NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution. (snip-more on the page, but this is the news.)
This guy used to write a Substack that I’d read as I had time, but usually always got to his Links writeup. You can see this week’s here; all the bits are choice, but I’m snipping one into this post. It’s a varied lot, but there’s at least something for everyone. When you need something to read, take a look!
Breakfast from the supermarket and bakery, for three people, costs a shade over 7 euros. Two fancy-pants coffees to-go costs a shade over 8 euros.
That seems like the right kind of gearing? Essentials are easily within reach; luxury items you have to think about.
Essentials are like: basic groceries, broadband/phone, roads, education, healthcare, energy, water, rent up to a certain amount etc. “Normal” coffee, house wine, that kind of thing.
It’s very hard to justify, in my head, why these should be the province of profit-seeking companies. Given we all have to have them, why should some people get to leach on that? Yes the profits are taxed but that’s an inefficient way to collect extra money from citizens.
We all form a government which is a kind of enlarged co-operative really. Why don’t we make a basket of essentials, democratically argued about and iterated over time, then nationalise not-for-profits to run supply chains and shops for them?
Just… take essentials out of the for-profit bit of the economy.
Our priorities have lost their way somewhere along the line.
And good for for-profit companies too, right? People without broadband can’t buy from Shein; can’t receive deliveries from Amazon. People without their health, without education can’t staff them. Remove the friction by making essentials work. (snip)
Come to Europe and get low-key radicalised haha
The EU may (or may not) be making technology policy missteps, but they are gently and patiently promoting a certain way of life which feels globally very, very special, and fundamentally counter to the hypercapitalism found elsewhere. (emph. mine-Ali)
Honestly I’d like to see serious economic papers that compare the two approaches. Why not do it this way? Why not go further and, as I suggested, choose radical nationalised businesses for essentials? Genuinely what is the problem with that? Why isn’t it simply obvious that we should live our lives in comfort, with room to participate and be kind to each other, and knock off early to go to the beach early on sunny days? And that’s not compatible with profit-extracting water suppliers etc, and shops run by people not just on minimum wage but without any kind of employment protection?
Why can’t politicians propose these kind of ideas, even as a generational directional plan rather than an election promise, without getting yelled at? (snip)
Car companies are tracking drivers’ data and selling it to third-party data brokers — leaving their customers to suffer the consequences.
R.J. Cross
Director, Don’t Sell My Data Campaign, PIRG
A new investigation found that GM, Honda, Kia, Subaru, Hyundai and Mitsubishi are tracking drivers’ data on everything from when they drive to how hard they hit their brakes.
At least they’re guarding that data and only using it to make their cars safer, right?
Wrong.
Right now, some of the biggest car companies are tracking millions of drivers’ data, sneakily selling it to third-party brokers, and leaving their customers to suffer the consequences.
The consequences we’ve seen so far are scary, such as insurance companies jacking up rates with no explanation. But the secretive wheeling and dealing of consumers’ personal data means that there’s a world of data breaches, identity theft and targeted scams right around the corner.
What information does your car computer track?
Cars and their connected apps know a lot about their drivers. They know how far you go, the start and end time of your trips, how hard you brake, how quickly you accelerate — and they may be tracking that information without drivers’ knowledge.
One data broker has detailed driving data on more than 10 million drivers.
Overnight and without explanation, one of these drivers found that his insurance had spiked by 21%. Why? Because GM had sold his driving data to a third-party broker, which compiled 130 pages of his driving behavior and sold it to his insurance company.
What does it mean when a company sells your data?
After automakers collect the data, third-party brokers sell that data to other companies — in this case, insurance companies — that use it against consumers without them knowing it.
The consequences could span far beyond insurance rates, though. With every secret handoff from data broker to buyer, we’re more at risk for data breaches, identity theft or targeted scams.
Your data includes personal information about you, your habits, behavior and preferences. If that information — your identity — gets into the wrong hands, it can be used against you.
How do I opt out of car data collection?
Unfortunately, much of the data-collecting technology that your vehicle uses can’t be opted out of. Most new cars today will have some type of location-tracking technology included.
Consumers shouldn’t have to worry that their car’s computers or connected apps are sharing their data with other entities. It’s time for car companies to reverse course by committing to not sharing or selling consumer data for anything other than what consumers are expecting — a functional car and safe driving experience.
Sign our petition to tell automakers to stop sharing your data.
From David Beckham’s poreless skin to the tastes of Queer Eye’s original Fab Five, metrosexuality marked an essential step toward a more open masculinity.
(This came from a magazine Janet linked a few days ago. I’m sitting and reading around in it today, and this struck me, especially in light of certain dark comments made over the past few years by the Republican VP nom. So I’m posting for juju. Or mojo. Mostly humorous spite, on my part. NVM me and enjoy the story.)
2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture. Read more from the series here.
“Precise, smooth, and powerful:” the sexual energy rippling through Gillette’s 2004 ad campaign nearly leaps from the page — not because razors were suddenly sexy, but because its star, David Beckham, was known at the time as “the biggest metrosexual in Britain.” With a freshly shaved head, glistening muscles, and a green-tipped razor in hand, the image cemented what the world already knew, by way of a £40 million global ad campaign. This British soccer star — this man who wore pink nail polish and, occasionally, his wife’s panties — was seen as the peak of masculinity that year, and nobody else came close. As Gillette’s tagline went, Beckham was “the best a man can get.”
Beckham may have been the gold standard for The Metrosexual, a “type” of man that entered the popular consciousness in the mid-2000s, but really the inspiration for the movement looked more like Stefon from Saturday Night Live. The character, played by Bill Hader, stopped by Weekend Update with highlights in his side-swept hair and Ed Hardy’s rhinestone regalia covering his body to let viewers in on the hottest new spots in nightlife. Stefon’s outfits were modeled after 2000s nightlife looks, a fitting visual metaphor for the chaotic, homoerotic overtones of the early 2000s.
Much like the fictitious clubs Stefon gushed over, metrosexuality had everything. There were the menswear bibles you had to subscribe to (Details, Esquire, and GQ); must-have fashion labels (from Paul Smith and Hugo Boss to Dolce & Gabbana); and, of course, grooming brands like Axe body spray, which launched in the U.S. in 2002. On TV, the metrosexual movement was dominated by the likes of Queer Eye’s “Fab Five,” who burst into straight men’s homes like a glitterati SWAT team, and by Stacy London and Clinton Kelly on What Not to Wear, the more composed (but equally bitchy) spiritual sister in the makeover reality show genre.
Men had been Yassified, remade in His image; “His” being, if it weren’t clear by now, a fashion-conscious, grooming-obsessed gay man. Yes, the homoerotic undertones of metrosexuality weren’t exactly subtle, but it was the 2000s, damnit, and men were allowed to be a little fruity and high maintenance as a treat. For those caught in the metrosexualmania, the fad might’ve felt like a flash of lightning: suddenly there, lighting up every follicle and pore. Google search results for the phrase exploded from 25,000 in mid-2002 to nearly a million by the end of 2005. But the term had roots far beyond its early 2000s heyday, first entering the cultural lexicon via the self-proclaimed “daddy” of metrosexuality, Mark Simpson, and his seminal 1994 essay, “Here Come the Mirror Men: Why the Future is Metrosexual.”
Written as a taxonomy on fascinating, capitalist animals who’d just discovered oil-free moisturizer and form-fitting pants, Simpson’s essay announced the arrival of the “[m]etrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade […] he’s everywhere, and he’s going shopping.” Or put more succinctly: “Metrosexual man is a commodity fetishist: a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by advertising.”
The notion that you should spend more time and money on clothes, grooming, and fitness wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. What made metrosexuality unique wasn’t its deep roots in capitalism, but rather its flirtation with queering masculinity in a way that felt fundamentally new. This was a tectonic vibe shift that democratized desire, cracking open the door for straight men to edge into femininity. Metrosexuality’s origin was also fundamentally shaped by the HIV pandemic, which spawned its own obsession with self-image. LGBTQ+ people — and particularly gay men — idolized gym-hardened bodies and obsessed over looking affluent and “healthy.”
The rise of the “metrosexual” may have been a straight thing, but the through lines of these two movements ran concurrently, separated more by who you wanted to sleep with and less by what designer brand you went shopping for. We may feel trapped today in a timeline that’s more metro than ever, but the newness and, frankly, the edginess of metrosexuality 20 years ago was historic — especially as it grew from that tiny 1994-era seedling into a blossoming flower.
Like Simpson’s read of heterosexuality in 90s menswear magazines being “so self-conscious, so studied, that it’s actually rather camp,” it was the self-serious, studied, and camp character of Patrick Bateman in 2000’s American Psycho that finally put the nail in the coffin of the 1990s’ dominant, grungy aesthetic. The film about full-time Wall Street hotshot and part-time murderer, played perfectly by a svelte and smug Christian Bale, rewrote the codes of the New Man for a new decade within its first 10 minutes. In an opening monologue that feels created in a lab for future metrosexuals to studiously replicate, Bateman walks through a morning routine that includes ice-pack facials, a thousand stomach crunches, deep pore cleanser lotion, water-activated gel cleanser, honey almond body scrub, exfoliating gel scrub, herb-mint facial masque (leave on for 10 minutes), moisturizer, anti-aging eye balm, and aftershave lotion with no alcohol (“because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older.”) By the time the film shows him studying himself in a mirror, flexing his muscles as he mindlessly fucks a woman, the codes of this new kind of man were crystallized.
By 2004, “metrosexual” had been crowned “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society. Naturally, culture was flooded with glistening bodies, clouds of cologne, hardened hair gel, and at least five pairs of queer eyes regularly dissecting and rebuilding straight guys. These habits and inclinations toward presenting health and wealth have hardened with the passing of time, like a particularly sculpted torso. To put this in more Shakespearean terms: Metrosexuality by any other name (say, a looksmaxxing alpha male, or muscle gay) smells just as strongly of whatever scent we’re being marketed that day. Just like in 2004, turn on the TV or open a fashion publication’s homepage, and you’ll be knocked on your ass by capitalism’s consumptive frenzy; the major difference now is the somehow more relentless push to sculpt, shop and spend, driven into hyperdrive by our social media feeds. No matter if you’re gay, straight, femme, or them, we’re bombarded by messaging that tells us to work out, dress better, and start an 84-step skincare routine. My algorithm seems to hit me with a barrage of perfectly toned, sexually ambiguous guys every time I doomscroll.
It doesn’t take an armchair anthropologist to tell you that every trend, no matter how culturally ingrained it seems, will fade out over time. See “demure,”“Brat,” and whatever microtrend TikTok’s algorithms push today. As culture shifted and economics crashed, so did the desire to spend exorbitantly on grooming. The word “metrosexual” now feels as dated as Carson Kressley and the other original Fab Five members I simply cannot remember, but its cultural impact has lived on; every subsequent movement owes a debt to the metrosexual — from hipsters and their gallons of beard oil all the way to streetwear bros with sneaker collections rivaling even Carrie Bradshaw.
Metrosexuality’s chokehold on the 2000s taught men to be more comfortable in their femininity, but in the 20 years that have passed, our cultural understanding of manhood has splintered. There is the darker side, filtering metrosexuality’s obsessive grooming into a toxic, warped worldview dominated by obsessively coiffed, overly buff, and deeply insecure influencers. This is the side where young men are breaking their legs to be taller and smashing their jaws to be more “alpha.”
But luckily, it’s not all broken bones and toxic trauma. There’s a more healthy, nuanced exploration of modern masculinity that leans into the queerer side of our metrosexual forefathers. One that has allowed rockstars like Harry Styles to grace magazine covers in womenswear, release a gender-neutral beauty brand (Pleasing), and say, “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine” in a 2018 interview with fellow softboy Timothée Chalamet. You can see it during a night out as you spot straight men with painted nails and crop tops dancing with their girlfriends. You can see it in the celebrity role models of Steve Lacy, Paul Mescal, and Josh O’Connor — the latter helping launch both the “rat boy” and “fruity boy” micro-trends. This particular flavor of New Man is united in an embrace of and comfort with the duality of their feminine and masculine sides — and, notably, not separated by sexuality. Omar Apollo, Steve Lacy, Frank Ocean, and Tyler, the Creator meld effortlessly with the likes of Jaden Smith and the airbrushed perfection of K-pop supergroup BTS.
It has been thirty years since the “metrosexual” emerged and twenty years since its cultural reign. As we continue to navigate this modern era, redefining what it means to be a man, we’d do well to remember just how many boundaries metrosexuality broke down. Sure, it may be responsible for the poisonous clouds of Axe body spray we endured and ushered in a new era of hyper-commodification, but it also brought newfound sexual confidence and liberation to masculinity that taught us that it’s okay to be a little gay. Had it not been for our metrosexual forefathers (and the queers that guided them), who knows what rigid sartorial hellscape we’d all be living in today.
Snippet (it’s not a long piece, and it’s full of info.)
Let’s be clear about what Kansas Republican legislative leaders are doing with their planned overhaul of budgeting: They are launching a personal and political power grab against Gov. Laura Kelly.
They have never accepted or respected her mandate. Despite Kelly winning a second term and having two years left to go, they have continually attempted to usurp the executive branch’s authority. They have tried a constitutional amendment and prohibiting her ability to negotiate Medicaid contracts. Now they’re going after her yearly state budget proposal.
Usually, the Legislature begins its yearly budget process with a proposal from the governor. Her office submits it when lawmakers arrive for the annual session, in January. Now an interim committee wants to start the process earlier, as soon as October of the previous year.
In this new process, the governor’s budget would be a suggestion, not a starting point.
And never mind that it’s a direct attack on Kelly. House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, assured the audience that these changes had nothing to do with the governor.
“This process has nothing to do with the governor,” he said at the meeting earlier this month, according to Kansas Reflector reporter Tim Carpenter. “If you’re going to focus on the governor, probably not the wisest thing to do, because this process has happened over time with many, many different governors.”
He was contradicted by Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, who let the proverbial cat out of the figurative bag.
“You’ll have a Republican governor, for example, or somebody you trust, and you trust the administration to build the budgets, and then you kind of rubber stamp stuff,” Masterson said. “And, then, you switch, and you have (the) opposition party and then there’s all that same power.”
Oh. So it’s like that, then.
(snip-More; also a vid of the sausage becoming sausage)
How do we know we’re on the Road to Splitsville (and possibly headed to a political and legal separation of the red states and the blue), and not on some other thoroughfare, like the Highway to Hell or the Boulevard of Broken Dreams? We know, because such a Split would be absurd and grotesque. But the red states are Republican states, and the Republican Party is the Donald Trump Party, and the fans of Donald Trump love the absurd and eat the grotesque with a fucking spoon.
Speaking of which: what are you doing on September 5?
If you’ve got some time, and $2,500 (per individual) to spare, you could join Christ-knows-how-many dipshits, ghouls, imbeciles, and traitors at—we kid you not—the “J6 Awards Gala,” to be held at Donald Trump’s golf club-cum-Ex Sematary in Bedminster, N.J. Go alone, with your significant other, or rope together eleven of your chums and snag a table for 12. Yes, 12 x $2,500 = $30,000 but, because this a Donald Trump-related production, the actual cost of a table for 12 is a cool $50,000. But think of th—
What? You have a question? (snip-a bit more, well worth the click. You can read if you’re not a subscriber.)
Last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the state’s fast-food minimum wage increase into law, which meant that employees at fast-food restaurants in the state went from making $15.50 per hour to $20 per hour. While the decision was lauded by many labor activists as part of broader efforts to improve working conditions and address wage disparities, some economists and fast-food industry members expressed concern over how the law would impact restaurants’ operating costs, which could result in reduced hours for workers or even job cuts.
However, according to new state and federal employment data, California’s fast-food industry has added jobs every month this year — including 11,000 new jobs since the wage increase officially went into effect in April. For instance, in May of 2023, there were 742,600 fast-food workers in the state; a year later, there were 743,300 workers.
According to a release from Newsom’s office last week, since raising worker wages, every month this year has seen consistent fast food job gains, and nearly each month has seen more jobs than the same month last year.
“What’s good for workers is good for business, and as California’s fast food industry continues booming every single month our workers are finally getting the pay they deserve,” Newsom said in a written statement. “Despite those who pedaled [sic] lies about how this would doom the industry, California’s economy and workers are again proving them wrong.”
by Skylar Tallal Fri, August 23rd 2024 at 10:30 PM
DES MOINES, Iowa — Summit Carbon Solutions is facing a set back in its proposed CO2 pipeline project, as the South Dakota Supreme Court ruled in favor of landowners who sued to keep Summit from surveying their land.
It’s a reversal of a lower court decision, with the state’s high court now claiming it’s premature to categorize Summit as a ‘common carrier’ for public utility. It’s something Summit needs to be able to prove before it can use eminent domain.
“One of our main arguments is that Summit’s not a common carrier,” Jess Mazour the conservation program coordinator with the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter said. “So it really does change the game here in Iowa as well.”
Summit can’t start building its pipelines in Iowa until it gets approval in North and South Dakota.
The Sierra Club Iowa Chapter calls the decision a victory for landowners. Even though the Iowa Utilities Commission isn’t taking up the club’s reconsideration request, the club is moving forward with its plan to take the fight to court.
“We now have precedent on our side and we’re going to have a strong base for when we file our appeal in district court,” Mazour said.
A similar court case is already on the books in Iowa, with Iowa’s highest court set to hear oral arguments October 8 at the state capitol.
“A landowner in Hardin County, Kent, he was sued for denying Summit access to his land and we are fighting that and also challenging Iowa’s survey law,” Mazour said.
Eminent Domain has been a major issue in Iowa over the last few years. Some Iowa lawmakers joined the pipeline opposition but haven’t been successful in their efforts to change state laws.
The topic is also coming up on the campaign trail, specifically in Iowa’s congressional races.
Congressional Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R) Iowa said carbon capture pipelines make sense for Iowa.
“So the carbon capture pipeline is only meant to lower the carbon intensity score of ethanol which makes it competitive globally,” Rep. Miller-Meeks said.
She said while eminent domain is a state issue, she hopes there will only be a limited number of landowners who don’t sign on voluntarily.
“Farmers and property owners need to look at the why the rationale and then determine if it’s in their best interest,” Rep. Miller-Meeks said. “Companies that are acquiring easements are looking at how do you make the land whole. How do you ensure farmers that you can grow crops in the near future?”
Iowa’s News Now did reach out to Summit for comment didn’t hear back.
Scottie's Playtime 