Eat Less Chikin — it’s made from the blood of labor

In one accounting, Joseph Grendys is worth $2.9 billion. In a more accurate accounting, he ain’t worth shit.

He’s the underserving owner of big chicken processing plants, an enterprise desperate for cheap labor and loaded with terrible working conditions. One of the reasons they hire undocumented workers is because they can be paid little and compelled to work under inhumane, dangerous connections, so that people like Grendys can make more money; because this country is caught up in anti-immigrant fervor, ICE can carry out massive raids on his plants and arrest workers, not bosses, and no one complains…at least no one with any influence.

You might be wondering, though…doesn’t this disrupt the work, costing Mr Grandys money? Sure, but he’d rather pay it out as a little loss in output than to, for instance, pay workers a living wage, or upgrade the processing plant to be cleaner and safer. And, as it turns out, this raid occurred after the plant was penalized for harrassment, and after efforts to unionize. We here in America have a fine tradition of brutal union-busting, how convenient that the federal government provides thugs at no cost to the owner.

The unusually large size of the raids is unheard of, but in this instance, there were extenuating circumstances. A raid that took in an estimated 680 immigrants of various statuses was allegedly planned 11 months in advance. In this case, the circumstances include a $3.75-million-dollar lawsuit settlement. This lawsuit, brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in a Morton, Mississippi, plant included accusations of physical and sexual assaults against its workers. There were also accusations of intimidation, labor violations, exploitation, and harassment of its labor force, with immigrants making up a huge portion of that labor. Some people believe that the raids may be part of a larger intimidation. According to the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, “ICE field office’s actions will fuel labor abuses, human trafficking, and a race to the bottom for workers’ rights.”

It’s not just brown-skinned people who feel the hammer, though. Have you ever heard of Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery, also called “The Chicken Farm”? It’s a program operating in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Missouri which purports to provide an alternative to prison for anyone convicted of drug crimes, although they’re apparently willing to accept anyone, whether they’re addicted to anything or not. You can sort of guess where this is going by the word “Christian” in the name.

About 280 men are sent to CAAIR each year by courts throughout Oklahoma, as well as Arkansas, Texas and Missouri. Instead of paychecks, the men get bunk beds, meals and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. If there’s time between work shifts, they can meet with a counselor or attend classes on anger management and parenting. Weekly Bible study is mandatory. For the first four months, so is church. Most days revolve around the work.

“Money is an obstacle for so many of these men,” said Janet Wilkerson, CAAIR’s founder and CEO. “We’re not going to charge them to come here, but they’re going to have to work. That’s a part of recovery, getting up like you and I do every day and going to a job.”

The program has become an invaluable labor source. Over the years, Simmons Foods repeatedly has laid off paid employees while expanding its use of CAAIR. Simmons now is so reliant on the program for some shifts that the plants likely would shut down if the men didn’t show up, according to former staff members and plant supervisors.

Translate “Money is an obstacle for so many of these men” to “We make them work for free.”

Jim Lovell, CAAIR’s vice president of program management, said there’s dignity in work.

“If working 40 hours a week is a slave camp, then all of America is a slave camp,” he said.

“Dignity in work”. There’s also dignity in earning a just and fair return on one’s labor. Is there dignity in being a parasite who lives on the dangerous, back-breaking work of others?

I’m going to have to agree with that last statement, though. The rich are doing their best to turn the country into a slave camp, to their benefit.

Just to put more frosting on the grift, here’s a cute trick the parasites can pull. Chicken processing is dangerous work — all kinds of machines that shred birds can also do terrible things to worker’s limbs. And when someone’s hands are shattered in a machine? CHA-CHING, CAAIR gets the benefits.

Men who were injured while at CAAIR rarely receive long-term help for their injuries. That’s because the program requires all men to sign a form stating that they are clients, not employees, and therefore have no right to workers’ comp. Reveal found that when men got hurt, CAAIR filed workers’ comp claims and kept the payouts. Injured men and their families never saw a dime.

Wait! There’s more! Remember, CAAIR is advertising itself as a tool for therapy and recovery of addicted individuals. So why don’t they employ therapists and experts in drug treatment?

In addition to injuries, some men at CAAIR experience serious drug withdrawal, seizures and mental health crises, according to former employees. But the program doesn’t employ trained medical staff and prohibits psychiatric medicine.

Poultry processing has become a sinkhole of unfair, criminal labor practices. All I can say is…stop eating chicken. It’s cheap protein where the filthy rich can degrade worker’s lives in its production, because it is poorly regulated.

Maybe you can start eating KFC again when the profits of their labor is shifted to the pockets of the workers someday.

Awesome band becomes awesomer

This is how you do it.

Last week when the Dropkick Murphys played Termianl 5 for two nights, things were going according to plan. It was St Patty’s Day week, the shows were packed, and people were getting drunk. And rowdy. Really rowdy. As has become tradition the band invited the ladies to come onto the stage for their encore of “Kiss Me I’m Shitfaced” 50+ ladies made it past the barricade and onto the stage and danced the song away. The band then kicked into “Skinhead on the MBTA” and a ton of dudes were getting past security and the stage ended up being packed tighter than the underside of a real man’s kilt. As the band kicked into T.N.T. by AC/DC some moron started seig heiling (the nazi salute) in time to the beat.

Dropkicks singer / bassist Ken Casey noticed this and ran right over to the guy, smashed him in the face, took off his bass and hit him with that and then jumped on him and all out chaos ensued. We could only assume from our vantage point that said nazi got his ass kicked. About 30 seconds later Ken emerged from the pileup with his shirt torn and made his way back to the front of the stage. He strapped on his bass and said into the microphone “Nazis are NOT FUCKING WELCOME at a Dropkick Murphys show.”

Yes! Before the usual pearl-clutching centrists start whimpering about free speech and violence, I’ll just point out that kicking the ass of some vicious maniac who supports genocide and mass deportations and racism is a perfect example of an appropriate, tempered reaction.

Racist and stupid

Wow. Case in point that racists have been emboldened by the current culture: Parker Mustian. He’s a high school student who made hate videos and shared them with his classmates. He happily expresses racist views, brandishes a rifle, and threatens to shoot up his school.

“Howdy, I’m Parker Mustian and I hate black people,” the teen begins in the first clip. “They’re the worst. They’re stinky and they just suck. They’re just bad people.”

Mustian proceeds to fire a weapon at what he claims are “a box of Jordans – the favorite pair of shoes for a black man.”

“I’m going to show you what I think of a black man,” Mustian says, unloading his weapon at the box of shoes.

“F*ck all n*ggers,” he says after firing.

Mustian is in South Carolina, which may contribute to his attitude…but he’s also wealthy and connected, so he apparently thought he was immune to all consequences.

Mustian is the grandson of Richard Quinn, the prominent South Carolina political strategist whose empire recently collapsed as part of a multi-year corruption probe. That probe is ongoing, in fact, as Quinn was arrested earlier this year and charged with eleven counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation.

Mustian is the son of prominent Columbia, S.C. attorney Ben Mustian, who is Quinn’s son-in-law.

Nice family you got there, Parker. It must be a strain to have to live up to their reputation.

The one good thing is that it used to be that people would think these same horrible thoughts, but they’d be reticent about announcing them in public. Not any more! Now we get to see shit for brains on display all the time.

Here be monsters, and we’re lacking in heroes

I remember being a young couple in our 20s, with wee little babies. We would have done anything — we would have willingly died — to save those kids, but we didn’t have to. Jordan and Andre Anchondo did.

Jordan, 24 and Andre, 23, were among 20 victims killed in Saturday’s mass shooting at a Walmart and shopping center in El Paso, leaving their infant son without parents as they died protecting him, their family told The Post. Jordan’s death was confirmed Saturday. Family members confirmed Andre’s death to The Post late Sunday night, after waiting more than 24 hours to find out what happened to him.

Tito and other family members said they believe Andre died trying to shield his wife and son from the gunfire.

Jordan’s sister, Leta Jamrowski, told the Associated Press that based on the baby’s injuries, Jordan died shielding their baby.

“He pretty much lived because she gave her life,” Jamrowski, 19, told the AP.

Jordan was holding him in her arms when she died, Jamrowski said. She fell on him as she collapsed onto the floor, breaking some of his bones but keeping him alive, her sister said.

They left behind two other kids who are asking where their parents are now. This is a horror story beyond my imagining, but it’s happening for real. People are killing other people over an imaginary threat. The reason Jordan and Andre died defending their child is racism, plain and simple.

John F. Bash, U.S. attorney in the Western District of Texas, said the case is being treated as domestic terrorism. A manifesto that authorities believe Crusius posted on the Internet forum 8chan includes attacks against Latino immigrants and rants about a “Hispanic invasion.”

“This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles wrote in a statement. “I’m outraged and you should be too. This entire nation should be outraged. In this day and age, with all the serious issues we face, we are still confronted with people who will kill another for the sole reason of the color of their skin.”

Why is this crisis coming to a head now? The answer is plain and simple: Donald Trump. People have been warning of the danger of our racist president before this weekend’s massacres.

A white-nationalist presidency is untenable. Having to endure one while the man in the office has committed obvious crimes, such as obstruction of justice, is even worse. Add on the ever-increasing threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism — which the FBI director warned about just last week and the administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric fuels like gasoline — and it is impossible not to conclude that the presidency is too powerful for someone as racist as Donald Trump.

In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”

So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?

We are in an intolerable situation. The president is a white nationalist bigot, and the senate is controlled by another greedy bigot. The Democrats are in denial and are avoiding doing anything about the putrid, rotting elephant in the room — impeachment proceedings are vital at this point.

Since taking over the House, the Democrats have not sat idly, passing several bills that have signified where they stand as a party. However, the semantic Twister the House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler is playing right now in order to avoid simply launching an impeachment inquiry when the number of House members in favor of one is now in triple digits is an insult to African American voters in particular, the Democrats’ most faithful and consistent constituency.

People will say it’s futile as long as Moscow Mitch cracks the whip in the senate, but I don’t care. The fight has to be made, and every delay undermines the fading moral authority of the opposition party. If you’re not going to fight against racism and murder, what were you elected for?

Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans will never allow a conviction, I know. However, the other main Democratic arguments against impeachment are bunk: the effort against Richard Nixon united the country, they currently enjoy sufficient public support, and they can do all the business that the people require in Congress while putting Trump on trial for the crimes that they crow on Twitter all day that he committed. Again, what was the point of bringing Robert Mueller to testify before the American people if you weren’t going to do a single thing with his report other than tell us to go vote our conscience once we read it? What if we live in a state where Republicans take that vote away? What if Trump does something else even more disastrous before the election that makes all of this moot? And don’t tell me that it isn’t possible, because, please.

It seems to me that telling the electorate to have the conscience our representatives lack is the “thoughts and prayers” of the Democratic party.

The Republican party has always been the racist party

Not to claim the Democrats are flawless, but these newly released tapes of Ronald Reagan and Nixon are revealing. Also unsurprising.

“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in newly unearthed tapes published by The Atlantic.

Nixon replied, “Yeah.”

And Reagan went on to say, “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”

In a subsequent conversation with Secretary of State William Rogers, Nixon echoed Reagan’s sentiments in his description of the African delegates: “Reagan called me last night, and I didn’t talk to him until this morning, but he is, of course, outraged. And I found out what outraged him, and I find this is typical of a lot of people: They saw it on television and, he said, ‘These cannibals jumping up and down and all that.’ And apparently it was a pretty grotesque picture.”

Jesus. Nixon was terrible. Reagan was terrible. I’m skipping over a few more Republican presidents, but Trump is terrible. That these people got elected also tells us that the electorate is terrible.

Devious racists are experts at hiding

Angela Saini, whose book Superior: The Return of Race Science does an effective job trashing racist pseudoscience, has an article in Scientific American summarizing the problem. A lot of it has to do with the poisonous crap on the Internet.

As the media landscape flattens, drawing audiences away from traditional outlets to a plethora of online ones, those with outdated views have found themselves elevated from the lonely shadows into the light. They have moved on from letters in green ink and pulled up a seat alongside reputable writers and academics. The internet has opened the door to racists and sexists, and they have happily walked in. They’re trampling over our carpets with their grubby shoes even as we offer them a drink. They have normalized extremism, pseudoscience and crackpottery.

The blame can be spread widely. Social media corporations, such as Twitter and Facebook, have allowed racist networks to proliferate. Recent research from Western Sydney University, looking at a decade of cyber-racism, has shown that race-hate groups are sophisticated and creative in disseminating racist propaganda to their followers online. The Gab social network and the journal Psych seem to have been set up expressly to give these elements their own unfiltered space. Online magazines such as Breitbart, and the companies that advertise through them, are complicit in presenting a glossy front to bigotry. And then comes the second tier of publicity when, even if only in outrage and disbelief, this content is shared online. This, in turn, has infected mainstream political discourse, lowering the tone a little further every day.

This stuff has been around for ages — a hundred years ago it was in the form of eugenics, it morphed into The Pioneer Fund (established in 1937, a rather telling decade), in the 60s I was exposed to it via the John Birch Society and William Buckley, and we’re still battling it now. It’s just metastasized into a thousand little online outlets, all vying to put up a veneer of respectability over a dungheap of bad ideas.

I feel like Saini could have just said “Quillette!” in 144 point bold Impact font, it’s the same thing. They try desperately to pretend that they hold a legitimate scientific position, when they’re just the Daily Stormer with a facade to shield them from hate crime status.

Child murderer was a white nationalist

Who is surprised? The recent shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival was perpetrated by an angry young man with racist views.

Legan also shared his views that include fringe white supremacist book written in 1890. Called “…one of the most incendiary works ever to be published anywhere,” by a noted anarchist, Legan quoted from the book in a post accompanied by a Smokey the Bear sign about fire danger. He wrote: “Read Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”

According to the book Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Subculture, Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard was authored under a pseudonym. It is purported to expand on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “theories of master–slave morality and herd mentality …”

The book is described as being akin to Social Darwinism and includes misogynistic and racist principles “claiming that the woman and the family as a whole is the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.”

Please do go on about how antifa is a dangerous organized gang. So far, they’ve killed no one, while these right wing thugs are running up the score. This guy murdered a 6 year old child and seriously wounded his mother and grandmother!

Why am I seeing variants of this same story everywhere?

You know the one…the one where a white American thinks you’re only allowed to speak English.

Xiara Mercado walked into a Starbucks in Hawaii dressed in her Air Force uniform, ordered her drink, and was casually talking on the phone to someone in Spanish. As she left, a woman tapped her on the shoulder — not to thank her for her service, but to scold her for speaking a language other than English.

“You shouldn’t be speaking Spanish, that’s not what that uniform represents,” the woman said, telling Mercado that her choice to speak Spanish in public was “distasteful.”

Where is this coming from? I’m an out of touch ivory tower guy from a culture where we think it’s fabulous when people are fluent in multiple languages. This resentment against people with different backgrounds feels wrong, like there’s a side of America that doesn’t want to believe that they are not the definition of reality.

It’s also weird to see this kind of demand in Hawai’i, which has an indigenous population as well as a substantial Asian population in addition to us colonizers. Isn’t it wrong to be speaking English, or Japanese, or Spanish there with this kind of attitude?

(R) stands for (RACIST)

If you are a Republican, you’re racist. If you vote Republican, you are a racist. If you live in a county that voted for Trump, you live in a racist county. Trump himself is an unabashed racist.

That isn’t name-calling. That’s simply an obvious fact at this point. Our incompetent bigot of a president is letting it all hang out.

At an arena rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump quadrupled down on his recent racist attacks on four female Democratic lawmakers. He also chastised one of them for using “the big, fat, vicious…F-word” against him, alleging, “that’s not somebody that loves our country.”

“She looks down with contempt on the hardworking American, saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,” the president said of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), to cheering from the crowd, many of whom began chanting, “Send her back,” enthusiastically joining in on the collective anti-Omar hate.

Ilhan Omar is a hardworking American. How dare he treat her as something else. “Send her back” is a shout of racism. There are no dogwhistles necessary anymore — the Republican party is openly drawing on the ugliest strain of American politics and is amplifying it.

The president’s comments came at a time of his announced nationwide raids on undocumented immigrants, as well as his recent asylum plan that could pose his gravest threat to migrants. This week, his racist tirades were defended, excused, or even laughed off by major players in the national Republican Party, with Team Trump arguing that the president didn’t mean it, or that he was correct to say it, or that he was merely being his typical, funny self.

It seems like it was just a few months ago that conservatives and centrists were wringing their hands over whether it was fair to call these people new American nazis, and they were splitting hairs over whether they were really fascists or not. Can we at least regard that argument as over? We’ve got a demagogue holding rallies (Why is he still doing that? Doesn’t he have work to do?) and leading mobs in racist chants, threatening to deport or jail people, journalists and opposition politicians, for being brown. He’s laughing at us. He knows the Democratic party is spineless and will do nothing. If we accuse him of being a new Hitler, I wouldn’t put it past him to grow a toothbrush mustache to mock us.

It’s 1932. What are you doing?

I don’t think I have enough patience to deal with people this far gone

How do young people become racists? On Reddit (a dubious source, I know), one young man explains how his own self-loathing was easily co-opted into support for “scientific racism”. It started with “4chan related memes, which were the coolest thing on the internet”, and then he gets deeper into LessWrong and other sites, and he discovers the two coolest people ever — Davis Aurini (!) and Mencius Moldbug (!!), which tells me that you have to be dwelling in an intellectual vacuum if you think a skull-posing misogynist and a blithering reactionary are intellectuals at all.

To me he was the coolest guy ever. A fearless intellectual who used facts, logic and reason to challenge society’s deepest taboos and come to disturbing conclusions, and a Silicon Valley programmer on top of that. One of his favorite conclusions was that there were biologically distinct human races, and some, like “the black race”, had lower IQ. At this time, 4chan was beginning to go alt-right, with the creation of /pol/, Stormfront brigades, and the pervasive idea that SJWs destroyed OWS and New Atheism, so “race realism” was a big topic there as well. They made it look like a valid scientific theory, with charts and data sheets and all, that just happened to be a taboo because of our collective trauma with slavery and imperialism. Sure, it makes sense that people approach the subject of race with caution, but does that really mean there are absolutely no differences between the races? If the Neanderthals were still alive, wouldn’t these PC leftists be telling us that even they are equal to us?

I was immediately sold on it. Part of the reason is the obvious: it told me I was the master race, and gave me a purpose in life, as a fighter in the war to save western civilization from degeneracy. The incels are always telling you that you are an abomination, that everyone hates you, that you are and will always be been genetic garbage, and the racists let me get some of my self-esteem back.

On top of that, I think part of the appeal of scientific racism is exactly that it feels so wrong. I was ignorant and had never understood what racism was and why exactly it was wrong. I thought it was just a moral failing, and for similar reasons as in “masochistic epistemology”, I was drawn to racist ideas exactly because they were so disturbing. When I was confronted with an argument I didn’t have an answer to – and they do come up with some intimidating statistics and ten-dollar words – I felt like my whole worldview was collapsing, like I was turning into a freak just for being exposed to these ideas, like I would never be able to go back and be accepted by society. There is a reason these far right people like the red pill metaphor so much: they present their ideology as a revelation so profound and disturbing that hearing it will change who you are forever, probably ruining your life. That’s what I felt: knowing this would turn me into an outcast, and I could never trust anyone outside of the alt right.

That rings true. He was deeply ignorant. His intellectual void encountered a body of bad ideas that were “edgy” and swathed in pretentious vocabulary, so he absorbed them. Then he is simultaneously hit with feelings of superiority because he knows the dark secrets, and isolated from better ideas by the feeling that he is now an outcast.

Now I have a couple of questions. How did a garbage site like 4chan become fashionable among young people? And how do we rehabilitate people so infested with bad ideas that they have become pariahs?