None of us are better than this

When an Alabamian tells you to “Stop telling people that Alabama is better than this. It’s not,” you should listen. It’s a bitterly scathing op-ed.

In the past few years, when they weren’t being sent to prison for one felony or another, Alabama Republicans have attacked Hispanics, blacks, gays, blacks, transgender people, blacks, teachers, anyone who practices a religion other than Christianity and blacks.

And now, girls and women.

Their hateful bills have been ripped to shreds by federal courts and they have managed to drive away potential businesses looking to relocate to Alabama. Not to mention, the poor management of this state has deterred our best and brightest from sticking around and has driven a number of businesses out of the state.

All of that has not cost Republicans a single vote in this state. In fact, in those midterms I spoke about, the Republicans without a plan — running on nothing but hate and religion — gained seats in the Alabama Legislature.

Stop telling me we’re better than this.

We’re not.

That’s true of all of us, though. We’ve got a Trump in the presidency and corruption and unconstitutional destruction in the Senate; the Republican party is working hard to shut down democracy by suppressing the vote, and if that doesn’t work, they’re wrecking education so coming generations will be as ignorant as this one. This disaster isn’t the work of some distant nefarious evil-doer in Washington DC, it’s your neighbors and co-workers and those gomers down at the local reactionary church and your conservative uncle and your parents soaking in the warm glow of Fox News and your kids who are absorbing idiotic memes from their fellow players in video games. We’re not going to get out of this mess by electing the right figurehead. You’re going to have to pay attention to school board elections and speak up in uncomfortable social situations and canvas neighborhoods before elections and tell certain members of your family to go fuck themselves.

No more getting by, avoiding conflict, sitting quietly so you don’t make a scene. If you keep that up, it’s on you. You’re just as bad as an Alabama Republican senator, and you’re making the country worse.

It’s the malignant stupidity that gets me down

To justify spending large sums of money on a “Space Force”, Ted Cruz argues that we need it to defend ourselves from Space Pirates.

During a hearing Tuesday of the Subcommittee on Aviation and Space U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) argued that a Space Force is necessary to ward off space pirates.

“Pirates threaten the open seas, and the same is possible in space,” he said during his opening statements. Since “the ancient Greeks first put to sea,” Cruz argued, we’ve recognized the “necessity to protect waterborne traffic and commerce from bad actors.”

And now, he says, it’s time for the Space Force to do the same in space.

<throws up hands in despair>

<throws plans for the day to the floor>

<sweeps arms across desk, throws everything to the floor>

<tears at hair>

<stares exasperatedly at ceiling>

<seethes & weeps>

There is no point to anything. Our Republican overlords are fucking idiots whose sole purpose is to distract and delay with nonsense while the looting proceeds behind the scenes. We are all so fucking fucked by these fucking clowns.

When is the People’s March on Washington? I’m going to go sharpen my kitchen knives while I wait for the main event to begin.

Let’s rag on Alabama some more

These are all the Republicans who voted for the Handmaid’s Tale bill:

What do they all have in common? (Hint: there are only 4 women in the state senate, and they’re all Democrats.)

(Although, to be fair, a lot of white women voted for those asshats.)

Perhaps also relevant is that Alabama ranks #49 in the list of ‘best states in the US’. They beat Louisiana, which is nice, but Mississippi beat them, which ought to be a serious embarrassment. For comparison, Washington state is #1, Minnesota is #3.

Also, they ranked 50th in education.

Alabamians, I think you’ve been totally screwed over by your leadership. You can do better.

How stupid are these legislators?

When Senator Clyde Chambliss, a Republican, for example, was asked if the law would allow for incest victims to obtain abortions, he responded: “Yes, until she knows she’s pregnant.”

He did not elaborate on how someone would have an abortion before she knows she’s pregnant, outside of claiming, “It takes time for all the chromosomes to come together.”

Oh, yeah, 50th in education. It shows.

It’s not just Alabama

Don’t blame the citizens of Alabama exclusively for their misogynistic laws. This poison is everywhere. Even in Minnesota. Even in your local community. It’s happening here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota.

Our local movie theater has given in to pressure from church groups, like this rag-tag mob of regressive bible-thumpers, to host a showing of the movie Unplanned in town. I can’t blame the theater, they are trying to represent the views of the community, and they did turn down a request to put it in their regular week-long rotation and are instead showing a single Sunday matinee. Still, we’re going to have a showing of a dishonest anti-choice propaganda film right here in my town. We get a fair number of religious films at the theater (the latest was Breakthrough), and I’m not going to complain — I’m just not going to attend. Unplanned, though, is worse than that, because it lies.

It is the story of Abby Johnson, who was a director of a Planned Parenthood in Texas who had a sudden conversion, resigned, and became an anti-abortion advocate. That much is true. She did make a surprisingly abrupt about-face on abortion. Was her motivation principled and honest, though? Probably not.

Johnson’s departure from Planned Parenthood turned out to be a more complex story than it first appeared. At a court hearing for an injunction sought by Planned Parenthood to prevent Johnson from divulging confidential information to her new allies, two of Johnson’s former co-workers testified that she told them in the days before she resigned that she was afraid she was about to be fired. At one time, Johnson, who was named the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate’s employee of the year in 2008, seemed to have a promising future with the organization. By mid-2009, however, her relationship with her employer had begun to deteriorate. Salon reported that on October 2, Johnson was summoned to Houston to meet with her supervisors to discuss problems with her job performance. She was placed on what Planned Parenthood calls a “performance improvement plan.” It was just three days later, on Monday, that Johnson made her tearful appearance at the Coalition for Life. The following day she faxed Planned Parenthood a resignation letter, which mentioned nothing about a crisis of conscience.

She claimed that she was pressured by Planned Parenthood to increase the number of abortions at her clinic, which is just bizarre. PP does not push clients toward abortion, if anything, it’s the opposite — their purpose is to serve the medical needs of the women. There was an increase in the number of abortions at her clinic before her sudden departure, but it was because they were providing more abortion pills at clients’ request. Only 3% of the services offered at her clinic were abortions. Johnson claimed she had an epiphany while observing an ultrasound guided abortion, during which she claimed the fetus struggled to escape from the suction, which is absurd. The fetus is only a bit more than half a centimeter long at six weeks. It has mere bumps for limbs, it still has prominent branchial arches, it’s not motile at all.

Oh, about that abortion in the sixth week: Johnson claims it was a 13 week abortion. At that stage, the fetus is about 7cm long and does have small limbs which exhibit spontaneous movement. Planned Parenthood does keep very careful records of all procedures, of course, and there was no early second trimester abortion on the day she claimed — only one 6th week abortion. So she lied about that, too.

Of course, the movie is going to exaggerate and dramatize everything even further, and lie about the realities of abortion every step of the way — it’s made by the same people who made God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2, both of which were shown here in Morris, no doubt at the urging of the same ignoramuses who are bringing in this latest abomination from Pure Flix.

Some of us are planning some kind of response. I’ll be attending the movie on the 19th of this month (oh, the pain I suffer to be informed), and we’ve talked about having a post-movie discussion, although I suspect none of the proponents of religious stupidity will attend. We’re also hoping to bring in a showing of No Choice, an excellent documentary from Bill Moyers on why women need this right for a matinee showing the week after — the distributors have been helpful and willing, and the theater is considering helping us out — but I doubt that we’ll get much participation by the people who need the information most.

We are not going to adopt the histrionic scare tactics of the deplorable anti-abortionists, which does tend to limit the magnitude of potential reactions. So no, sorry, we’re not going to stand outside the theater with bullhorns. Does anyone have any other suggestions about what can be done? Unplanned is being shown on Sunday the 19th, while we’re hoping to show No Choice on Saturday the 25th.

The lying theocrats are winning in Alabama

The legislature in Alabama has passed an evil bill to deny women autonomy. This is a transparent attempt to do great harm to the citizens of their state, but only if they are women.

The Alabama bill, which passed 25-6, is even more restrictive than prior state-level abortion laws, and it includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions. Six of the Senate’s Democrats voted against the bill — one abstained — and they staged a filibuster into Tuesday night after debating the bill for more than four hours, with senators discussing the role government should play in legislating what a woman can do with her body and the definition of life.

After a Democratic amendment to the bill that would have provided exceptions for victims of rape and incest failed 21-11, Democrats railed against the prospects of young crime victims having to carry the resultant fetuses to term and having to then live with their assailants’ children for the rest of their lives.

It’s a purely Republican bill, promoted by dumbass Republican men. They fought fang and claw against any exceptions, any amendments, and also shot down an amendment that would have required the state to pay for the medical bills of unwanted babies for three years. This is not pro-life. It’s pro-misogyny.

All those voting for the bill were men. All Republicans. When signed into law by Alabama’s governor, women who have abortions will face no sanction, but doctors performing them could face “10 years in prison for attempting to terminate a pregnancy and 99 years for actually carrying out the procedure,” BBC reports. The only exception is for saving the life of the mother.

There’s a deeper logic behind this: they want this law to go to the Supreme Court, because their plan is to use the stacked judiciary to over throw federal laws — they want to impose their godly will on everyone, in every state. They are not content to oppress only the women of Alabama.

During floor debate, Sen. Clyde Chambliss (R) led the effort for passage of the ban. Its purpose is, Chambliss said, “So that we can go directly to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe v. Wade.”

Apparently, there has been a surge of these kinds of bills all across the country. Abortion foes have been emboldened by the appointment of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and are confident that he’ll tip the balance in favor of religious tyranny. That, and that Trump has been busy packing the courts with incompetent ideologues approved by the Federalist Society.

This is one of the many ugly legacies of the last presidential election. Also note that these “pro-life” people are the ones cheerleading for us to bomb the people of Iran.

Follow the money

We’ve been castigating Twitter and Facebook for providing a permissive environment that fosters the growth of fascists and Nazis — and that absolutely is a problem that needs to be addressed — but there’s one major player on the Internet who hasn’t been confronted quite as much. Sure, Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer has been shut down multiple times and is constantly struggling to find a stable host, and yes, Gab got shut down for a while, but they keep bouncing back. But 8chan, which might well be the root source of the persistent infection, never seems to have a hiccup. It just keeps going and going and going, fostering a toxic troll culture that occasionally erupts out of its petri dish to poison other environments. How does it do that?

All we need to do is look at who covers 8chan’s payroll.

What’s 8chan’s secret? It can all be traced back to its owner, Jim Watkins and his company NT Technologies. Watkins has created a mostly self-contained system where he hosts the 8chan domain without the help of third parties. And it’s allowed 8chan to remain on solid footing while its contemporaries struggle. While Watkins couldn’t stop Google from delisting 8chan from its search results, people who wanted to find it still knew where to go.

But Watkins still needs an outside source of cash to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and staff that keep 8chan running. A significant source of the site’s funding is Amazon.

Fascinating. Who would have thought America’s richest man, a multi-billionaire whose company has ruthlessly stomped all over all competition, might be a negligent slumlord who enables a slimy underground to fester? Inconceivable.

But that’s where a significant fraction of 8chan’s income comes from. They’ve cut themselves off from the sources that even give a marginal fuck to policing their output, which means they are isolated from vulnerable dependencies, and are getting by on a revenue stream from selling audiobooks through Amazon. They’re peddling total crap, but it’s enough to get the trickle of cash they need to maintain the site.

The site’s videos star attractive Filipina women who deliver pro-Trump news in heavily accented English. And at a time when most news sites obsess over generating traffic from Facebook, The Goldwater largely ignores that platform. Instead, everything it does is catered to the trolls, alt-righters, Trump sh*tposters, and other anonymous members of the internet’s most deplorable message board, 8chan.

8chan is living on ads for one product, their cheesy audiobooks, that is sold through one outlet, Amazon. They can do this because Amazon don’t care. There have been other occasions when people have noticed that Amazon continues to support hate sites despite all protests. Amazon is only about the money.

Watkins’ selection of Amazon as his financial lifeline to the outside world is not an accident. The company does not run away from websites that others deem toxic. When thousands of advertisers abandoned Breitbart after the right-wing website featured racist categories like “black crime,” Amazon continued to run ads on the site.

Of course they put up a policy that tries to look benign, but it’s basically a cover story that they freely ignore.

According to the policies it puts up on its own website, Amazon prohibits the sale of items that “promote or contain materials or activity that is hateful, harassing, harmful, invasive of another’s privacy, abusive, or discriminatory (including on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age).” This would seem to rule out Breitbart and 8chan. But when asked about the apparent contradiction, the company did not respond to a request for comment.

You know they just say that so they can quickly yank out anything that gets the attention of the media and that might harm the reputation (that is, profit) of the company. Well, the media just noticed 8chan is funded by Amazon deals. I’d like to imagine they’d do a fast PR move to protect the company, but they’re so big they don’t care anymore.

Maybe it’s time to break them up so a certain venal plutocrat named Bezos would have to care.

Grifters gotta grift

This is a true rags-to-riches story. Brian Kolfage was broke.

According to the source, Brian Kolfage personally confided that was “broke” last year after his “really fake” news empire collapsed and Facebook “deplatformed” him.

So what did he do? Did he go on welfare? Did he beg the nanny state for a handout? Did he flop on a street corner and beg? No! He did what any red-blooded American go-getter would do: he started a GoFundMe page.

His page raised $22 million to build a wall on our southern border, to out-Trump Trump. He really out-Trumped Trump, because the wall still wasn’t built, but Brian Kolfage isn’t broke anymore.

That anonymous source shared an Instagram post highlighting Kolfage’s recent purchase of a fine seagoing vessel which they believe is “close to a million dollars.”

Yay! Capitalism works!

Jacob Wohl keeps kicking his own ass

It’s a marvel. He keeps putting himself in the spotlight to do something incredibly stupid.

He got some fool college kid to help him make the claim that Pete Buttigieg assaulted him…but the kid backed down and confessed to making the story up, so Wohl and Burkman just did a press conference in their driveway in which the piece de resistance was a video of the kid drinking a caramel frappucino. He’s got a Starbucks caramel frappuccino. Most forced coercion events… do not involve caramel frappuccino. No one has argued that this was a case of “forced coercion”.

They announced that there were going to be “hundreds” of protesters showing up at their press conference (that’s all these guys do, I think, is call “press conferences” for attention), and as evidence, they showed that there was an Eventbrite event organized by Leftist agitators.

Examining the event revealed that the organizer was…Jacob Wohl.

I’m sure the only reason journalists show up for their press conferences at all any more is just to see Wohl and Burkman faceplant.

Urge to join a union rising…rising…rising

I love watching corporate idiots roasting over an open fire. Delta Airlines tried doing a little gentle union-busting with some posters, and it didn’t go at all well.

Two posters made by Delta as part of an effort to dissuade thousands of its workers from joining a union drew a torrent of criticism after they were posted on social media Thursday.

The posters included messages targeting the price of the dues that company workers would be paying if the union formed.

“Union dues cost around $700 a year,” one noted. “A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union.”

The other, with a picture of a football, was framed similarly.

“What does $700 mean to you?” it said. “Nothing’s more enjoyable than a night out watching football with your buddies. All those union dues you pay every year could buy a few rounds.”

Who needs job security, safe working conditions, and better wages when you could just play video games and drink beer? Those posters reveal how much contempt management has for their workers.

Here’s my favorite response:

The meme that points out that you can build a guillotine for $1200 is my second favorite.