I’m not sure how to begin this tale. It seems like a fruitless endeavor, a constant push that yields little result but loss. I’ve watched the company I came to as an opportunity for a new start some five years ago slowly dwindle through decreasing ups and increasing downs to the point that I find myself frustrated with an inability to keep up with the disappointments.
These images I use are meant to be hyperbolic, nonetheless, they do well to express this lament, my own and others in this country, that I’m losing the fight.
The past weeks have seen our shop lose half of our workers due to layoffs, and more to leaving the fight to better opportunities elsewhere even as I am also dealing with reduced pay.
I thought I would learn so much at this job, and I have – though not quite the way I’d hoped, and not the things I’d hoped. And, now… Now I find that I am faced with a decision to fight the good fight and do what I can to save this floundering vessel, or am I committing slow suicide riding a sinking ship.
I am faced with the question of who is owed my loyalty? When the stone reaches the tipping point, do I push harder or do I get out of the impact zone? Our jobs are more than a way to put beans on the table; it is our identity, our productivity, our impetus to face the day and the very slings and arrows of life. I’ve sacrificed blood, sweat, tears, agility, health and a great deal of my sanity. Now I wonder if I’m too old, too broken down and jaded to begin anew.
These are the thoughts that have ravaged my spirit these past weeks. Some days reality sucks, the sky is dark and storms rage, but does that define my life or does it just describe my moment?
So, now, here I sit. A generally frugal nature and a number of blessings in my life has allowed me to realize some things: I’m not going to starve, I’m not going to be homeless, I’m just going to have a bit more time. The horror of being forced to deal with many of the things I just didn’t have the time or energy for earlier!!! So, no, I’m not worried for me. And, if I am so fortunate to ride out this storm I will be better for the opportunity to care for the things I’ve allowed to wallow in neglect. But, I very much do worry for those who will truly suffer under our Dear Leader.
January 22, 1953 The Arthur Miller drama, ”The Crucible,” opened on Broadway. It was a parable that reflected the climate of fear that pervaded American society and the politics of its time, witchcraft in the late 17th century, communism in the mid-20th. In both times there existed also the fear of false accusation. From the New York Times review of the Broadway revival in November 2001: “Today, the play is a cautionary tale of astounding immediacy. Its themes include the pathology of rumor, the arrogance of the religiously righteous, the dangers of private panic in the face of public terror, and the individual’s difficulty in acting rationally in the face of mob hysteria.” scene from the original production Read the playwright’s reasons for writing it:
January 22, 1973 Women won control of their reproductive rights when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, and thus women may terminate a pregnancy before the last 10 weeks. Only during the last trimester, when a fetus can survive outside the womb, would states be permitted to regulate abortion of a healthy pregnancy. Prior to the Court’s ruling that the decision was private and belonged to the pregnant woman, abortion was essentially illegal in all states except New York (as of 1970). About the decision History of New York’s law
January 22, 2001 President George W. Bush signed a memorandum the day after his inauguration reinstating full restrictions on U.S. overseas aid that might go to any program that provided abortions or considered them an option for women. Known as the Mexico City policy, or global gag rule, first signed by President Ronald Reagan, it had been withdrawn by President Bill Clinton as soon as he took office.
The republican’s know their policies and ideas are very, very unpopular. They can’t win on them, so they are forced to cheat and drum up fake fears to scare voters to vote for them. Hugs. Scottie
‘Congratulations’ the fake letter reads, ‘you have been selected as a Wayward Steward exchange home for homeless immigrants and victims of foreign wars.’
A Bala Cynwyd couple received a fraudulent letter from the Pennsylvania Congressional Office of Immigration Affairs this week informing her that she’d been selected as a “wayward steward” to house five refugees. The office does not exist, nor does the program. Elizabeth Bennett holds the letter on Sept. 27, 2024.Read moreCharles Fox / Staff Photographer
A Bala Cynwyd voter got a detailed letter this week from the made-up Pennsylvania Congressional Office of Immigration Affairs notifying her that her household had been selected to house five migrant refugees.
No office exists, nor does such a government-mandated housing program, but the letter, doctored to look like an official government document, provided specific details designed to mislead someone less attuned to a scam — and laid the blame for the fake program at the feet of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris during a heated and close election in which immigration has increasingly become a focal point.
“I’m concerned to find out how many people might have actually gotten it and to make sure the record’s set straight so people aren’t getting fearful or angry and deciding to vote another way,” Elizabeth Bennett, 62, said.
The letter says Bennett was selected as a “wayward steward” as part of “US5Ca12-B … written into Law by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.” No such law exists.
It advised Bennett she’d been selected based on property and income records and would receive an $80 weekly stipend for food costs. The letter suggested a “minimum of one bedroom be prepared with a minimum of 5 beds,” with a link to “government-approved” bunk beds.
The return address listed is for an intersection in front of the Capitol building in Harrisburg.
Neither the governor’s office nor the department of state immediately returned a request for comment.
Bennett is unsure why she was targeted. She has a large Harris/Walz sign in her front yard. Ironically, she’s also done volunteer resettlement work with immigrants for the last 30 years but she assumes that was just a coincidence.
“Of all the people they could send this to, I would be the one who is like, ‘OK let’s get the room set up, we gotta take care of these people,’” she said. But as she read on, she realized the program was fake and intended to scare people.
“I could definitely see, even for me reading this letter it felt threatening even though I’m very pro-immigrant because it felt like something that was being imposed on me,” she said.
It’s unclear if other Pennsylvanians received the letter. Bennett posted about it in small Facebook groups but hasn’t heard from others who received it.
But whoever created the letter took time to make it look like an official document, including an imprint of a fake Pennsylvania seal on the letterhead and a stamped date informing Bennett when to expect the migrants.
A listed phone number for the fake office, with a Harrisburg area code, goes to a voicemail for the named office where a messaging service invites the caller to press one for housing vouchers, two for reimbursements, and three to “expand your footprint to help more people.”
The letter Bennett received went on to specify garages or sheds without electricity and running water could not be used.
“Thank you for your dedication to the health and safety of these future Americans!” it concluded.
Misinformation about migrant resettlement and illegal immigration has been rampant in the campaign. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have made it a focus of their bid for the White House claiming that migrant resettlement has drained resources from small towns and that illegal immigration has driven crime and economic hardship, with little evidence.
The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement does invite people to be part of a government hosting program but participation is entirely optional.
State Rep. Joe Hohenstein (D., Philadelphia) is an immigration attorney who called the letter “a betrayal of the actual spirit of our country.”
“It’s definitely designed to make people think that there’s a broader government program to resettle refugees and my guess is that the intention is to stir up fear of immigrants and refugees,” he said. “That’s reprehensible It’s a betrayal of the actual spirit of our country of being a welcoming beacon to people who are seeking freedom.”
In the next week, Hohenstein is cosponsoring a bill to establish an Office of New Pennsylvanians, which would help provide support services for refugee businesses and migrants fleeing persecution in Pennsylvania.
“This would provide help to people who need it,” he said. “It would not be a mandate to anyone.”
This man understands, this person gets it! Those of us not center, those of us not maga, those of us paying attention to what is happening and see what red states are doing to the LGBTQ+ and how hard they are trying to keep anyone not fully supporting them from voting … Yes we are scared. We feel all the movement to the future acceptance of people who are different from the main stream, all the rights for black people, all the rights for minorities, all the rights for the disabled, all the rights for the poor, and all the rights that have been gained for the LGBTQ+ are being wiped away with the goal being removing us from public society so that we have no voice in the very country we live. Welcome to the 1950s white cis straight men in charge society. Hugs. Scottie
“She wants to take away your private health care. There are many people in this country who spend a lot of money on private health care.
“It’s the best health care in the world, by the way. But they want to do it. They worked hard to make money and they want to do it under her. You’re not going to have private health care plans anymore.
“And you can be a wealthy person or middle income person and you want to spend on a really good plan, better than a government plan. And you’re not gonna be allowed.
“You’re all going to be thrown into a communist system. It’s a communist system. You’re going to be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care.” – Trump, at yesterday’s disastrous “press conference” in New Jersey.
Wow. Trump finally said it out loud. Everyone having access to health care is bad. pic.twitter.com/YVxWuFkY9C
He is appealing to the selfish assholes who want to deny everyone but themselves of any privilege. ” This is not about me hoarding. This is about you who should not have anything.”
If you take that argument to its logical conclusion (since timely health care in more than just a few cases literally saves lives), what it obliquely implies is that the amount of money you have in the bank is the measure of your worth as a human and that you don’t necessarily have a right to life.
Guess what. The anti-abortion challenges to EMTALA are also going to destroy EMTALA itself. Get used to being dumped back in the parking lot if you should be unlucky enough to not be able to prove your ability to pay. Too bad if you are brought in without identification or an accompanying family member with the insurance card.
… EMTALA … requires hospital emergency departments that accept payments from Medicare [i.e. virtually all hospitals] to provide an appropriate medical screening examination (MSE) for anyone seeking treatment for a medical condition regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay. Participating hospitals may not transfer or discharge patients needing emergency treatment except with the informed consent or stabilization of the patient or when the patient’s condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.
… EMTALA, as a federal law, supersedes state laws that ban abortion. So, doctors who perform emergency abortions to stabilize a patient are protected by EMTALA. Hospitals that fail to do so could face fines or be booted from Medicare. …
[with more about cases SCROTUS heard and punted on]
August 10, 1883 Adrian “Cap” Anson refused to field his visiting Chicago White Stockings team in an exhibition baseball game if the Toledo Mud Hens included star catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker in their lineup. Chicago’s Captain Anson, who grew up in slaveholding Iowa, said he wouldn’t share the diamond with a non-white player. After more than an hour’s delay, Charlie Morton, the Toledo manager, insisted that if Chicago forfeited the game, it would also lose its share of the gate receipts; Anson relented. Moses Fleetwood Walker Morton had not planned to have Walker catch due to injury, but insisted on putting him in at centerfield, despite Cap Anson’s objections.
August 10, 1948 Gay rights activist Harry Hay organized what later became the Mattachine Society (originally ~ Foundation), a groundbreaking 1950s gay rights organization. The group was named after the Mattachines, a medieval troupe of men who went village-to-village advocating social justice. Mattachine: Radical Roots of Gay Liberation: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mattachine:_Radical_Roots_of_the_Gay_Movement
August 10, 1984 Two Plowshares activists, Barb Katt and John LaForge, damaged a guidance system for a Trident submarine with hammers at a Sperry plant in Minnesota. In sentencing them to six months’ probation, U.S. District Judge Miles W. Lord commented, “Why do we condemn and hang individual killers, while extolling the virtues of warmongers?“ “ Barb Katt More plowshares actions: https://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/issue42/articles/a_history_of_direct_disarmament.htm
August 10, 1988 President George H.W. Bush signed legislation apologizing and compensating for the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. President Franklin Roosevelt had authorized the round-up of hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry, some of whom were American citizens, as security risks. Most lost all their property and were moved to relocation camps for the duration of the war (though not in Hawaii, then not yet a state, where public opposition would not allow it).
August 10, 1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman and 107th Justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
August 10, 2005 Mehmet Tarhan was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment on two charges of “insubordination before command” and “insubordination before command for trying to escape from military service” because he refused to serve in the Turkish Army. He would not sign any paper, put on a uniform, nor allow his hair and beard to be cut. He went on two extended hunger strikes to protest his arrest and abuse while in Sivas Military Prison. War Resisters International has supported his efforts throughout his ordeal. He was released unexpectedly from prison after one year. Read more: https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2005/turkey-conscientious-objector-mehmet-tarhan-hunger-strike-more-32-days
New laws may make it easier to pursue far-right activist over alleged role in spreading disinformation
(I think they are here, because of our Constitution. However, it’d be good to see this sort of activity controlled, and people safer. -A)
Images of Tommy Robinson using his phone while sunbathing in Cyprus as a Rotherham hotel housing asylum seekers was set alight have prompted outrage among those long concerned about his ability to inspire far-right action, even from a distance.
Yet while he has long seemed able to operate with impunity, events may finally be catching up with the man who first rose to prominence in 2009 as the de facto leader of the now defunct English Defence League (EDL).
Far from being powerless to pursue Robinson, new legislation means the authorities may be able to move more easily against those who share damaging information online that they know to be untrue.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is already known to be among those who are being looked at by police for their alleged role in disseminating disinformation.
A former director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald KC, spelled out on Monday how he believed investigators would want to quickly identify individuals who are involved in “online organisation, online incitement and online conspiracies”.
“I think prosecutors will want to have a strategy to identify people who may have been involved in inciting and encouraging these events, and they will want to arrest them and build cases against them. These are, in one sense, the most important people,” Lord Macdonald told BBC Radio 4’s World at One.
While Robinson has been abroad since 28 July, when he fled the UK on the eve of a high court hearing over contempt of court proceedings, he has maintained a near constant commentary on events in the UK since the fatal stabbings of three young girls in Southport on 29 July, sharing claims that police have described as false.
While he has long been a prolific user of multiple social media platforms – benefiting in particular from the return of his X account after Elon Musk bought Twitter – going after him for his online output is not clear-cut.
Dominic Grieve, a former attorney general for England and Wales, told the Guardian: “It is an offence to incite violence on the grounds of race, belief or sexual orientation, and there is incitement to hatred. But it’s a grey area between the right to criticise and incitement to hatred and is a very difficult area to police.
“Quite simply, that’s why it is possible for people to play around with that area. Either you clamp down on it, in which case legitimate freedom of speech gets eliminated and breeds undesirable problems of its own, or you live with it and challenge those views through debate.”
Recent changes in the law open up other possibilities. Since January, an amendment to the Online Safety Act 2023 allows for the prosecution of those who convey information that they know to be false and “if the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience”.
Ashley Fairbrother, a senior prosecutor at the law firm Edmonds Marshall McMahon, said: “This now makes the circulation of damaging and false information online into an offence in its own right.” (snip-More)
Aug. 4, 2024, 5:00 AM CDT By Anthony L. Fisher, Senior Editor, MSNBC Daily
It’s always the end of the world for the Make America Great Again movement. Ever since Donald Trump’s escalator ride in 2015, there’s been zero nuance to the MAGA message. “Only I can fix it,” the leader roared to thunderous applause upon accepting the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
But especially since Vice President Kamala Harris became the likely Democratic nominee, MAGA messaging has gone from overwrought and hyperbolic to absolutely hysterical and apocalyptic.
Trumpists wave off any and all criticism as unworthy of discussion, bad-faith accusations from minds afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yet, deranged is the only appropriate descriptor of the rhetoric emanating from MAGA land’s loudest megaphones. It’s Trump and some of his closest allies and most prominent boosters who have been speaking of an imminent totalitarian government, end times and literal biblical demons.
These people include podcasters with massive, fiercely dedicated audiences. Titans of industry. Religious extremists with political ambitions and close ties to Trump world. And the richest man in the world.
Musk once generally reserved that term for environmentalists — or really anyone concerned about climate change. But he’s since expanded the definition to anything that involves the mysterious and horror-movie-sounding “woke mind virus.” In 2023, Musk told Joe Rogan, “It’s essentially the extinctionists. It is that they’re propagating the extinction of humanity and civilization.”
It’s hard to argue what’s “most disturbing” among these deranged comments from very angry people, but a worthy contender came from Lance Wallnau, the influential Christian nationalist who has the ears of both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. He likened the first Black and Indian woman to be nominated for president by a major party to Jezebel — a spirit with demonic powers. In case he wasn’t driving the point home with just the name, Wallnau clarified that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel … in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”
The MAGA right hasn’t cornered the market on ridiculous and irresponsible hyperbole in politics. Left, right and center are all capable of taking liberties with facts, hyping the fear factor and exaggerating the stakes.
But of all American political tribes, there’s only one with politically influential figures using this election season to prophesize about Jezebels and explicitly making it about race and gender. Or literally warning of the imminent end of the world because of a Marxist conspiracy to smuggle totalitarianism on an unsuspecting public through environmentalism.
This was once the content you’d find on the furthest, most ridiculous fringes of the AM radio dial. And they are what remains of the brain trust of the MAGA movement. (snip-More)
Moses Fleetwood Walker
Barb Katt
Read more: https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2005/turkey-conscientious-objector-mehmet-tarhan-hunger-strike-more-32-days
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Scottie's Playtime 