#moving company in New Hampshire

[coffeeman777]

This is for all of my follwers/mutuals who are Christians:

I want to preface this by saying that what I'm about to share with you is only to ask you for prayer. I don't want favors, and I'm not looking for a handout. We need God to open a door for us, and so I beg you, please pray for us.

We moved to Florida coming on three years ago. We came here primarily because we believed God was leading us here. In various ways, we believed God confirmed His will for us, and so I left a great job and we sold a great house to move here. We have been opposed in every way imaginable since.

Days after moving down, Lisa and I were in a terrible car accident that we only walked away from by God's grace. We were rear-ended by an Edible Arrangements delivery truck on the highway, and Lisa sustained significant injuries that are still causing us major problems. The franchise owner was operating their delivery vehicle without insurance, and I've learned since that they shut down their Edible Arrangements franchise and took off, leaving us holding the bag.

I've been in armed security since I got out of the Marines, and in New Hampshire, that was enough to take care of myself and my family. But it isn't in Florida. The pay for most armed security gigs here is super low, and I haven't been able to find work comparable to what I had in New Hampshire. So I tried to change courses.

I earned my personal trainer certification through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, but couldn't make it as a trainer. I made the attempt to go back to college and get a degree and certification as a paramedic, but after months of jumping through hoops, that fell through. I went back to New Hampshire by myself and spent six months away from my family to try to earn enough money working both my old job and a second job, but that plan didn't work because hours were limited with both gigs, and each job wanted me to work overlapping hours; I couldn't make the schedules line up.

My incredibly generous parents-in-law offered to pay our bills so that I could come back to Florida and try a new plan. I went to a CDL training course to get into trucking. After the very long and very expensive process, I finally got my CDL-A. While I was working on that, a random disagreement between my health insurance company and the medical supplier that issued me my cpap (I have sleep apnea) resulted in the supplier demanding that I give them the machine back. It took from middle February to early June for me to get another cpap. The end result is that, as of today, I have just under two months of cpap usage data. I discovered only after getting my CDL that no trucking company will hire me with less than 90 days of cpap usage data.

I've been pre-hired and subsequently turned away from three different trucking companies since I got my CDL over the cpap nonsense (one of which told me that what I had for cpap usage was fine, only to tell me on the first day of orientation that it actually wasn't fine, and they had to let me go). It's going to be another month before I can get started with any trucking company, and I'm concerned that I'll have to go to refresher training, which will only increase the months of time I'll have to spend as a trainee with whatever company hires me, which means it will be a long time before I make enough money to survive.

My in-laws can't continue paying our bills, and although I've had a half dozen low paying jobs in this time just to be bringing in something, now I'm struggling to get anything. I've applied to more jobs than I can remember, and I can't get any traction. Not even Domino's will call me back. Our backs are up against a wall.

My first payment for the money I borrowed to pay for CDL school was due almost a month ago, and I haven't been able to pay it (I had to get financing because my GI Bill expired and the VA ignored my request for an extension). Rent is almost 2k a month. We can't afford groceries (we've been living off of food pantries).

I don't know what to do. I've been crying out to God for an open door, but so far nothing has happened. My in-laws are just about tapped out, and in my mind, the only thing worse than wrecking my own family financially is dragging them down with me.

Please pray for us. Please pray for God to give us an open door, or some understanding of what to do next. I know God didn't bring us here to let us die. God is good, and God keeps His promises. God is perfect, and righteous, and just in all His ways. God has promised that He will turn about all things for the good of them that love Him. I know God has not abandoned us, and that when the time is right, God will make a way.

I say again, I am not looking for favors or begging for money. I know all of us are really going through it right now. All I want from you is prayer. Please pray intensely for us.

Thanks, I love you all.

[inside0ut-dotnet]

Amidst a nationwide surge of legislation aimed at curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, especially transgender persons, Pride events have faced significant opposition. The Human Rights Campaign, an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, reports that states have introduced over 500 such legislative pieces this year. Pride celebrations have attracted crowds throughout the country, with both new and longstanding events fostering unity and inclusion among LGBTQ+ individuals. However, some festivities have been overshadowed by protests and threats, leading to the cancellation of certain events due to harassment. Traditionally, many companies have demonstrated support for the LGBTQ+ community during Pride Month. This year, however, some have chosen to reduce their involvement due to escalating societal polarization and concerns over violence, vandalism, and customer loss, causing apprehension among brands about openly endorsing the LGBTQ+ community. The LGBTQ+ community perceives the reduction in Pride-themed marketing by major corporations as a regression in the pursuit of equality and acceptance. Pride Month, a period marked by celebration and increased visibility, feels less supported by corporate entities, which is disheartening for many. In states like New Hampshire and Oregon, library story hours featuring drag performers were cancelled. In Los Angeles, a fight erupted at an elementary school. Such events underscore the persistent division and intolerance within society. The wave of legislation is a troubling development in the United States, signifying an orchestrated move to diminish the liberties of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly targeting transgender people. This legislative push poses a grave challenge to the rights and freedoms of the LGBTQ+ community, fostering a hostile environment where discrimination and prejudice are not only tolerated but actively encouraged by the law. This can have serious implications for the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ+ individuals. Despite the challenges and setbacks, it is important to continue advocating for equality and acceptance. It is crucial for advocates and allies of the LGBTQ+ community to speak out against this legislation and work towards protecting the rights of all individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. By raising awareness, mobilizing support, and advocating for change, it is possible to push back against these harmful laws and promote equality for all. Pride month serves as a reminder of the progress that has been made, but also the work that still needs to be done to create a more inclusive and tolerant society. By standing together and fighting for equality, we can create a more inclusive and accepting society for all individuals.

[beautifulgiants]

‘I didn’t want to be swallowed up’: actor Josh Hartnett on swapping Hollywood for Hampshire

On track for megastardom, the actor turned down the part of Superman (twice) and turned his back on Hollywood. Now living in rural Hampshire, he talks about choosing fulfilling projects, his hippie childhood, the perils of stalkers – and the fun of owning pygmy goats

Stuart McGurk - Sun 28 Jul 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/28/i-didnt-want-to-be-swallowed-up-actor-josh-hartnett-on-swapping-hollywood-for-hampshire

Full interview below

Every morning, as soon as the actor Josh Hartnett wakes up in his home in the Hampshire countryside, there are mouths to be fed. Most obviously, those of his four young children. But also: the dog, several guinea pigs, several more chickens and a small herd of pygmy goats. The goats, Hartnett notes, are his favourites.

“They’re the sweetest animals on the planet,” he says, over Zoom, from his home. “They’re like dogs. They would live in the house if they could. In fact, I’ve seen people having their goats in the house with diapers on, but we felt that was kinda cruel.”

Hartnett and his wife, the British actor Tamsin Egerton, spent lockdown here. For years they’d been living a ping-pong existence between the UK and the US. When their third child was on the way, they decided to stay in Hampshire, and Hartnett has become a fixture in local village life ever since.

Unlike when he’s in New York or LA, “where people only want to talk about your career,” he says, here “nobody cares”, which is just how he likes it. He’s in the UK on a marriage visa, which means he can only be out of the country for work 180 days a year, or roughly one movie, which also suits him fine. At night, after the kids have been put to bed, he sometimes finds time to paint – his first love. But mostly, he says, this existence allows him to experience his children growing up in a way he otherwise wouldn’t.

“This is all brand new to me,” he says. “I never would have expected it. And time passes quickly. With four children, you have so much to do. In a way, less is happening. But more of the important stuff is happening. My oldest daughter is eight and a half now – that feels like it happened in the last two years to me. So I’m trying to soak up as much as possible.”

Hartnett’s Hollywood trajectory was a fairly common one. Interesting early indie roles saw his stock rise – Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty in 1998, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides a year later. Those parts catapulted him into big-time roles that required little more of him than to look lovelorn (40 Days and 40 Nights, where his character gives up sex for Lent), heroic (Black Hawk Down, which was thrilling but thin), or heroic and lovelorn at the same time (the deeply terrible Pearl Harbor).

But Hartnett didn’t much like the attention that came with the big gigs. And before long he did the most unforgivable thing any would-be megastar could: he decided he didn’t want to be one. He left LA, moved back to his home state of Minnesota and parted company with his agents. Tabloids still bring up Hartnett’s disappearance – “What happened to Josh Hartnett?” Screen Rant asked recently – though it’s been almost two decades since he made the switch.

In reality, Hartnett only stopped working for 18 months. But from then on he declined the bland heart-throb roles for which he was often suggested and instead pushed for more challenging, smaller projects. (He notably turned down the role of Superman twice.) “I just didn’t want my life to be swallowed up by my work,” he says now. “And there was a notion at that time you just kind of give it all up. And you saw what happened to some people back then. They got obliterated by it. I didn’t want that for myself.”

Hartnett is 46 now and, in the past few years, his career has shifted. For a while he took on interesting parts that didn’t always come off. Films like Mozart and the Whale (2005), a love story about two people with Asperger’s, or Resurrecting the Champ (2007), about a journalist who discovers a former heavyweight boxer living on the streets, or even The Black Dahlia (2006), a highly anticipated James Ellroy adaptation. “Some of those films were successful. Some of them were failures. But I was always swinging for something that was outside what people expected from me.”

But recent projects have come good. Last year alone saw him steal the show with a gloriously funny turn as a clueless Hollywood actor in an otherwise so-so Guy Ritchie film (Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre), followed by an astronaut in a metaphysical love triangle in a standout episode of Black Mirror (“Beyond the Sea”), followed by a key role as a nuclear physicist in the Oscar-sweeping smash Oppenheimer. We’re a hair’s breadth away from someone calling it the “Joshonaissance”.

Next up is Trap from M Night Shyamalan, the director of every film with a twist ending you’ve ever watched (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, Old, etc). It sees Hartnett as a doting father who takes his daughter to a pop concert. The twist, which takes within the trailer: he’s also a serial killer known as “The Butcher”. The entire concert is a trap laid on to catch him. A turbo-charged cat-and-mouse caper, the pitch was “Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert”.

In casting Hartnett, Shyamalan spoke about how hard it is to find an actor like him. No sooner have movie stars become movie stars by landing the starring role that works for them, he said, they “start to think about how they protect it”. Before long, they start only playing real-life people or settling into franchises. “And so to find somebody that’s a bona fide movie star, that’s a great human being and is willing to risk everything, man, that’s a rare combination. And sometimes you think that doesn’t exist any more. And then he walked in.”

Which does beg the question: why the purple patch now? Hartnett, after all, left the safe roles behind back when Bush was president.

It could, reckons Hartnett, be as simple as “the rest of the industry sort of catching up with what I was always hoping to do”. But also, he says, “maybe it’s also because of my age. I could name a million examples of actors who have become more interesting as they get older. You can’t be an ingenue forever, right?”

Harnett first met Shyamalan at the premiere of The Village in 2004, where they went for dinner afterwards and nerded out over film. He’d always wanted to work with him precisely because of how different all his projects were. “He’s got this reputation as being the sort of king of twists. But I have always looked at him in a different way personally – he’s someone who takes on lots of different genres and just enters those genres from a different perspective.”

He’s also another director Hartnett has had to wait for. When he got the call for Oppenheimer from Christopher Nolan, it came some 20 years after they’d spoken about The Dark Knight, which Nolan was working on at the time. Hartnett wasn’t much interested in playing Batman, and pitched himself instead for a role in another Nolan film, about rival stage magicians, called The Prestige. The role eventually went to Christian Bale, who Nolan had cast as Batman.

It was something of a relief, then, to get the Oppenheimer call all those years later.

“We didn’t have a direct conversation about it,” he says when I asked if Nolan referred to their earlier chat. “But the implication was: ‘I’d better take it.’ You only get so many opportunities with Chris Nolan.”

He doesn’t regret, he says, not pursing superhero roles. But he does allow: “I recognise the missed opportunity to work with a guy like Chris. And I’ve figured out that as much as you’re worried about curating your career to things you’re interested in, I don’t believe that’s the most important thing any more. It’s about finding people who you really trust.”

Hartnett grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father was a musician, his mother “the girl that likes to go see bands”. He describes them as hippies. They were living in a “shared living situation with other couples and single people” when his mother became pregnant.

I ask if it was it a commune?

“I’m not going to say it was a commune,” he laughs. “It was not a commune. But yes, the way they describe it, it does sound like a commune …”

His father got “a real job” – as a building manager – and bought a house, but his parents soon split up. His mother moved to San Francisco. By the time he was four, his father had married his stepmother, and “it became a much more normal Midwestern existence”.

He was, by the sounds of it, a curious mix. A natural worrier (“My family says I was an existentialist from the age of 12”) and lover of the arts, but also a jock who played on the school football team. “I played a lot of sports, because that’s what you did in the Midwest.” He got his love of painting from his stepmother, an artist, and for the longest time wanted to be an artist himself. He got his love of movies later, in his teens, when working in a video store called Mr Movies. Each night he took armfuls home, becoming obsessed with the French New Wave, and Italian directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Federico Fellini.

“This is Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the mid-90s. There wasn’t a lot of foreign film or classics you could rent in Blockbuster. But there was in Mr Movies.”

When I ask if he’s still in touch with his mother, he pauses for a second, and says: “No, she died last year.” It was a difficult relationship. “We had spent most of my youth not around each other. And she had issues with drugs and alcohol.” She had gone to rehab, then developed dementia.

I tell him my father died recently, too – a grief I feel I’m still processing many months on.

“Yeah,” he says after a second or two. “I think… my process of feeling like I had to mourn that relationship, or grieve that grief, I think that started a long time ago. And maybe because I didn’t see her as much as you’d have seen your father, because, you know, she wasn’t around…”

It was his father who had the much bigger impact on his life and, listening to Hartnett talk about him, it’s hard not to draw a through-line from his father’s priorities to his own. The idea, simply, that work isn’t everything; that your family comes first.

“My dad was not someone who valued achievement in that way – high-level work achievement as a means of proving himself. He owned a company. He allowed himself and his employees to work four days a week. And he was home a lot.” He was, he says, “an incredibly responsible human being.”

Over the course of conversation, Hartnett had mentioned the various reasons he’d stepped away from a certain kind of megawatt fame, of which this is clearly one. But I ask him now if there was a point – a moment – he can trace it back to.

He says it wasn’t so simple, no clear line between “happy Josh and unhappy Josh”, but then says: “People’s attention to me at the time was borderline unhealthy.”

Whose attention?

“Well, look, I don’t want to give this a lot of weight,” he begins. By which he means: what he’s about to say is a reason, not to be confused with the reason. “There were incidents. People showed up at my house. People that were stalking me.” At one point, he says, “a guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison.” Harnett was 27 at the time – this was 19 years ago. “There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.”

We talk, briefly, about politics. When we meet, it’s a few days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and a few weeks after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Hartnett campaigned for Obama, and has met Biden a couple of times. “He had a wonderful grasp of the issues and was incredibly eloquent, but I don’t know where we’re at these days. That debate was frightening.”

Mostly, thinking of the Trump shooting, he’s fearful of where the US is heading. And not just for us – but what we leave for those after us. “We’re in a transitional moment. The rhetoric is so hot. It’s tragic. And you have fears that the democracy might not be able to withstand those shocks. As you and I experienced recently, life goes quickly. We’re the next generation to go. Do we want to spend all that time fighting each other?”

We end on something substantially lighter – Hartnett’s rather unexpected cameo turn in the latest season of The Bear, recently nominated for a record 23 Emmys. It’s another role, like Trap, in which he plays a dad, or rather a stepfather – though one, presumably, rather less murderous.

It was also another role, he says, that was years in the making, the universe once again circling back around. He’d spoken to co-creator Christopher Storer some time before about making a film that never got off the ground. He remembers Storer mentioned at the time another project he was working on, based on his sister, a chef, and people he knew in Chicago. When Hartnett eventually got the call for season three, he didn’t hesitate. It was, after all, his new rule: work with people you trust.

“And I’ve never been on a set like it,” he says now. “All the actors show up even when they’re not working. They just love being there. It’s like a clubhouse. It shouldn’t be allowed to be called work. It’s too much fun.”

It was also a role that didn’t take long to shoot – a fraction of his 180-day allowance – then back to the Hampshire countryside and his wife, his four young children, his dog, his chickens, his guinea pigs, and several, diaper-free, pygmy goats.

Trap is in cinemas in the UK on 9 August

Fashion editor Helen Seamons; photographer’s assistant Scott Hobson-Jones; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; grooming by Charley McEwen at The Only Agency using 111Skin; location airspacelocations.co.uk

Josh Hartnett wears shirt by ralphlauren.com, trousers and necklace his own.(Image 1)

Cardigan by connollyengland.com, shirt by ysl.com and trousers by oliverspencer.co.uk. (image 2)

Shirt by chestudios.co.uk; knitted top by connollyengland.com; trousers by oliverspencer.co.uk.(image 3)

Photographs: Zoe McConnell/The Observer

[wenclairfamily]

Travel Blog: Visiting the Birthplace of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Dover, New Hampshire may seem like a quaint small town... but in this small town back in the early 1980's: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created a little independent comic book called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was while living in Dover that the two men created their own comic company called Mirage Studios... mostly because the studio was literally just a mirage; due to the fact that they were making their comics from their shared home they were living in. While the two would eventually leave New Hampshire to flourish their quickly growing in popularity franchise, the street where they lived while creating the Ninja Turtles still remains.

Upon visiting this holy ground for Ninja Turtles fans, I quickly realized that the street Mirage Studios once was housed on definitely shows the humble beginnings of the Ninja Turtles' creators. While some modern houses have been built on the street, most homes look over fifty years old now. Also, I quickly realized that many of these older homes have may not even had washing machines. Tons of clothes were swinging on clothes lines outside many homes (not photographed here out of respect of not wanting to show peoples' literal dirty laundry), and I also spotted several people walking down the street to a local community center that apparently had a washing machine; as people had bags of clothes and bottles of detergent in their hands. I have no idea if the Ninja Turtles creators had a washing machine in their home... but how humbling would it be to learn that Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman had to walk down the street to a community center to wash their clothes the day before they debuted the first Ninja Turtles comic at a nearby comic convention.

If you did not spot the Ninja Turtles manhole cover (installed a year ago thanks to a crowd funded campaign), you'd have no idea that a multi-million dollar franchise started on this very street. One can only imagine how nearby residents feel about their community's ties to the Ninja Turtles. Some might feel very happy that two of their own made it big. Others might feel anger and envy; wondering why life didn't deal them as well a good hand. It's a question I decided was best not to ask residents I passed by. Also, there were signs up nearby the famous Ninja Turtles birth site to stay away from individuals' private property. So I simply took my pictures, walked up and down the street a bit... and then moved on.

As a fun side note, I also made a point of visiting the closest comic book store near the famous site: Jetpack Comics. The creators of the Ninja Turtles were actually longtime friends with the owner of the store. Just click the center photo above and read the fun news story that I saw hanging on the wall about the owner and his store. Needless to say, this store had more Ninja Turtles comics than any comic book store I had ever been in. Plenty of exclusive variant covers from modern Ninja Turtles comics, tons of rare variant cover reprints of the famous Ninja Turtles/Cerebus crossover, some fun old Turtles merchandise, and a nice stash of classic Turtles comics from the old Mirage Studios days... although I may have picked out a nice amount of those classic comics to buy before I left. Sorry to any disappointed Turtles fans. ;)

[girlactionfigure]

The dark-haired girl on the right with the impish smile, her name was Eddie Lou, she was about 8 years old when this photo was taken in 1909. The picture was taken at the Tifton Cotton Mill, Tifton, Georgia. The girls worked there.

The photograph was taken by Lewis Hine, who visited factories such as this mill and took photographs of the children who worked there as evidence for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).

In another part of the country, Mary Harris Jones, also known as "Mother Jones", led a march of children from Philadelphia to New York in what would be known as the March of the Mill Children, a three-week trek by striking child and adult textile workers on July 7, 1903.

Children had been forced to work in coal mines and mills, when their fathers were killed or injured, unable to support the families. As a result, many children suffered stunted growth and were injured, maimed. Mother Jones described the children, "some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over ten years of age, the state law prohibited their working before they were twelve years of age."

“Since 2000, for nearly two decades, the world had been making steady progress in reducing child labour,” according to the United Nations. “But over the past few years, conflicts, crises and the COVID-19 pandemic, have plunged more families into poverty – and forced millions more children into child labour. Economic growth has not been sufficient, nor inclusive enough, to relieve the pressure that too many families and communities feel and that makes them resort to child labour. Today, 160 million children are still engaged in child labour. That is almost one in ten children worldwide.”

This is an update of a series of stories that have been posted for Labor Day. You can find those stories in the Peace Page archive or Google the information on your own to find out more.

~~~~~

“Over 100 years ago, the National Child Labor Committee used photos of children doing industrial work to demand change in America. Several states adopted child labor laws, and after much debate and several setbacks, the Fair Labor Standards Act became law in 1938. Its protections included the nation’s foundational child labor laws, including restrictions on the age of workers and hours they can toil,” wrote Michael Lazzeri, regional administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in Chicago

Max McCoy of the the Kansas Reflector wrote today on September 3, 2023:

“After more than a century of progress, you might think child labor is a thing of the past, something we condemn other countries for but that we don’t need to worry about here. Tragically, that shadow army of workers is still with us, and many of those workers are children. These underage exploited are often immigrants . . .”

“In February of this year, a cleaning company was fined $1.5 million for employing children ages 13 to 17 at meatpacking plants in eight states. The firm, Packers Sanitations Services Inc., was the target of a federal Department of Labor investigation that found 102 children working illegally, including 26 at the Cargill meatpacking plant at Dodge City.

“Appallingly, many states are now racing to loosen — not tighten — child labor laws.

“Arkansas, for example, in March did away with the requirement that the state’s Division of Labor had to give permission or verify the age of children under 16 to be employed. Although those under 14 still cannot be employed, the ending of age verification requirements is an invitation to child labor abuses.

“Other states are making similar moves.

“Iowa, for example, has made it legal for teenagers to work in meatpacking plants and children as young as 16 to bartend. New Jersey and New Hampshire have also lowered ages for some types of work. The argument goes that work builds character and that overly restrictive laws prevent young people from fully developing their capacity to earn a living.

“But such arguments stink like the stuff you find on a slaughterhouse floor.”

~~~~~

"In the early 1900s, Hine traveled across the United States to photograph preteen boys descending into dangerous mines, shoeless 7-year-olds selling newspapers on the street and 4-year-olds toiling on tobacco farms. Though the country had unions to protect laborers at that time — and Labor Day, a federal holiday to honor them — child labor was widespread and widely accepted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed," according to the Washington Post.

Mother Jones would say after the march, "I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to these wrongs. That they did not care that these children were to be the future citizens of the nation."

Many industries hid the fact that they employed children. They took advantage of poor families, such as Eddie Lou's family. Eddie Lou's father had died and left her mother with 11 children and no income. Her mother was forced to work at the cotton mill for $4.50 a week. Eddie Lou and four siblings also worked there and they were all together paid $4.50 as well. Eddie Lou and her youngest siblings would eventually be sent to an orphanage because her mother wasn't able to provide for them.

“If we don’t hold the line on child labor, we risk losing one of the things the has sets us apart as a nation founded not only on laws, but of morals,” wrote McCoy. “Of course children provide cheap labor, but business profits should not be the gauge of our society. In addition to the mental and physical tolls that children suffer in jobs that are inappropriate — and can you really imagine a 16-year-old wiping down the bar and asking what’s your poison? — there’s also a danger these children will become primary breadwinners for their families, with their educations coming a distant second.”

The children at the march carried banners that said, "We want more schools and less hospitals" and "We want time to play."

~ jsr

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

[myhauntedsalem]

Madame Sherri’s Castle

West Chesterfield, New Hampshire

In the 1920s, Madame Antoinette Sherri was a French costume designer who catered to the actors and actresses in New York City. She moved there from France with her husband in 1911. Madame Sherri also did a little Vaudeville acting, dancing, and singing on the side. During the summers she would visit with an actor friend who spent his summers in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire. She liked the area so much that after her friend passed away, in 1927 she built a chateau style mansion in the area and would host very large extravagant parties of which most of the guests were the rich and elite from New York City. The mansion had a grand stairway made of stone that led to a large red door which served as the entrance. Local residents referred to her chateau as Madame Sherri’s Castle.

Madame Sherri became known to the locals in West Chesterfield as quite an eccentric. She was known to cruise around town in her cream colored Packard touring convertible wearing nothing but a fur coat. When she was wearing clothes, she wore some of her extravagant costumes that she designed. Besides the lavish parties that she would throw in the mansion, she lived in a much smaller cottage near the place. That home was later discovered to be packed full of boxes and such, leaving very little room for living space. There always seemed to be a entourage of young french beauties that was in her company which led some to believe she used the castle as a brothel.

As Madame Sherri grew older and had a harder time getting around she moved to a nursing home in Brattleboro, Vermont. Over the years her castle sat empty and had been looted and vandalized several times. In 1962 the castle burned to the ground. Madame Sherri made arrangements to have the grounds and castle remains sold. On the day the sale was finalized, Madame Sherri passed away. Many believe that this meant her spirit was tied to the castle and remains there to this day.

Today, the castle ruins remain in what is now the Madame Sherri Forest near West Chesterfield, New Hampshire. The stone foundation, fireplace and grand stairway entrance are still intact. Many visitors to what remains of Madame Sherri’s castle claim that they heard the sounds of a grand party emanating from the ruins with music playing, guests chattering and having a good time. Others say they have seen the Madame Sherri’s apparition ascending the grand staircase in one of her extravagant dresses.

The Madame Sherri Forest is a 488 acre preserve open to the public and can be found near West Chesterfield, New Hampshire on Gulf Road just off the Vermont border.

[mariacallous]

It’s now illegal in the US for robocallers to use AI-generated voices, thanks to a new ruling by the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday.

In a unanimous decision, the FCC expands the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, to cover robocall scams that contain AI voice clones. The new rule goes into effect immediately, allowing the commission to fine companies and block providers for making these types of calls.

“Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities, and misinform voters,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement on Thursday. “We’re putting the fraudsters behind these robocalls on notice.”

The move comes a few days after the FCC and New Hampshire attorney general John Formella identified Life Corporation as the company behind the mysterious robocalls imitating President Joe Biden last month before the state’s primary election. At a Tuesday press conference, Formella said that his office had opened a criminal investigation into the company and its owner, Walter Monk.

The FCC first announced its plan to outlaw AI-generated robocall scams by updating the TCPA last week. The agency has used the law in the past to go after junk callers, including the conservative activists and pranksters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman. In 2021, the FCC fined them more than $5 million for conducting a massive robocalling scheme to discourage voters from voting by mail in the 2020 election.

“While this generative AI technology is new, and it poses a lot of challenges, we already have a lot of the tools that we need to grapple with that challenge,” Nicholas Garcia, policy counsel at Public Knowledge, tells WIRED. “We can apply existing laws like the TCPA, and a regulatory agency like the FCC has the flexibility and the expertise to go in and respond to these threats in real time.”

[posttexasstressdisorder]

A breathtaking scam: Inside Georgia's newest voter suppression tactic

Thom Hartmann

August 2, 2024 12:07AM ET

Photo by Olesya Yemets on Unsplash

Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking.

First, the background.

When Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp was Secretary of State — the state’s top elections official — and running against Stacey Abrams for Governor in 2018, Abrams’ organization had registered 53,000 people (70% African American) to vote. Kemp put those registrations on hold so they couldn’t vote in the 2018 election, which he won by 54,723 votes.

But that was just the beginning for Kemp. By the year prior to the 2018 election he’d purged a total of 1.4 million voters from the rolls, claiming he was just removing people who’d died or moved. On a single night in July 2017 he removed half a million voters, about 8% of all registered Georgia voters, an act The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.”

ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast hired the company Amazon uses to verify addresses and ran the names and addresses of those 534,000 people Kemp purged that July day through their system: 334,000 of them, most Black, had neither died nor moved. But they’d sure lost their right to vote.

Then Kemp shut down 8 percent of all the polling places in Georgia just before the election, the majority — recommended as a “cost saving move” by a white consultant Kemp had hired — in Black neighborhoods. Did I mention that he “won” that election by only 54,723 votes?

In 2020, when Stacey Abrams again challenged Kemp for the governorship, Kemp’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff-ens-purger”) purged another 309,000 voters from the rolls; Palast hired the company again and found that 198,351 of them had neither died nor moved.

It’s worth noting that if Brian Kemp wanted to take away a gun from any Georgia resident, Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that he’d have to go to court and prove his case; to purge voters from the rolls and take away their votes, though, Republicans on the Supreme Court have also ruled that Kemp doesn’t even need to notify those voters.

This year, Kemp signed a new law allowing any citizen to present a list of voters they believe must be purged from the rolls; one person, Marjorie Taylor Greene ally and Republican activist Pam Reardon, submitted a list of 32,000 voters, and the Chairman of the Ft. Benning area GOP, Alton Russell, challenged over 4,000 voters. A total of 149,000 voters were challenged by a handful of white Republican activists.

These tricks have helped keep Republicans in charge of Georgia politics, a state that would almost certainly be blue if every citizen were allowed to easily vote.

But there was some blowback to Kemp’s and Raffensperger’s “mass purge by vote vigilantes” strategy, so now comes Kemp’s latest trick.

This week Georgia rolled out a new website where people can let the state know they’ve moved (or their relative has died) and cancel their voter registration online. It’s super easy; you just plug in your information and, poof, your voter registration vanishes.

This would seem to be a solution in search of a problem. For example, over the past 50 years I’ve lived in Michigan, New Hampshire, Germany, Georgia, Vermont, Oregon, Washington DC, and then Oregon again: I never once let a state know I’d moved. Nobody does.

Instead, states track death records and the expiration of drivers’ licenses to determine who’s died and moved so they can then cancel registrations appropriately. My being registered to vote in both, say, Washington DC and Oregon when I only live in Oregon, is not a problem for DC if I don’t try to vote there. And nobody ever tries to vote twice just because they’ve moved; it’s a form of “voter fraud” that just doesn’t happen in any meaningful numbers.

But “keeping the voter rolls clean” — as if it were an urgent imperative making the wait for drivers’ licenses to expire just too dangerous — is the new excuse for Kemp’s Georgia website. Nobody’s believing the GOP’s “mass voter fraud” schtick anymore, so they’re reverting to this rational-sounding new way of getting Democrats removed from the voting rolls.

The problem with the new “cancel my registration” site is that bad actors, if they know a person’s name, address, DOB, and either Social Security or drivers’ license number, can simply go in and cancel other people they don’t want voting.

The “safety barrier” is that Republican activists who want to delete voter registrations in areas they know are heavily Democratic might be deterred from trying to do that with this new site, because they don’t have all that data on every Georgia voter.

Until this week.

For an hour Monday, the entire Georgia voter database — including names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security and drivers’ license numbers — was publicly posted on that very site. Oops, Kemp said! Anybody could download it and share it with others, including Republican activists who might want to keep on purging Democratic voters.

As the Executive Director of the Georgia Democratic Party said, “This portal is ripe for abuse by right-wing activists who are already submitting mass voter challenges meant to disenfranchise Georgians.”

When the Associated Press — which downloaded and printed out the list — showed it to the Georgia State Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, she was horrified, pointing out, “If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration.”

This is nuts.

Vice President Kamala Harris has promised that if she’s elected president and gets a Democratic House and Senate, the first piece of legislation she’ll sign will be the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which will put an end to Kemp’s games in Georgia and similar Republican stunts across the nation.

If you think it should be harder to take away your vote than your gun, double-check your voter registration (especially if you live in a Red state) and show up this fall!

ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast.

[coochiequeens]

It sounded promising until I got to the "— we use the term women+ — (is) self selecting. If you feel that you belong in a feminine space, we want you to feel welcome here" But I shared it for anyone wants to give it a try.

Tana Hoffman, founder of ILLA, a women+ networking app to encourage participation in the outdoors, spoke at an "activation" event in Park City on Wednesday. Katie Hatzfeld/Park Record

Park City women with a passion for the outdoors gathered at the Stio on Main Street on Wednesday evening to learn about ILLA, a company that connects women based on their interests.

“I just want to say, thank you guys for coming out,” said Tana Hoffman, the founder of ILLA, who drove down from her home in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Fifteen women gathered around as she explained how ILLA’s app works.

“You create a profile and you can find other skiers, snowboarders, bikers, mountain bikers, climbers, surfers, whatever you love to do, depending on your area,” she said.

Based on your profile, members receive notifications when, for example, another person pings for a ski partner on a coming day. Those available or interested are thrown into a group chat to plan their own adventure. It’s a cross between a friendship dating app and a Facebook group. 

This “activation” event on Wednesday was a chance for people to learn about ILLA, connect face-to-face, find some ski or boarding buddies for the winter and develop their own women-centric community.

Hoffman had attendees raise their hands to identify fellow skiers or boarders, and then encouraged each other to connect — like an in-person ILLA group chat. She passed out cards with information about how to create a profile.

Sarah Kodric, winner of the night’s $75 Stio gift card prize, came looking to find friends and fellow Epic Pass-holding snowboarders in the Park City area. After moving from her home in Slovenia to Utah with her boyfriend in June, she was eager to find some women to hang out with. 

Madison Blackley, a Park City born-and-raised professional snowboarder, popped in after boarding at Woodward’s monthly women’s night. She talked to the group about her passion for encouraging adult women towards sports they love.

Madison Blackley, a professional snowboarder and Parkite, spoke at the ILLA event about upcoming snowboarding camps for women in the area.Katie Hatzfeld/Park Record

“I coach for women’s camps called Beyond the Bounds. We run women’s adult snowboard camps,” said Blackley. “(These camps are for) anyone, a beginner, never been in the park, if you’re trying to keep up with your boyfriend, if that’s your goal, whatever your goal is.” 

One girl called out, “It’s for him to keep up with us!” The group laughed.

This was the attitude for many of the women who attended. And for ILLA’s creator, that’s the whole goal.

The New Hampshire native said she’d always been involved in the outdoor industry but struggled in the male-dominated world. 

“Most of the ski shops I was in, surf shops I was in, I was always kind of the little sister,” said Hoffman. 

Hoffman said gaining confidence as a woman in the outdoors was not easy, a challenge shared by many of the women she met, and she found herself drawn toward women-first communities.

Over the years, Hoffman began connecting other female outdoor-enthusiasts with each other through social media or group chats. But as one person, she could only do so much. What if there was an app for that? 

With this mission, Hoffman founded ILLA in February 2022. 

“ILLA was a way of, how do we scale this beyond myself, beyond me doing group text messages and group Instagram introductions,” she said.

Currently there are about 1,000 users from all across the country, she said, but certain areas have more concentration than others.

“We find that wherever you think of as a mountain hub, we tend to see more. So like the Tahoes and Missoula and Bozeman, … areas that you think of as being inherently attractive to the outdoor industry,” said Hoffman.

Park City is one of those places, and Hoffman said she hopes events like Wednesday’s will bring more women onto the platform.

“The women focus — we use the term women+ — (is) self selecting. If you feel that you belong in a feminine space, we want you to feel welcome here,” said Hoffman. “ILLA is very much a choose-your-own adventure. We’re the tool, not the enforcer.” 

Still in early stages, the platform is a web app, but plans to launch in the app store by the end of December or early 2024.

Right now, anyone can join ILLA at illawomen.com, and updates will be announced to members as they come.

News

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[The Daily Don]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 26, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Today, on the anniversary of the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, the FTC and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for using “a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to maintain its monopoly power.” The FTC and the suing states say “Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.” 

The states suing are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

While estimates of Amazon’s control of the online commerce market vary, they center around about 40%, and Amazon charges third-party merchants for using the company’s services to store and ship items. Last quarter, Amazon reported more than $32 billion in revenues from these services. The suit claims that Amazon illegally overcharges third-party sellers and inflates prices.

This lawsuit is about more than Amazon: it marks a return to traditional forms of government antitrust action that were abandoned in the 1980s. Traditionally, officials interpreted antitrust laws to mean the government should prevent large entities from swallowing up markets and consolidating their power in order to raise prices and undercut workers’ rights. They wanted to protect economic competition, believing that such competition would promote innovation, protect workers, and keep consumer prices down. 

In the 1980s, government officials replaced that understanding with an idea advanced by former solicitor general of the United States Robert Bork—the man whom the Senate later rejected for a seat on the Supreme Court because of his extremism—who claimed that traditional antimonopoly enforcement was economically inefficient because it restricted the ways businesses could operate. Instead, he said, consolidation of industries was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers. While antitrust legislation remained on the books, the understanding of what it meant changed dramatically.

Reagan and his people advanced Bork’s position, abandoning the idea that capitalism fundamentally depends on competition. Industries consolidated, and by the time Biden took office, his people estimated the lack of competition was costing a median U.S. household as much as $5,000 a year. 

On July 9, 2021, Biden called the turn toward Bork’s ideas “the wrong path” and vowed to restore competition in an increasingly consolidated marketplace. In an executive order, he established a White House Competition Council to direct a whole-of-government approach to promoting competition in the economy. 

“[C]ompetition keeps the economy moving and keeps it growing,” Biden said. “Fair competition is why capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth…. But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back.”

In that speech, Biden deliberately positioned himself in our country’s long history of opposing economic consolidation. Calling out both Roosevelt presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw part of the Progressive Era, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the New Deal—Biden celebrated their attempt to rein in the power of big business, first by focusing on the abuses of those businesses, and then by championing competition. 

While still a student at Yale Law School, FTC chair Lina Khan published an essay examining the anticompetitive nature of modern businesses like Amazon, arguing that focusing on consumer prices alone does not address the problems of consolidation and monopoly. With today’s action, the FTC is restoring the traditional vision of antitrust action.

President Biden demonstrated his support for ordinary Americans in another historic way today when he became the first sitting president to join a picket line of striking workers. In Wayne County, Michigan, he joined a UAW strike, telling the striking autoworkers, “Wall Street didn’t build the country, the middle class built the country. Unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going, you deserve what you’ve earned. And you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now."

Even as Biden was standing on the picket line, House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) released a new budget plan that moves even farther to the right. Yesterday, former president Trump backed the far-right extremists threatening to shut down the government, insisting that holding the government hostage is the best way to get everything they want, including, he wrote, an end to the criminal cases against him. 

“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed,” Trump wrote on social media. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”

McCarthy is reneging on the agreement he made with Biden in the spring as conditions for raising the debt ceiling, and instead is calling for dramatic cuts to the nation’s social safety net, as well as restarting construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, as starting points for funding the government. Cuts of more than $150 billion in his new proposal would mean cutting housing subsidies for the poor by 33%, fuel subsidies for low-income families by more than 70%, and funding for low-income schools by nearly 80% and would force more than 1 million women and children off of nutritional assistance. 

The “bottom line is we’re singularly focused right now on achieving our conservative objectives,” Representative Garret Graves (R-LA) told Jeff Stein, Marianna Sotomayor, and Moriah Balingit of the Washington Post. The Republicans plan to preserve the tax cuts of the Trump years, which primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations. 

At any point, McCarthy could return to the deal he cut with Biden, pass the appropriations bills with Democratic support, and fund the government. But if he does that, he is almost certain to face a challenge to his speakership from the extremists who currently are holding the country hostage. 

This evening, the Senate reached a bipartisan deal to fund the government through November 17 and to provide additional funding for Ukraine (although less than the White House wants), passing it by a vote of 77–19. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) urged the House Republicans to agree to the measure, warning them that shutdowns “don’t work as bargaining chips.” Nevertheless, McCarthy would not say he would take up the bill, and appears to feel the need to give in to the extremists’ demands. Moreover, he has suddenly said he thinks a meeting with Biden could avert the crisis, suggesting he is desperate for someone else to find a solution. 

Former president Trump has his own problems this evening stemming from the civil case against him, his older sons, and other officers and parts of the Trump Organization in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James has charged him with committing fraud by inflating the value of his assets. Today New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled that Trump and his company deceived banks and insurers by massively overvaluing his real estate holdings in order to obtain loans and better terms for deals. The Palm Beach County assessor valued Mar-a-Lago, for example, at $18 million, while Trump valued it at between $426 million and $612 million, an overvaluation of 2,300% (not a typo). 

Engoron canceled the organization’s New York business licenses, arranged for an independent receiver to dissolve those businesses, and placed a retired judge into the position of independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization. 

This decision will crush the heart of Trump’s businesses, and he issued a long statement attacking it, using all the usual words: “witch hunt,” “Communist,” “Political Lawfare” (ok, I don’t get that one),  and “If they can do this to me, they can do this to YOU!” Law professor Jen Taub commented, “It reads better in the original ketchup.” Trump’s lawyers say they are considering an appeal. The rest of the case is due to go to trial early next month.

Finally, today, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s request to let it ignore the court’s order that it redraw its congressional district maps to create a second majority-Black district. Alabama will have to comply with the court’s order. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[missanxietyinvestigates]

The Gravestone in the Auction House

The first day I walked into my internship for the year, I was greeted with a gravestone leaning against a pillar by the door. According to my boss, he had gotten it in New Hampshire and didn't really know anything about the owner.

[Grave transcription: Eliza P. / Wife of / Ezekiel B. Coat. / Died / Mar. 12. 1864 / AE. 34 yrs. 5ms. / Rest together / Abbott E. Coats / Died / Mar. 10. 1864 / AE. 3 yrs. 2 ms. 18 ds.]

My curiosity got the best of me and with my boss's permission, I started to hunt down Eliza.

Eliza Pamelia Goodell was born on November 7th, 1829, to Chester and Betsy (Fuller) Goodell in Rowe, Massachusetts. Within a couple years, her family would move to Readsboro, Vermont, to reunite with family in the area. There, 3 siblings would be born. Growing up, Eliza would have been expected to help with child-rearing, despite only being 6 years older than the youngest. Her father is listed as a farmer for most of his life, though an article in the North Adams Transcript hints towards some other activities as well:

His wife, Betsy, does not appear in any newspaper articles, as far as I can tell.

Despite being a teenager during the Mexican-American War, it would likely be a distant thought, rarely being reported in newspapers and an unlikely topic of conversation.

When she was 21, she would marry Ezekiel Bradford Coates, of Heath, Massachusetts. Ezekiel was the youngest of his siblings, the son of a carpenter. He lost his mother and two of his siblings at a young age, leaving him to be raised by his stepmother and siblings.

A little over a year later, their first son, Albert, would be born. Then came Abbott, Adelbert, and Elnora in Stratton.

In May of 1858, her son Abbott, suddenly grew sick and passed away. His death certificate lists inflammation of the brain as a cause of death, which could be encephalitis, meningitis, or cerebritis in modern terms. He was five. Then, just over a year later, she would lose her mother to cancer. This would have been a devastating time for her, especially with rising tensions throughout the US, it may have felt to her like her world could end at any moment.

In January of 1862, Eliza would have another son, Abbott E, in Townshend. Just a month later, Ezekiel, likely seeing the 75$ bounty for enlistment, would volunteer as a soldier in the Civil War.

That October, Ezekiel would join the rest of his unit as a Corporal in Townshend.

He was part of the 16th Vermont Infantry, Company D, which mainly was on picket duty. Picket duty was keeping an eye on the enemy from their side and keeping their superiors informed. This was extremely important during battles such as the Battle of Gettysburg, which his unit was a part of.

During the Battle of Gettysburg, Ezekiel would have been on the front line, watching others from his unit being hit by shells. A superior officer write on his report:

"In this movement it was under terrific artillery fire, one shell hitting two men and killing them instantly. The regiment was finally halted in support of a battery and just in season to receive and repel a heavy charge of infantry. Darkness soon came on and the battle ceased with the Sixteenth in the front line."

August 10th, 1863, Ezekiel and his unit were mustered out and started making their way home.

The family would enjoy a few blissful months reunited, but in early 1864, a disease began spreading through New England. It would come suddenly, sometimes killing people within two days, and was very infectious.

In early March, Eliza would have seen her two-year-old son, first become feverish, then have a sore throat, and then pass away. During that time, there was not a lot that a doctor could do to help him, and she may have turned to one of the many quack remedies that were advertised at the time. Very soon after, she would have started feeling the symptoms herself, and on March 12th, just one day after her son's passing, Eliza Goodell passed away from Scarlett Fever.

To learn more about the epidemic itself and it's history, there was a journal published at the time discussing it:

She would be buried with her son in Round Hill Cemetery soon after. Her eldest child would have been 11 years old, and without their mother, they were spread to family and friends who could take them in.

In 1867, Ezekiel would remarry and have four more children with his new wife, Charlotte.

Eliza's 3 living children, Albert, Adelbert, and Elnora, continued to live with relatives until adulthood. Albert would end up moving to Rhode Island and becoming a high-level government official in several offices, while Adelbert would run a private coach service in Massachusetts, and Elnora would settle down in Townshend with her husband Charles Boynton.

A possible reason why this gravestone ended up in an auction house was that during the 1890s, the graveyard was renovated, and several gravestones that had fallen into disrepair had to be replaced. It is very possible that Eliza's gravestone was replaced during this time, and the original gravestone was set aside somewhere and forgotten.

[foreveralwaysanauthor]

Charlie's Basic Info

Name: Charlotte Luisa Joy Sanka-Mays

For the most part, Charlie's faceclaims were really easy to pick which, in a way, made it harder for me to pick Erica's later on. Anyway, for the 60s, we have Diahann Carroll (Paris Blues), the 80s, Lisa Bonet (Angel Heart), the 90s, Angela Bassett (What's Love Got To Do With It), and now Tessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok)

Nicknames: Charlie, Lottie (she especially loves it because of The Princess and the Frog), and Char (Vivien is the usual culprit, but sometimes others will call her that as well)

Age: 38 

Date of Birth: September 16

Zodiac: Virgo

Birthstone: Sapphire 

Nationality: Jamaican and Columbian

Sexuality: Bisexual

Birthplace: Princess Anne, Virginia Beach, Virginia

Current Residence: Laconia, New Hampshire

Occupation: Author

Talents/Skills: Tying cherry stems into knots with her tongue, embroidery, violin playing, origami, and procrastination.

Birth order: Only child

Parents: Kenan Arlo Sanka and Camila Maria Martinez

Signature:

Autograph:

Height: 5’4”

Race: African American

Eye Color: Brown

Hair Color: Black with colored braids

Glasses or contact lenses: Contacts for reading and colored contacts for fun

Distinguishing features: A tattoo behind her ear of a crown, faded scars on her thighs from self-harm in her teenage and young-adult years, and stretch marks on her abdomen that she’s grown to love.

Mannerisms: Constantly tucking her hands into either her pockets or sleeves, reapplies lip gloss or chapstick when it starts to feel too dry, and will stare into space while thinking and not realize it until someone points it out.

Health: Used to suffer from a combination of anorexia and bulimia, but has since recovered and is at a healthy weight.

Hobbies: Collecting crystals, making candles, creating elaborate costumes for conventions, doing far too much research for her books, and watching bootlegged Broadway shows online.

Greatest flaw (in their opinion): Perfectionism, 100%. Throughout her formative years, she was pressured by her parents to be the perfect child - perfect grades, perfect appearance, perfect everything. The slightest misstep resulted in shouting matches, venom-filled, snarky comments, and silent treatments. By the time she had graduated, she was top of her class and one of the best dancers at her company. College was supposed to be her way to a perfect future, but then she met Hayley and everything changed. However, even now, her parents forced perfectionism is still engraved in her bones - a reminder to be on top of her game, no matter the cost. She struggles a lot with letting things happen as they may and allowing herself to be anything but perfect.

Best quality (in their opinion): Her imagination. Getting lost in make-believe worlds and creating sprawling cities in her mind had always been a source of entertainment in Charlie’s rigid childhood, but now that she allows her creativity to flow into her novels and children’s books, she takes pride in her imagination.

Biggest fear: For the longest time, she would have said falling in love as she saw what it did to her parents, but now that she has Hayley and knows what real love is like, she would say either centipedes, snakes, or becoming paralyzed. She had broken her leg in a car accident as a teenager and was kept in a wheelchair for the most part. The feeling of only moving from her bed to the wheelchair and back again was like torture for the typically active girl and, now, the idea of going back to that terrifies her.

Hogwarts House: Slytherin

Favorite ice cream: M&M, but only with vanilla ice cream and peanut butter drizzle

Favorite color: Pink

Favorite number: 19, how old she was when she met Hayley

Favorite songs: Don’t Cha by The Pussycat Dolls, Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield, and Shark In The Water by V V Brown

Favorite movies: Uptown Girls, Pitch Perfect, Burlesque, Howl’s Moving Castle, Hidden Figures

Favorite TV shows: Orange Is the New Black, Doctor Who, Arcane, The Queen’s Gambit, and Demon Slayer

Favorite books: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne, Butcher and Blackbird by Brynne Weaver, Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

Favorite video games: Minecraft, Candy Crush, and Fallout

A musical they like: Heathers

A place they want to visit: Venice, Italy

[manorpunk]

Who are the loony left and the loony right?

Sunny: oh this is gonna be fun. So, we should probably start with some context - there was a lot of self-sorting during the Polycrisis and we’re still living with the downstream effects of that in 2069.

Maria: And it wasn’t just an urban coasts vs rural interior thing. There were a lot of digital communities that became face-to-face communities.

Sunny: Yeah. It was kind of the silver lining to all of this. The coasts were fine, everyone knew the coasts would be fine, they still had people keeping the lights on, but in the interior it was just YOYO - that’s an acronym for You’re On Your Own - and there were some people who were really into that. If you didn’t like your life then you could just move with your internet friends to some ruins in Montana or whatever and start over.

Jacob: neo-carpetbagging, baby!

Maria: Yeah, but the odds weren’t great. The textbooks like to portray it as this brave new world, like a Thirteen Colonies redux, but it was more like… you flip a coin, if it’s heads then your new community turns into a sex cult, if it’s tails you die from contaminated water or get shot over a petty dispute, and if the coin lands on its side then you start some rural industry like brewing or beekeeping that’s boring and profitable enough to form a stable business and cover basic maintenance costs. So it really was like the Thirteen Colonies in that sense.

Jacob: Yeah, all the successful Kowloons - that’s the nickname for these frontier towns by the way, Kowloons - the successful ones were all, like, hipster company towns.

Maria: They’re not that bad. Not anymore, at least. Sorry, what was the question?

Sunny: loony left and loony right.

Maria: okay, yes. Point being, “the ideological became geographic,” as the saying goes. So, do we wanna do right or left first?

Jacob: We kinda just did. The loony left formed sex cults and the loony right shot each other over property disputes.

Sunny: there’s so much more we could talk about, though. Like the Suburban Samurai. So, in eastern America you’ve got the Boswash megalopolis on one side, you’ve got the Great Lakes Republic on the other-

Jacob: that’s me!

Sunny: -and in between it’s one big exurb full of Suburban Samurai: rentiers, small business manor-lords, get-off-my-property types… Neo New Hampshire people, basically.

Jacob: Yeah, they’re all the chuds who think they’re Charles Martel protecting their local Denny’s from Chinese invasion.

Maria: Really? I thought you would’ve liked the Suburban Samurai.

Jacob: Why the hell would I?

Maria: Because you live on a manse and dress like an 18th century cavalry officer.

Jacob: Ahem, just because I live on a vast estate with a fleet of cross-dressing servants doesn’t mean I’m not a socialist.

Sunny: the word ‘socialist’ has pretty much lost all meaning now, if that didn’t tell you already. Shall we do the loony left now?

Maria: excuse me, I think we’re forgetting something.

Jacob: oh I know where this is going.

Sunny: folks, it’s gonna get weird for a minute.

Maria: the Suburban Samurai pale in comparison to my sworn nemesis, Tidewater. The wrong side of the Appalachian mountains.

Jacob: ‘sworn nemesis,’ they’re literally on the other side of the continent.

Maria: and they’re still too close! Ladies and gentlemen, I will not rest until every last bastion of Southern perfidy has been erased from America! Dixie delenda est!

Sunny: Maria. No purges.

Maria: but how do know they don’t work if we’ve never even tried it?

[the next four minutes and twenty-three seconds have been edited from the recording]

Maria: Ahh… mommy has her gin now.

Sunny: So, the loony left!

Jacob: Slimmer pickings here. There’s a lot of off-the-grid types on the interior side of the Rockies.

Sunny: god, yeah, they’re all “but I don’t want the Global Logistics Network to track my location. The president shouldn’t be able to hijack my electronic devices whenever she wants, waaaaah.”

Jacob: what else… Maria, is Juche Cascadia still around?

Maria: Sort of. I let ‘em keep a little corner… like a zoo. *tipsy giggles* My own little open-air zoo of Maoist Third-Worldists.

Sunny: I’m stopping this before it gets weird again.

Jacob: too late.

Sunny: that’s all the time we have for today, folks!

[swordandstars]

Well, this is fun.

Yes, that is sarcasm.

Basically, one business in Texas paid another business in Texas to create a fake audio message "from Joe Biden" and then robocalled 5,000 to 25,000 (exact number TBD, investigation is ongoing) people in New Hampshire right before their primary.

The message? Don't vote.

It even implied that if they voted in the primary now, voters could not vote in the November General election. Oh, and as an additional "fuck you" to Democrats, they programmed the call to look like it was coming from the former state Democratic Party chair.

Investigations are in progress, and I'm going to be very curious to see who paid for and orchestrated the whole thing.

But this? This is diiirty. Here's why:

1) Voter suppression? Bad.

2) The call is literally coming from inside the house. Russia has been leading the pack for well over a decade in weaponizing new technology aimed at spreading misinformation and discouraging people from voting. Another day, another Fancy Bear psyop, wev.

This is two companies from our own country pulling this shit. Am I clutching my pearls and gasping that good ol' boys from the god fearing U S of A would nevah, I say NEVAH be part of such underhanded dealings? Fuck no, we wrote the playbook on this shit.

But bullshit like this is illegal here (because we are hypocrites who are fine meddling in other countries' elections, but you better not try it here by god) which they damn well ought to know. Especially when you're being this egregious and blatant about it. Legit American companies know that they're going to have an actual factual Federal investigation up their ass if they get caught.

And apparently they just... didn't care?

Okay. Cool, cool, cool.

Now, technically, creating AI deepfakes for robocalls is such new technology that laws really haven't caught up with it yet. Cause the law is usually 10-15 years behind technology on a good day.

But this is such a deep level of bullshit that the FCC was like, "Um, no. Effective IMMEDIATELY you're cutting this shit out."

So, unfortunately, that means that you won't be getting a scam call from Prince Harry asking you to send money to his favorite cancer charity. Or a scam call from Taylor Swift inviting you for a ride on her private jet if you type your Social Security number into a special secret website. Or George R.R. Martin encouraging you to set your local independent bookshop on fire because they are behind a secret conspiracy to repress the final Game of Thrones novel, Winds of Winter.

Because, again, this shit? Diiiirty. Enough to make the Federal government move fast enough to break the sound barrier:

So, your takeaways?

Go vote. Especially in the primaries. If you're in America, it's the time to vote for your fave and send a message to politicians who are pissing you off.

And then go vote in the general in November. Pay special attention to who is running for your local school board, judge seats, county commissioners, state reps, and Congress critters. Research every person on that ballot, and know exactly who you are voting into those positions.

Because your vote matters. Assholes wouldn't be trying to stop you from voting if it didn't.

[andrigyn]

Feeling insane today might apply to this pharma company and move my ass back to New Hampshire or Maine. My bf is trying to pitch a move to delco and I can’t do that again

[catdotjpeg]

[Image ID: Eight workers with Chipotle Workers United stand outside the Augusta Chipotle location. End ID.] 

Chipotle Mexican Grill has agreed to pay out $240,000 as part of a settlement for illegally closing its Augusta location to quash a fledgling union.

That settlement comes after the National Labor Relations Board found Chipotle violated the National Labor Relations Act when it closed the Augusta location after workers went public with their union campaign and subsequently blacklisted them.

Under the settlement, the workers will get between $5,800 and $21,000, based on their average hours worked, pay rate and their length of employment at the Augusta Chipotle, according to the Maine AFL-CIO.

“This isn’t just a victory for Chipotle United. It’s a win for food service workers across the country. It sends a message to corporations that shutting down a store and blackballing workers didn’t work for Chipotle and it won’t work for them either,” Brandi McNease, a former Augusta Chipotle worker and lead Chipotle United organizer, said in a Monday morning statement announcing the settlement...

Chipotle workers at the location on Stephen King Drive in Augusta voted to form a union in late June 2022. That came just a week after the Chipotle workers staged a two-day walkout in protest of what they called unsafe working conditions and low staffing.

It was the first Chipotle store in the nation to file for union recognition. It came amid an upsurge in union activity across the country, particularly in sectors that aren’t traditionally unionized, such as food service.

But Chipotle closed the location effective July 19, 2022, the same day as the National Labor Relations Board was set to hold a hearing to determine the union election process. The location’s workers were informed of the closure in an email that morning.

Laurie Schalow, the chief corporate affairs officer for Chipotle, told the Bangor Daily News at the time that the closure was prompted by staffing challenges, saying the chain went to “extraordinary lengths” to recruit new workers at the location.

But the location’s workers said the move was in retaliation for the union drive, calling it “union busting 101” and challenging the closure at the National Labor Relations Board...

The Augusta Chipotle workers then found they were blacklisted at other locations in the state. McNease, who was widely quoted about the first-ever union campaign at a Chipotle location in local and national press, attempted to apply for an opening at the Chipotle in Auburn, but found her email address on file with the chain was blocked. After using an alternate email address and getting an interview, she was later told she wasn’t eligible for hire there.

As part of the settlement, Chipotle will give the former Augusta workers preferential hiring at other locations in Maine for a year, as well as post notices at 40 stores in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts stating it will not close stores or discriminate against workers based on their support for unionization.

Chipotle maintains it didn’t do “anything wrong” surrounding the closure of the Augusta location, saying in a statement that it settled because “the time, energy and cost to litigate would have far outweighed the settlement agreement.”

“We respect our employees’ rights to organize under the National Labor Relations Act and are committed to ensuring a fair and just work environment that provides opportunities to all,” the company said.

Jeffrey Neil Young, an attorney with Solidarity Law in Cumberland who represents the Chipotle workers, said the settlement won “substantial gains” for the workers even though it fell short of forcing Chipotle to reopen the location.

“Not all of the workers have secured work elsewhere and offering them preferential rehiring rights as well as substantial back pay helps remedy Chipotle’s blatant union-busting. The labor laws need to be changed to impose greater penalties to more effectively deter companies like Chipotle and Starbucks from closing stores and blackballing workers in the face of union organizing efforts,” Young said Monday.

-- “Chipotle pays out $240K to Maine workers for illegal union busting” by Christopher Burns for Bangor Daily News, 27 Mar 2023