#steyer

[allthingseurope]

Steyer, Austria (by Heinz)

[spectraling]

Started thinking about @lindirs-gaze fancasting bojan actors/characters as lotr characters in their tags occasionally and I am going to add

[lovachromakiva]

Benjamin Steyer - Melody for a Walk

[internetterminus]

[fuckarylee]

In the Moonlight & At the Blue Hour by Jens Steyer

In the Moonlight & At the Blue Hour by Jens Steyer

[classic-elegant-beautiful]

[knockmeoutbabe]

Kinda really missing my pen pals tbh

[gigglesandfreckles-hp]

jilytober day 27!

He blinks, then leans back with exaggerated thoughtfulness. “Okay…” He turns back to the parchment, smoothing it between them. “So, what about Steyer? He—” “Should be more than enough defence while the Beaters pull forward. If not, he shouldn’t be your Keeper.” James stops, his gaze flicking up to hers, and a slow, delighted grin spreads across his face. “You’re so hot, Evans.”

@jilytoberfest

[odinsblog]

The Republican Party is one of thee most racist, antisemitic hate groups in recent history. I almost said that they have some nerve accusing anyone else of being antisemitic, but then I remembered how the GOP just spent the last two years employing the “big lie” about Trump winning the last election, and how they adhere to the Joseph Goebbels method of always accusing others of doing what they themselves are guilty of.

[fortunatelychaoticphantom]

With all due respect, I grew up among right-wing people, and none of them have ever held hatred for Judaism, Jews, or Israel. (In fact a lot of them like Israel and ranted that our last three presidents screwed it over) I’ve never even encountered a modern-day nazi in southern USA where they supposedly thrive. Who exactly do you mean when you say right-wingers are antisemitic?

Hi!

You're referring to this post.

Obviously, the outright showcase of antisemitism is more of a far-right / alt-right kind of behavior. The Unite The Right Rally from 2017 is a great and not a particularly subtle example in this regard with all the "Jews will not replace us" chants... Even in the January 6th insurrection, a rebellion meant to reinstall Trump who is supposedly a great ally to Israel, there were people in the crowd literally wearing shirts that say "Camp Auschwitz" on them alongside the usual Nazi memorabilia and iconography.

It's also important to remember that the majority of conspiracy theories, that are much more prevalent within right wing circles, are also mostly at their core antisemitic. Everything dealing with "cabals", "elites" and "lizard people" are usually just euphemisms for Jews. Also, everything about George Soros and dozens other dog-whistles. And sometimes they just blame the Rothschilds for causing wild fires in the US with a space laser...

[By the way, there's an Israeli anthropologist of religion named Adam Klin Oron, who investigated the conspiracy community in Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish. it is not very big but it does exist. I mean, the paradox of Jewish people believing in antisemitic conspiracy theories is absolutely fascinating, especially the methods they have to adopt to settle this cognitive dissonance. I think he has some papers and maybe lectures in English out there, if your curious about the subject]

But it is important to note that the usage of "elites" in particular as well as of other dog-whistles and antisemitic tropes (like the dual-loyalty) are common even among less extreme sections of the right. In 2018 Kevin McCarthy twitted: "We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election!”. It's comments like this, refusal to condemn antisemitism from within the party and only when it comes from the left (the same tactic of the left themselves), and other constantly present actions that make it clear that Jews are not in much a priority for the Republican party and more not exactly welcomed.

Now, there's also the whole thing about Evangelicals. They might just be some of the biggest allies of Israel, but they also want all Jews to move there in order to set Armageddon in motion. Seriously. This is an actual thing they believe in and is the only real reason any of them ever does anything for and about Israel and Jews.

Similarly, many other right supporters of Israel have an alternative reason for their support, both in the US and outside of it, especially in Europe which have been at the forefront of massive immigrant and refugee waves from Arab nations in the past decade. This support isn't actually for Israel or Jews - it's just plain hatred for Arabs and Muslims. They sort of view Israel as a double-gift: 1) it concentrates all Jews together, away from them, and 2) Israel is always fighting Arabs, and they hate Arabs, so that's good (a philosophy Netanyahu supports whole hardheartedly, preferring to swallow the antisemitic frog for the support and legitimization of his actions). So while technically many right wing will actively support Israel, the reason is often ironically antisemitic and Islamophobic.

To be clear - this is not about individuals. It never is. It can't be. It's impossible for hundreds of thousands and millions of people to think and act exactly the same. Of course there are many people, both on the left and the right, who are not antisemitic and many people who truly wish to protect Jewish people and Israel's right to exist. But this isn't about individuals, it's about prevalent beliefs and behaviors in movements. And these are unfortunately quite common, in both political parties.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

Octopus Energy has surged to the top of the U.K. electricity market with its plucky brand of clean, flexible, customer-centric energy. Now it’s loading up on new investment to make a broader push into North America.

The sprawling clean energy startup pulled in two new investments in recent weeks. On May 7, it announced a re-up from existing investors, including Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and the Canada Pension Plan. Last week, it added a new round from the $1 billion Innovation and Expansion Fund at Tom Steyer’s Galvanize Climate Solutions. The parties did not disclose the size of the new infusions but said that they lift Octopus’ private valuation to $9 billion. Previously, Octopus raised an $800 million round in December, putting its valuation at $7.8 billion. Thus, eight-year-old Octopus enters the summer of 2024 as one of the most valuable privately held startups in the world, but one whose impact is felt far more in Europe than in the U.S. The new influx of cash will help fund expansion in North America, both by growing its retail foothold in Texas and by ramping up sales of the company’s marquee Kraken software to other utilities. The company has its work cut out if it wants to reproduce its U.K. market dominance across the pond.

“It is a Cambrian explosion of exciting growth in almost every direction,” Octopus Energy U.S. CEO Michael Lee told Canary Media last week.

In the U.K., Octopus has gobbled its way up the leaderboard of electricity retailers, consuming competitors large and small until it reached the No. 1 slot this year. It supplies British customers in part with clean power from a multibillion-dollar portfolio of renewables plants that it owns. The company lowers costs to customers by using smart devices or behavioral nudges to shift their usage to times when the renewables are producing the most cheap electricity. Octopus also began making its own heat pumps, to help households break out of dependence on fossil gas at a volatile time.

In the U.S., land of free markets and capitalist competition, market design largely blocks Octopus from rolling out its innovations, and instead protects the monopoly power of century-old incumbent utilities. There is no national electricity market to take over, but a state-by-state hodgepodge of fiefdoms that obey differing rules. So Octopus made its first stand in Texas, whose competitive power market most closely resembles the U.K.’s system. It now sources power for tens of thousands of retail customers in the state.

“It is absolutely clear to me that the energy transition is happening first in Texas,” Lee said. ​“This is a fantastic market to be in if you know how to work with customers and help them be a central focus in providing that energy transition to the grid.”

Such an assertion might have elicited derisive snorts from Californians or New Yorkers a few years ago, but facts on the ground now support Lee’s thesis.

[evilelitest2]

Was Sander's Robbed in 2020?

Ok so lets walk to the past for a bit. Its 2020, the Democratic primary is getting heated. Biden keeps leading in all the polls, but after three primary elections, he has been coming off short. Moderates are panicking and it looks like Bernie Sanders might be able to get the nomination after all. He was counted out after the heart attack, and yet he kept on going.

So Sanders going in 2020 had two options for how to run his campaign. About 30% of the party loved him, about 20% of the party absolutely hated him, and 55% were mixed more ambivalent about him. He could either

Try to win over the parts of the party that aren't already supporting him, in particular the black community (Sanders does this a bit with the Latino democrats, his latino outreach very impressive and very underreported in the Democratic party

Try to hold unto your 25-30% of the party and hope rest of the vote is split between all the different moderates, so he can win with a plurality of the vote. due to the weirdness of the Democratic primary rules he can still win the nomination even without the majority, the winner only needs a plurality. if the moderate votes are split between Biden, Mayor Pete, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar, then Sanders could squeak in a victory with less than a third of the party.

Biden is the frontrunner, is polling ahead of everybody else, particular among the all important African-American segment of the democratic electorate. However he isn't beloved and there are a ton of Moderates running against him, and all of them are focused on attacking Biden in the hopes that they could take his place.

Sanders too option 2, which was risky. Winning with a plurality rather than a majority always leaves a lot of sore feelings, and had Sanders won the 2020 primary he would have to have dealt with the 70% of the electorate who didn't vote for him feeling sore, but maybe he could have handled it, we will never know. The advantage of his plan is that he just needed to hold unto his base, who already loved him. The danger is that if the moderates ever managed to rally around a single candidate, suddenly he is very outnumbered. Risky play but he did it. This is the same plan that trump use to win the Republican primary in 2016 (to be clear, that isn't a moral judgement on sanders, Trump isn't bad because he won with a plurality, he is bad because he is a fascist). There is one key difference though the Republican primary uses a winner takes all approach, so who ever wins the state gets all of the points, which allowed Trump to expand his lead. This is because Republicans don't believe in democracy.

Those are some great mittens

So far this plan has been working well for Sanders. The moderates have split the vote, Sanders won Nevada, New Hampshire and either won Iowa or it was so close that he basically won Iowa. Biden has yet to do well in any of the first three states.

But Then, South Carolina, the first state with a large black electorate. Biden secures a key endorsement from US Representative and Civil Rights activist Jim Clyburn. The results were a pretty stunning turnaround for Biden, who won 49% of the votes and got 39 of the delegates. Sanders came in second, with 20% of the vote and 15 of the delegates. Buttigieg, Warren, Steyer, and Klobuchar didn't get a high enough percentage of the vote to get any delegates.

Biden almost won more than the rest combined.

So lets take a moment to talk about the US primary system, because it is both illogical and needlessly complicated. Rather than have all the states vote at once like a normal fucking country, each individual state plus the territories plus DC hold there own primary, most of which are not in order. So for example, the great state of NY, fourth largest state in the country and the center of the global economy, has its primary at the literal end of the process. So yeah, I've never in my lifetime gotten to have any effect on a presidential primary, because the race is already over by the time it gets to NY. So who wins a primary is not necessarily the most popular person with the party, its who ever can stay in the race longest, its a marathon. A super popular candidate could still drop out if they aren't popular in the first few state. Maybe Elizabeth warren was super popular in New York and if she had been able to hold unto those state she would have won, but we will never know. this system sucks, and I hate it.

So the way the primary goes down is that you have 4 elections from individual states. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. Then you have something called Super Tuesday, where Virginia, North Carolina, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, and Utah all go at once. So basically you go from 4 individual states to a fuck tone of state (including the two largest) all at once).

So another critical thing about the democratic party is demographics. While the republican party is a white Christianity identity party, the democratic party is a diverse coalition. The most important part of that is the African American vote, who have steadily become the deciding vote in the Democratic party since the 60s. About 90% of African American voters are democratic, and African Americans make up just over a quarter of the Democratic party. They are also by far the most organized and proactive voters, due to years of having to fight against voter suppression (especially in the South). The black electorate in the democratic party is one of the parties greatest advantages, and it also why the party has become steadily less racist every year (Obama really accelerated this process). To be clear this is a good thing, the Democratic party is better for it.

For a series of very complicated reasons I could get into another time, Sanders had never done particularly well with African American voters and Biden has. This isn't universal, the African American community is not a monolith and has a diversity of views but that is how the demographics played out generally in the primary. Most importantly, apart from Biden was the only candidate, moderate or progressive, who seemed to excite the African American voting bloc.

The reason why this matters is that Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada don't have very large black populations, Iowa and new Hampshire are lily white, and Nevada is less than 10% African American. Despite being more than a fourth of the party, the first three states are not representative of the African American vote (maybe we should have one nation wide election eh?)

So once biden won South Carolina, it became obvious that A) Biden's defeats in the first three states were not affecting his popularity in the larger states B) none of the other moderates had any real African American support. This is what leads to the supposed "betrayal"

The Day before Super Tuesday, Obama called up the remaining moderates, and convinced most of them to drop out and endorse Biden. They did so, and it basically shattered Sander's chance of winning. With most of the moderates unified, Biden won 10 states to Sander's 4, wracking up 726 delegates to sanders 505. Biden got 286065 votes to sanders 74,755. Not only was this a great victory for Biden, after super Tuesday all of the other moderates withdrew, allowing him to crush Sanders going forward. Biden had 2709 Delegates to Sanders 1,113, but more importantly Biden won 51% of the votes, with sanders getting 26%. Some Sanders fans have blamed Elizabeth Warren for not dropping out, but even if Warren had and every one of her votes had gone to standers (and there is a lot of evidence to suggest a third of her votes would have gone to Biden), that would only make Sanders at 33% to 51%.

To put this in raw numbers, Biden won 19 million votes. Sanders had just under 9.7 million. Biden won 10 million more votes than Sanders (Elizabeth warren got 2.8 million)

So I see a lot of leftist types claim that this was an example of democratic treachery, that the DNC party robbed sanders of his chance of winning, this was Nixon style Ratfuckery that destroyed Sander's populist campaign to put Biden, who nobody likes anyway, in charge. And as a progressive who didn't want Biden to win, I have to say it sucked...but that wasn't a cheat.

Biden won the popular vote, love him or hate him, he did win more than half of the democratic votes, that makes him the candidate, that is how democracy works, sometimes you lose. Some have claimed that Obama calling up the other moderates and getting them to drop out was a cheat but....how? The moderates knew they couldn't win after South Carolina, and they were ideologically closer to Biden, so they dropped out and endorsed the person they agreed with more. Most Sanders fans wanted Warren to drop out, so I knew you guys understand that importance of consolidating behind a winning candidate. Thats just good politics, the fact that Sanders didn't bother to try to court other candidates to drop out is actually a major weakness of him as a candidate. If the situation had been reversed, and the moderates were trying to win with only 30%, wouldn't you guys want the other progressives to drop out behind sanders

Because Sanders is a populist, and his rhetoric is so tied to the idea of "The people rising up against the elites" that idea that he lost demographically is sort of a trauma his more radical followers can't really deal with, so they retreat to conspiracy theories. Remember, a conspiracy theory is something people turn to to avoid facing a difficult truth. If you identify yourself as populist, and you lose demographically, you have to face some difficult questions. Maybe sanders was the wrong candidate? Maybe he made mistakes? Maybe his fanbase sabotaged his chance of winning, maybe his hardcore fans make a mistake in there understanding of the political situation. Maybe he didn't do anything wrong, it just wasn't the year for a progressive? Or maybe Sleepy Joe Biden actually was a more cunning political operator than they gave him credit for and they were duped.

Or most difficult of them all. Maybe most Americans just don't agree with Sander's position?

Those are hard questions, but you kinda of have to answer them if you want to be a progressive who accomplishes things. I might do later posts that address them if people are interested.

There is a segment of the left who are moving into purple

However, for those who can't face difficult choices, they retreat to conspiracy, and they claim that Sanders was robbed

Hey you know who hasn't been saying that Sanders was robbed by the DNC? Bernie Sanders, because he is an adult who understands how democracy works. He lost, he took it gracefully and then he endorsed and campaigned for the winner, cause sanders actually cares about the cause and not faux revolutionary nonsense.

(Fun fact, Biden and Sanders are friends Irl. Like no joke, those two get along personally)

I didn't vote for Biden in the primary and I was not happy when he won the Primary. However I never thought Biden was senile, or a fool, or a hack, I think that he is a very cunning politician who has a public persona that encourages people to underestimate him And become people can't stand the idea that they could lose to Biden, they retreat into fantasy. This is why MAGA denies the election, they can't face the reality that most of the country doesn't like them, and they can't admit that they lost to a man who doesn't fit there mental image of an impression leader

Yeah...that ends well.

[roseunspindle]

Mel Harris: What I've Seen Her In

The Pagemaster - Claire Tyler

Stargate SG-1 - Oma Desala - Episodes: "Meridian", "Reckoning: Part 1" and "Threads"

House M.D. - Barbara Bardach - "Safe"

Criminal Minds - Congresswoman Steyer - Episode: "Sex, Birth, Death"

[pattern-recognition]

If you were a traveler in the world of Kino's journey, what method of transportation, weapon, and quirky companion would you bring? (Maybe a combination of two or more). Be indulgent!

The ideal vehicle would definitely be a honda super cub, but with the 124cc engine, followed only by the Ural because it was my dream motorcycle for a while (I'm eternally appalled at how expensive archaic soviet tech that hasn't changed since the 30s is in the US).

The weapon choice, it's almost embarrassing how much deliberation this gave me. I'm going to take the cop out approach and make a loadout for each bike respectively. For the Honda: Bodeo 1889 and a Beretta Tomcat in .32

For the Ural: Steyer-Hahn 1912 with the stock holster and in 9mm para like the wehrmacht rechamberings, the Tula-Korovin in .25 acp, and MAT-49 to stow on the bike

Idk about a companion though, I've never been a big fan of animals but having a human companion would ruin the vibe. I'd want something like a ghost, or a mental apparition that appears only in my vision and gives be conflicting and condescending advice.

[bighermie]

Bidens stay at house in Lake Tahoe owned by former 2020 rival and green climate investor Tom Steyer | Fox Business

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

Clarity of vision is the key to achieving your objectives. Tom Steyer. La clarté de la vision est la clé pour atteindre vos objectifs

December 20 2022