#Arizona School Construction

[balladofthe101st]

Buck Compton came back to see the Company to let us know that he was alright. He became a prosecutor in Los Angeles. He convicted Sirhan Sirhan in the murder of Robert Kennedy, and was later appointed to the California Court of Appeals. 

David Webster became a writer for the Saturday Evening Post and Wall Street Journal, and later wrote and book about sharks. In 1961, he went out on the ocean alone, and was never seen again.

Johnny Martin would return to his job at the railroad and then start his own construction company. He splits his time between Arizona and a place in Montana.

George Luz became a handyman in Providence, Rhode Island. As a testament to his character, sixteen hundred people attended his funeral in 1998.

Doc Roe died in Louisiana in 1998. He’d been a construction contractor.

Frank Perconte returned to Chicago and worked a postal route as a mailman.

Joe Liebgott returned to San Francisco and drove his cab.

Bull Randleman was one of the best soldiers I ever had. He went into the earth moving business in Arkansas. He’s still there.

Alton More returned to Wyoming with a unique souvenir: Hitler’s personal photo albums. He was killed in a car accident in 1958.

Floyd Talbert we all lost touch with in civilian life, until he showed up at a reunion just before his death in 1981.

Carwood Lipton became a glass making executive in charge of factories all over the world. He has a nice life in North Carolina.

Harry Welsh – he married Kitty Grogan. Became an administrator for the Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania school system.

Ronald Speirs stayed in the Army, served in Korea. In 1958, returned to Germany as Governor of Spandau Prison. He retired a Lieutenant Colonel.

Lewis Nixon had some tough times after the war. He was divorced a couple of times. Then in 1956, he married a woman named Grace and everything came together for him. He spent the rest of his life with her, travelling the world. My friend Lew died in 1995.

I took up his job offer and was a personnel manager at the Nixon Nitration Works, until I was called back into service in 1950 to train officers and rangers. I chose not to go to Korea. I’d had enough of war. I stayed around Hershey, Pennsylvania, finally finding a little farm. A little peaceful corner of the world, where I still live today. And there is not a day that goes by that I do not think of the men I served with who never got to enjoy the world without war.

[professor-beaker]

I just remembered another embarrassing young-me story that shouldve clued me in to being aroace (buckle in, boys, theres a reason i blocked this out).

So this takes place when i was in elementary school in arizona. Tiny, oblivious me, stationed in a class of mostly guys. I, being extraordinarily naïve and young and curious (read: confused) when it came to anything remotely romance-y, decided one day to conduct an experiment. I tore a sheet of paper out of my spiral bound notebook and began to construct a list.

For some reason that has been since lost to the years that ive spent blocking this out of my memory, i began writing down names of kids that i suspected could have a crush on me. The list started miniscule, but then grew once i asked my mom how to tell if a boy likes you, and she said, "look for the ones teasing you" (side note, mom: those were just my bullies). Then i started to narrow them down: by how annoying i thought they were, and by what others would think if i got together with one of them. I didnt even consider my feelings as part of the equation- i think i was trying to get back at a girl who was laughing at me for not having kissed a boy yet. The details are foggy, but i remember this being an actual project that i was intent on following to completion. I logged everything- it was more than a little creepy, actually.

Then in came New Kid.

New Kid was from a different state, or maybe a different country. He was quiet, and funny, and was nice to me, despite hanging around the other boys. On his first day there, i put his name on my list- just "New Kid" at the time, i didnt know him- likely because i was mistaking kindness for affection. By week two, i had circled his name in highlighter to emphasize his status, in my mind, as a worthy candidate.

Then- the tragedy.

I dont think ive ever been described as graceful. Over the course of this fall semester, ive fallen down the stairs twice, slipped on ice and split my lip, dropped my clarinet and broken a key, crashed my scooter a week before a concert and scratched the entirety of my face, and walked into a tree and gained a new scar above my eyebrow. Ive dropped more christmas ornaments and bowls of ramen than i can count. My phone's glass protective cover is shattered, and always has been. Which is why it should be no surprise that on this particular day, i dropped not only all my schoolwork papers, scattering them around my desk, but my treasured list, too.

I gathered the papers as quickly as i could, but i wasnt fast enough to stop one bratty boy from getting his hands on the one list i should never have created. To my horror, i realized i had titled it, in bold, crooked letters, "Crushes"- and, oh man, did this kid light up when he realized this.

"Hey, look!" He exclaimed gleefully- and at the top of his lungs, might i add- "[name]'s made a list of everyone she likes!"

I dont think ive ever been that mortified before, maybe not even since. I didnt like a single boy on that list- at least, not on the way my foolhardy title implied. I wanted to yell at all of them, tell them it was only a stupid categorization, i actually hated a lot of them. But as all the other kids crowded around to get a look at the demise of mini-me's social life, laughing at my red cheeks, the only defense i could indignantly stammer out was, "Those arent the people i like! Those are the people that like me!"

I dont remember much after that, but i do remember New Kid being touched at being at the top of my list, eventually ending up the only boy that would talk to me, and then telling me he hated himself and trying to coerce me into kissing him.

Moral of the story, kids are dumb and childhood romance is in the negatives in terms of usefulness.

[robertreich]

The Dark Side of Sports Stadiums

Billionaires have found one more way to funnel our tax dollars into their bank accounts: sports stadiums. And if we don’t play ball, they’ll take our favorite teams away.

Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion-dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.

A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl: State Farm Stadium.

That's where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was finally built after billionaire team owner Michael Bidwill and his family spent years hinting that they would move the Cards out of Arizona if the team didn't get a new stadium. Their blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying over two thirds of the $455 million construction tab.

And State Farm Stadium is not unique. It’s part of a well established playbook.

Here’s how stadiums stick the public with the bill.

Step 1: Billionaire buys a sports team.

Just about every NFL franchise owner has a net worth of over a billion dollars — except for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly owned by half a million cheeseheads.

The same goes for many franchise owners in other sports. Their fortunes don’t just help them buy teams, but also give them clout — which they cash-in when they want to get a great deal on new digs for their team.

Step 2: Billionaire pressures local government.

Since 1990, franchises in major North American sports leagues have intercepted upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer funds from state and local governments to build stadiums.  

And the funding itself is just the beginning of these sweetheart deals.

Sports teams often get big property tax breaks and reimbursements on operating expenses, like utilities and security on game days. Most deals also let the owners keep the revenue from naming rights, luxury box seats, and concessions — like the Atlanta Braves’ $150 hamburger.

Even worse, these deals often put taxpayers on the hook for stadium maintenance and repairs.

We taxpayers are essentially paying for the homes of our favorite sports teams, but we don’t really own those homes, we don’t get to rent them out, and we still have to buy expensive tickets to visit them.

Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth from which we’ll all benefit.  But numerous studies have shown that this is false.

As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, "If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark."

But what makes sports teams special is they are one of the few realms of collective identity we have left.

Billionaires prey on the love that millions of fans have for their favorite teams.

This brings us to the final step in the playbook: Threaten to move the team.

Obscenely rich owners threaten to — or actually do — rip teams out of their communities if they don’t get the subsidies they demand.

Just look at the Seattle Supersonics. Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz owned the NBA franchise but failed to secure public funding to build a new stadium. So the coffee magnate sold the team to another wealthy businessman who moved it to Oklahoma.

The most egregious part of how the system currently works is that every dollar we spend building stadiums is a dollar we aren’t using for hospitals or housing or schools.

We are underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford.

So, instead of spending billions on extravagant stadiums, we should be investing taxpayer money in things that improve the lives of everyone — not just the bottom lines of profitable sports teams and their owners.  

Because when it comes to stadium deals, the only winners are billionaires.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Arizona Daily Star:

Environmental groups are going to court to block the U.S. Forest Service from constructing new roads in Chiricahua National Forest, citing danger to endangered jaguars.

The lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Tucson contends the agency failed to comply with various laws in approving construction of 2.6 miles of new segments in the Environmental Management Area of the forest southeast of Tucson.

The issue is about more than that segment, however. It would open or reopen 20 miles of roads within the area to “disruptive motorized access,” said attorney Adriane Hofmeyr.

That’s unacceptable, she wrote, because it would affect 11 federally listed species and potentially, one designated critical habitat.

Hofmeyr said the area is also home to — and central to the survival of — one of the last known wild jaguars in the United States, an animal that was given the same Sombra, meaning shadow, by students at Paulo Freiere Freedom School in Tucson. She also said it is the home to threatened Mexican spotted owls.

That was not properly considered when the agency gave its go-ahead last year, she contends. Hofmeyr represents five environmental groups that are suing, including the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.

There was no immediate response from the Forest Service or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which also is named as a defendant.

According to the lawsuit, the Forest Service stated that the project’s purpose is to provide “permanent, legal, motorized access’’ to John Long Canyon, the North Fork of Pinery Canyon and Horseshoe Canyon. Hofmeyr said that is unnecessary.

“These canyons can be accessed via non-motorized means, providing opportunity for recreation while maintaining the pristine, wild nature of the area and protecting biodiversity and natural resources,’’ she wrote. “The construction of these proposed roads for motorized access and the resulting increase in human use and activity in these remote areas will cause significant harm and disturbance to protect species and their habitat.’’

[lboogie1906]

Captain Ed Dwight (September 9, 1933) the first African American astronaut candidate, IBM computer systems engineer, real estate developer, professional sculptor, and former Air Force test pilot, was born in Kansas City, Kansas.

His father Ed Dwight, Sr. played second base for the Kansas City Monarchs in baseball’s Negro League which left Ed with his mother, Georgia Baker Dwight. He graduated from Bishop Ward Private Catholic High School in Kansas City, The school did not accept African Americans, but his mother wrote to the Vatican directly, and they ordered the school to accept her son and racially integrate. He attended Kansas City Junior College where he completed an AA in Engineering and enlisted in the Air Force. He racked up over 9,000 flying hours. He continued his education and graduated with an Aeronautical Engineering BS from Arizona State University. He received his MFA in Sculpture at the University of Denver.

He was accepted as the first African American in NASA’s Astronaut Training Group. He was not selected as an astronaut and he resigned from the Air Force at the rank of Captain. He took a position with the IBM Corporation as a Marketing Representative & Systems Engineer. He became an Aviation Consultant for a Dallas firm and joined Executive Aviation, Inc. He founded Dwight Development Associates, Inc. a Real Estate Land Development, and Construction Company, and became one of the largest Real Estate development entrepreneurs in Denver.

He would become recognized for many of his sculptures across the country, including that of the historical life-size sculpture representation of President Barack Obama’s first inauguration scene, and the Underground Railroad Memorial in New Jersey. He owns a studio/gallery and foundry in Denver. He has received hundreds of awards from around the US for his achievements & contributions to racial progress through his many sculptures. He has received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Arizona State University. He was made an honorary Space Force member. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #phibetasigma

[kemetic-dreams]

How Italians Became ‘White’

Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only “free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States” were eligible to become naturalized citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.

As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.” Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.

Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an “uncivilized” and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.

Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white nigger” and “nigger wop.”

The penalties of blackness went well beyond name-calling in the apartheid South. Italians who had come to the country as “free white persons” were often marked as black because they accepted “black” jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans. This left them vulnerable to marauding mobs like the ones that hanged, shot, dismembered or burned alive thousands of black men, women and children across the South.

The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — celebrated on Monday — was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record.

Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

Historians have recently showed that America’s dishonorable response to this barbaric event was partly conditioned by racist stereotypes about Italians promulgated in Northern newspapers like The Times. A striking analysis by Charles Seguin, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, and Sabrina Nardin, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, shows that the protests lodged by the Italian government inspired something that had failed to coalesce around the brave African-American newspaper editor and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells — a broad anti-lynching effort.

A Black ‘Brute’ Lynched

The lynchings of Italians came at a time when newspapers in the South had established the gory convention of advertising the far more numerous public murders of African-Americans in advance — to attract large crowds — and justifying the killings by labeling the victims “brutes,” “fiends,” “ravishers,” “born criminals” or “troublesome Negroes.” Even high-minded news organizations that claimed to abhor the practice legitimized lynching by trafficking in racist stereotypes about its victims.

As Mr. Seguin recently showed, many Northern newspapers were “just as complicit” in justifying mob violence as their Southern counterparts. For its part, The Times made repeated use of the headline “A Brutal Negro Lynched,” presuming the victims’ guilt and branding them as congenital criminals. Lynchings of black men in the South were often based on fabricated accusations of sexual assault. As the Equal Justice Initiative explained in its 2015 report on lynching in America, a rape charge could occur in the absence of an actual victim and might arise from minor violations of the social code — like complimenting a white woman on her appearance or even bumping into her on the street.

The Times was not owned by the family that controls it today when it dismissed Ida B. Wells as a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress” for rightly describing rape allegations as “a thread bare lie” that Southerners used against black men who had consensual sexual relationships with white women. Nevertheless, as a Times editorialist of nearly 30 years standing — and a student of the institution’s history — I am outraged and appalled by the nakedly racist treatment my 19th-century predecessors displayed in writing about African-Americans and Italian immigrants.

When Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England in the 1890s, Times editors rebuked her for representing “black brutes” abroad in an editorial that joked about what they described as “the practice of roasting Negro ravishers alive and boring out their eyes with red-hot pokers.” The editorial slandered African-Americans generally, referring to rape as “a crime to which Negroes are particularly prone.” The Times editors may have lodged objections to lynching — but they did so in a rhetoric firmly rooted in white supremacy.

‘Assassins by Nature’

Italian immigrants were welcomed into Louisiana after the Civil War, when the planter class was in desperate need of cheap labor to replace newly emancipated black people, who were leaving backbreaking jobs in the fields for more gainful employment.

These Italians seemed at first to be the answer to both the labor shortage and the increasingly pressing quest for settlers who would support white domination in the emerging Jim Crow state. Louisiana’s romance with Italian labor began to sour when the new immigrants balked at low wages and dismal working conditions.

The newcomers also chose to live together in Italian neighborhoods, where they spoke their native tongue, preserved Italian customs and developed successful businesses that catered to African-Americans, with whom they fraternized and intermarried. In time, this proximity to blackness would lead white Southerners to view Sicilians, in particular, as not fully white and to see them as eligible for persecution — including lynching — that had customarily been imposed on African-Americans.

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2019/10/10/srw1011-staplesgallery/4792c59ca6f516c487b724c1c77fd4899b3050d3/photo_cat.jpg

Nevertheless, as the historian Jessica Barbata Jackson showed recently in the journal Louisiana History, Italian newcomers were still well thought of in New Orleans in the 1870s when negative stereotypes were being established in the Northern press.

The Times, for instance, described them as bandits and members of the criminal classes who were “wretchedly poor and unskilled,” “starving and wholly destitute.” The stereotype about inborn criminality is plainly evident in an 1874 story about Italian immigrants seeking vaccinations that refers to one immigrant as a “burly fellow, whose appearance was like that of the traditional brigand of the Abruzzi.”

A Times story in 1880 described immigrants, including Italians, as “links in a descending chain of evolution.” These characterizations reached a defamatory crescendo in an 1882 editorial that appeared under the headline “Our Future Citizens.” The editors wrote:

“There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”

The editors reserved their worst invective for Italian immigrant children, whom they described as “utterly unfit — ragged, filthy, and verminous as they were — to be placed in the public primary schools among the decent children of American mechanics.”

The racist myth that African-Americans and Sicilians were both innately criminal drove an 1887 Times story about a lynching victim in Mississippi whose name was given as “Dago Joe” — “dago” being a slur directed at Italian and Spanish-speaking immigrants. The victim was described as a “half breed” who “was the son of a Sicilian father and a mulatto mother, and had the worst characteristics of both races in his makeup. He was cunning, treacherous and cruel, and was regarded in the community where he lived as an assassin by nature.”

Sicilians as ‘Rattlesnakes’

The carnage in New Orleans was set in motion in the fall of 1890, when the city’s popular police chief, David Hennessy, was assassinated on his way home one evening. Hennessy had no shortage of enemies. The historian John V. Baiamonte Jr. writes that he had once been tried for murder in connection with the killing of a professional rival. He is also said to have been involved in a feud between two Italian businessmen. On the strength of a clearly suspect witness who claimed to hear Mr. Hennessy say that “dagoes” had shot him, the city charged 19 Italians with complicity in the chief’s murder.

The monument to David Hennessy rises above nearly all the other tombs in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.William Widmer for The New York Times

That the evidence was distressingly weak was evident from the verdicts that were swiftly handed down: Of the first nine to be tried, six were acquitted; three others were granted mistrials. The leaders of the mob that then went after them advertised their plans in advance, knowing full well that the city’s elites — who coveted the businesses the Italians had built or hated the Italians for fraternizing with African-Americans — would never seek justice for the dead. After the lynching, a grand jury investigation pronounced the killings praiseworthy, turning that inquiry into what the historian Barbara Botein describes as “possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history.”

The blood of the New Orleans victims was scarcely dry when The Times published a cheerleading news story — “Chief Hennessy Avenged: Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob” — that reveled in the bloody details. It reported that the mob had consisted “mostly of the best element” of New Orleans society. The following day, a scabrous Times editorial justified the lynching — and dehumanized the dead, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.

“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.” The editors concluded of the lynching that it would be difficult to find “one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”

Lynchers in 1891 storming the New Orleans city jail, where they killed 11 Italian-Americans accused in the fatal shooting of Chief Hennessy.Italian Tribune

President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.

Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage. The mythologizing, carried out over many decades, granted Italian-Americans “a formative role in the nation-building narrative.” It also tied Italian-Americans closely to the paternalistic assertion, still heard today, that Columbus “discovered” a continent that was already inhabited by Native Americans.

The “Monument to the Immigrant,” commissioned by the Italian American Marching Club of New Orleans, stands along the Mississippi River in Woldenberg Park.William Widmer for The New York Times

But in the late 19th century, the full-blown Columbus myth was yet to come. The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation. The influential anti-immigrant racist Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the United States Senate, quickly appropriated the event. He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans. “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things,” he wrote, “but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”

Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration. Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed.

The Italian-Americans who labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965 used the romantic fictions built up around Columbus to political advantage. This shows yet again how racial categories that people mistakenly view as matters of biology grow out of highly politicized myth making.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matthew Sheffield at Flux:

Despite the evidence provided by history, polling, and daily news events, there are millions of people in the United States who actually think that Democrats are just as extreme as Republicans. In a 2022 CNN poll, 52 percent of respondents said that Democrats’ viewpoints were generally mainstream, little different from the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans. A survey also done in 2022 by CBS found that 49 percent of respondents said Democrats were “extreme,” only slightly higher than the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans.

Needless to say, thinking that Democrats are anywhere as extreme as Republicans is totally absurd. Donald Trump is the only president in American history who refused to leave office after losing a free and fair election. He frequently lavishes praise on violent January 6th rioters as “great people” with “love in their heart.” He frequently promises “vengeance” against opponents and says he will imprison and execute people who disagree with him. And it’s not just Trump. Moderate Republicans in Congress have been extinct since the Trumpist hordes eliminated the few who hadn’t been swept away during the Tea Party movement of the late 2010s. The Republican Party nationally and in a variety of states devised and executed a criminal scheme to steal the 2020 election and throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans. The American right is also much more violent than the left. Since 1970, about 75 percent of political hate crimes are committed by right-wing extremists. Only 4 percent were committed by far-left extremists.

There are no leftist members of Congress who are anywhere as radical as Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who was censured for posting a stylized video of himself murdering New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021. He and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attracted national controversy for speaking at a neo-Nazi political event just a few months later. There aren’t any Democratic members of Congress who have spoken at rallies of communists who advocate violence. The anecdotal evidence of individual members’ extreme views is also borne out when we examine Congress from aggregate statistical measures. Since 1992, congressional Democrats have moved slightly to the left, while Republicans have moved much further to the right.

On most specific political issues, Americans agree overwhelmingly with Democratic policies. Republicans’ desires to mandate school prayer, eliminate all abortions, ban same-sex marriages, give billionaires lower taxes, and block people from getting health care are terribly unpopular. (That Republicans enjoy majority support on other issues like the economy mostly stems from the fact that Democratic-leaning voters are more willing to criticize their own side than Republicans are.) A party with such extreme opinions shouldn’t be able to win elections anywhere outside of rural areas in the Old Confederacy. This is why lying to the public about supposed Democratic extremism is the core component of all Republican messaging. Trump uses the phrase “radical left” in every speech he delivers, and the talking point is repeated hundreds of times a day at Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Real America’s voice, and the entire gigantic propaganda apparatus of right-wing media.

But Republicans don’t just lie about the opposition, they are also constantly being deceptive about their own views. Under the watchful eyes of leaders like Mitch McConnell, they have outsourced their most unpopular policy viewpoints to unelected judges who can do things that could never get passed through legislation—like stopping student loan forgiveness or banning the sale of completely safe abortion medication. And under the new Project 2025 agenda being constructed for Trump by Christian nationalist extremists like his former budget director Russ Vought, national-level Republicans will move the remains of their policy apparatus from the Congress and into the bureaucracy, where they intend to do things like using an obscure 150-year-old law commonly referred to as the Comstock Act to criminalize abortions through agency rulings. Freed from having to advocate or legislate on their most controversial viewpoints, congressional Republicans are able to focus their public messaging exclusively on the few issues like immigration or the economy where they currently have majority support. They spend the rest of their time attacking Democrats through spurious investigations, like their endless hearings on Hunter Biden. None of these efforts ever results in substantive legislation. Senate Republicans scuttled their own immigration enforcement bill, Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s years-long impeachment investigations have turned up nothing, and House Republicans voted more than 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without bothering to offer an alternative.

[...] Abortion is far from the only issue on which radical Republicans are far out of step with the majority of Americans, and it’s unfortunate that millions of people are having to be the personal object lesson about what the far right wants to do to the rest of us. But at long last, it appears that the public is waking up to the unpleasant reality that far-right Republicans don’t believe in democracy and will do anything they can to restrict and control others. Democrats must act with great urgency to ensure that this process continues and expands by building an infrastructure to protect democracy.

Matthew Sheffield wrote in Flux that the Republicans' extreme views are being camouflaged in public by pushing the laughable assertion that the Democrats are just as extreme… except that even the leftmost Dems are nowhere near as extreme as GOPers.

[newstfionline]

Sunday, November 3, 2024

Canada’s largest drug ‘superlab’ in history has been taken down, police say (Washington Post) Canadian federal officers have dismantled what they described to be the largest, most sophisticated drug lab in the country’s history, seizing a massive cache of weapons and drugs intended for both international and domestic distribution. The facility, described by police officers as a drug “superlab,” contained enough fentanyl and precursor chemicals to produce more than 95.5 million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl, an amount that “could have taken the lives of every Canadian, at least twice over,” Assistant Commissioner David Teboul with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement. About 54 kilograms of fentanyl and 390 kilograms of methamphetamine, in addition to “massive amounts of precursor chemicals” and smaller amounts of cocaine, MDMA and cannabis, were discovered at the facility in Falkland, a small rural community in British Columbia, the police statement said, adding that the lab was believed to be behind the production and distribution of “unprecedented quantities” of fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Falling Back (NYT) The transition to fall is scattered with seasonal markers: The occasional chill in the air; the urge to make soup. These changes so far have happened like clockwork, and next comes the one that actually involves clocks. On Sunday Nov. 3, people in the United States and Canada will “fall back” to standard time, setting their clocks back an hour and signaling the end of daylight saving time. (Hawaii and most of Arizona, which are on permanent standard time, keep their clocks the same.) For now, most of us will be making the switch. And while many scientists maintain that standard time is better aligned with human circadian biology, even a modest time adjustment can take some getting used to—particularly when it means shorter, darker days. The extra hour of afternoon darkness can be especially hard for people who are “vulnerable to feeling down in the autumn and winter—which is an awful lot of people,” said Norman E. Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine who coined the term “seasonal affective disorder.” “They may be low-energy, lethargic, prone to overeating and just out of sorts for a while.” Many people—if they’re not working the night shift or parenting a small child—will get an extra hour of sleep on the morning after the clocks change. And that’s “going to enable them to function better,” said Elizabeth B. Klerman, a professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

As data centers for AI strain the power grid, bills rise for everyday customers (Washington Post) Consumers in some regions of the country are facing higher electric bills due to a boom in tech companies building data centers that guzzle power and force expensive infrastructure upgrades. Companies such as Google and Amazon have ramped up construction of new data centers as they race to compete in artificial intelligence. The facilities’ extraordinary demand for electricity to power and cool computers inside can drive up the price local utilities pay for energy and require significant improvements to electric grid transmission systems. As a result, costs have already begun going up for customers—or are about to in the near future, according to utility planning documents and energy industry analysts. In the Mid-Atlantic, the regional power grid’s energy costs shot up dramatically, and data centers are cited as among root causes of rate increases of up to 20 percent expected in 2025.

Smuggling rings make billions from migrants (Washington Post) He called himself a simple onion farmer, a Mayan Indian with four kids and a fourth-grade education. U.S. prosecutors knew better. By his late 30s, Felipe Diego Alonzo had built a crime route stretching from Central America to Texas, allegedly paying off Mexican drug cartels along the way. He tooled around Guatemala’s western highlands in a loaded silver Ford Ranger pickup and had a show horse valued at $100,000. Alonzo’s business “was more profitable than drug trafficking,” said one of the Guatemalan officials who detained him. Alonzo was moving people. At least 80 percent of unlawful border-crossers hire smugglers. They guide people through treacherous jungles on the trek from Colombia to Panama. They whisk migrants over remote Guatemalan border crossings and up traffic-clogged Mexican highways. With revenue estimated at $4 billion to $12 billion a year, the smuggling of migrants has joined drugs and extortion as a top income stream for groups like Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, increasing their economic clout throughout the hemisphere.

Bolivia’s president accuses supporters of former leader Morales of seizing 3 military barracks (AP) Bolivian President Luis Arce on Friday condemned the seizure of three military units by supporters of former President Evo Morales, saying that “the taking of a military unit is a crime of treason against the homeland and an affront to the country’s Constitution.” Earlier on Friday the Bolivian Armed Forces said in a statement that “irregular armed groups” had kidnapped military personnel and took control of military units in the center of the country, where police officers began to clear the roads blocked 19 days ago by supporters of former President Evo Morales. The conflict broke out three weeks ago when Bolivian prosecutors launched an investigation into accusations that Morales fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl in 2016, classifying their relationship as statutory rape. Morales has refused to testify in court.

In Spanish Town Devastated by Flood, a Grim Search for Bodies (NYT) Plates with half-eaten dinners were still sitting on the white tablecloths in the nursing home’s dining hall on Thursday, amid muddy and overturned wheelchairs and walkers. Six people died in the facility on Tuesday, as a raging river exploded out of its banks and swept through villages and towns around the Spanish city of Valencia, on the country’s east-central coast. Among them was the town of Paiporta, where residents said the water came without warning. It had not even been raining on Tuesday night when the water from the river swept in suddenly. The floods killed at least 205 people in Spain, in the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s recent history, with almost all of those deaths, 202, in the Province of Valencia, the authorities said on Friday. More than 60 of the victims were killed in Paiporta, a working-class town on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia, according to the official, Vicent Ciscar, the town’s deputy mayor. Amidst the mud, the grim search for bodies goes on.

US is sending $425 million in military assistance to Ukraine (AP) The Pentagon announced Friday it was sending an additional $425 million in military assistance to Ukraine as Kyiv prepares to face Russian forces augmented by North Korean troops. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had said more aid was coming, and soon, during his visit to Kyiv last week. This aid package includes weapons that will be pulled from existing U.S. stockpiles, including air defense interceptors for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, munitions for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and 155 mm artillery, and armored vehicles and anti-tank weapons.

Japan plans automated cargo transport system to relieve shortage of drivers (AP) Japan is planning to build an automated cargo transport corridor between Tokyo and Osaka, dubbed a “conveyor belt road” by the government, to make up for a shortage of truck drivers. A computer graphics video made by the government shows big, wheeled boxes moving along a three-lane corridor, also called an “auto flow road,” in the middle of a big highway. A trial system is due to start test runs in 2027 or early 2028, aiming for full operations by the mid-2030s. The plan may sound like a solution that would only work in relatively low-crime, densely populated societies like Japan, not sprawling nations like the U.S. But similar ideas are being considered in Switzerland and Great Britain. The plan in Switzerland involves an underground pathway, while the one being planned in London will be a fully automated system running on low-cost linear motors. In Japan, loading will be automated, using forklifts, and coordinated with airports, railways and ports.

Israel’s path of destruction in southern Lebanon raises fears of an attempt to create a buffer zone (AP) Perched on a hilltop a short walk from the Israeli border, the tiny southern Lebanese village of Ramyah has almost been wiped off the map. In a neighboring village, satellite photos show a similar scene: a hill once covered with houses, now reduced to a gray smear of rubble. Israeli warplanes and ground forces have blasted a trail of destruction through southern Lebanon the past month. The aim, Israel says, is to debilitate the Hezbollah militant group, push it away from the border and end more than a year of Hezbollah fire into northern Israel. Even United Nations peacekeepers and Lebanese troops in the south have come under fire from Israeli forces, raising questions over whether they can remain in place. More than 1 million people have fled bombardment, emptying much of the south. Some experts say Israel may be aiming to create a depopulated buffer zone, a strategy it has already deployed along its border with Gaza. Some conditions for such a zone appear already in place, according to an Associated Press analysis of satellite imagery and data collected by mapping experts that show the breadth of destruction across 11 villages next to the border.

North Gaza 'apocalyptic,' everyone at 'imminent risk' of death, warns UN (Reuters) The situation in the northern Gaza Strip is "apocalyptic" as Israel pursues a military offensive against Hamas militants in the area, top United Nations officials warned on Friday. "The entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence," they said in a statement signed by the acting U.N. aid chief Joyce Msuya, heads of U.N. agencies, including U.N. children's agency UNICEF and the World Food Programme, and other aid groups. Israel began a wide military push in northern Gaza last month. The United States has said it was watching to ensure that its ally's actions on the ground show it does not have a "policy of starvation" in the north. "Humanitarian aid cannot keep up with the scale of the needs due to the access constraints. Basic, life-saving goods are not available. Humanitarians are not safe to do their work and are blocked by Israeli forces and by insecurity from reaching people in need," they said.

Almost two dozen countries at high risk of acute hunger, UN report reveals (Guardian) According to a joint report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program, 22 countries across the globe are expected to experience heightened levels of acute food insecurity over the next six months. Five of those countries—Sudan, South Sudan, Mali, Palestine, and Haiti—are expected to face famine or the risk of famine between now and May 2025. Situations are likely to degrade even further in some areas experiencing food insecurity as a La Niña weather pattern is projected to sweep the globe this winter. With unusually high levels of rainfall (and the accompanying risk of flooding) expected for some regions, “many countries experiencing humanitarian crises risk being further affected by La Niña, which could exacerbate food insecurity, increase human suffering and result in further economic losses,” added the representative.

[mantislyblaca]

The abandoned Warner & Swasey Observatory, constructed by Worchester Warner and Ambrose Swasey as a gift for Case School of Applied Science.

Worchester Warner and Ambrose Swasey founded the Warner & Swasey Company in 1880 and manufactured telescopes and other precision tools. Warner and Swasey became trustees of the Case School of Applied Science and constructed an observatory for the school as a gift.

Designed by the architectural firm Walker & Weeks, the observatory was built between 1918 and 1920 at the cost of $87,000. The original wing on the south end consisted of a copper dome atop a cylindrical brick tower for a 9½-inch refractor, which was relocated from the backyard of Warner and Swasey’s mansions. The new facility also included two four-inch transits, a zenith telescope, and two Riefler clocks.

The new observatory was dedicated at 2:30 p.m. on October 12, 1920. Dr. W.W. Campbell, one of the most noted astronomers of the world and director of the Lick Observatory, gave the opening address.

In October 1940, a new wing to the observatory was completed, which was outfitted with a library, lecture hall, and a new 24-inch Burrell Schmidt telescope from Warner & Swasey that was installed in the spring of 1941 at the cost of $127,000.

Light pollution began to impact the dark skies that initially attracted Warner and Swasey A new $200,000 observatory, Nassau Astronomical Station, was completed 30 miles to the east in Geauga County on September 7, 1957. The Burrell Schmidt telescope was relocated to the new facility. To compensate for the relocation, a 36-inch telescope was installed.

An enlargement of the library and office space were completed in 1963.

In 1978, the Astronomy Department at Case Western Reserve University made a deal with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy to build a new observatory at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The Burrell Schmidt telescope was moved from the Geauga County observatory was relocated in May 1979, and the 36-inch reflector from the facility was moved to Nassau in 1980.

Public night lectures, which were open to the public, were relocated to the Museum of Natural History’s Murch Auditorium in 1979.

After the reflector was removed from the facility, the building was used for offices for Case Western. In 1982, the five remaining faculty members who were stationed in the building were moved to the main campus of Case Western. The structure was sold in 1983 to a partnership controlled by Alfred Quarles for the television outfit, TBA, Inc. for $130,000.

The abandoned observatory was sold at a foreclosure auction on September 6, 2005, to Nayyir Al Mahdi and his girlfriend, Stacey Stoutemire, for $115,000. The couple had planned on restoring the building into a residence. The plans were scrapped after the owner was convicted of mortgage fraud and sent to prison in 2007.

School Of Science Still Stands Today In 2024

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[hospitalterrorizer]

diary290

7/5-6/24

friday - saturday

it is done!!!!!!!!!!!

i will probably do a proper post for it tomorrow, some time, like in the noon (not that it will get any people to listen really)

but here's the linxx!

and then here's the cover art!

#so funny (if you want to see what's going on, you should probably open it up in a separate tab and look at it zoomed in to see all the junk going on)

i'm glad i did the watermarks on the pics at the bottom there, it makes it kind of look uncomfortable, or like seedy i suppose, which helps a lot w/ what the cover is aiming for.

i think basically it's as good as i could have gotten it, the cover. i do like it, i feel like maybe i could do it better, if i planned it out more, maybe it looks like a mess to anyone else, it's kind of one intentionally but i mean, maybe in a bad way it's one too.

also, on bandcamp i wrote a big-ish thing about the album as it was made, here it is:

likely in progress since october of 2022, certainly in progress since november of 2022, finally complete in july 2024. these are songs about nothing especially. this album has seen: two apartments, one move, two jobs, a cockroach infestation, a mass shooting at the neighboring school of our last apartment, my girlfriend surviving the shooting because she was in a different building and he wanted to kill teachers because he did not get a job, the most traveling i've done in my life, myriad illnesses, various canker sores, working out through being sick, not recovering sooner because i had to work out because it would upset me to not complete the ritual as i normally do, the worst sore throat of my life, an ear infection, the starting of a public diary, the maintenance of a public diary, ants on the windowsill, ants in the flour, long standing friendships growing longer, shedding of irritability, regrowth of the irritability, self disgust of varying levels and varying causes, scrubbing the floor naked, bruising my knees at the melt banana show and bruising my knees doing kneeling squats and bruising my knees doing other things, the uneasy orbit of a sleep schedule (an asteroid almost, in capture, then, crashing), several remasterings, 2 computers, an apartment that's a single room, an apartment of multiple rooms cheaply constructed, inflation, grocery store packages changing graphic design, rotten fruit, eaten fruit, my girlfriend's mother loving then hating then loving us, rabbits in grass, rabbits on concrete, bird corpses and living birds and horses in a field for the rodeo and the bulls kept across from them moaning of a captivity under moonlight, the construction and completion of the las vegas sphere (orb of prosperity), numerous nightmares about being murdered, denver colorado, kyoto, tokyo, takeshita-dori street, all the green, a place where sad old gay men convened and sang karaoke remembering their youth in old mecha anime theme songs, a fashion magazine photographer speaking in english to me (stumbling in a beautiful way) "i hope to see you again one day", arizona and the asu campus, a strange fall fair where a woman told me to hold two pumpkins to my chest so it'd be like i had breasts (she seemed supportive), the strange trump-loving foodtruck that served elote that my gf liked, my most recent live performance with thomas since 2018, my girlfriend learning korean, completion of multiple books, falling in love with foucault as i did when i first read him in college, meeting people for the first time, meeting some for the second, sleeping on a bed in chicago, loving chicago, people staring at me in public, children staring at me, wondering if children hate me because at my root there is something wrong with me and everyone except me can tell, being published in various online journals, the coming first publication of my work in print, in a journal people hold in their hands of flesh, nothing special, everything special, stretches of relative silence, all the meaningless stuff, all the stuff i don't want to tell you because i like it too much. i already gave you too much, most likely. you will not have a sense of any of this as you listen to the record. i put it here, i don't know why. this album is 32 songs, 47-ish minutes long. you can click a button on a web site to listen to it, and you will hear it. 

credits

released July 5, 2024

Girlfriend - let me live, took me places, bought me food, let me cook, let me clean. m.b. ghul + clout jesus - voiceover/narration on track 1. please read his story here:

thomas / me and my kidney - let me use his microphone and audio interface to record extra vocals on panic! at the costco and au naturale. please listen to his music here:

georges bataille - wrote the sentence which i lifted for the album title (letter to kojeve where he begins talking about unemployed negativity) thomas hardy - wrote tess of the d'urbervilles which i quote on the final song. neighbors - let me scream and didn't ever complain or call the police. hospital terrorizer - i screamed and i wrote the songs and i made the cover and stuff.

but since i am on my blog i guess i can get into more detail about the record, and i also feel like anyone who reads this / has been reading this, you have actually seen what it's been like, the hostility of the little bit of writing i did for the album isn't really pointed back here, it's not necessarily a pose it's just like, i dunno, as a thing to make, there's so much time and effort, and most of that's invisible, that's not being said in a self pitying way, it's more about how that's the case for so much music, which makes it interesting, i think.

anyway, there's one song here called 'i didn't think before i started a diary' which isn't really about this diary, i wrote that song prior to even starting this, it's about something weird you can see w/ people who do have diaries on the internet, where some people like, years after they're done being updated, things like that, or even just posts / miniature diaristic stuff, of archiving all that, when really this is more about the practice/act than an archive to reach into history with. it was also inspired by a piece of poetry by a friend though i don't know if i could even find it. it's written from the perspective of someone wanting to archive a person, and i kept thinking about that from the other side. that's really the only song i have so much to say on i think, because the others are either a little more personal or a little more obvious, there's lots of political things, the song hell baby works off of a reference to hideshi hino's hell baby, the manga where a deformed baby is thrown into a dump and she is revived by flaming ghosts and wanders back to her family and then is shunned once again. it's really tragic.

anyway i know i said i'd have more pictures from yesterday to post but i've been busy all day with trying to get everything like ready enough, some songs feel a little odd still but that just seems like how they are, it's only 2 that feel a little odd and idk, if i really hate them eventually i will just remaster them and release them together or something but they sound good to me, i think i'm caught off guard by them because there's a newness about them, because i worked on one up to the last bit here, and another was the product of an error related to a crash where the .wav came out normal but the mp3 came out strange sounding i think, so i had to go back and re export. either way both sound good/cool just unexpected to me, and i am someone who had expectations that were precise about those songs, specific things about what frequencies were blasting when and how stuff sat, and then that's just new now.

tomorrow i have to make like... 3 posts inside the internet world, to make people maybe look at my album, and then it will be entirely/totally out of my hands, it will truly be over then, that's like the advertising period i get, lol, one day.

anyway i am super super tired right now, so i will sleep,

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[scar1ett-eyes]

About me!

(More after the cut!)

Hello!(´▽`*)

My name is Jules, I go by any pronouns, and I am Pansexual.

I love to write, just sometimes lack the creativity to come up with a decent plot. I would like to start accepting requests if I get at all big on here!

I've written about yuri satosugu demon/angel au for school. A dorlene siren au for the Mauraders fandom, co-written with my irl friend Veda! (@hugs4prongs) And tons of WIPS that I may or may not post on my Ao3! (Juleszybear)

I am a multishipper, honestly the only things I don't ship is incest and minor/adult ships!

I'm trying to get into art! I might post some of my art on here, I'm super open to constructive criticism. I really want to get better, and will take any tips you give me.<3

Main Fandoms/Intrests; Hunter x Hunter, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, School Bus Graveyard, Demon Slayer, Project Sekai, Blue Eye Samurai, Attack on Titan (I will edit this list as I watch/complete shows)

Smaller Fandoms/Intrests; Umbrella Academy, Arcane The Hunger Games, Yandere Simulator, Life is Strange, Migi&Dali, Danganronpa, Love Death Robots, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Spy X Family.

Random facts!

Feel free to stop reading(／。＼)

♡My favorite colors are dark red, dark blue, and dark purple. Mainly red though.

♡ I'm bigggg on music, just like every teen loll.

My favorite bands/artists are Artic Monkeys, Tyler the Creator, Tv girl, System of a Down, Eminem, Crystal Castles, Pastel Ghost, Lil Peep, Mac DeMarco, My Chemical Romance, Deftones, Nirvana, Pierce the Veil, Evanescence, Falling in Reverse, Bôa, Insane Clown Posse, Queen and just the genre of Vocaloid?

I swear I actually listen to their music

(ノдヽ)

Some of my favorite songs atm are Love Ka? by HiiragiKirai, Imma Kill U by Insane Clown Posse, Twilight by Bôa, The Adults are Talking by The Strokes, Moonlight on the River by Mac DeMarco, Brand New Dance by Eminem, Crying Lighting by Arctic Monkeys, and Messages from the Stars by The Rah Band.

♡ I lovelovelove! nature and just about everything it has to offer!^^ Except for insects. I plan to visit anywhere and everywhere when I'm old enough.

♡ I play fortnite, minecraft, project sekai, and crk a ton, and am trying to get into other games like val, ow, cod, ect.

I'm more of a realistic game type of person, whereas some people like more indie games.

Some of my favorites are Life is Strange and Detroit Become Human.

I do like indie games aswell.

♡ My favorite drinks are applejuice, watermelon arizona, rootbeer, and white milk (゜゜;)

♡ I probably wont make the first move, but I would love to make friends/muturals on here!

That's all, Goodbye!(⌒∇⌒)ノ"

[jakerandall]

❝ NOTHING BUT THE OPEN ROAD AND THE NEVER ENDING WHY ❞

STATS:

Name: Jacob Randall

Age: 40

Face Claim: Chris Evans

Occupation: Former crime journalist & novelist

Neighborhood: Wrightsville Beach

Gender & Preferred Pronouns: Cis male & he/him

BIOGRAPHY:

trigger warnings: heart condition, death

Born and raised in Wilmington, Jacob Randall is the oldest of four children created by a construction worker turned developer and a dental assistant. They were a large family yet a genuinely happy and well-balanced family. His biggest obsession as a child was basketball. Anywhere and anytime he could play, Jacob had a ball in his hands and dreamed of one day being in the NBA. If at all possible he wouldn’t miss a game on television, and often got in trouble for dribbling and tossing that ball around the house. He played for the YMCA, youth leagues, and his schools. Which eventually earned him a scholarship to the University of Arizona.

Aside from basketball, the biggest dream he had was to be a writer. It was something he shared with his grandfather, his love for books and reading. They’d talk about all the books they read, sometimes even read the same so they could compare notes, and his grandfather had once told Jacob that he wished he had gotten into the publishing business. It inspired Jacob once in university, he studied english and creative writing, played basketball and picked up beach volleyball, and somewhere along the way he ended up taking a bit of a detour. In needing to fulfill credits and requirements, Jacob took a journalism class and his writing got him noticed. He ended up really loving the writing style and found that he had natural instincts as an investigator.

Once he graduated Jacob had a few daily newspapers seeking him out but he chose the The Charlotte Observer to return home and began working the crime desk. It turned into a bit of an obsession for Jacob. The job, he worked non-stop, covering the biggest crime stories in the state, and while he built up a reputation and eventually won himself a Pulitzer Prize it all came at the sacrifice of his family and friendships. Every single relationship he tried had failed due to him not being present enough. Jacob always put the work and writing first, he believed he was doing important work and was going to make a difference, and had always been very proud, but it eventually took too big of a toll.

When his mother was diagnosed with a heart condition, Jacob wrongly assumed he had more time than he did and not only missed out on most of her suffering and being there to be a support for her, he hadn’t been there when she passed away. Instead, Jacob had been off investigating a story. The story turned out to be one of the biggest of his career, and maybe also the most dangerous. One that challenged him as a human being; his values, what he stood for, who has the right of justice.

A woman had reached out to him, telling him about something that had been happening on cruise ships. It was something she had done her own little investigation into because her friend went missing at sea. Digging into it he found that there was a history to this, something that has never really been made hugely public and garnered enough press attention. So Jacob went on the investigative hunt trying to find out what happened with this missing woman and found out there was one before her and almost a year to the date. In the end, he uncovered the truth and found the person responsible, but committed his own crime in the process. Something Jacob now has to live with himself over.

After that and the passing of his mother, he kept the promise he had made to himself and quit investigative journalism. He’d always intended and had meant to be a novelist. Since then he’s written five New York Time’s Best Sellers. Using some of his experiences as a crime reporter for inspiration.

[spacefinch]

Finch's Rambles, MSB edition

A few months ago, one of my mutuals suggested that Walkerville Magic School Bus is not located in any one place, but changes location periodically. Rather like Howl's Moving Castle. That being said, here is where I think Howl's Moving City happened to be for each MSB episode.

(If it's marked as n/a, there either wasn't enough information to decide where the city was at the time or it wasn't important.)

Gets Lost in Space: n/a

For Lunch: n/a

Inside Ralphie: n/a

Gets Eaten: California

Hops Home: Eastern US

Meets the Rot Squad: Southeastern US

All Dried Up: California (at the school); Arizona (in the desert)

In the Haunted House: n/a

Gets Ready, Set, Dough: n/a

Plays Ball: n/a

Goes to Seed: Minnesota

Gets Ants in its Pants: Oregon

Kicks Up a Storm: California

Blows Its Top: California

Flexes Its Muscles: n/a

The Busasaurus: Montana or Wyoming

Going Batty: Eastern or Midwestern US

Butterfly and the Bog Beast: Louisiana

Wet All Over: Midwest

In a Pickle: n/a

Revving Up: Colorado or Idaho

Taking Flight: n/a

Getting Energized: California (specifically, the Sierra Nevadas)

Out of this World: Great Plains (in D.A.'s dream, the asteroid is headed straight for the middle of the US.)

Cold Feet: Florida

Ups and Downs: Minnesota

In a Beehive: New England

In the Arctic: NORTHERN Minnesota

Spins a Web: Southeastern US (Florida, Louisiana, eastern Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, or North Carolina). While orb spiders and trapdoor spiders can be found all over the US, Deinopis spiders are only found in the aforementioned states in the US part of their range.

Under Construction: n/a

Gets a Bright Idea: n/a

Shows and Tells: n/a (but New England would be a good bet.)

Makes a Rainbow: n/a

Goes Upstream: Oregon or Washington State, assuming the salmon are Pacific salmon. If they're Atlantic salmon, then this episode takes place off the New England coast.

Works Out: n/a

Gets Planted: n/a

In the Rainforest: n/a

Rocks and Rolls: Colorado

Holiday Special: Northern Minnesota or New England

Meets Molly Cule: n/a

Cracks a Yolk: Definitely not Rhode Island.

Goes to Mussel Beach: Southern California

Goes on Air: Eastern US (based on the presence of the blue jay that pokes its head into the pickle jar)

Gets Swamped: either Minnesota or the Northeast.

Goes Cellular: n/a

Sees Stars: n/a

Gains Weight: n/a

Gets Charged: n/a

Gets Programmed: n/a

In the City: Eastern US

Takes a Dive: n/a

[seydaseven]

❝ NOTHING BUT THE OPEN ROAD AND THE NEVER ENDING WHY ❞

STATS:

Name: Jacob Randall

Age: 40

Face Claim: Chris Evans

Occupation: Former crime journalist & novelist

Neighborhood: Wrightsville Beach

Gender & Preferred Pronouns: Cis male & he/him

BIOGRAPHY:

trigger warnings: heart condition, death

Born and raised in Wilmington, Jacob Randall is the oldest of four children created by a construction worker turned developer and a dental assistant. They were a large family yet a genuinely happy and well-balanced family. His biggest obsession as a child was basketball. Anywhere and anytime he could play, Jacob had a ball in his hands and dreamed of one day being in the NBA. If at all possible he wouldn’t miss a game on television, and often got in trouble for dribbling and tossing that ball around the house. He played for the YMCA, youth leagues, and his schools. Which eventually earned him a scholarship to the University of Arizona.

Aside from basketball, the biggest dream he had was to be a writer. It was something he shared with his grandfather, his love for books and reading. They’d talk about all the books they read, sometimes even read the same so they could compare notes, and his grandfather had once told Jacob that he wished he had gotten into the publishing business. It inspired Jacob once in university, he studied english and creative writing, played basketball and picked up beach volleyball, and somewhere along the way he ended up taking a bit of a detour. In needing to fulfill credits and requirements, Jacob took a journalism class and his writing got him noticed. He ended up really loving the writing style and found that he had natural instincts as an investigator.

Once he graduated Jacob had a few daily newspapers seeking him out but he chose the The Charlotte Observer to return home and began working the crime desk. It turned into a bit of an obsession for Jacob. The job, he worked non-stop, covering the biggest crime stories in the state, and while he built up a reputation and eventually won himself a Pulitzer Prize it all came at the sacrifice of his family and friendships. Every single relationship he tried had failed due to him not being present enough. Jacob always put the work and writing first, he believed he was doing important work and was going to make a difference, and had always been very proud, but it eventually took too big of a toll.

When his mother was diagnosed with a heart condition, Jacob wrongly assumed he had more time than he did and not only missed out on most of her suffering and being there to be a support for her, he hadn’t been there when she passed away. Instead, Jacob had been off investigating a story. The story turned out to be one of the biggest of his career, and maybe also the most dangerous. One that challenged him as a human being; his values, what he stood for, who has the right of justice.

A woman had reached out to him, telling him about something that had been happening on cruise ships. It was something she had done her own little investigation into because her friend went missing at sea. Digging into it he found that there was a history to this, something that has never really been made hugely public and garnered enough press attention. So Jacob went on the investigative hunt trying to find out what happened with this missing woman and found out there was one before her and almost a year to the date. In the end, he uncovered the truth and found the person responsible, but committed his own crime in the process. Something Jacob now has to live with himself over.

After that and the passing of his mother, he kept the promise he had made to himself and quit investigative journalism. He’d always intended and had meant to be a novelist. Since then he’s written five New York Time’s Best Sellers. Using some of his experiences as a crime reporter for inspiration.

[baddieladdie]

Let's judge the Fallout series collector boxes together ( •̀ω •́ )

FIRST UP! Fallout x Bones Coffee Company

Time for a ROAST hehehe

First impression: she's giving pre-school construction realness.

WHAT ARE THOOOOOOSE?! Look at hose fuggly metal shits. For $60, they might as well make it with real metal clasps.

AND WHAT HAPPENED HERE?!

The box interior is alright, but it feels more akin to artwork or fan art. That this collection box is more faithful to the series itself rather than to the universe the Fallout show is set in.

The skeleton standing in the iconic Vault entrance is pretty neat looking. But the coffee bag 'Pip-Boy item' isn't doing it for me. I think it's the highly detailed logo on the coffee bag that throws me off.

From a consumer/collector perspective: This product was sold out in under 3 hours, per the Bones Coffee website. I saw the tweet yesterday announcing this release. However, the product was already sold out by the time I received the email from Bones Coffee.

Next up! AriZona x Fallout

The variety pack sold by AriZona iced tea feels like it could be found in universe. If the box was dirted up a bit, it would fit right into the games. Essentially, I think AriZona did their research when creating a collector's box that fit in-universe themes.

Additional note for AriZona: They have made some super cute in-universe ads for these drinks! You can tell a fuck was given.

From a consumer/collector perspective: AriZona's twitter does a pretty good job of communicating updates to their exclusive Fallout collaboration. The AriZona x Fallout variety pack pictured above is currently available on Amazon for 36 USD.

Last one! Jones' Nuka Cola

I got more invested in the Fallout Universe after graduating from college. Because of this, I absolutely missed out the NukaCola Quantum release in 2016 (related to the Fallout 4 game release)

I am so excited to try what 'Victory' tastes like. That is certainly a more abstract flavor to cultivate. The packaging itself looks very nice as well. Notably, the bottles are labeled nice. AriZona may have had a fancy box but their cans still have some focus on the brand. The labels here are centered on the Fallout Universe first and the brand second.

For the exclusive marketing imagery: Jones got the label RIGHT! I love how they added that staticky-old screen effect to their logo. It makes it blend right into the art.

Also worth mentioning, unlike Bones Coffee and AriZona, Jones has a whole website dedicated to their Fallout series related product (linked below). What interested me the most on their site was the comment on 'Caps 4 Gear'. I didn't see anything Fallout related yet, but that could be something exciting to look for in the future!

From a consumer/collector perspective: The price did feel a little steep, despite considering the need for amble gentle packaging. A single 4-pack is currently being sold on the Jones website for 25 USD. It'll take some time between placing the order and receiving the product. But if you are interested, there are still pre-orders available :)

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Dropping Sunrises in a Jar by Melinda Thomsen

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee:

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/dropping-sunrises-in-a-jar-by-melinda-thomsen/

Each poem in Dropping Sunrises in a Jar began as a way to understand why #birds appear so happy at sunrise. Written from notes spanning over twenty years, Dropping Sunrises in a Jar glimpses nature’s inner workings of joy. In free verse and form poems, sunrises from across the globe are depicted in a variety of awakening colors and sounds. #Poems recount the morning opera from locations like a sleeping car on a train going to Beijing to construction crane noise in Prague, the cooing of doves in North Carolina, and canyon towhees in Arizona. By organizing the poems into three sections: I’ll tell you how the Sun rose, A Ribbon at a time, and The Steeples swam in Amethyst, the readers ultimately find themselves gently released back into their world with signs of hope. #nature #poems #birds #chapbook #FLP

Melinda Thomsen’s Armature from Hermit Feathers Press (2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye award and an honorable mention in the 2019 Lena Shull Poetry Contest from NC Poetry Society. Her books Field Rations (2011) and Naming Rights (2007) are also from Finishing Line Press, and her latest poems can be found in Salamander Magazine, Artemis Journal, THEMA, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Miscellany, The New York Quarterly, and Poetry Quarterly, among others. A 2023 Randall Jarrell Poetry Contest Honorable Mention, 2019 Pushcart Nominee from The Comstock Review, and a Semi-Finalist in the 2004 “Discovery” / The Nation poetry contest, she’s an advisory editor for Tar River Poetry and current Vice President of Programming for the North Carolina Poetry Society. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she received her MA in English from The City College, CUNY, and MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the Writing Center Coordinator for the John Paul II Catholic School and lives in North Carolina with her husband Hunt, two cats, and one chicken.

PRAISE FOR Dropping Sunrises in a Jar by Melinda Thomsen

I love that poet-philosopher Melinda Thomsen has turned her wise but uncynical eye and voice towards the tragedy of climate change. Thomsen writes, “I wake to the sky’s daily burning/in these—my sunset—years to collect sunrises…like candles gathered from my forgiving earth… But this burning keeps flushing out the birds…” Thomsen writes extensively of birds, those things with feathers, to give us what I love best in eco poetry, hope-punk. But, sad and knowing as her poems often are, Thomsen can’t help but bring her child-like wonder to the world, and for that I am grateful.

–ELIZABETH J. COLEMAN, editor of Here: Poems for the Planet, Copper Canyon Press, 2019

In Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Thomsen skillfully highlights and juxtaposes the cyclical nature and beauty of sunrises and the corresponding splendor and chaos of local fauna, flora, as well as man made technologies. From mynas in Maui, bridges in New York City, construction in Prague, to warblers in Maine, Thomsen’s celebration of origins and beginnings cleverly serves as an homage to rebirth, routine, and hope.

–JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ, author of The Fire Eater, Bad Mexican, Bad American, and The Parachutist

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems