argaman01

[argaman01]

Just wait for the punchline.

[argaman01]

The media was more cruel and critical of Biden than it ever was to Trump.

The media refused to honor Biden's accomplishments and dismiss the MAGA peanut gallery. They focused on insignificant details and right-wing falsehoods.

[argaman01]

Homestead Greys In Star Trek DS9

I recently started watching Deep Space 9 and it brought the biggest smile to my face to see Sisko wearing a Homestead Greys hat.

The Homestead Grays were a Pittsburgh-based Negro league baseball team that played in the Negro National League from 1922 to 1948…

The Homestead Grays were one of the most successful Negro league baseball teams, winning multiple championships in the Negro National League. The Homestead Grays weren’t inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame UNTIL 2006 (almost 60 years later!). They were one of the best baseball teams PERIOD… So seeing one of the characters in a show from the 90’s represent this team years before the baseball hall of fame even did made me so happy… The record stats from the Homestead Greys weren’t put into consideration into baseball history until this year! The Homestead Greys had some of the best baseball players of all time on their team.

As someone from Pittsburgh seeing this team represented in something as impactful as Star Trek made me so happy. Whoever did the costuming for Star Trek Deep Space 9, excellent job.

[argaman01]

So great to have her tell off that waste of space Owen Jones pseudo-leftist antisemite.

Elica Le Bon

[argaman01]

I wonder what our real vice president to come, Elon Musk, thinks about this?

The incoming Trump administration has even more plans to delay electric vehicle adoption than previously thought. According to Reuters, which has seen transition team documents, the Trump team wants to abolish EV subsidies, claw back federal funding meant for EV charging infrastructure, block EV battery imports on national security grounds, and prevent the federal government and the US military from purchasing more EVs.

During the campaign, candidate Trump made repeated references to ending a supposed EV mandate. In fact, policies put in place by President Joe Biden only call for 50 percent of all new vehicles to be electrified by 2032 under US Environmental Protection Agency rules meant to cut emissions by 56 percent from 2026 levels.

Instead, the new regime will be far more friendly to gas guzzling, as it intends to roll back EPA fuel efficiency standards to those in effect in 2019. This would increase the allowable level of emissions from cars by about 25 percent relative to the current rule set. US new vehicle efficiency stalled between 2008 and 2019, and it was only once the Biden administration began in 2021 that the EPA started instituting stricter rules on allowable limits of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from vehicle tailpipes.

About a third of the population looks to the California Air Resources Board, rather than the EPA, to get their emissions regulations.

The so-called ZEV states (for zero-emissions vehicles) do have something closer to an EV mandate, and from model-year 2026 in these states (California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington) and the District of Columbia, a third of all new cars sold by each automaker will have to be battery-electric—assuming the EPA grants California a waiver to allow this to happen.

As with the first Trump administration, we can expect a sustained attack on California's ability to set its own vehicle emissions regulations and any attempts by other states to use those regs.

More Tariffs

Trade tariffs will evidently be a major weapon of the next Trump administration, particularly when deployed to block EV manufacturing. Even the current administration has been wary enough of China dumping cheap EVs that it instituted singeing tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and batteries, with bipartisan support from Congress.

The Biden tariffs were justified on economic grounds as a way of defending US industry against an unfair level of state support from China toward its own automakers. The Trump team plans to use national security as the justification for its own barriers to EV imports, using section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act.

But according to the documents seen by Reuters, the tariffs on battery materials will be applied globally, something that should significantly increase the cost of a new EV. The transition team plans to allow individual countries to try to negotiate exemptions to the tariffs, Reuters wrote.

No More Tax Credit, No More Public Chargers

While the Trump team plan is meant to boost US auto manufacturing versus imports, a key tool in forcing more local EV production is also not long for this world. As we thought, the $7,500 clean-vehicle tax credit will be eradicated once Trump takes office.

But according to Reuters, the Trump transition team also plans to claw back as much of the $7.5 billion allocated for charging infrastructure put in place by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Much of this money has not been spent, due to the lengthy timelines involved. Rather than be disbursed directly by the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the funds were instead allocated via the states, in the same manner as highway funding. As such, there could be significant amounts of this program that will never see completion.

One Trump team idea could speed up EV charger deployment—the incoming administration intends to do away with environmental reviews that are required for projects like charging stations.

Other rules and regulations meant to protect the public are also set to be scrapped, including one that requires all automakers to report to the government when one of their vehicles crashes while operating under partial automation, such as Tesla Autopilot. This standing order has caused plenty of grief for Tesla following more than 1,500 crashes, with multiple injuries and deaths, and Tesla's opposition to the requirement is widely known.

Finally, the US government fleet can be expected to get more polluting. Currently the federal government is required to purchase more EVs as it replaces old vehicles, with a requirement for all light vehicles to be zero emissions by 2027. This will no longer be the case under Trump, who will also end any Department of Defense programs that are meant to purchase or develop electric military vehicles.

[argaman01]

The Turkey Story

So it’s 2001, and my family drives from fucking California and like three blizzards to get to Ohio for thanksgiving, becuase my grandparents are moving into a nursing home and it’s their last holiday in that house.  So its a bit bittersweet but ultimately a good thing.

Since it’s their last holiday there, the family pulls out all the stops when it comes to dinner, all the Russian desserts come out, as does the Lethal Bacon Mashed Potatoes and the horrible candied yams with the mini marshmallows dish because not all expressions of love are good, even if they are sincere.  In the spirit of going all-out, Uncle Bobby smokes a Turkey.  

Uncle Bobby started cooking as a boy scout by tossing foil-wrapped potatoes into a campfire and has been addicted since, and now has a hand-made smokehouse in the backyard where he makes various cured meats and other delights.  He seasons the turkey in the traditional manner, but he and grandpa have a shared passion for a spicier mesquite-style bird, so Bobby makes a Cornish Game Hen seasoned that way, for them.

Then Bobby has a Brilliant Idea.  He realizes that he can stuff the turkey (once it has been smoked) with regular stuffing, and there is still plenty of room for him to put the game hen inside THAT, and stuff the game hen becuase why not?  He confers with Mom, and she explains how to cut open the turkey so there’s  dramatic reveal as the stuffing and game hen come out.  It’s Genius.

Except, of course, that my Aunt Sue is attending, Uncle Cliff slouching after her.

So the day of the dinner, tensions are running a bit high, between the marathon cooking, the kids all being trapped indoors due to aforementioned blizzards, and Uncle Cliff deciding that the best way to amuse himself is by hiding from the adults in the basement, getting drunk and rambling about how various ethic groups were destroying America.  Being that I had close Muslim friends that were leaving the country becuase of 9/11, I was near tears from this nonsense and ready to fight a man roughly five times my size.  

Sue, for some reason, keeps coming down and defending him, or telling us we’re rotten children for ‘attacking’ him, becuase she Must Stand By Her Man, even if her man is a hefty bag of dog feces with an ugly mustache.

My sister eventually bolts upstairs to tattle and my grandfather limps down to the basement and brandishes his Hip-Bone Cane, hands rock-steady in spite of the Parkinson’s slowly taking over him.

“Firstly Cliff, It may not be my roof much longer but while you are under it you will be civil, or I’ll beat your skull in.  Also, dinner’s ready, everyone go wash up.”

We go upstairs and sit down, and do the traditional “Name one thing you’re thankful for” as the bread gets passed around the table, and things calm down a bit.  Bobby brings out the Turkey and everyone goes OOH becuase it’s really pretty, them Mom carves it open so that the stuffing spills out dramatically along with the game hen and there’s an appreciative gasp all around becuase it looks cool.

Only Sue KEEPS gasping, in utter horror, before getting up and clasping her hands to her face ala Edvard Munch and shrieks-

“OH MY GOD IT WAS PREGNANT!”

We all stare at Sue.  We all look back at the fully-dressed-cooked-and-stuffed birds that in no way had any internal organs in them or ever gave live birth. Then we all looked back at Sue, trying to figure out where to begin but since she’d been trying to justify Cliff’s behavior she was pretty much free-associating conspiracies and scandals now, and just kept going.

“IT WAS PREGNANT MY GOD WE’VE COMMITTED AN ABORTION WE’RE ALL GOING TO HELL FOR THIS, I’M SO SORRY JESUS-” She goes into full pearl-clutching gibbering horror at this point and falls back into her chair like it’s a Victorian fainting couch only it’s a shitty chair from the Eisenhower administration so it collapses and she slams into the floor, sobbing and kicking her feet like a toddler.

Everyone watched for a moment before my Mom sighs heavily and starts carving and serving the turkey while my grandmother mouths “she’s not coming back”.   

Cliff, reactions delayed by about six beers, finally notices his wife is on the floor and tries to pick her up, falls on his ass himself.  They are assisted by Dad, who is saintly patient man and less immune to this jacknapery at that point. I am stuffing dinner rolls into my face to keep from laughing at this grand spectacle and it’s not working.

“I CAN’T EAT IT, I REFUSE TO PARTAKE IN THIS BARBARISM-”  Sue begins but Dad puts on his best Kindly Father voice (he was heavily involved with the catholic church and even considered becoming a priest before getting drafted but that’s another story) and assures Sue that she need not eat, or even be in the room if she wants.  She nods, placated by being the center of attention again, and Dad goes in for the kill.

“I wouldn’t want you to go hungry.  Can I make you some Eggs?”

“That would be lovely.” Said Sue, joke flying over her head like a boeing 747.  I recall watching my grandmother nearly choke to death on the green beans over that, and everyone pointedly trying to avoid talking about anything poultry-related while Sue sat there and ate the most ironic scrambled eggs in the history of mankind.

Shortly thereafter, Cliff threw up in the sink and they went home, and the party got underway properly, with Grandpa raising a toast to Mom and Uncle Bobby “For marrying well, for a change” “Pregnant Turkey” has been an Ohioan thanksgiving staple since then.  I’ll see if I can hit Uncle Bobby up for instructions but if you decide to make it 1. you HAVE to shriek “OH MY GOD IT WAS PREGNANT” when you carve it open, or it’s not authentic and won’t taste as good 2. Share the pictures with me.

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[argaman01]

The people asleep on cows post.

[argaman01]

Hello everyone, I'm here today to engage in the absolutely thankless task of defending the hell out of this sentence getting commuted.

First things first:

I am not a prison abolitionist (this is important)

This former judge is one of the worst scumbags alive. Basically, he sent kids to juvie/prison in return for kickbacks.

So why did I want his sentence commuted? Oh, me? I didn't.

But this was part of a package of commutations requested by prison abolitionists. Yes, they asked for this, even spent hundreds of thousands on advertisements to demand it. Basically, Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 people who were on "compassionate release", meaning they were already living at home. This is mostly just really old/sick people.

Biden didn't commute this guy's sentence as such, he commuted the sentences of a type of person out on compassionate release and didn't take the judge out of the pile. He didn't say, "except, not him".

This judge (scumbag) served 13 of his 16 years, but in 2020 was sent home because he was in such poor health it was assumed Covid would kill him. He's been at home ever since.

Now, this is important. This man cannot commit this offense again. He's not a judge any more! So recidivism is impossible. He cannot re-offend. So, in his case, prison can't be for rehabilitation or in any way to make sure he doesn't do it again. He can't! Never could have. The only real reason he was there was to punish him, which is fine. Personally, I'm fine with prisons being solely for punishment. But are you? Is that what you've been saying? Has that been your stance, that prisons are to punish people?

"But this guy was especially bad." Oh, so... mercy for people who didn't do really bad things? Then you're not getting any of these commutations. Because if you were in federal prison for long enough to qualify to be out on compassionate release, you did something really bad! Biden also pardoned everyone in federal prison for non-violent marijuana charges and you could count the number of people on your fingers because you don't actually get sent to federal prison over minor drug crimes.

Let's make it clear: "Mercy and leniency, but only for people who I define as innocent" means.... no mercy and no leniency. And you can be on board with that. You can be vengeful or a revanchist or bitter and brutal at heart; you're totally allowed. But then don't pretend you're not! In fact, that's the heart of Trumpism: there are those for whom laws should protect but not bind, and for others laws which should bind but not protect. (Or, as Óscar Benavides put it: "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.") If your stance is just "good things for people I like and agree with, and bad things for those I don't" then you just have a different sense of who should be punished or die. But your thinking is fundamentally the same. Have you had a consistent stance about vigilante killing lately? Let me ask, who's allowed to decide among the populace who may live and who must die?

It's very unlikely anyone will ever again be as generous and compassionate as Biden has been with his powers. Because when he is, when he actually does it, when he's kind down to his very soul, you fucking hate it. That's what 2024 was; the revealed preferences election. You didn't want to pay people a living wage to deliver your burrito, you don't actually want people let out of jail, and you think capital punishment is fine as long as the executioner was hot.

[argaman01]

ok call me when new york city is keeping tens of thousands of people in hellish underground prisons for decades with no trial and zero access to the outside world so when they’re freed they ask if they got liberated by notorious dead person of 18 years saddam hussein

i don’t think if you let people out of rikers they would ask if they had been pardoned by ronald reagan

[argaman01]

Amen!

I have said this so many fucking times and you know what, I’m going to keep saying it until people are sick to the back teeth of me, but the fact that antisemitism is at terrifyingly high levels around the world and Jews are having to literally beg everyone else to see their humanity, to give a single, solitary shit is beyond outrageous.

Antisemitic hate crimes at UK universities have soared to record levels, as they have in most of the Western world, people are being attacked on streets and on public transport, women and girls have been raped for the “crime” of being Jewish to “atone” for Palestine, there was an honest to fuck planned pogrom in Amsterdam, there is not a single space left on social media that isn’t awash in Nazi propaganda and blood libel and those who aren’t directly complicit in these horrors are mostly completely silent.

Those ‘social justice’ activists who like to preach Silence Is Violence.

Well, where the FUCK are you now???

Oh…

[argaman01]

I say this as an American who thinks the CEO of United Healthcare was a criminal who was responsible for the needless deaths of many in the American healthcare system. I say this as someone who has personally had my health compromised by United Healthcare:

There is a direct line between celebrating the brutal murder of Jews on 10/7 and celebrating the vigilante murderer of the United Healthcare CEO. The idea that extrajudicial violence is okay when it's done for the "right" reason will destroy any movement it touches. And people are just refusing to see it because they were unable to see, name, and stop their antisemitism in response to 10/7.

And now saying something obvious like "gun violence is wrong" is bad take.

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[argaman01]

Very important history to know to counter all the transphobes out there.

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[argaman01]

Emet

I say this as an American who thinks the CEO of United Healthcare was a criminal who was responsible for the needless deaths of many in the American healthcare system. I say this as someone who has personally had my health compromised by United Healthcare:

There is a direct line between celebrating the brutal murder of Jews on 10/7 and celebrating the vigilante murderer of the United Healthcare CEO. The idea that extrajudicial violence is okay when it's done for the "right" reason will destroy any movement it touches. And people are just refusing to see it because they were unable to see, name, and stop their antisemitism in response to 10/7.

And now saying something obvious like "gun violence is wrong" is bad take.

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[argaman01]

So I guess just being Jewish is controversial.

by Emma Riva

Andy Warhol painted Mao, machine guns and Marilyn Monroe, but the public was scandalized in 1980 when he painted Jews.

The New York Times claimed that Warhol’s “Ten Portraits of Jews in the Twentieth Century” “reek[ed] of commercialism, and their contribution to art is nil,” and The Philadelphia Inquirer called the portraits “Jewploitation.”

But this month, Andy Warhol Museum Chief Curator Aaron Levi Garvey, a Jewish curator and historian originally from New York, installed them at the museum.

“I never understood calling these portraits commercial or vapid,” Garvey said. “What of Warhol’s work isn’t commercial? He worked with the idea of what an icon is.”

The 10 Jewish subjects that Warhol, art dealer Ronald Feldman and JCC of Greater Washington Gallery Director Susan Morgenstein selected in 1980 were actress Sarah Bernhardt; United States Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis; philosopher Martin Buber; physicist Albert Einstein; psychologist Sigmund Freud; comedians the Marx Brothers; Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir; songwriter George Gershwin; and writers Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein.

The installation at the Warhol, Garvey said, was initially conceived as a gesture of solidarity coinciding with the five-year commemoration of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

Then the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 happened.

Fear of controversy over highlighting Jews during a period of escalating violence and brutality in Israel — as well as personal antisemitic threats that Garvey said were made against him via email and voicemail — could have caused the Jewish curator to postpone or cancel the exhibit. But he’s no stranger to anti-Jewish hate and decided to go through with the installation.

“People used to carve swastikas into my desk when I was in high school, and I experienced major antisemitism in college,” he said. “I want viewers of ‘Ten Portraits’ to learn and be open to dialogue.”

The portraits share a room on the fourth floor of the Warhol with Keith Haring’s “Untitled (Elephant)” — a literal elephant in the room alongside a figurative one, Garvey noted.

In the lineup of Warhol’s “Jewish geniuses,” as the artist nicknamed them, the views and figures represented are complex. Kafka abandoned Judaism. Bernhardt hid her Jewish identity. Stein supported the Vichy government of France, an actively anti-Jewish regime. Einstein is quoted as saying: “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state” in a 1938 speech entitled “Our Debt to Zionism,” even though he was offered the position of president of Israel.

One of the many things that makes “Ten Portraits” so timely and provocative is that it asks viewers to consider what being a Jewish icon means. All the portraits are of Ashkenazi Jews and speak to a certain image of Jewish identity. However, rather than Jacob Riis-esque tenement photography or depictions of Jewish suffering and tragedy, Warhol highlighted Jewish exceptionalism in the arts, government and sciences.

“I want viewers to think about all of these people in multitudes, in a non-linear fashion,” Garvey said. “It’s about Jewish exceptionalism but in a multitude of ways. All of the subjects contain multitudes. In the wall text, I put that Martin Buber was a Zionist philosopher. Someone told me I couldn’t say that, and I was like, ‘Well, that’s what he was,’” Garvey recalled.

Garvey said that the museum’s internal response to the installation has been mixed, including various complaints that misidentified Garvey’s ethnicity and some inflammatory antisemitic remarks. But nonetheless, Garvey and Warhol Director Patrick Moore co-signed an exhibition statement calling for peace and solidarity.

[argaman01]

For today’s farce of media coverage on Jewish topics, our top contender is the BBC!

The BBC claims that there is a “Jewish Quarter” where Jews live among a diverse population of Muslims and Christians in Damascus.

Which is such an interesting conclusion, given that there are a total of 3 Jews left in Syria.

Nobody ask the BBC what happened to the Jews of Syria, they might have an aneurysm.