Labor Day Reads: Decadent Fun vs Angry Wipipo
Posted: September 4, 2023 Filed under: just because | Tags: Labor Day weekend, Parades, Southern Decadence, Weird Barbie 9 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Hope you’re having a relaxing and peaceful Labor Day Weekend! The heat has backed off here some, and this morning, we had a pleasant tropical shower. I only wish it would cool off sooner in the evening, but thankfully, I’ve begun to notice the shorter days. Right now, I’m listening to the late Robbie Robertson. We had a marvelous Southern Decadence Weekend and parade yesterday, which is our biggest Gay Pride Event. Fortunately, there was nothing but fun, costumes, and marching bands. Evidently, we missed the angry mobs this year.
There’s a great combination of krewes and bands that parade. You don’t have to be a member of the GLBT community to come out and share the PRIDE.
But, Oh, Florida! Florida has a NAZI infestation. Imagine taking your family to Disneyland and the Goyim Defense League screams slurs at everyone in sight. This is from The Rolling Stone, as reported by Peter Wade. (Trigger warning, especially the video)
Members of white supremacist and antisemitic hate groups marched outside Orlando, Florida, on Saturday screaming invectives, raising the Nazi salute, and yelling “Heil Hitler” and “white power.”
“We are everywhere!” neo-Nazis can be heard shouting in a video shared by former Florida House of Representatives member Anna V. Eskamani. Later in the footage, they yelled, “Heil Hitler” while performing a Nazi salute.
Days before the march, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism warned it was coming. “Two extremist groups, the Goyim Defense League (GDL) and Blood Tribe (BT), are planning to gather in Florida in September 2023 for a joint, public demonstration(s) they are calling the ‘March of the Redshirts,’” the center said in a community advisory shared via email on Thursday.
The ADL describes the Goyim Defense League as “a loose network of individuals connected by their virulent antisemitism” with an “overarching goal” to “expel Jews from America.” The organization characterizes Blood Tribe, led by white supremacist Christopher Pohlhaus, as “a growing neo-Nazi group that claims to have chapters across the United States and Canada.”
“Blood Tribe presents itself as a hardcore white supremacist group and rejects white supremacists who call for softer ‘optics,’” the ADL writes.
In video captured by News2Share’s Ford Fischer, the groups chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Jews get the rope.”
Pohlhaus appeared to lead portions of the march. When Pohlhaus yelled, “Heil the führer!” others responded with, “Heil Hitler!”
Speaking to reporters, Pohlhaus said, “We just have to start a fire. We’re the kindling. Once we set the fire, we get the fire hot, then we get the rest of our brothers blazing.”
Again, Trigger warning. This video is graphic and full of antisemitic slurs.
So, which parade would you instead attend? So, the movement to sterilize public education is happening everywhere. This extremism is reported in The Daily Beast. “The California Megachurch Pushing Public Schools to the Far Right. From fights over LGBT rights to prayer at school board meetings, Chino Valley public schools have become ground zero for the culture wars.” These people are not nice or loving, but they are organized to get shit done. Again, politics is local. Watch your School District elections. Trigger Warning. More angry, insane wipipo.
Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God.
Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming the enemy: state Democratic officials who are challenging her right-leaning policies—and drafting laws that hinder book bans and protect teachers from harassment.
“Today we stand here and declare in his almighty name that it’s only a matter of time before we take your seats and we be a God-fearing example to the nation, how God is using California to lead the way,” Shaw crowed, adding, “We already know who has won this battle. You will be removed in Jesus’s name! You, Satan, are losing.”
Now Shaw is in the national spotlight in wake of her Chino school board passing codes that ban pride flags in classrooms and force educators to inform parents if their children identify as transgender—the first such policy to be passed in the state.
This summer, Shaw’s school board meetings, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, became chaotic spectacles, ones that attracted the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists and pitted them against students and parents protesting what they’re calling anti-LGBTQ practices that endanger children. When California superintendent of schools Tony Thurmond appeared at the July meeting in opposition, Shaw unceremoniously silenced him.
Weeks after state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a civil rights probe into Shaw’s “gender disclosure” policy, his office sued the school board. Bonta said the policy violates the California constitution and state law, and would cause LGBTQ+ students, “mental, emotional, psychological and potential physical harm,” according to a press release.
Other right-leaning school boards across the state have followed Chino Valley Unified’s lead. Shortly before filing suit against the Chino board, Bonta issued statements denouncing the Anderson Union High School District, Temecula Valley Unified and Murrieta Valley Unified school boards’ decisions to pursue “copycat” anti-trans policies.
Speaking of another angry, idiotic white guy, catch this headline from The Guardian. Musk is intent on turning what used to be Twitter into a Fascist hell hole. “Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses. Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and Canada.”
The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK, or Canada.
The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail.
It centers on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two who were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan’s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent.
Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then-chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government’s campaign to ferret out critics but – because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company – provided assistance to the kingdom.
The new lawsuit details how X had originally been seen seen as a critical vehicle for democratic movements during the Arab spring, and therefore became a source of concern for the Saudi government as early as 2013.
The new legal filing comes days after Human Rights Watch condemned a Saudi court for sentencing a man to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, which it called an “escalation” of the government’s crackdown on freedom of expression.
The convicted man, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, is the brother of a Saudi scholar and government critic living in exile in the UK. Saudi court records examined by HRW showed that al-Ghamdi was accused of having two accounts, which had a total of 10 followers combined. Both accounts had fewer than 1,000 tweets combined, and contained retweets of well-known critics of the government.
The Saudi crackdown can be traced back to December 2014, as Ahmad Abouammo – who was later convicted in the US for secretly acting as a Saudi agent and lying to the FBI – began accessing and sending confidential user data to Saudi Arabian officials. In the new lawsuit, it is claimed that he sent a message to Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to Mohammed bin Salman, via the social media company’s messaging system, saying “proactively and reactively we will delete evil, my brother”. It was a reference, the lawsuit claims, to the identification and harming of perceived Saudi dissidents who were using the platform. Al-Qahtani was later accused by the US of being a mastermind behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
And, the Republicans have a new racist to add more MAGA hatred of black Americans. This is from The Hill. This OpEd was written by Juan Williams. “Ignore and inflame: the Vivek Ramaswamy approach to racism.”
Donald Trump is surely watching Ramaswamy’s rise closely.
Imagine a 2024 vice presidential debate where the GOP candidate is a brown-skinned man, and he is telling a black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, that Democrats take minority voters for granted.
Ramaswamy is preparing for that fight by taking his racial rhetoric to disturbing heights.
“I’m sure the boogeyman ‘white supremacists’ exist somewhere in America – I have just never met him,” Ramaswamy said recently on CNN.
“Never seen one…”
Say what? Keep in mind, Ramaswamy spoke a year after a white racist went into a Buffalo grocery and killed 10 people with automatic gun inscribed with the n-word.
He spoke days before another white racist went into a Jacksonville store and killed three black people with a rifle marked with swastikas.
Did Ramaswamy miss the white supremacists marching through Charlottesville in 2017? Has he forgotten Dylan Roof’s racist murder of nine Black Charleston churchgoers in 2015?
Ramaswamy’s reckless use of racial and tribal appeals to win over Republican voters was also on display at an early August event in Iowa.
He said he wants to cancel the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the day when slaves in Texas first heard they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. He called it a “useless” holiday.
Two months earlier, Ramaswamy had posted a social media video praising Juneteenth as a celebration of “how far we’ve come.” He added that “as a first-generation American myself, you better believe I’m proud of it.
We are clearly seeing two visions for America. One is hateful, dystopian, worships guns and a twisted version of Christianity, and sees White Men at the top of the food chain. The other is live and let live and seeks to expand our diverse democracy and to ensure liberty and justice for all of us. In a world of conformity, I choose to be Weird Barbie. This is from UK Glamour. The thinkpiece is written by Olivia Anne Cleary.
Kate McKinnon portrays Weird Barbie in the summer blockbuster Barbie. Her character is introduced to viewers under a veil of mystery and, on account of Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie, trepidation. However, I was introduced to Weird Barbie long before the film. As were many others. We just didn’t realise there was a name for it at the time.
As the younger sibling, I often ended up getting my big sister’s hand-me-downs in the’90s. It’s a rite of passage any kid sibling goes through. I inherited her Walkman when she graduated to a Discman. A few years later, I was given said Discman when she upgraded to a fancier model. But the one thing I never inherited was her Barbie dolls. Why? Well, she had chopped off all their hair some years prior and coloured them in with various felt tip pens. My mother, unwilling to subject me to the sight of these dishevelled dolls, who no longer had use for the Barbie hair brushes we had so many of, opted to buy me new ones. However, a couple of the felt tip pen-adorned Barbies remained in an old toy box. I’d never given them much thought until I watched Barbie the film. It was only then that I came to realise that those neglected dolls I’d ignored were, in fact, Weird Barbies.
The pang of nostalgia was instant, as were the chuckles and murmurs I heard around the screening room when McKinnon’s character made her first on-screen appearance. Weird Barbie is feared and avoided by the other dolls in Barbie Land, but it soon becomes apparent that she’s not frightening, simply different.
When explaining why she looks so unique, Weird Barbie reveals that her owner cut her hair, drew on her face, and put her in flexible positions. She was then somewhat discarded and forgotten about, and is now stuck as “Weird Barbie.” Instead of wearing the stereotypical high heels, she’s in flat shoes, and rather than living with the rest of the Barbies, she’s isolated in a house on a hill. “Come into my weird house. Hi! I’m Weird Barbie. I can do the splits. I have a funky haircut and I smell like basement,” she says, by way of greeting the visiting humans.
See you at next year’s Southern Decadence!
What’s on your reading and blogging list.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: September 5, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19, Donald Trump, flu season, Labor Day weekend, Peter Strzok 38 Comments
Otto Moller: White Red Black Cat
Good Morning!!
We’re heading into the long Labor Day weekend, as schools around the country prepare to reopen and flu season approaches. Schools that have already opened are fighting coronavirus outbreaks. In other words, a covid-19 perfect storm could be approaching.
The Washington Post: Coronavirus updates: Labor Day could fuel another rise in infections if people aren’t cautious, experts say.
Local officials and health experts say they worry that gatherings during Labor Day weekend — the first long weekend for students who have returned to classrooms across the country — could lead to a repeat of the national surge of coronavirus infections that followed Memorial Day if people don’t follow health guidelines.
This weekend presents challenges that didn’t exist earlier this summer, including schools resuming and a wider spread of infections overall, said Thomas Tsai, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who partnered with Google to publish a forecast model for infections.
The Old Actress, Max Beckman
“In some ways we’re entering Labor Day with a more volatile mix than we did before Memorial Day,” he said. “We have masks and treatment, but we’re starting with a much higher base of cases, and we’re still seeing new hot spots rise across the country.” [….]
Infections swept through the Sun Belt after Memorial Day, straining health-care systems in Texas, Florida, Arizona and other states as record numbers of people fell ill in those places. Tsai said the rise was attributable to a rushed reopening in Southern states where testing and contact tracing weren’t yet in place, inconsistent mask mandates and increased travel due to the holiday.
The Washington Post: Covid-19: A bad flu season colliding with the pandemic could be overwhelming.
Doctors and health officials are urging Americans to get vaccinated against influenza in record numbers this fall to avoid a dreaded scenario: flu colliding with a raging coronavirus pandemic.
They worry that tens of millions of flu-related illnesses could overwhelm hospitals, doctor offices and laboratories that test for both respiratory illnesses.
Symptoms of flu and covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, are similar.
“When someone presents to a physician with fever, cough, malaise, unless it’s one of the few things peculiar to covid-19, like a loss of smell, it’s hard to tell them apart when both are circulating in the community,” said Benjamin D. Singer, an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and a pulmonary critical care specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If people wear masks and follow social distancing recommendations, we could even reduce the number of flu cases.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Still Life With Cat
“This fall and winter could be one of the most complicated public health times we have, with the two coming at the same time,” Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a recent interview on the JAMA network.
“On the other hand, I’m an optimist. If the American public heeds the advice that we said about face covering and the social distancing and the hand-washing and being smart about crowds, this could be one of the best flu seasons we have had,” Redfield said. “And particularly if they do one more thing, and that is to embrace the flu vaccine with confidence.”
Unfortunately, we’ve already seen that many people–particularly Trump cult members and some young people–aren’t going to bother with these prevention strategies.
The Washington Post: Experts project autumn surge in coronavirus cases, with a peak after Election Day.
Infectious-disease experts are warning of a potential cold-weather surge of coronavirus cases — a long-feared “second wave” of infections and deaths, possibly at a catastrophic scale. It could begin well before Election Day, Nov. 3, although researchers assume the crest would come weeks later, closer to when fall gives way to winter.
An autumn surge in covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, would not be an October surprise: It has been hypothesized since early in the pandemic because of the patterns of other respiratory viruses.
“My feeling is that there is a wave coming, and it’s not so much whether it’s coming but how big is it going to be,” said Eili Klein, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine….
By Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Respiratory viruses typically begin spreading more easily a couple of weeks after schools resume classes. Although the pandemic has driven many school districts to remote learning, there is a broad push across the country to return to something like normal life.
The Labor Day holiday weekend is a traditional time of travel and group activities, and, like Independence Day and Memorial Day, could seed transmission of the virus if people fail to take precautions. And viruses tend to spread more easily in cooler, less humid weather, which allows them to remain viable longer. As the weather cools, people tend to congregate more indoors.
I plan to continue staying home most of the time and wearing my growing collection of masks anytime I leave my apartment. That’s not difficult for me, because I enjoy solitary activities like reading and I’m past the days when I enjoyed going to parties or otherwise mixing with large groups of people. But I’m worried about what is going to happen when kids return to school and bring home the virus to the older people they live with.
The fallout continues from the Atlantic article about Trump’s disrespect for the military. A couple of examples:
Bess Levin at Vanity Fair: Donald Trump, Human Parasite, Has Also Said Soldiers Missing In Action Should Be Left For Dead.
…shortly after The Atlantic story was published, the Washington Post reported that a former senior administration official confirmed that Trump regularly made disparaging comments about veterans, in addition to this choice take on soldiers missing in action:
In one account, the president told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Also, he thinks he deserves a badge of honor for making up a foot injury to get out of the draft:
Trump believed people who served in the Vietnam War must be “losers” because they hadn’t gotten out of it, according to a person familiar with the comments. Trump also complained bitterly to then Chief of Staff John F. Kelly that he didn’t understand why Kelly and others in the military treated McCain, who had been imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam War, with such reverence. “Isn’t he kind of a loser?” Trump asked, according to the person familiar with Trump’s comments.
Girl with cat, by Paula Modersohn-Becker
It’s believable because Trump has called so many of his fellow Americans, including military veterans, suckers, losers and the like. The story challenges Trump’s political narrative that he is a winning deal-maker who is so infuriated by the sacrifices Americans have been forced to make — in misbegotten wars and bad trade deals — that he gave up his own comfortable lifestyle to stand in and fight on their behalf. In this telling, they are good people who deserve a selfless champion like him.
Giving up his private life netted Trump the most powerful office in the world. He characterizes that as sacrifice, but the personal payoff was huge.
If it’s true that Trump believes people who sacrifice the most for causes greater than themselves — soldiers who laid down their lives — are losers, what does he think of the many hardworking American doctors and nurses who rushed into hospitals to treat coronavirus victims? What does he think of the police officers whose public service he commends so often? What does he think of farmers who kept putting on “Make America Great Again” hats when his trade war with China squeezed their profits and forced the government to give them subsidies to continue operating?
Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and Harvard graduate who served in a Marine infantry battalion during the Iraq war, said Trump simply doesn’t get the concept of sacrifice for the greater good.
“The man has no honor, and can never understand the millions of men and women that serve with honor for their country,” Gallego told NBC News. “I served with and buried men that even in a thousand lifetimes Trump couldn’t come close to matching their honor, courage and commitment.”
Peter Strzok has a book coming out next week, and I think I might want to read it. The New York times: Ex-F.B.I. Agent in Russia Inquiry Says Trump Is a National Security Threat.
A former senior F.B.I. agent at the center of the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia defends the handling of the inquiries and declares President Trump a national security threat in a new memoir, while admitting that the bureau made mistakes that upended the 2016 presidential election.
Harijs Ebersteins, Portrait of an Elegant Lady with Her Black Cat
The former agent, Peter Strzok, who was removed from the special counsel’s team and later fired over disparaging texts he sent about Mr. Trump, has mostly kept silent as the president and his supporters have vilified him.
But Mr. Strzok’s new book, “Compromised,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its publication on Tuesday, provides a detailed account of navigating the two politically toxic investigations and a forceful apologia of the bureau’s acts. Mr. Strzok also reveals details about the F.B.I.’s internal debate over investigating the president himself, writing that the question arose early in the Trump presidency and suggesting that agents were eyeing others around Mr. Trump. Mr. Strzok was himself at first opposed to investigating the president.
But in a scathing appraisal, Mr. Strzok concludes that Mr. Trump is hopelessly corrupt and a national security threat. The investigations that Mr. Strzok oversaw showed the president’s “willingness to accept political assistance from an opponent like Russia — and, it follows, his willingness to subvert everything America stands for.”
Mr. Strzok’s insider look serves as a counter to the efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to discredit the Russia investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr has appointed a veteran prosecutor to review the conduct of the F.B.I., Mr. Strzok and others for possible misconduct and bias.
The Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found the bureau had sufficient reason to open the inquiry and found no evidence of political bias.
Anne Applebaum interviewed Strzok at The Atlantic: ‘Who’s Putting These Ideas in His Head?’ The former FBI agent Peter Strzok worries that Americans will never learn the full story about Trump’s relationship with Russia.
Strzok has always argued that he, James Comey, and the rest of the FBI tried, from the beginning, to treat both of these cases apolitically: They were focused on following the law. But after the Department of Justice released some private texts in which he was critical of President Donald Trump, he was accused not just of bias, but of seeking to deliberately discredit the president. Strzok, who also worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team in its early months, became a hate figure for everyone who sought to distract the public from the facts about Russia’s intervention and the Trump team’s eager embrace of it. “I have devoted my adult life to defending the United States, our Constitution, our government and all our citizens,” Strzok writes in the introduction to Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump. “I never would have imagined—could not have imagined—that the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, would single me out with repeated attacks of treason, accusing me of plotting a coup against our government.”
Woman with a Siamese-Catm by-Kees Van Dongen
As I read Strzok’s book, I found myself unexpectedly angry, because his narrative exposes an extraordinary failure: Despite multiple investigations by the FBI, Congress, and Mueller’s team, Americans have still never learned the full story about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or Trump’s own decades-long financial ties with Russia. Four years have passed since the investigation began. Many people have been convicted of crimes. Nevertheless, portions of reports produced by Mueller, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and others remain redacted. Investigations are allegedly ongoing. Details remain secret. Meanwhile, valuable FBI time and money were spent investigating which email server Hillary Clinton used—a question that, as it turned out, had no implications for U.S. security whatsoever.
Strzok himself was not exactly reassuring: He does not believe that Trump’s true relationship with Russia was ever revealed, and he now worries that it won’t ever be. It’s not clear that anyone ever followed up on the leads he had, or completed the counterintelligence investigation he began. He doesn’t say this himself, but after speaking with him I began to wonder if this is the real reason the Department of Justice broke with precedent in his case by not just firing a well-respected FBI agent but publicly discrediting him too: Strzok was getting too close to the truth.
Head over to The Atlantic to read the interview.
Have a safe and enjoyable Labor Day weekend, Sky Dancers! Let’s hope Trump goes off to one of his golf courses and leaves us alone for a few days.
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