect of Islam? Now a separate strand.

Which religion in particular? Any favourites?

Muslim hate preacher hates gays big surprise hardly a discussion is it? What should be done about it?

Calm down soft lad you post your little snide comments and people can reply how they want isn’t that liberal democracy at work?

Have a day off lad

Yes boys!

Terry Christian Lucy Meacocks off Granada Alan Davies

Have a good day lids

David Lloyd on Liverpool’s civic buildings and developments. Focuses on the now 5 star Municipal Buildings. https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/is-the-future-of-liverpools-historic?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios

Doesn’t quite work to In My Life but I like it

Excellent source on what’s going on in tech is 404media. Read two excellent articles. One on using third world labour to get paid on TikTok and Insta, the other (with pod) on manipulating algorithms to put out shite but profitable content. https://www.404media.co/email/859d66c7-c3cd-4e28-9af9-cd064e20e216/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-28-ai-powered-tiktok-hustlers/ US is threatening to ban TikTok in the news today.

The biggest extremists in the UK put Liz Truss in to 10 Downing Street. She promptly crashed the pound making everything more expensive and nearly destroyed UK pension funds.

Bit more coverage than Echo in The Post yesterday. The refurb was crap and there were all sorts of problems with it, let alone the look and feel. https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/st-johns-liverpools-punch-drunk-market?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html Excellent read.

Analysis of Sunak’s rehashed “enemy within” speech. “Since Office Enemy without — beaten him & strong in defence Enemy within — Miners’ leaders Liverpool & some local authorities — just as dangerous in a way more difficult to fight But just as dangerous to liberty Scar across the face of our country ill motivated ill intentioned politically inspired.” ”excerpt from Margaret Thatcher’s notes for the “enemy within” speech to the 1922 Committee, July 19 1984.” -Thatcher’s notes read like a poem from an alternate universe evil e.e. cummings, but she intended to double down on them at that year’s Tory Party conference before the Brighton bombing fatally changed the course of that event. A draft of the speech she never gave were released by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation in 2014. It revealed that she had planned to say: “ We meet today as free people in a free country. But everyone of us here senses the shadow that has fallen across this freedom since last we met. The shadow I speak of is the violence and intimidation which has scarred and wracked the coal industry, and particularly the working miners and their families… … The shadow grows darker as influential men and women in our society question, even repudiate, the ideas of Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. From this dark cloud falls an acid rain that eats into liberty. It can be seen above all in the natural home that these views and voices now find in the Labour Party. It explains why that party is so muted in its condemnation of picket violence; so muted in its praise for the hard-pressed police; so muted in its support for the tens of thousands of working miners; so muted in its advocacy of an NUM ballot; but so willing to trumpet the cause of the present NUM leadership in its extreme and uncompromising objectives. Yet the Labour Party in its present form, infiltrated by extremists, riven with factions, still stands upon the stage as the (principal) alternative to the Conservative Party in governing Britain. That, Mr. Chairman, is the measure of the shadow which has fallen across freedom since last we met.” https://open.substack.com/pub/brokenbottleboy/p/the-enemy-within-remix?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios