…& so it goes on

There are so many ways Mr. Trump has challenged the norms of the presidential system that such merch can seem the least of the matter. What is selling NFTs with pieces of a mug shot suit compared with the indictment that necessitated the mug shot? What is offering $99 Victory47 cologne in a gold bottle with a gold Trump head as a stopper (another product available on the sneaker website) compared with offering to throw NATO allies to Russia like little pieces of red meat? Besides, realistically, there’s no way the sneakers will provide much of a financial boost to Trump World.

The sneakers are being created by a company known as 45Footwear LLC and are not officially “designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals,” according to a disclaimer on the sneaker website. That company licenses the Trump name and image from one called CIC Ventures LLC, which happens to have the same address as the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The Trump sneaker website looks a lot like the Trump NFT website, and as with that arrangement, Mr. Trump most likely receives a licensing fee. He did present the sneakers at Sneaker Con himself.

Despite the fact that, as of Sunday, the website claimed that the 1,000 pairs of numbered Never Surrender sneakers had sold out, leaving the somewhat less exciting T-Red cherry knit sneaks and Potus 45 white knit sneaks available at $199 each, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which the shoes provide any meaningful source of income.
[…]
Like Mr. Trump’s tendency to turn every courtroom appearance into a form of entertainment that can be used as a campaign op, his effort to commoditize his legal jeopardy is a long-term strategic play. In reducing his indictments to a slogan on a consumer good, he is reducing their gravity.

It’s a form of insidious trivialization, the sort of tactic that plays perfectly in the landscape of late-stage capitalism in which everything is a product for sale. Oh, those old federal charges? They’re not serious; they’re a style choice. He’s transforming indictments into accessories, a language everyone speaks. The more product he sells, the more he makes a mockery of his situation. That’s where the real profit lies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/style/trump-gold-sneakers.html

…how the man is anything more than a punchline continues to land with all the joy & exuberance of falling right on the boney bit of your ass…& not for the spectators

We were supposed to empty the truck in under an hour. Given how little we made — I was paid $12.25 an hour, which I was told was the standard starting pay — I was surprised how much my co-workers cared about making the unload time. They took a kind of bitter pride in their efficiency, and it rubbed off on me. I dreaded making a mistake that would slow us down as we worked together to get 1,500 to 2,500 boxes off the truck and sorted onto pallets each morning. When the last box rolled out of the truck, we would spread out in groups of two or three for the rest of our four-hour shift and shelve the items from the boxes we just unloaded.

Most of my co-workers had been at the store for years, but almost all of them were, like me, part time. This meant that the store had no obligation to give us a stable number of hours or to adhere to a weekly minimum. Some weeks we’d be scheduled for as little as a single four-hour shift; other weeks we’d be asked to do overnights and work as many as 39 hours (never 40, presumably because the company didn’t want to come anywhere close to having to pay overtime).

The unpredictability of the hours made life difficult for my co-workers — as much as if not more than the low pay did. On receiving a paycheck for a good week’s work, when they’d worked 39 hours, should they use the money to pay down debt? Or should they hold on to it in case the following week they were scheduled for only four hours and didn’t have enough for food?

…clearly what they should have done was sell over-priced bootleg sneakers…or lie about how their home is 3 times the size it really is…or just claim their car is worth more than their debts…or…impart state secrets to foreign powers…then maybe they’d have been president

Many of my co-workers didn’t have cars; with such unstable pay, they couldn’t secure auto loans. Nor could they count on holding on to the health insurance that part-time workers could receive if they met a minimum threshold of hours per week. While I was at the store, one co-worker lost his health insurance because he didn’t meet the threshold — but not because the store didn’t have the work. Even as his requests for more hours were denied, the store continued to hire additional part-time and seasonal workers.

Most frustrating of all, my co-workers struggled to supplement their income elsewhere, because the unstable hours made it hard to work a second job. If we wanted more hours, we were advised to increase our availability. Problem is, it’s difficult to work a second job when you’re trying to keep yourself as free as possible for your first job.

…ok…so I guess that rules out the car thing…but have they tried flogging bad AI generated images of themselves to racists…because if they haven’t…are they even trying, really?

Many people choose to work part time for better work-life balance or to attend school or to care for children or other family members. But many don’t. In recent years, part-time work has become the default at many large chain employers, an involuntary status imposed on large numbers of their lowest-level employees. As of December, almost four and a half million American workers reported working part time but said they would prefer full-time jobs.

When I started working at the store, I assumed that the reason part-time work was less desirable than full-time work was that by definition, it meant less money and fewer or no benefits. What I didn’t understand was that part-time work today also has a particular predatory logic, shifting economic risk from employers to employees. And because part-time work has become ubiquitous in certain predominantly low-wage sectors of the economy, many workers are unable to find full-time alternatives. They end up trapped in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on and aren’t predictable enough to plan a life around.

…another fun one I’ve come across is to classify employees as contractors…in some places that’s a much cheaper sort of person to employ…who has to cover a lot more of their own costs & to whom you owe substantially less responsibilities…then there’s the zero hours thing…which, if you haven’t come across…congratulations…but that thing about it being hard to work a 2nd job when you need to be free for the 1st…it’s like that…but the 1st job makes it a condition of employment that there isn’t a 2nd…while having no responsibility to provide so much as a single-shift…sound like it couldn’t be a thing, right?

There are several reasons employers have come to prefer part-time workers. For one thing, they’re cheaper: By employing two or more employees to work shorter hours, an employer can avoid paying for the benefits it would owe if it assigned all the hours to a single employee.

But another, newer advantage for employers is flexibility. Technology now enables businesses to track customer flow to the minute and schedule just enough employees to handle the anticipated workload. Because part-time workers aren’t guaranteed a minimum number of hours, employers can cut their hours if they don’t anticipate having enough business to keep them busy. If business picks up unexpectedly, employers have a large reserve of part-time workers desperate for more hours who can be called in on short notice.

Part-time work can also be a means of control. Because employers have total discretion over hours, they can use reduced schedules to punish employees who complain or seem likely to unionize — even though workers can’t legally be fired for union-related activity — while more pliant workers are rewarded with better schedules.

In 2005 a revealing memo written by M. Susan Chambers, then Walmart’s executive vice president for benefits, who was working with the consulting firm McKinsey, was obtained by The New York Times. In it she articulated plans to hire more part-time workers as a way of cutting costs. At the time, only around 20 percent of Walmart’s employees were part time. The following year, The Times reported that Walmart executives had told Wall Street analysts that they had a specific target: to double the company’s share of part-time workers, to 40 percent. Walmart denied that it had set such a goal, but in the years since, it has exceeded that mark.

…wallmart…net profits somewhere between seven-&-some & seventeen-&-a-bunch…billion…a year…for at least the last…15 years? 20?

It’s not just Walmart. Target, TJX Companies, Kohl’s and Starbucks all describe their median employee, based primarily on salary and role, as a part-time worker. Many jobs that were once decent — they didn’t make workers rich, but they were adequate — have quietly morphed into something unsustainable.

…target posted a loss in ’14…but otherwise only in the low thousands…of millions…TJX…up there posting wallmart numbers…kohls ain’t having a great year, apparently…not yet as bad as they posted for 20/21 but they look like the poor relation…starbucks is modest…never broken $5 billion net in a year by the looks of it…no wonder they’re so dead set against having unions

One of the most surprising aspects of this movement toward part-time work is how few white-collar people, including economists and policy analysts, have seemed to notice or appreciate it. So entrenched is the assumption that full-time work is on offer for most people who want it that even some Bureau of Labor Statistics data calculate annual earnings in various sectors by taking the hourly wage reported by participating employers and multiplying it by 2,080, the number of hours you’d work if you worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Never mind that in the real world few workers in certain sectors are given the option of working full time.

The shift to part-time workers means that focusing exclusively on hourly pay can be misleading. Walmart, for example, paid frontline hourly employees an average of $17.50 as of last month and recently announced plans to raise that to more than $18 an hour. Given that just a few years ago, progressives were animated by the Fight for $15 movement, these numbers can seem encouraging. The Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen wrote on social media last year that “Walmart’s probably a better employer at this point than most child care providers and a lot of the jobs in higher ed.”

The problem is that most Walmart employees don’t make $36,400, the annualized equivalent of $17.50 an hour at 40 hours a week. Last year, the median Walmart worker made 25 percent less than that, $27,326 — equivalent to an average of 30 hours a week. And that’s the median; many Walmart workers worked less than that.

Likewise, at Target, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $25,993. The median employee of TJX (owner of such stores as TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods) makes $13,884 a year; the median Kohl’s employee makes $12,819.

Those numbers, though low, are nevertheless higher than median pay at Starbucks, a company known for its generous benefits. To be eligible for those benefits, however, an employee must work at least 20 hours a week. At $15 an hour — the rate Starbucks said it was raising barista pay to in 2022 — 20 hours a week would amount to $15,600 a year. But in 2022 the median Starbucks worker made $12,254 a year, which is lower than the federal poverty level for a single person.

…work smarter, not harder…I swear I heard a consultant say that once…an expensive one, even

And this is after the post-Covid labor shortage, when pay for low-wage workers rose faster than it did for people in higher income brackets.

Since my stint at the big-box store, where I ended up working for six months, I’ve come to think that every time we talk about hourly wages without talking about hours, we’re giving employers a pass for the subtler and more insidious way they’re mistreating their employees.
[…]
To the extent that the shift to part-time work has been noticed by the larger world, it has often undermined rather than increased sympathy for workers. For decades, middle- and upper-class Americans have been encouraged to believe that American workers are hopelessly unskilled or lazy. (Remember when Elon Musk praised Chinese workers and said American workers try to “avoid going to work at all”?) The rise in part-time work seems on its face to support this belief, as white-collar workers, unfamiliar with the realities of the low-wage work environment, assume that workers are part time by choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/opinion/part-time-workers-usa.html [NYT]

…& you just know there’s folks in that exact circumstance who are still dipping into their own pocket to line the coffers of his illigitimate-ness felonious dunk…I’m not trying to be rude…but this is why people in other bits of the world wonder sometimes if americans on the whole really “get” irony…though…& I say this as a lifelong adherent to a near religious approach to the appreciation of irony…I’m not sure it’s really the right term for the context

Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.

Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.

The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.
[…]
Nor is the challenge confined to national politics. In 2021, Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers. In 2022, it followed up with another report detailing threats against local school boards. In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, “We know who you are” and “We will find you.”

…the fact that this is…somehow…functionally a legal & above board aspect of an allegedly legitimate campaign strategy on the part of not-terrorists…or extortionists…or organized criminal enterprise…who at the very least presumably want a license fee for the use of the playbook the way you-know-when-you’ve-been-tangoed charges companies just smart enough not to involve him any other way for the use of his brand…or…as most people think of them…name…again…this shit literally has his name on it…when you go arrest the people who did it…they’re wearing it…flying flags with it…yard signs…you name it…you see why the irony thing gets questions, right?

But the tsunami of MAGA threats is different. The intimidation is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.

…but…reducing it to irony…makes it sound trivial…&…this is a non-trivial problem

But I don’t want to be too bleak. So let me end with a point of light. In the summer of 2021, I received a quite direct threat after I’d written a series of pieces opposing bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Someone sent my wife an email threatening to shoot me in the face.

My wife and I knew that it was almost certainly a bluff. But we also knew that white nationalists had our home address, both of us were out of town and the only person home that night was my college-age son. So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house.

Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, “Why did you get this threat?”

I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. “I’m a columnist,” I said, “and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.”

The deputy paused for a moment. “I’m a vet,” he said, “and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.” And then he said words I’ll never forget: “You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/opinion/magas-violent-threats-are-warping-life-in-america.html

…now…maybe you’re side-eyeing that & thinking involuntarily about the last season of the wire & the asshole who just makes shit up to accentuate “the dickensian aspect”…but…honestly…call me a CAB…because I guess if I’m honest…I’m probably on team #onlysomecopsarebastards…I know…it’s unfashionable…but I grew up with the sort that didn’t get to shoot anyone…& in the age when nobody had mobile phones & you never knew if a callbox would have a working phone in it even if you found one…if you got lost…particularly if you were a woman or a kid…but even if you were just a tourist…you found the next visible member of the constabulary & they’d get you sorted…probably call you sir or ma’am & not have it sound like a low-key insult, too…so…maybe it’s that…maybe it’s just the part where absolutes generally strike me as unnaturally convenient & generally shitty as a basis for much

This Wednesday meeting used to convene in the basement before a white supremacist showed up one June night in 2015 and opened fire, killing nine people. Now Republican presidential candidates and their backers crisscrossing South Carolina ahead of the state’s Feb. 24 primary seemed to be exhibiting what the 56-year-old pastor called a “lapse in memory.”

Since the start of January, the United States has counted six mass killings, its rate of firearm-wrought bloodshed outpacing every other wealthy nation by far. The candidates vying for the GOP nomination, if they address the carnage at all, make no mention of safeguarding access to the weapons used in attack after attack after attack.

…look…it’s pretty awful to contemplate is you’re afflicted with things like basic empathy…so, I’m sorry to be so blunt & all…but…just…think about how it sounds to most people in most places…not just in the states but even some of those shithole countries your MAGA supporter would expect to be envious of the US in every respect…that this is a boast & a campaign asset

“During my four years, nothing happened,” Trump told a gathering of NRA members this month in Pennsylvania. “And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing.”

…&…exactly who is it trying to tell what?

The police lacked power, too: South Carolina has never had a red-flag law, so state courts can’t intervene to temporarily remove a firearm from someone deemed dangerous. Haley wanted to keep it that way, saying at a town hall last summer after announcing her candidacy: “I don’t trust the government to deal with red-flag laws. I don’t trust that they won’t take them away from people who rightfully deserve to have them.”

She and Trump had both opposed closing what activists dubbed the Charleston loophole, the technicality that permitted Roof to buy a .45-caliber Glock before the FBI completed a background check that would have rendered him ineligible. Under federal law, gun sales can proceed if such a probe takes longer than three days, but since the massacre, 22 states have moved to expand that window. South Carolina has not.

Manning hoped Haley would change her mind, considering she’d attended the funerals here. Instead, just that morning, she was talking about Mother Emanuel on “The Breakfast Club” radio show, detailing her push to remove the Confederate flag from the State House in wake of the killings. Roof had uploaded photos of himself holding the flag, along with a manifesto in which he declared: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world.”

Yet in the same interview, Haley said the national media had rushed in to “define” the massacre. “They wanted to make it about guns,” she said. “They wanted to make it about racism …”

It was about guns, the pastor thought. It was about racism.
[…]
It was why Hali Doctor had to grow up without her mother.
[…]
She appreciated that Biden was trying to restrict access to guns in the face of endless gridlock. Her sister had kept her apprised of everyone’s stances. But to Hali, no politician was saying with appropriate passion what she longed to hear — that gun violence was the most urgent issue in America, that it should be treated like a national emergency, that people like her, millions of people, must cope with loss every second of their lives. It’s always humming in the background, threatening to spill into conversations that should be mundane. It’s tattooed on her left hand: “Angel Energy,” because, her family says, she and her mother shared the same gentle aura.

The last politician who inspired her was President Barack Obama, when he sang “Amazing Grace” at the memorial for Mother Emanuel’s slain pastor. Hali stood in the crowd while the whole world watched and, in that moment, it felt like there was nothing more important than stopping the bloodshed.

Haley had been there, too. The root of the problem, the former governor said last month, was “the cancer that is mental health.”

“You can be mentally ill and hurt no one,” Hali imagined saying if they ever crossed paths again. “What makes you a threat is the gun.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/16/mother-emanuel-survivors-gop-candidates-trump-haley/

[…been a bit de-railed this morning but I think I might be able to claw back a bit of time to get this to run its course in…uh…due course?]

…even if the gun to someone’s head is metaphorical…people who have a problem with the idea that they ought not to be in the hands of people who can’t be trusted with them…well…probably best to keep those folks at a distance…say…the effective range of whatever they might be carrying…which is easier said than done if you’re out in the midday sun with the mad dogs & englishmen

The sweet, earthy scent of tomatoes hangs in the air as a crew of 44 workers speeds through rows of vines. They fill 32-pound buckets with fruit, then deliver them to co-workers waiting on the backs of flatbed trucks who dump the contents into crates to be sorted and packaged.

During an eight-hour shift, each worker hauls an average of about three tons of tomatoes. They work at this pace all winter in this small farming community in southwest Florida — and all summer on a farm in Tennessee, where temperatures can reach the 90s.

But unlike at many other farms, every worker takes a 10-minute break every two hours during the hottest part of the year. When they feel the effects of heat illness coming on, they have the right to cool down in the shade. Sunripe Certified Brands, the company that owns the farm, must provide clean water, shaded rest areas and nearby bathrooms for all of its workers.

These are the strongest set of workplace heat protections in the United States. They were not put in place by local, state or federal regulators, but by the workers who spent years organizing to push companies to adopt them.

…& those 10mins in the shade between 110min stints working in the heat…that shit took actual years & basically a union…but there ain’t been slaves since forever & it ain’t illegal if people are willing to work so don’t go coming over all dangerously socialist or anything radical like that…& don’t get confused about how it seems like you’re not the one adopting radical or extreme stances on shit…that’s just the insidious communism rotting your brain using solvents like “I’m not really down with treating people that badly & it doesn’t even seem like we need to, really…might even work better if we didn’t” or “have we tried finding out if even the awful people are less hard to live with if everyone gets the shit they need to be alive & mostly healthy before we get to the complicated shit?”

…because…if we did…I think I may have missed a meeting…& probably a lot of memos?

Heat stress kills dozens of workers and sickens thousands more each year, according to the Labor Department, a toll that’s likely to rise as climate change makes dangerously hot days more common. Last year was the hottest on record, and forecasters are predicting that this year will top it.

But so far, efforts to protect farmworkers from heat have been limited. There are no federal workplace heat safety rules, although the Labor Department is slowly working to create some. Only four states — California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado — have heat rules that apply to farmworkers.

In November, a push to create heat regulations for farm and construction workers in Miami-Dade County stalled because commissioners worried the rules “could potentially kill industry.”

…uh huh…this industry…these regulators…who are doing such a bang up…oh…wait…no, that’s the workers again

Every year, the organization sends auditors to participating farms, where they interview at least half the workers about labor conditions. So far, organizers say they’ve done more than 30,000 interviews. Auditors also check companies’ payroll records for evidence of wage theft.

That’s more oversight than most government regulators can manage. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which has 1,850 inspectors for 130 million U.S. workers, can’t inspect every job site every year. Last year, it conducted 34,267 inspections for the country’s 6 million employers.

When OSHA inspectors discover lawbreaking farms, they issue fines. For example, when a farmworker died of heatstroke on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., farm last year, OSHA fined the farm $15,625. But the FFP has the ability to punish wrongdoers by barring them from selling to specific clients, which could hurt farm owners’ wallets more.

“If they lose their status as an FFP farm, then they’re looking at millions of dollars in potential losses,” Reyes Chávez said.

The FFP said it has recovered more than half a million dollars in stolen wages on behalf of workers, ousted 19 supervisors accused of sexual harassment and suspended nine farms for violating workers’ rights — which means those farms can’t sell to the program’s buyers until they prove they corrected the violation. Repeat violators may be permanently banned.
[…]
Workers are motivated to move fast because they’re paid by the bucket, but the bonus they get from the FFP makes it easier to stop for a break.

“If you start feeling bad, you rest for 15, 20, 30 minutes,” said Arturo Basoco, 35, who is on his seventh short-term contract to pick tomatoes for Sunripe. “Your body might tell you that you need more and you rest for an hour or two. If it gets really bad, then you go home or see a doctor. That’s how it should be.”

…I mean…when you put it that way…only an idiot would disagree, right…or maybe a sociopath

“Is there a cost associated with 10-minute breaks every two hours? Absolutely,” Esformes said. But he said his business benefits from keeping workers healthy and productive — and it’s the right thing to do.

“My responsibility as a business owner is to provide a safe place for people to work,” he said, “and if I can’t make a living and do that at the same time, I need to find another [expletive] job.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2024/farmworker-heat-safety-fair-food-program/

…see…you can be in the employment gig & not be a sociopath…could someone tell the right?

“A library should not exclude material from its catalogue because of the origin, background or views of a person who created the material,” it says.

“A library should not prohibit or remove material from its catalogue because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

And the gut punch is about the librarians themselves. They shall not be “dismissed, demoted, suspended, disciplined, reassigned, transferred or otherwise retaliated against,” the bill states.

This part is urgent.

…tell ’em that shit, while you’re at it

A similar federal bill — the Fight Book Bans Act — was introduced in the U.S. House in December. Meanwhile, last year Illinois became the first state to pass a law penalizing libraries that ban books. New Jersey was considering one.

The bill in Maryland would be a sweeping and pioneering stand against a trend right out of Europe’s totalitarian age or any of the science-fiction books my kids read (when they were still able to get them in the library).

In the 2022-2023 school year, there were 3,362 instances of books being banned from public school classrooms and libraries, according to Pen America. The organization’s tally includes instances “where students’ access to books in school libraries and classrooms in the United States was restricted or diminished, for either limited or indefinite periods of time.”

It’s the volume of attacks that is new in our era.

Sutherland said that in her 14 years as a librarian, she could previously think of only two instances of book challenges.

…& I get it…I’m a sample size of one…arguably atypical…potentially an unreliable narrator…so it’s probably one of those things where I’m blind to my implicit biases & telling on myself…but…I don’t think of myself as the sort who would have been all for the delights of the auto da fé…but…well…I guess it’s like this…lot of years ago I was in the audience for a debate…the set up was that there’s a burning building…you’re a passer by…in the building is a person…alive but not for much longer…& the very last surviving copy of the complete works of shakespeare…& the sides were arguing about which to save…so there I am…hand in the air…looking to ask a question designed to help out the ones arguing to save the life…I ask whether the value we place on the book is for the artifact or because it represents something that has become a huge part of the very fabric of our language…because they might not be all bound up in one block of pages…but shakespeare is fucking everywhere like the letters in a stick of rock…so do we even really need the source to retain its value, sort of thing…except the person arguing that side is a) the very definition of an arrogant public schoolboy b) too dumb to see where that question is going & thinks it’d be much cleverer to dismiss it before bothering to figure out how it was going to argue against them…oh…& I guess c) had barely read the titles of more than two of the man’s plays…& if I’m honest…they made a prick of themselves trying to do it…so…when the other guy…who was about 20 years older, a couple of lifetimes smarter…& a decent judge of facial expressions…turned to me rather than pick a new person to call on & asked me to expand on what I was getting at…I argued that the nature of mortality is unavoidable so in a sense the death of the individual can at best be postponed…but the knowledge & linguistic feats of the collected works are potentially immortal…so…rationally…the loss & the gain in the scope of the history of mankind makes it a no brainer that you take the book

…not saying that’s why save-the-book carried the day…mostly just admitting I can be petty that way…but…I figured the context was going to be important if I was gonna do the next part where I admit I might be open to the idea that…on the principle of but-you-said-it-was-an-appropriate-response…if you’re willing to burn books…I…might not object if you wound up on a pyre before your funeral…when in spain…do a little inquisiting…or whatever

They have a playbook: finding passages in books that make them clutch their pearls, submitting objections to libraries, then heading to school board meetings.

There, they read graphic passages, fanning themselves or rolling their eyes. At a Carroll County, Md., school board meeting in the fall, they described garments falling to the ground, “secret sweetness” and rape, apologizing to the audience — which, at these meetings, usually includes the students they’re allegedly protecting.

The campaign was successful in Carroll County — getting more than 50 books removed, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Water for Elephants.”

…I’m…you know…I’m pretty sure I ain’t even kidding, really…these people are taking “just don’t fucking get it” to a level of lethality that being even dangerously stupid shouldn’t be able to threaten anyone with other than the ones exhibiting it…which it very clearly is to the point of arguably being the common denominator of a number of endemic crises that very much include public health

“When we see the challenge forms,” Jones, the legislator, said, “there’s a box that asks: ‘Have you read this book that you’re challenging?’ And more times than not, it’s ‘No, I haven’t read the book.’”

Turns out, the Moms for Liberty website links to a cheat code, BookLooks.org, the lazy conservatives’ highlight reel of out-of-context, lurid, violent, provocative or controversial passages of books — no deep reading necessary. Easier for kids to find, too.

…I mean…the god-fearing ones…they could presumably take it up with their favorite vengeful almighty post immolation…assuming that ends when they die…which in their telling of it seems a long way from certain…but that sort of thing is best discussed with jesuits & rabbis & imams & other folks who are familiar with the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin…so…at least you won’t have to put up with that part

Sometimes, the objectors just take the book they want to get rid of and walk out with it. Sutherland said she sees that often.
[…]
The fine for deliberately walking out with or destroying a book used to be $250. Jones’ bill raises it to $1,000 and a possible three-month jail sentence — all to say to the book banners, “We see you, and we know what you’re doing,” she said.

The fact is, you can’t have it both ways, book banners. You can’t claim freedom and liberty and then decide what books other people can read. You can’t object to the government, then ask the government to do your parenting for you by banning the books you don’t want your kids to read.

“It’s your choice to leave that book on the shelf,” Jones said. “If it’s not right for you, if it’s not right for your family, nobody’s telling you to check it out.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/02/19/maryland-bill-book-challenges-libraries/

…or…you know…not check it out…just thieve the fucking thing…which they could do from any bookstore if they actually wanted one that bad…but that’s not the point, is it…not when you can try to make everyone else have to confine themselves to the narrow-minded reality you wish you lived in so bad you’d be willing to make fetch happen

“House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” he said in a statement. Calling the Senate bill a “status quo” measure, he added, “The mandate of national security supplemental legislation was to secure America’s own border before sending additional foreign aid around the world.”

It was an exercise in circular logic by the speaker. Previously he had declared as “dead on arrival” in the House a bipartisan Senate proposal that included provisions to secure the border as well as aid for Ukraine and Israel. That bill was the result of months of difficult negotiations among Republican and Democratic senators. Those talks had begun only because Republicans had insisted that Democrats and President Biden act on border security, saying they would not accept a Ukraine-Israel funding bill without something on immigration.

The proposal amounted to the most conservative bipartisan immigration legislation proposed in decades. But once former president Donald Trump denounced it, it had no future in either the Senate or House. Republican senators ran away from the measure, and it was defeated there.

…& it shouldn’t take burning them at the stake…it shouldn’t take anything more than “bye, felicia…”

Johnson is a leader in name only, buffeted on all sides to the point of immobility. His lone success, if it can be called that, was House passage of a resolution to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The margin was by a single vote, and it came a week after Johnson and company were embarrassed by the failure to pass a similar resolution because Republican vote counters were outfoxed by House Democrats.

House Republicans found no high crimes or misdemeanors, the standard for such a rare step. Instead Mayorkas fell victim to policy disputes between Republicans and Democrats and to the administration’s failure to move more quickly and decisively to deal with the problems at the border. There is virtually no chance a trial in the Senate will result in the secretary’s conviction. Senators probably will make quick work of their responsibilities.

The decision by House Republicans to go ahead with the impeachment of Mayorkas amounted to performative politics in the extreme. As others have said, if lawmakers want to solve a problem, they have to introduce legislation and then get enough votes to pass it — and in the Senate that still means 60 votes, not a simple majority.
[…]
Johnson and his Republican colleagues face another round of decisions when they return from their current recess. One will be aid for Ukraine and Israel. Another will be how to keep the government funded, an issue that long has divided Republicans in the House. That issue ultimately was McCarthy’s undoing, when he put on the floor a funding bill that was approved with Democratic votes.

Johnson’s speakership could hinge on how he navigates these issues. His tenure could end quickly or continue through the year. At that point, voters will decide whether they want Republicans to remain in the majority or take power out of their hands and give it back to the Democrats. Johnson’s first months as speaker have been difficult but perhaps nothing like what awaits him.

Speaker Johnson says he has priorities. So why hasn’t he acted on them? [WaPo]

…& what stakes are these pratfalling play actors rolling their loaded dice over?

With the Israel-Hamas war, a nuclear Rubicon of sorts has been crossed: Two elected Israeli officials — a government minister and a member of parliament — not only publicly referenced Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons but suggested that they be detonated over Gaza. This was a disturbing first. Meanwhile, in Washington, a long-standing secret executive order has prohibited American officials from even acknowledging that Israel has nuclear arms. Given the increasing risks of nuclear weapons proliferation — and, worse, use — continuing such self-censorship about Israel’s nuclear arsenal is not just bizarre; it’s harmful.

One of us directs a national security research center, which last month conducted an unclassified Israel-Iran nuclear war game. Israel fired nuclear weapons against Iran twice (using a total of 51 weapons) and Iran replied with a nuclear strike of its own. Surprisingly, the strategic uncertainties following the exchange were greater than those that preceded it.
[…]
When this practice began, the White House also promulgated a regulation — described in an Energy Department classification bulletin — that threatens present and past government employees with disciplinary action, including firing, if they publicly acknowledge Israel has nuclear weapons. So far, the regulation has been withheld from public release.
[…]
With Israeli officials’ recent public outbursts on using nuclear weapons in Gaza, though, whatever possible benefit this policy might have had has evaporated. Maintaining it will only make matters worse.

One of us was a CIA officer who helped stop South Korea from getting nuclear weapons and just published a book, “Hunting Nukes,” detailing this and related nonproliferation efforts. After the CIA’s review board approved the book’s publication, though, the Pentagon demanded that references to Israel’s nuclear program be deleted.

Another of us has initiated the declassification of many archival documents on Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Yet the Pentagon recently redacted all references to Israel’s nuclear program from a 60-year-old memorandum that U.S. diplomats had written on the need for regional Middle Eastern denuclearization talks, even before Israel had produced a weapon.

What is the Pentagon protecting? Does it really think keeping Israel’s nuclear program classified is in our national security interest? If we pretend we don’t know Israel’s nuclear status, doesn’t it only make it easier for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, South Korea, Japan and others to proceed with nuclear weapons programs of their own?

Worse, doesn’t it provide policymakers cover to finesse dealing honestly with proliferation challenges they would prefer to ignore, such as in North Korea? Here, also for diplomatic reasons, U.S. officials stubbornly declare they will never accept Pyongyang as a nuclear weapons state despite its repeated nuclear tests and growing arsenal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/19/israel-nuclear-weapons/

…uh huh…so

Former President Donald Trump on Monday compared the sudden death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a prison colony to the legal peril he faces in the United States, elevating a talking point in some right-wing circles linking the two in his first comments on Navalny’s death.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

…what…no law against gathering kindling that I’m aware of…not my fault if his hair lacquer is flammable & those suits of his go up like a christmas tree…accident waiting to happen, that…nobody but himself to blame

Navalny’s death, which was announced by Russia’s prison service, followed his surviving several poisoning attempts, including one in 2020 in which he was poisoned with a military nerve agent during a business trip to Russia. Navalny, who crusaded for years on exposing corruption in Putin’s government, blamed the poisoning attempt on the Russian president. The Kremlin has denied involvement in the poisoning attempts and dismissed suggestions Putin was behind Navalny’s death.

…but ass-weasel von clownshow has been a poisonous shit his whole life…& got covid once…so…you know…samsies, right?

“Navalny=Trump,” the right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza posted. “The plan of the Biden regime and the Democrats is to ensure their leading political opponent dies in prison. There’s no real difference between the two cases.”

Trump compares Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death to his own legal woes [NBC]

…so…I guess for…well…probably mostly moral & potentially legal reasons…I should be extra clear about something here…when I say I wouldn’t piss on some folks if they were on fire…I’m not advocating for anyone to dox them or send a SWAT team to break down their door…or hunt them down & light them up…I’m not threatening them…& I’m not asking or advocating for anyone to threaten them…yes…I am aware that’s ironic, too…on account of they find the mere existence of other people or just words on a page to be existentially threatening in ways they think justify jailing &/or murdering people…so they absolutely couldn’t comprehend the apparently too-subtle-for-some distinction…but…let me try to be clear…when I say these people appear too stupid to live…I mean it literally

…the way darwin would

…I’m just not comfortable with winding up collateral damage in that fucking car crash

…so…maybe I’ll try buying up all the matchsticks…yeah…that’ll probably fix everything

…except apparently my day…or my mood…sorry…will try to acquire some tunes so you don’t entirely regret getting involved in any of this nonsense?