Lazy Caturday Reads With Trucker Cats

Happy Caturday!!

Percy the trucker cat, photo by Paul Robertson

Dakinikat turned me on to the world of truck drivers who have cat companions along for the ride. Here’s an article that discusses the phenomenon. CharityPaws.com: Trucker Cats May Be The Coolest Cats!

For what it’s worth, having a pet is hard work.

Love is easy enough to provide while on the road – but food, water, space, and entertainment are all needs too, and sometimes hard to come up with.

In the case of dogs especially, playtime is the hardest need to fill for truckers. After several hour-long walks, a game of tug-of-war, and an afternoon in the sun spent playing fetch, who wouldn’t be tired? But for truckers this can be time consuming and delay important deliveries!

That’s why many truckers have turned to cats as the solution for those lonely road trips. Trucker cats are the coolest cats with their chill laid back personalities and ability to make truckers feel awesome. They also have some great hearing which is why the made it to our list of “what animal has the best hearing” list. Having a companion with good hearing on board can help you find critters that may sneak around while you are sleeping or even alert you to danger!

With most of their time spent on the road in a little truck cab, cats are the perfect companion for truckers– and here’s some of the best reasons why according to one trucker’s resource:

• Cats are low-maintenance: they eat less than their canine counterparts, take up less room, and don’t need as much playtime.
• They’re loving and affectionate: cats are just as sweet as any other animal, once they have a chance to warm up to you.
• They’re obedient, and trainable: cats can do tricks and walk on leashes, with the proper time and training!
• They’re protective: though not as scary as a dog, cats are perfectly capable of altering truckers if something looks, sounds, or even smells off.

Other reasons topping truckers’ lists include cleanliness, cuteness, and the fact that having a cat in a truck is a pretty good conversation starters. Some even say that having a feline friend is a constant reminder to drive and act safely during the long haul. They are also incredibly loyal as shown by the Room 8 cat – and having that kind of loyalty on the road will make any trucker feel amazing!

Read more at the link above.

Here’s a video about trucker cats, posted on YouTube by Cheezburger.

Long Read: Are Americans Experiencing Collective Trauma?

I want to call your attention to an excellent, but very long read in The New Republic by Anna Marie Cox: We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized. Subhead: “The pandemic. The mass shootings. Insurrection. Trump. We’ve been through so much. What if our entire national character is a trauma response?”

This is a very long piece, so I’m just going to give you some samples to help you decide if you want to tackle reading the whole thing.

As of last year, four in 10 Americans knew at least one person who died from Covid. This year, three in 10 Americans say they know someone who has been affected by an opioid addiction, and one in five knows someone who’s died from a painkiller overdose. In 2022, more than three million adults were displaced by some form of natural disaster—that’s more than three times as many displaced per year between 2008 and 2021. Last year, some cities saw a 50 percent increase in evictions over pre-pandemic levels. One in five knows someone who’s died due to gun violence; one in six has witnessed a shooting; 21 percent have been personally threatened by a gun. Half of Americans know someone personally who has experienced at least one of those events.

After Trump’s “grab her by” tape became public, calls to the national sexual assault hotline jumped up by 35 percent (as Michelle Goldberg observed, Trump was a walking trigger for assault survivors). During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, calls to the sexual assault hotline spiked 201 percent. Lockdown—the first two months of the pandemic—saw a rise in intimate partner violence of 101 percent, with the rate stabilizing at an increase of about 8 percent from pre-pandemic numbers as of 2022.

Another photo of Trucker cat Percy, by Paul Robertson

And then there are the frontline workers and “essential personnel,” those who risked their lives for our safety and comfort during the spring of 2020. I assume that we agree health professionals faced trauma (and may well still). There are 22 million of them in the United States, and after the pandemic, 55 percent reported experiencing burnout, and three in 10 said they were now considering leaving the profession. The 55 million essential personnel who worked through the worst days of Covid suffered a similar toll: A year into the pandemic, the American Psychiatric Association found that 34 percent of essential workers had been treated by a mental health professional, 80 percent had trouble over- or under-sleeping, and 39 percent said they were drinking more alcohol than they had before….

These are traumas at the individual level in numbers so large that they demand national attention because there are national consequences—think of the nationwide therapist shortage and “the Great Resignation.”

So, what if the reason so many people identify as trauma survivors is that they are? What if the horrors of the last seven years do translate into a nation that is suffering more than mere political dysfunction? What if the polarization, paranoia, conspiracism, and hopelessness that bog us down have a more holistic origin than structural malfunctions or individual malfeasance?

What if our entire national character is a trauma response?

Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response.

Next Cox explores expert opinions about the concept of “collective trauma.”

The origin of the academic study of “collective trauma” has been credited to Kai Erikson’s 1977 book, Everything in Its Path, an account of the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek flood in Logan County, West Virginia, five years prior, which killed 125 people and destroyed 550 homes in a small mining community. In the book, Erikson writes of grappling with “thousands of pages of transcript material, whole packing boxes full of it,” that confounded him “not because the material is contradictory or difficult to interpret but because it is so bleakly alike.” He found respondents echoing one another to a frustrating degree, so much so that “a researcher is very apt to conclude after rummaging through these data that there is really not very much to say.” Eventually, however, he came to believe that the uniformity itself was meaningful; the damage done at Buffalo Creek was something more than a mere collection of individual harms.

Collective trauma, he wrote, means “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” Collective trauma happens in slow motion, “A form of shock all the same…. ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.”

Trucker Abdirahman Abdul and Aisha

In other words, the defining characteristic of collective trauma—and what makes it almost impossible to self-diagnose—is that people who have been through it no longer believe in the integrity of their community. How does anyone see themselves as a traumatized collective if no one feels that they belong?

So, pull back to the macro level. For a moment, put aside your or anyone else’s individual experience. Think of the country itself as a patient.

In the past seven years, the country has sustained significant, repeated damage to its institutions. The courts, elections, law enforcement, and so on are its vital organs. Trump has been punching America in the kidneys since he first floated the idea of a “rigged election.” January 6 was a heart attack. The musculature that is the justice system, well, it was always spasmodic. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery shocked many white people into awareness of our already dysfunctional law enforcement apparatus, and then the Dobbs decision drove home how easily the rights that support us can be yanked away. Were we ever really as strong as we thought?

The country was already weakened by Trumpism when the pandemic attacked our nervous systems more than figuratively. It cut away at the millions of tiny threads that knit up our towns and cities. Think of the loose social ties that grow from just seeing the same people at the grocery store (or the office) every day—think of the mail. Our national proprioception—our awareness of where our parts are in relation to one another—deteriorated. Our creaky supply chain is another symptom of this disconnect. So is “you’re on mute.”

I won’t quote any more, but these excerpts are just from the introductory part of the article. Cox later demonstrates with examples how the notion of trauma can apply to our collective experience as a nation. There is so much in the piece, that I wonder if Cox is planning to turn it into a book.

I’m not sure how the MAGA world fits into this hypothesis, but after my reading about the traumas of Appalachia–from poverty, drugs, unemployment, and breakdown of families (see my Wednesday post), I wonder if an argument could be made that the attraction to Trump as powerful father figure could also have arisen out of trauma. At any rate, I highly recommend this article.

Other Stories to Check Out

NBC News: Special counsel asks for ‘narrow’ gag order for Trump in election interference case.

Citing threats against individuals former President Donald Trump has targeted, special counsel Jack Smith has asked a federal judge for a narrowly tailored gag order that restricts the 2024 presidential candidate from making certain extrajudicial statements about the election interference case brought against him.

A redacted copy of a government filing — released Friday, after an order from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — comes in connection with the election interference case, one of four criminal cases the former president is facing, two of which are federal.

“The defendant has an established practice of issuing inflammatory public statements targeted at individuals or institutions that present an obstacle or challenge to him,” the special counsel’s office wrote.

Whispur and DanDan, photo by Whispurer on Reddit

The government said Trump “made clear his intent to issue public attacks related to this case when, the day after his arraignment, he posted a threatening message on Truth Social.”

Trump’s Aug. 4 post read: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

Trump, the office wrote, “has made good on his threat,” spreading “disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses.

“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election, the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution—the judicial system—and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals—the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors,” the prosecutors wrote.

Naturally, Trump responded publicly to the filing:

At an event in Washington, Trump made his first public remarks on the filing by attacking Smith, arguing that the special counsel “wants to take away my rights under the First Amendment, wants to take away my right of speaking freely and openly.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, responded earlier Friday by calling the filing “nothing more than blatant election interference because President Trump is by far the leading candidate in this race.”

Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage at The New York Times: Special Counsel Obtained 32 Private Messages From Trump’s Twitter Account.

The federal prosecutors who charged former President Donald J. Trump with a criminal conspiracy over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained 32 private messages from his Twitter account through a search warrant this winter as part of their investigation, court papers unsealed on Friday said.

Questions have lingered about what prosecutors were looking for in Mr. Trump’s Twitter account ever since it was revealed last month that the government had served the warrant on Twitter in January. In an earlier release of documents, prosecutors disclosed that they had obtained some private messages from Mr. Trump’s account but not how many.

The 32 messages, whose content has not been disclosed, were only a small fraction of the larger body of data that Twitter was forced to turn over under the terms of the warrant, the new court papers said. Much of the legal wrangling over the matter focused on the Justice Department’s demand that Twitter, purchased last year by Elon Musk and now known as X, not inform Mr. Trump of the search warrant.

Mr. Trump’s posts on the platform in the chaotic months after the election were mentioned several times in the indictment that the special counsel, Jack Smith, filed against him in Washington last month. What remains unclear is whether Mr. Smith’s team sought the warrant for Mr. Trump’s account merely to confirm that he had posted the messages that appeared in public, or whether they suspected that some private data in the account might also be important.

What were investigators looking for in the private messages?

The newly unsealed documents — an exhaustive record of the legal fight between Twitter and the Justice Department over whether to hide the execution of the warrant from Mr. Trump — added a few new details about what the government may have been seeking.

Waylon the Trucker Cat, photo by owner Nick

For example, the materials showed that prosecutors wanted to learn if there were other accounts that Mr. Trump had been logging into from the same internet address he used for his Twitter account, which during his presidency was a main channel for his public statements. But it was not clear whether looking for other accounts was merely a routine step or whether investigators had a specific reason to be asking.

The new materials — unsealed at the request of a coalition of news media organizations, including The New York Times — opened a broader window into the back and forth between the special counsel’s office and Twitter. The dispute touched on how to balance the government’s need to protect a sensitive investigation with the social media company’s desire to be transparent with its most famous user.

The documents were particularly sharp in describing Mr. Trump’s repeated attempts to obstruct federal inquiries — an argument that prosecutors used in securing permission from a judge in Washington not to tell the former president for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account.

In detailing Mr. Trump’s “pattern of obstructive conduct,” the new papers cited his attempts to interfere with the special counsel’s other inquiry — one in which the former president stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after leaving office.

Read more at the NYT.

ABC News: Hunter Biden’s lawyer says gun statute unconstitutional, case will be dismissed.

The attorney for President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing felony gun charges, said Friday that the statute is “likely unconstitutional” and he expects “the case will be dismissed before trial.”

“On the facts, we think we’ll have a defense,” Abbe Lowell told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “Good Morning America.”

The younger Biden has been indicted by special counsel David Weiss on three felony gun charges, bringing renewed legal pressure on him after a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors imploded in recent months.

The conduct described in the indictment dates back to October 2018, when Hunter Biden procured a Colt Cobra 38SPL despite later acknowledging that he was addicted to drugs around that time.

While the criminal statutes cited in the indictment are clear — it is a crime to lie on a gun application form or to possess a firearm as a drug user – Hunter Biden’s attorney suggested that the charges could be unconstitutional, citing a recent appeals court ruling that drug use alone should not automatically prevent someone from obtaining a gun.

“The only change that has occurred between when they investigated [this alleged crime] and today is that the law changed,” Lowell said. “But the law didn’t change in favor of the prosecution. The law changed against it.”

With Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill, Lowell suggested that political pressure on prosecutors played into their decision, questioning the timing of the charges in light of revelations from whistleblowers about the investigation.

No kidding. The political pressure from right wing Congresspeople has been off the charts. And Special Counsel David Weiss himself was appointed by Bill Barr after political pressure from Donald Trump.

CNN: Justice Jackson implores Americans to ‘own even the darkest parts of our past’ in speech commemorating 60th anniversary of 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday implored Americans to “own even the darkest parts of our past” in a speech commemorating 60 years since the deadly 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

“History is also our best teacher. Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice. But can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?” Jackson said at the church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Trucker cat, photo by abbenquesnel on flicker

“We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them. We must not shield our eyes. We must not shrink away lest we lose it all,” she said.

The justice didn’t invoke a particular case, but as a whole her speech nodded to efforts targeting the teaching of critical race theory in schools and books about the struggle for racial equality and other topics.

“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” she said. “I know that atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive. But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.”

At times, Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, drew a personal connection to the tragedy, in which a bomb exploded at the church on September 15, 1963, killing Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson. Nearly two dozen others were injured.

“As a mother of two young women who will always be my little girls, I can imagine no greater horror than to lose a child this way,” Jackson said.

“And even now, six decades later, the magnitude of that tragic loss weighs heavily on all of us because those girls were just getting started. They could have broken barriers. They could have shattered ceilings. They could have grown up to be doctors or lawyers or judges appointed to serve on the highest court in our land,” she added.

Read more at CNN.

That’s a sampling of today’s news. Feel free to discuss anything and everything in the comment thread.