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I don’t know why that affected me so strongly, but I’m watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But it’s mentioned that the captain’s body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked ‘captain’. And that’s …

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

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Happiness Will Come To You.

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Lmaoooo you can see it sweeping in on the right at the start of the video

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Hunter Schafer had her passport gender marker changed back to M after years of having at as F, and she said the only document not changed was her birth certificate. Implies the agency responsible for passports is cross referencing with other documents and is not just denying new gender marker changes but will start forcibly reverting them to their original marker. God knows what else they have access to but I'm sure it's not pretty.

I need people to understand how serious it can get. And if you only start noticing now and ringing alarm bells, better late than never; but it's also a shame if it takes a white celebrity to sound off in order for people to take institutional transphobia and transmisogyny seriously. Even if this is a notable escalation, it displays a serious devaluing of the violence faced by any invisible transfem, seeing as we are typically the canary in the coal mine. Marginalized transfems of all stripes, nonwhite, disabled, poor, have been begging for people to pay attention and take stuff seriously and it's a disgrace that it's just been met with, at best, performative gestures. We need to keep us safe, and we need to do better to do that.

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It is a rare and delightful thing to watch the richest man in the world he dragged by three astronauts (I'm hoping these tweets are actually real).

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contrary to popular belief i think calvin's adhd is, funnily enough, medicated. he takes extended release ritalin every morning alongside his chocolate frosted sugar bombs. this is because he appreciates being more easily able to focus on his various Schemes, Projects, and Machinations while more effectively ignoring schoolwork

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what they don't tell you is that after you turn 30 you have ocasional but powerful bouts of home ownership fever, which is like baby fever but instead of randomly really wanting a baby you go on zillow and look at modest properties you will nonetheless never be able to afford. and then it passes and you're like wtf was that about. yay time for another $6 coffee to stave off the dread

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definitive list of things it’s okay to deadname:

twitter

gulf of mexico

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important confession

i lied about my HIV status and all aspects of my identity (marital status, trafficking past, family, etc.) on this blog and i truly apologize.

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Helena is so evil and also such a colossal fuck-up I love it. Like wow you really just went out of your way (definitely without a sanction at that) to stalk a guy that you catfished into giving you mediocre dick at a company retreat and managed to creep him the fuck out within 5 minutes of conversation, so badly that he had to run home and get his roomie to give him a reverse lobotomy. Didn't even remember his wife's name?? His wife whom you are keeping chained to the radiator in the office basement??? Girl.

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i know it's because they didn't have the kind of modern medical knowledge we do back then but reading about polar exploration history is hysterical in hindsight because so many of these guys heard accounts from their fellow explorers describing the absolutely hellish obstacles they faced from both the extreme environment and their own mental and physical deterioration and were like "skill issue" and then went there to prove it and encountered the exact same problems

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Hi. I love Hades and Hades 2 as much as everyone else but we NEED to make some noise because Supergiant is refusing to sign contracts with fair pay and anti-AI clauses. And they are straight up recasting VAs to punish VAs who are striking (sag-aftra has been striking for 7 months).

We really need to make noise here because this mistreatment will continue if we don't.

I'm providing a link for the company contact page in the replies. Please send them a comment on their contact page and encourage others to do so. Maybe even leave a steam review about it, idk.

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