#February 23 Election

[magz]

Lets Talk Palestine (Instagram channel)

February 24, 2024

• 92 Palestinians killed, 121 injured in Gaza in past 24 hours

• Mass anti-government protests across Tel Aviv as Israeli’s have grown impatient to lack of a hostage deal and are calling for an election to see Netanyahu leave, showing mounting disdain for the government. Police have arrested 21 people and reports show the use of water cannons to disperse protestors

• Israeli air raid hits home housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, killing 7 incl. 1 child

• Gaza ceasefire talks in Paris seems to be the most serious push in weeks; Israel’s war cabinet will convene to vote on the proposed outline & framework, indicating that something “tangible” was produced, especially as Israeli negotiators will be sent to to Qatar to continue talks. This doesn’t mean a ceasefire is close or that Israel has halted its plan to invade Rafah — these talks are unpredictable & subject to change

• Armed Israeli settlers assault 2 Palestinians at a make-shift checkpoint in Hebron (West Bank)

-

February 25, 2024

• 86 Palestinians killed, 142 injured in Gaza in past 24 hours

• Palestinians in northern Gaza are being starved as they’ve been cut off from aid as Israel’s relentless bombardment has prevented aid transport from southern Gaza; UNRWA hasn’t delivered any aid since Jan 23. Kamal Adwan Hospital (north) reports increased malnutrition: 1 in 6 kids are “severely malnourished” + hospitals struggling due to lack of fuel, medicine & ambulances

👆 Almost all aid in Gaza goes through Rafah crossing (Egypt) in the south but in recent weeks it has been almost totally halted, dropping from 200 trucks/day to 57, some days less than 20. 2,000+ trucks with enough to feed the entire population have piled up outside the crossing, prevented from entering by Israel. Meanwhile, Israelis have been protesting for weeks at Karem Abu Salem crossing, blocking aid trucks

• Netanyahu affirms Rafah ground invasion, saying a hostage deal would only somewhat delay the invasion

[triviallytrue]

Were there Russian Chaos Agents on tumblr in 2016?

First things first:

Things I got wrong in earlier posts on this:

@ms-disinformation didn't identify these accounts ahead of time, this blog started posting in 2019 and is focused on accounts that are likely to be bot-run

Relatedly, the accounts accused of being Russian state actors were accused of being trolls, not bots - they were almost undoubtedly human-run

Tumblr didn't announce the mass ban of these accounts until several months after they did it - they banned the accounts in fall of 2017 and announced them in March 2018.

What actually happened?

The Internet Research Agency is a Russian company accused of creating fake social media accounts to attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. On March 23, 2018, tumblr posted a list of accounts they claimed were linked to the IRA that they had terminated the previous fall. On November 16, 2018, they posted a second list of accounts given to them by law enforcement of other IRA-related accounts (unrelated to any election interference) that were also terminated.

How did tumblr identify these accounts?

tumblr has been extremely vague about the methodology used to find these accounts, but we do have another source: the Buzzfeed News journalist who wrote about the termination of these accounts back on February 6, 2018 (over a month before tumblr's post) identified them by cross-referencing tumblr accounts with twitter's list of IRA-affiliated accounts, finding similar or identical usernames and profile pictures.

Unfortunately, this only kicks the can further down the road - how did twitter identify these accounts? These sites don't want to reveal their methods, but this study offers some insights into the behavior of these accounts and possible tools used to identify them.

Why should we believe tumblr's narrative?

There are a lot of reasons I'm convinced that tumblr is being honest with us about this, the simplest of which is that they don't have a good reason to lie about this. tumblr nukes accounts all the time without disclosing its reasons - if they wanted to get rid of an arbitrary list of accounts they dislike, they could do that and none of us would know. They deleted these accounts months before posting any explanation at all, and the only backlash they received was in articles like the Buzzfeed News article above slamming them for not talking about the Russian troll problem, instead of accusing them of terminating activists.

It's also not like this is some tactic that tumblr has employed frequently - the list of IRA-affiliated accounts has been untouched since 2018. This was a once-off, not part of any organized strategy to suppress certain types of posters.

Moreover, tumblr users with similar post content were left untouched, including many that reblogged heavily from the IRA accounts - the Buzzfeed News article identifies one such blog (alwaysbewoke) who posted more or less the same type of antiracist, pro-Sanders activism (albeit without the eventual support for Trump) who wasn't deactivated.

It's also worth noting that the IRA is a real company and not a US boogeyman (even if some subsection of liberals use the phrase "Russian bot" as such) - recently, the leader of the Wagner group came forward and confirmed that he founded it and still finances and runs it, and he's relatively direct about the fact that it was used to interfere in US elections:

“Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere,” Prigozhin said in November, one day before the US midterm elections.

Finally, and most convincingly in my opinion, no one behind any of the over a hundred accounts on the tumblr IRA list or the thousands on the twitter one have come forward in the past six years to claim that they were wrongfully associated with the IRA and banned as a result.

Isn't that fascinating? Can you imagine what a story it would be, if social media sites were not only terminating activists but lying about why they were doing it? Do you think that not a single one of these hundreds of alleged activists thought of calling a sympathetic journalist, showing them their US driver's license, and asking them to a run a story? What about messaging their old mutuals, or making a new account, or finding a federated platform that won't delete them on sight? I can't find a shred of evidence that any of this ever happened, and that's pretty telling.

The funny part is, there's no real evidence that these accounts ever achieved anything, and indeed, reasons to doubt that they did. They operated in preexisting echo chambers and circulated mostly true stories with a specific slant to them, with the occasional dash of outright lies. Certainly, it's hard to argue that they were less reliable or more biased than your average Fox News article. But arguing that they weren't Russian propaganda seems pretty difficult.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I am discussing anime academia today, I was reading another paper that was equally frustrating, along a different axis:

“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

This as a premise is a good concept; someone mining the 90's Usenet anime communities for how the fandom saw female fans back then (the article title is quoting one such thread). So of course, the opening line of this article about the anime fandom in the 90's is....sigh....a reference to Donald Trump:

Commenting on the 2016 American presidential elections, multiple news reporters noted that a relationship could be found between Donald Trump supporters and online anime fans

It of course goes on to discuss Gamergate, 8chan, online right-wing radicalization, references to the "Fascist" themes of Attack on Titan, and on and on. The obvious problem with this is that it is irrelevant; the "methodology" section involves this aside about how they pulled this data from Google Archives but Google is an advertising firm and not a replacement for a real archive and we need to Fight The System and buddy my dude that is not germane to your sample size!!! But more importantly, it is backwards. I don't need to explain the argument here in detail; the article is positing a throughline from 90's anime discourse to modern right-wing internet politics through a sort of 'lock-in' effect of built culture norms around misogyny. Which is fine, you can make that argument - but why is all this future stuff in the first section? You haven't really presented the argument yet! This isn't a book, its not the intro chapter - literally 30% of the text of this article is stating a conclusion upfront, justified not through the text itself but citations to other articles about its truth.

This is something media studies pulled from traditional science - traditional science states "established facts" up front that the paper is building on. But that is because - a thousand caveats aside - in chemistry those facts are....facts. They may be wrong facts, but they can, ostensibly, be objective descriptors. This paper cites "anime is still synonymous with far-right ideologies of white and male supremacy, and events of anti-Blackness" like its citing the covalent bond count of carbon. That is not and never will be a fact one can cite, that is an argument; and its not one that is important for understanding this analysis of Usenet groups. This structure is pulled from other sciences, but it flourishes because it lets you pad the citation count of your peers. Its embarrassing how often you can skip the first 1/3rd of a paper in this field - really the worst possible thing to copy from economics (ding!)

This paper also does the insane thing of jumping between citations from 1992 and events in the 2010's like anime culture is continuous between those time periods. Its an extremely bold claim it just does in the background... but lets set that aside.

This hyper-politicization & hyper-theorizing leads to the second issue of extreme under-analysis. This is the actual value-add of this paper:

From this search, I was able to find the discussion threads “How many females read r.a.a.?” (135 messages; opened on July 13, 1993), “Question: Girls on r.a.a?” (23 messages; opened on February 25, 1994), “Female Otakus” (221 messages; opened on June 25, 1994), “Women watching anime” (72 messages; opened on October 4, 1994), and “Female fans - Do they exist?” (61 messages; opened on October 26, 1995). While these discussions may seem like they were spaces for marginalized users to discuss their experiences, they were often started and overwhelmingly occupied by identified male users. In total, I extracted 252 messages from 1992 to 1996 that were relevant to the gendering of anime fandom, and among those, I classified them as 7 kinds of negative networking discursive practices: (e.g. Table 1. Negative networking practices on rec.arts.anime).

252 messages, five threads - later on it will name other threads, so its more than this, but you get it. It has a bunch of data. And from that data, the article quotes...less than half a dozen examples. There are no quantitative metrics, no threads are presented or discussed in detail from this data set. Some other event is discussed in detail, but again it quotes essentially one person once. The provided "Table 1", the only Table, is a list of the author's categorizations of the data; the data itself is not present. Its file format is a CSV, presumably to mock me for clicking it.

There is, from top to bottom, a complete lack of engagement with the data in question. This would fail an intro anthropology seminar; the conclusion is simply presumed from 1% of the sample size while the rest of the messages are left on read. I just don't think there is any value in that, a handful of messages from 1996 divorced from their context and stapled onto modern politics as a wrap-up. What did the people on this Usenet value? How did they think of women collectively? As anime fans, as outsiders, as romantic partners, as friends? What subfactions existed? Questions like those would presumably be the point of this investigation, but they are treated as distractions.

And this article was, in anime academic circles, a pretty well-trumpeted one. I'm not cherry-picking a bad one here, it was the "hot paper" of the month when it came out. Its just that the standards can be so low, its a field that simply lacks rigor. Which doesn't stop a ton of great work from being done btw, that isn't my point at all. My point is that the great work is not selected for; it goes unrewarded, bogged down by academic standards divorced from discovering real insights.

(I do not think the question "why are they misogynist" ever crossed the author's mind. That should be your literal thesis, and its a ghost. Just ugh.)

[officiallordvetinari]

Below are 10 featured Wikipedia articles. Links and descriptions are below the cut.

The election in 1860 for the position of Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford was a competition between two candidates offering different approaches to Sanskrit scholarship. One was Monier Williams, an Oxford-educated Englishman who had spent 14 years teaching Sanskrit to those preparing to work in British India for the East India Company. The other, Max Müller, was a German-born lecturer at Oxford specialising in comparative philology, the science of language.

Adolfo Farsari (Italian pronunciation: [aˈdolfo farˈsaːri]; 11 February 1841 – 7 February 1898) was an Italian photographer based in Yokohama, Japan. His studio, the last notable foreign-owned studio in Japan, was one of the country's largest and most prolific commercial photographic firms. Largely due to Farsari's exacting technical standards and his entrepreneurial abilities, it had a significant influence on the development of photography in Japan.

Girl Pat was a small fishing trawler, based at the Lincolnshire port of Grimsby, that in 1936 was the subject of a media sensation when its captain took it on an unauthorised transatlantic voyage. The escapade ended in Georgetown, British Guiana, with the arrest of the captain, George "Dod" Orsborne, and his brother. The pair were later imprisoned for the theft of the vessel.

Abu Muhammad Hasan al-Kharrat (Arabic: حسن الخراط Ḥassan al-Kharrāṭ; 1861 – 25 December 1925) was one of the principal Syrian rebel commanders of the Great Syrian Revolt against the French Mandate. His main area of operations was in Damascus and its Ghouta countryside. He was killed in the struggle and is considered a hero by Syrians.

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (April 23, 1922 – July 24, 1995), who professionally used the mononym Cameron, was an American artist, poet, actress and occultist. A follower of Thelema, the new religious movement established by the English occultist Aleister Crowley, she was married to rocket pioneer and fellow Thelemite Jack Parsons.

Maya stelae (singular stela) are monuments that were fashioned by the Maya civilization of ancient Mesoamerica. They consist of tall, sculpted stone shafts and are often associated with low circular stones referred to as altars, although their actual function is uncertain. Many stelae were sculpted in low relief, although plain monuments are found throughout the Maya region. The sculpting of these monuments spread throughout the Maya area during the Classic Period (250–900 AD), and these pairings of sculpted stelae and circular altars are considered a hallmark of Classic Maya civilization.

The North Norfolk Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) is an area of European importance for wildlife in Norfolk, England. It comprises 7,700 ha (19,027 acres) of the county's north coast from just west of Holme-next-the-Sea to Kelling, and is additionally protected through Natura 2000, Special Protection Area (SPA) listings; it is also part of the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The North Norfolk Coast is also designated as a wetland of international importance on the Ramsar list and most of it is a Biosphere Reserve.

Preening is a maintenance behaviour found in birds that involves the use of the beak to position feathers, interlock feather barbules that have become separated, clean plumage, and keep ectoparasites in check. Feathers contribute significantly to a bird's insulation, waterproofing and aerodynamic flight, and so are vital to its survival. Because of this, birds spend considerable time each day maintaining their feathers, primarily through preening.

The Wells and Wellington affair was a dispute about the publication of three papers in the Australian Journal of Herpetology in 1983 and 1985. The periodical was established in 1981 as a peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on the study of amphibians and reptiles (herpetology). Its first two issues were published under the editorship of Richard W. Wells, a first-year biology student at Australia's University of New England. Wells then ceased communicating with the journal's editorial board for two years before suddenly publishing three papers without peer review in the journal in 1983 and 1985. Coauthored by himself and high school teacher Cliff Ross Wellington, the papers reorganized the taxonomy of all of Australia's and New Zealand's amphibians and reptiles and proposed over 700 changes to the binomial nomenclature of the region's herpetofauna.

Wulfhere or Wulfar (died 675) was King of Mercia from 658 until 675 AD. He was the first Christian king of all of Mercia, though it is not known when or how he converted from Anglo-Saxon paganism. His accession marked the end of Oswiu of Northumbria's overlordship of southern England, and Wulfhere extended his influence over much of that region.

[allgremlinart]

oh yeah since the primaries are coming up, here's a list of the Democratic candidates, to be researched or ignored at your discretion, and some other relevant info (since I personally hate. having to flitter around the internet to figure everything out.)

via: Ballotpedia

[ID: A screenshot of the Ballotpedia webpage on the Democratic presidential nomination, 2024. The text reads,

Democratic Candidates

Joe Biden (D), incumbent president of the United States, announced he would run for re-election on April 25, 2023.

Marianne Williamson (D), 2020 presidential candidate and author, announced her candidacy on February 23, 2023. She withdrew from the race on February 7, 2024, and re-entered the race on February 28.

Other Democratic candidates

Jason Palmer (D), a businessman, announced his candidacy on November 10, 2023.

Cenk Uygur (D), a media commentator and founder of The Young Turks, announced his candidacy on October 12th, 2023. At the At the time of the announcement, it was not clear that Uygur met the natural born citizen requirement in Article II, Section 1, of the United States Constitution.

Withdrawn Democratic candidates

Dean Phillips (D), a U.S. representative from Minnesota, announced his candidacy on October 26, 2023. He withdrew from the race on March 6, 2024. END ID]

The Democratic National Convention will take place in Chicago, Illinois, from August 19th-22nd, 2024. Here's a state-by-state rundown of who can vote in the presidential primaries. Here's a state-by-state schedule of when the 2024 Democratic and Republican primaries are being held.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eric Hananoki at MMFA:

While some Republicans have tried to distance their party from Laura Loomer, her show’s guest list indicates how closely linked the GOP is to the far-right extremist.  More than a dozen GOP nominees, elected officials, and Trump advisers have appeared on Loomer’s show, including Trump running mate JD Vance, senior Trump campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and Jason Miller, and members of Congress.  [...] Republicans have routinely supported Loomer by sponsoring her newsletter and appearing on her streaming show since it launched last year. Here is a list of those appearances:  

October 26, 2023: Jason Miller, Trump campaign senior adviser. 

November 3, 2023: Dave Williams, then-head of the Colorado Republican Party. 

November 7, 2023: Then-Rep. George Santos of New York. 

January 30, 2024: Sigal Chattah, national committeewoman for the Nevada Republican Party. 

October 17, 2023, February 13, 2024, July 23, 2024: Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump. 

February 13, 2024: Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. 

March 19, 2024: Rep. Cory Mills of Florida. 

March 21, 2024: Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

April 25, 2024, and June 4, 2024: Will Scharf, Trump attorney. 

April 30, 2024: Lynne Patton, Trump campaign senior adviser. 

May 21, 2024: Kari Lake, then-U.S. Senate candidate and now nominee in Arizona. 

May 23, 2024, and July 17, 2024: Corey Lewandowski, who helped with the Republican National Convention and then again joined the Trump campaign as a senior adviser in August. 

July 25, 2024: Bernie Moreno, U.S. Senate nominee in Ohio. 

Since the launch of Loomer Unleashed by Laura Loomer on Rumble last year, more than a dozen GOP electeds and Trump officials have appeared on her podcast.

[redjaybathood]

This is not my text but a translation of a text originally posted here.

Give the author on twitter a like, a reblog and a follow while you are at it.

"Today commemorates the death of Noman Çelebicihan, a leader of the Crimean Tatar people.

January 26, 1918, he was imprisoned as the result of the Red Terror, and a month later, on February 23, in Sevastopol (Aqyar) they shot him and threw his body into the sea. 

I will talk about why it is important to learn about him, below.

Noman Çelebicihan was the one who revived the tradition of Qurultay, a national democratic assembly.

It was under his leadership that the Crimean Tatar self-awareness began to flourish for the first time since the annexy of Crimean Khanate (1783).

During the February Revolution of year '17, demand for self-awareness in society is growing, and in April, Çelebicihan becomes a comimissioner of spiritual leadership and first democratically elected mufti of Crimea. This was when he also became the first Mufti of Muslims of Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. 

Meanwhile, the Muslim Executive Committe becames the main executive body of the government. 

In Summer 1917, Crimean national military units began to form, the so called Squadrones. Çelebicihan then calls for a formation of Muslim Armed Forces.

December 1917, Qurultay has declared Crimean Democratic Republic, founders of which were Çelebicihan and like-minded individuals. This was also when they adopted a democratic Constitution drafted by him, Cafer Seydamet and other peers. 

It talked about electoral right for everyone, any and all class ranks or titles were canceled, as were their priveleges, it asserted equal rights of women and men, established regulations on assembly of parlaiment. A regulation on election of national government - Directory - was also established. 

Çelebicihan, as well as Cafer Seydamet (who became a minister of foreign affairs and military minister), maintained connections to Central Council of Ukraine (Ukrainian Central Rada). In Spring 1917, by an invite of the Central Council, Crimea sent 10 people in a delegation to participate in the work of the Congress of Nations (Congress of the Enslaved Peoples of Russia) in Kyiv.

Apart of all that noted above, Çelebicihan lifted the obligation of Crimean Tatar women to wear a veil, which led to a wave of disconent from conservative part of populatoin. 

At the Congress, he declared and advocated for the equality of all nations that live in Crimea: "Our mission is to create a state like Switzerland. Nations of Crimea are a beautiful bouquet, and every nation needs equal rights and conditions, because we are to walk side by side."

It is thanks to Çelebicihan that a women's gymnasium (a school) and technical school were opened in Simferopol (Aqmescit), that a Pedagogic Institute based on Zıncırlı medrese was opened, and that there were established short-term advanced training courses for teachers. 

In addtion, he was a writer and a poet, one of his most known works is "A Prayer for Swallows", and his poem-pledge Ant Etkenmen is now a national anthem of all Crimean Tatars.

You can find the lyrics and a modern translation today in the Kitap Qalesi publication

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kitap Qalesi | Кримськотатарське видавництво (@kitap_qalesi)

Listen to it here:

Bolsheviks seizing power endangered the existence of Crimean People Republic. 

January 4, 1918, Çelebicihan took initiative to rsign from the positions of leadership.

Due to attempts to negotiate with Bolsheviks about the cessation of armed struggle in Crimea, on January 18, 1918, they took over the government in Simferopol (Aqmescit), arrested Çelebicihan and transported him to Sevastopol (Aqyar) in an airplane. February 23, 1918, he was shot in the city prison.

This is not the full list of what Çelebicihan has become famous for, in a fairly short time. He wrote poetry, published papers, organized an underground society for Crimean Tatar youth in İstanbul, there were also other changes that were introduced in the Republic."

A longer text is to come, and the author plans to publish it on her blog on Drukarnia. It already has an awesome post on where to learn Crimean Tatar language. And while it's in Ukrainian, most browsers, whether on mobile or PC, support auto translation. I translated this thread just because twitter makes it really tedious to read threads in other languages. So like. Subscribe and support the author!

[comeonamericawakeup]

The QAnon movement is fading away, said Molly Olmstead, but its "extreme right-wing conspiracy theories have gone mainstream." Even Republican elected officials now voice beliefs once considered fringe: The deep state is pulling the strings, elections are stolen by massive voter fraud, Democrats are replacing white Christians with brown immigrants, and violence and strongman leadership may be necessary to save America. A deranged Pennsylvania man recently voiced these views after killing and decapitating his father, whom he described as a federal employee taking part in "the government's treason." The killer, Justin Mohn, complained he was the victim of discrimination as a white man, and called on "patriots and militia members" to take the country back from "the communist, globalist takeover of America" by the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Sound familiar? These are all ideas espoused by Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.

Not surprisingly, right-wing media depicted Mohn as a nut in the grips of Anon, but he never once mentioned that deluded group, which is no longer very active. In the Trump era, unhinged conspiracy theories have become "standard Republican beliefs."

THE WEEK February 23, 2024

[theculturedmarxist]

Conor here: The following post goes into the ins and outs of the case ahead of the April 23 beginning of the case, the outcome of which seems to be a foregone conclusion and will be a major blow to labor.>New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber noted back in January when the Supremes agreed to hear the case that the very fact that they did so meant they would likely rule so that it’s harder to unionize. The reasoning behind that belief isn’t just the conservative majority on the court but also that the courtdeclined to hear a similar case in 2014 (back before the current conservative majority).

By Michael Z. Green, professor of law and the director of the Workplace Law Program at Texas A&M University. Originally published at The Conversation.

What factors must a court consider when the National Labor Relations Board requests an order requiring an employer to rehire terminated workers before the completion of unfair labor practice proceedings?

That’s the central question that the Supreme Court will consider on April 23, 2024, during oral arguments in the Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney case. The global coffee shop chain is challenging the NLRB, the federal agency responsible for enforcing U.S. workers’ rights to organize, saying that the agency used the more labor-friendly of two available standards when it asked a federal court to order the company to reinstate workers at a Memphis, Tennessee, store who lost their jobs in 2022 amid a nationwide unionizing campaign.

The Conversation U.S. asked Texas A&M law professor Michael Z. Green to explain what’s behind this case and how the court’s eventual decision, expected by the end of June, could affect the right to organize unions in the United States.

What Is This Case About?

Seven baristas who were attempting to organize a union at a Starbucks shop in Memphis, Tennessee, were fired in February 2022. Starbucks justified their dismissal by asserting that the employees, sometimes called the “Memphis 7,” had broken company rules by reopening their store after closing time and inviting people who weren’t employees, including a television crew, to go inside.

In June of that year, the shop became one of more than 400 Starbucks locations since 2021 that have voted in favor of joining Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.

While a complaint over the mass dismissal was pending with the NLRB, Kathleen McKinney, the NLRB director for the region that includes Memphis, sought an injunction in a federal district court to force Starbucks to give the Memphis 7 their jobs back while the case proceeded. The company must “cease its unlawful conduct immediately so that all Starbucks workers can fully and freely exercise their labor rights,” she said.

By August 2022, a judge had ordered Starbucks to do that, and in September the baristas were back on staff.

Although the seven baristas got their jobs back and the union vote prevailed, the company has appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court because it believes the court should not have ordered the company to reinstate the workers while NLRB proceedings were still pending.

But the NLRB argues, and the lower courts agreed, that the terminations chilled further union activities at the store even after the election.

Nevertheless, Starbucks argues that firing the seven workers had no effect because employees at that coffeehouse still voted in favor of unionization.

What’s Being Challenged?

The justices will have to decide which approach federal courts should use when they consider requests for injunctions like this one.

Currently, five appeals courts, including the one where this case arose, base their decision on a two-part test.

First, the courts determine whether there is “reasonable cause” to believe an unfair labor practice has occurred. Second, they determine whether granting an injunction would be “just and proper.”

Four other appeals courts use a four-part test.

First, the courts ask whether the unfair labor practice case is likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that labor violations occurred. Second, they look to see if the workers the NLRB is attempting to protect will face irreparable harm without an injunction. Third, after showing likelihood of success and irreparable harm, they ask whether those factors outweigh any hardships the employer is likely to face due to compliance with the court’s order. Fourth, they ask whether issuing the injunction serves the public interest.

Two other appeals courts use a hybrid test that appears to have components of both of the tests. They ask whether issuing an injunction would be “just and proper” by considering the elements of the four-part test.

In its Supreme Court brief, Starbucks argues that having to give workers their jobs back in these circumstances can cause “irreparable injury” and that it’s an “extraordinary remedy.”

The NLRB, in its Supreme Court brief, says that the injunction was proper in this case because Starbucks terminated 80% of the union organizing committee at the Memphis store and the evidence showed the chilling effect this action had on the “lone remaining union activist.” According to the NLRB, this chilling effect “harmed the union campaign in ways that a subsequent Board ruling could not repair.”

A labor reporter discussing Starbucks’ unfair labor practice cases, including the one involving the Memphis 7, determined that NLRB administrative law judges had found labor violations in 48 out of 49 cases.

What’s the Potential Impact of the Court’s Eventual Ruling on This Case?

While the case may sound like it’s only about seven people employed at a single coffee shop, the scope is wider than that.

Although the NLRB issues hundreds of unfair labor practice complaints against employers every year, it usually doesn’t turn to the courts to force the rehiring of employees. It only sought these types of injunctions 17 times in 2023, for example.

And seven of those efforts involved Starbucks. Despite the small number of overall injunctions, the large number of unfair labor practice complaints – and the eventual 48 out of 49 findings of violations – might support the rare use of injunctions in this case.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Starbucks, the overall impact seems unclear.

For one thing, the court will have picked one test over another without any proof that one is more likely to result in an injunction or not. In addition, the underlying unfair labor practice case has been resolved, since the workers have gotten their jobs back and their workplace has joined a union.

What’s more, Starbucks has agreed to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the union – which has continued to make inroads at the company’s coffee shops.

Because the NLRB rarely seeks injunctions, the fact that this issue has obtained enough importance for consideration by the Supreme Court seems odd considering its valuable time and the limited number of cases it can consider each year. But let’s see what the court’s majority decides.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Kevin (KAL) Kallaugher

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 24, 2024

On Thursday, Moody’s Analytics, which evaluates risk, performance, and financial modeling, compared the economic promises of President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Authors Mark Zandi, Brendan LaCerda, and Justin Begley concluded that while a second Biden presidency would see cooling inflation and continued economic growth of 2.1%, a Trump presidency would be an economic disaster.

Trump has promised to slash taxes on the wealthy, increase tariffs across the board, and deport at least 11 million immigrant workers. According to the analysts, these policies would trigger a recession by mid-2025. The economy would slow to an average growth of 1.3%. At the same time, tariffs and fewer immigrant workers would increase the costs of consumer goods. That inflation—reaching 3.6%—would result in 3.2 million fewer jobs and a higher unemployment rate. 

Trump’s proposed tariffs would not fully offset his tax cuts, adding trillions to the national debt. 

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said that Trump’s tariff policy “would be bad for workers and bad for consumers.” Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi said: “Biden’s policies are better for the economy.”   

In the New York Times today, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management, debunked the notion that corporate leaders support Trump. Sonnenfeld notes that he works with about 1,000 chief executives a year and speaks with business leaders almost every day. Although 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans, he wrote, Trump “continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.”

Among Fortune 100 chief executives, who lead the top 100 public and private U.S. companies ranked by revenue, Sonnenfeld notes, not one has donated to Trump this year. 

While they might not be enthusiastic Biden supporters, unhappy with his push to enforce antitrust laws and rein in corporate greed, the president has produced results they like: investment in infrastructure, repair of supply chains, investment in domestic manufacturing, achievement of record corporate profits, and transformation of the U.S. into the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world. 

In contrast, they fear Trump. The populist plans that thrill supporters—like hiking tariffs and taking financial policy away from the independent Federal Reserve Board and putting it in his own hands—are red flags to business leaders. Such positions have more in common with the far left than with traditional Republican economic policies, Sonnenfeld says. Those policies reflect that Trump has surrounded himself with what Sonnenfeld calls “MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists,” while the more senior voices of his first term have been sidelined. 

On Saturday, Trump spoke in Philadelphia with a message that The Guardian’s David Smith described as “light on facts, heavy on fear.” He appears to be trying to overwrite his own criminal conviction with the idea that Biden’s immigration policy has brought violent undocumented migrants to the United States, creating a surge of crime. He told rally attendees that murders in their city have reached their highest level in six decades, while in fact, violent crime in the city is the lowest it’s been in a decade. 

In February, Trump pushed Republican lawmakers to reject a strong bipartisan border bill so he could use immigration as his primary issue in the election. That focus on immigration was key to the rise of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to power, and it is notable that Trump’s picture of the United States echoes the rhetoric of the authoritarians hoping to overturn democracy around the world.  

On Friday, during a podcast hosted by venture capitalists, Trump blamed Biden for starting Russia’s war against Ukraine by calling for Ukraine’s admission to NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that resists Russian aggression. This statement utterly rewrites the history of Trump’s support for Russia’s annexation of the same Ukrainian regions it has now occupied: as Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort testified, the Kremlin helped Trump’s 2016 campaign in exchange for the U.S. permitting Russian incursions there.

More significant in this moment, though, is that Trump, who is running to become the leader of the United States, is siding against the United States and parroting Russian propaganda. Mark Hertling, a retired lieutenant general of the United States Army who served for 37 years and commanded U.S. Army operations in Europe and Africa, wrote: “This statement is—to put it mildly—stunningly misinformed and dangerous.”

Trump told host Sean Spicer that the U.S. is a “failing nation,” claiming that airplane flights are being delayed for four days and people are “pitching tents” because their flight is never going to happen. In reality, as Bill Kristol pointed out, with 16.3 million U.S. flights, 2023 was the busiest year in U.S. history for air travel, and the cancellation rate was below 1.2%. This was the lowest rate in a decade. 

Trump is insisting at his rallies that crime is skyrocketing under Biden. In reality, crime rose rapidly at the end of Trump’s term but is now dropping. From 2022 to 2023, according to the FBI, the only crime that went up was motor vehicle theft. Murders dropped by 13.2%, rape by 12.5%, robbery by 4.7%, burglary by 9.8%. The first quarter of 2024 showed even greater drops. Compared to the same quarter in 2023, violent crime is down 15.2%, murder down 26.4%, rape down 25.7%, robbery down 17.8%, burglary down 16.7%. Even vehicle theft is down 17.3%. 

Trump’s negative picture might play well to his die-hard supporters, but portraying the U.S. as a hellscape has rarely been a recipe for winning a presidential election.

President Biden and Trump are scheduled to debate on Thursday, June 27, and Trump’s team is trying to lower expectations for his performance. He became so incoherent in Philadelphia that the Fox News Channel actually cut away while he was talking. The Biden-Harris team has taken simply to posting Trump’s comments, prompting Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo to note: “It’s pretty bad when one candidates rapid response account just posts the other guys quote verbatim with no explanation at all.”

After months of insisting that Biden is mentally unfit, now Trump and his surrogates are saying Biden will perform well in the debate because he will be on drugs. There is no evidence that Biden has ever used performance-enhancing drugs, but curiously, Trump’s former White House physician Ronny Jackson (whom Trump repeatedly misidentified as Ronny Johnson last week) gave Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo a very detailed list of drugs that could sharpen attention and clarity. One of the ones he mentioned, Provigil, was on the list of those widely and improperly distributed by the White House Medical Unit in the Trump White House. 

Jackson said that he was “demanding” that Biden take drug tests before and after the debate. A White House spokesperson responded: “[A]fter losing every public and private negotiation with President Biden—and after seeing him succeed where they failed across the board, ranging from actually rebuilding America’s infrastructure to actually reducing violent crime to actually outcompeting China—it tracks that those same Republican officials mistake confidence for a drug.”

With the evaluation that Biden is better for the economy and Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the U.S. is not based in reality, it jumps out that on Thursday, a filing with the Federal Election Commission showed that the day after a jury convicted former president Donald Trump on 34 criminal counts, billionaire Tim Mellon made a $50 million donation to one of Trump’s superpacs. Since 2018, Mellon has contributed more than $200 million to Republicans, giving $110 million to Republican candidates and funding committees in the 2024 election alone. He has also given $25 million to independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. 

In a 2015 autobiography, Mellon embraced the old trope that “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies, they have all cluttered Higher Education with a mishmash of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome,” saying that food assistance, affordable health care “and on, and on, and on” had made Americans on government assistance “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.” “The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass,” he wrote. 

It is this trope that the Biden administration has smashed, returning to the idea that the government should answer to the needs of all its people. The last three years have proved the superiority of this vision by creating a roaring economy; rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, supply chains, and manufacturing; cutting crime rates, and reinforcing international alliances. 

As Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and chief executive officer of the energy company Canary, told Wall Street Journal reporter Tarini Parti about Mellon: “He’s clearly terrified of Biden remaining the president.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lydskisses]

🌟 PO - Voltage Inc Love 365 General Election Top 50 Acrylic Stand 🌟

ETA: Late May - June 2024

Payment Deadline: 23 February 2024, 23:59 SGT (may end earlier)

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Acrylic stand comes in two sizes - 15 or 18 cm. If you get a character set (consisting of both sizes), there is a bonus mini badge given.

✅ DM to Order:

・15 cm Acrylic Stand SGD$24.50/ea

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#love365 #voltageinc #love365findyourstory #100恋 #１００シーンの恋 #otome #otomemerch #herloveintheforce #kissedbythebaddestbidder

[ms-m-astrologer]

US people: getting my W-2 form in the mail reminds me that our income taxes are due this year by Monday, April 15.

It’s said that submitting the form (hard copy or electronically) during a void of course Moon will help protect us from problems. (Audits for example.)

This is called “electional astrology” - we are electing to do something at a specific time and place. And the meaning of a void Moon in electional astrology is “nothing will come of the matter.” Which is exactly what we want!

Here is a list of all the void of course Moons longer than 8 hours:

Friday, February 9, 22:59 UT - Saturday, February 10, 13:42 UT

Friday, February 23, 04:18 UT - Saturday, February 24, 01:38 UT

Tusday, February 27, 18:22 UT - Thursday, February 29, 03:09 UT

Tuesday, March 12, 11:08 UT - Wednesday, March 13, 00:28 UT

Tuesday, March 26, 23:09 UT - Wednesday, March 27, 09:03 UT

Tuesday, April 9, 02:39 UT - 11:23 UT

Cautionary notes:

The “shadow of the eclipse” starts on Friday, March 15; and ends on Thursday, April 11.

Mercury enters its retrograde zone on Monday, March 18; and stations retrograde on Monday, April 1, remaining so until Thursday, April 25.

[remembertheplunge]

Heath Ledger's Death and the Christian Right Nuts reaction to it

The following are entries from my 2008 journal:

1/22/2008 8:29pm

Heath Ledger, Broke Back Mountain actor, died. Age 28 on Blue Monday. Pills.

Heath Ledger 1979-2008

1/23/2008

The media and the Christian Right nuts are really running Heath’s death into the ground. Suicide or not? Who cares? Dead is Dead.

9:25pm “Sudden death of Heath ledger just shot across the screen again on Fox 40.

8/11/09 

Heath ledger is on the cover of Vanity Faire now, some fancy magazine.

End of entries

Notes:

Brokeback Mountain was a movie released in 2005 about two gay cowboys and their romantic relationship. It was a great , powerful movie which helped advance the gay cause. Heath Ledger played the part of one of the gay cowboys.

His death on January 22, 2008 sparked a fundamentalist church to say that they would show up at Heath’s funeral and at the 2009 Oscars.

The movie “Milk”, about the life and death of San Fransisco Board of Supervisor

Harvey Milk had come out in 2008. Milk was the first openly gay person elected to office in California. He was assassinated by fellow former  Board of Supervisors Dan White in 1978. Sean Penn, who played Milk in the movie, won an Oscar for best actor for the role. Per The Telegraph, US news website  February 23, 2009 “Stars on their way to the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles (for the Oscars)  had to pass a group of Christian demonstrators outside who protested against gay marriage and attacked the memory of the late Heath Ledger…for his role in Brokeback Mountain.

[lboogie1906]

Jean-Baptiste Lislet Geoffroy (known as Geoffrey L’Islet) (August 23, 1755 – February 8, 1836) was a French astronomer, botanist, and cartographer.

L he was born in Saint-Pierre, Réunion. He was the son of Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy a white, French engineer working in Mauritius, and Niama, an enslaved Senegalese princess. His father had freed his mother to ensure his son was not born enslaved. He worked in geology, showing that the shoal, Isle Plate around Mauritius was formed by the debris of the crater of a volcano.

He was the uncle of abolitionist novelist Louis Timagène Houat. He married and had two children. His wife died in 1804.

At age 15, he entered the engineer corps and moved to Mauritius where he worked and studied astronomy and mathematics under Bernard Boudin de Tromelin, known as le Chevalier de Tromelin. When the Anglo-French War began, he was made assistant pilot, serving with de Tromelin. He became a draughtsman to the engineers of the Isle de France.

He was appointed to map Mauritius, and his success in the project earned him a commission as a Geographical Engineer. Avoiding the reign of terror, he was commissioned in 1794 to visit and chart Seychelles, and his success there earned him the promotion to assistant officer in the body of military engineers. When Captain-General Charles Mathieu Isidore Decaen took charge of Mauritius, he was promoted to captain, and when Isle de France was captured, he became chief of the commission for the inspection of the island.

He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences. The academy was dissolved during the French Revolution, and he was not among those reinstated when it was reformed in 1793. Unable to return to France, he founded the Société des Sciences et Arts de l’Ile de France. He was the only man of color to have been a member of the academy.

Among his many works was a map of the Isles of France and Reunion published first in 1797 and second in a corrected version in 1802. He published a chart of Seychelles and a map of Madagascar. He made a voyage to Madagascar, and his account of the voyage was published in Malte-Bruns Annales de Voyages. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[mariacallous]

Back in 2020, Slovakia’s then-Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini asked Viktor Orbán to act as a middleman between him and the Kremlin. He aimed for an invitation to Moscow just before Slovakia’s parliamentary election – hoping that it would appeal to the Slovak electorate. A piece of intelligence detailing the Slovak–Hungarian–Russian scheme was obtained by VSquare. Pellegrini eventually got his visit to Russia and still lost the election. However, he is currently the frontrunner in the race to become Slovakia’s next president.

Newly emerged evidence shows how Hungary and Russia worked together during the 2020 Slovak elections to help the Slovak government stay in power, all at the request of Slovakia’s then-prime minister, Peter Pellegrini. Today, the same man is the front-runner to become Slovakia’s next president (the first and second rounds of the country’s presidential election will be held on March 23 and April 6, respectively).

Pellegrini’s candidacy is supported by current Prime Minister Robert Fico, who is heavily criticized for his pro-Russian attitudes as well as for cracking down on NGOs, free media, and the country’s anti-corruption bodies. Were Pellegrini to be elected, he is expected to rubber-stamp Fico’s controversial initiatives as opposed to outgoing president Zuzana Čaputová or Pellegrini’s opposition-backed contender, former foreign minister Ivan Korčok.

According to sensitive, detailed intelligence material obtained by VSquare, Peter Pellegrini, his power slipping away, turned to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in February 2020 for last-minute help. Due to widespread anti-government sentiment after the 2018 murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kušnírová, Pellegrini’s government was heading for defeat in the February 29, 2020 Slovak parliamentary elections. Pellegrini secretly asked Orbán to help arrange an official invitation to Moscow, arguing that such a visit would appeal to the Slovak electorate and boost his election chances. He used Orbán as a middleman because of the Hungarian government’s close, well-known ties to the Kremlin.

The intelligence material specifically says that Pellegrini told Orbán that an invitation to Moscow would help him to win the Slovak elections. It also clearly indicates that the Russian and Hungarian governments had high-level discussions on helping Pellegrini stay in power.

[digitalyarbs]

The many faces of John Quincy Adams based upon his portrait by John Singleton Copley.

In 1797, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, quite unexpectedly received a shipping case. It contained this portrait of her twenty-eight-year-old son by John Singleton Copley, which Mrs. Susanna Copley had asked her husband to paint as a gift for her old friend. Abigail was delighted, and she wrote to John Quincy Adams on June 23, 1797, “It is allowed to be as fine a portrait as ever was taken, and what renders it peculiarly valuable to me is the expression, the animation, the true Character which gives it so pleasing a likeness . . . It is most elegantly Framed, and is painted in a masterly manner. No present could have been more acceptable.” John and Abigail Adams had visited London in the 1780s and had become friends with the artist and his wife, and Copley had painted a full-length portrait of John Adams in 1783. Copley had also painted a likeness of Abigail Adams, daughter of John and Abigail Adams, probably at about the same time, which was subsequently destroyed by fire. John Quincy Adams responded to his mother in a letter dated July 29, 1797, enlightening her on the circumstances under which his portrait had been painted: "The history of the Portrait which you received last March was this. While I was here, the last time, Mr. Copley told me that Mrs. Copley had long been wishing to send you some token of her remembrance and regard, and thinking that a likeness of your Son, would answer the purpose, requested me to sit to him; which I did accordingly and he produced a very excellent picture, as you see. I had it framed in a manner which might correspond to the merit of the painting, and after I left this Country it was sent out by Mr. Copley. . . . It is therefore to the delicate politeness of Mr. and Mrs. Copley, that we are indebted for a present so flattering to me, and in your maternal kindness so acceptable to you. They are well, with all their family and continue to remember you with affection."

John Quincy Adams was serving as the United States Minister to the Netherlands in 1796 when he sat for Copley, having been appointed by President George Washington in 1794. He was resident in London for several months in 1795 and 1796 to conduct negotiations concerning the ratification of the Jay Treaty, which resolved many issues remaining from the American Revolution. Even though Adams was a relatively young man, he had been chosen for these important positions because of his extraordinary education and upbringing. Since he had often accompanied his father when he was sent to Europe on government business, the younger Adams had traveled to France, Spain, the Low Countries, England, the German States, Russia, and Sweden by the time he was seventeen. Often John Adams’s business required lengthy stays, and John Quincy Adams had therefore been enrolled in schools in Paris and Amsterdam. Back in the United States in 1786, Adams entered Harvard College, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated the following year. Subsequently he studied law in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and then began to practice law in Boston.

Adams recorded seven sittings for his portrait from February to April 1796. Two of the notations provide an elucidating glimpse into the experience of posing for Copley. On March 4 he wrote: “At Mr. Copley’s all the morning sitting for my picture. Conversation with him political, metaphysical, and critical. His opinions not accurate, but well meaning.” On March 28: “At Mr. Copley’s all morning, sitting again for my picture. Stayed there too long gazing at his Charles [Charles I ], and at a portrait of the three youngest princesses [The Three Youngest Daughters of King George III, 1785, Royal Collection, United Kingdom], a finely finished thing.”

In a stylish oval format, the portrait shows a rather debonair John Quincy Adams with powdered hair, dressed in a black frock coat with a white stock and a glimpse of a pink waistcoat. He is set against a red curtain and a crepuscular landscape. Copley carefully delineated Adams’s features but painted the costume and background with dashing and loose brushwork.

Shortly after the portrait was completed, Adams became engaged to Louisa Catherine Johnson in London. He went on to a brilliant political career, serving in the United States Senate, as Minister to Russia, as Minister to England, and as Secretary of State. In 1825 he was elected the sixth president of the United States, and after he lost his bid for re-election, he represented Plymouth, Massachusetts, in Congress for the rest of his life. Adams also went on to have his portrait painted by many of the leading artists of his day; in all he sat for at least sixty likenesses. Of all these portraits, Adams decided that “Copley’s Portrait of 1796, Stuart’s head of 1825, and Durand’s of 1836 . . . are the only ones worthy of being preserved.