CrowTankieRobot

Can't wait for this article to hit the chud sites accompanied by the inevitable comments about "eating the bugs" and "living in the pod" for the millionth time.

Another example of this, maybe less important but still notable, is the defiance of many states over Federal scheduling of cannabis (a C-I drug, therefore "totally illegal"). While the FDA claims jurisdiction over all drugs, probably using the Interstate Commerce Clause (be advised, IANAL), the states have looked at cannabis as a states rights issue. Right now, I think they are avoiding really big legal trouble by using a few loopholes (e.g. MN is deriving its delta-9-THC and other cannabis products from industrial hemp, a fairly inefficient process). Outside of Native American reservations, I'm not sure that any state is actually selling anything like cannabis flower. But it is real defiance on the part of many states, since delta-9-THC and other cannabinoids are the substances which are actually scheduled and regulated by the FDA, and they have really pissed off the Feds with their actions. I don't think you would have seen this at an earlier time in US history, and it's an interesting development.

Then there's the Covid response, or lack of it, mostly thanks to the chuds turning it into another front in the culture war. That's also one for the history books.

Americans really love their signifiers of negative freedom ("freedom from") and negative identity, and they turn those into religions just as much as any religion they might actually practice. So the tradcath thing is partly a silly aesthetic pose (e.g. Dasha from Red Scare), but it also usually serves an actual need, even if it's something really neurotic. As the evangelical Protestants have become so perniciously anti-intellectual and backward, the tradcath option looks more appealing to those who value education and at least a minimal amount of intellectual content to their spirituality. It also has a big performative aspect (lots of costume dress-up for the clergy, Latin Mass zealotry, etc.) that allows one to differentiate from the evangelicals (negative identity). My guess is that's why you see so many high-profile converts lately among the power elite.

Finally...an example of "jury nullification" for the left. Every other time I've heard that term, it's always been from a MAGA chud. Too bad the incident (and court case) happened in the UK, though, not here.

So many cultural minefields to cross...anyone remember the George HW Bush incident with the grocery scanner? That was blamed in part for his loss to Clinton.

It's also nice to see that years after Roger Ailes toppled down the stairs to his demise, his successor(s) at Fox "News" still have the fetish for newsreaders from the Blonde Fembot Factory.

That's rather ironic, since the right-wing economists at Stanford's Hoover Institution would normally consider anathema any mention of "national industrial policy", even if it was dressed up with all sorts of niceties about "public-private partnerships" and similar nonsense. The careers of so many there (Sowell, etc.) are predicated on a near-religious belief in the old Thatcherism "there is no such thing as society". Similarly, for Hooverites, "there is no such thing as the public sector", or at least there ought not to be.

Dr, Harris may live inside ivory towers and ivy-covered walls, but he apparently doesn't understand that he's a lot closer to the old plantation than he realizes. Something tells me that his heterodox "progressive market theory" (or whatever he would call it) is tolerated more because of his Third World background than for any other reason.

After the raids in 2006, the company needed to replenish its work force fast. Swift executives set up a war room where they posted maps on the walls and circled target cities for recruitment. The company’s H.R. team advertised on the radio and in local newspapers. They bought space on billboards. They sent representatives to job fairs and set up a recruitment station at unemployment offices. But few workers would bite. Finally, Swift started offering free bus service to Cactus from Amarillo. Somali refugees began to apply, and in 2007, after JBS acquired Swift, it stepped up the hiring of refugees to maintain production.

It's surprising that this story actually reveals one of the key problems of industrial agriculture, the vertical integration and monopolization which has grown exponentially since the '80s--particularly through M&As and finance capital buyouts. The working conditions in these plants are often beyond description, and the article only obliquely mentions the latest work hazard: Covid. A family member lived in Sioux Falls, SD during the worst of the pandemic years, and they told me of the panic that spread through the community as workers at the Smithfield plant there got sick and died. It turns out that Covid spreads best in cold, damp conditions, which makes meat processing plants uniquely dangerous. Then there was the spectacle of Donald Trump insisting that the plants stay open during the worst of the pandemic, which resulted in huge spread of Covid outside of the confines of the plants and the predictable deaths of workers from the virus.

What a joke of an article. These "think" tank morons just phone it in, every damn time. FEE has to be among the very worst, with seemingly no standards for what kind of garbage gets posted on their site. I recall that another FEE "writer" was featured on a Chapo episode some time ago, and their prose read exactly like this Jon Miltimore idiot. I wish I could remember more details--but I do know that the individual in question was a college dropout who had basically bounced around from marginal job to marginal job and somehow ended up at FEE. That seems to be how they find these people--I'm guessing that the pay is lousy and they prey on not-too-bright recent college grads or dropouts who have run out of options. I also noticed that Miltimore is affiliated with "Intellectual Takeout", which is a really lame project run out of the Center for the American Experiment, a regional right-wing "think" tank in MN. "Takeout" exists basically to provide prefabbed term papers with right-wing themes which lazy students can copy in order to "pwn" their supposedly Marxist professors. However, colleges now use sophisticated anti-cheating software, and this is a really great way to get blackballed from higher ed by being expelled for plagiarism.

Actually, if memory serves, it was our side that ended up using the tactical nukes. I think the wargame scenario was that the chuds commandeered a tank battalion and were terrorizing the cities with large artillery fire. Enhanced radiation weapons (neutron bombs) were used to neutralize the threat. It turns out that this is one of the only practical ways to stop a mass armored attack.

As I recall, a couple of people from the Pentagon or other military agency wargamed a full-on (likely worst-case) Civil War 2.0, and the upshot was that "[tactical nukes] were used early and often". The outcome would be grim, to say the least.