Category: Crap For Brains

Newsom signs bills forcing gun owners to pay “sin tax” and curbing the right to carry

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three new gun control measures into law on Tuesday afternoon in a ceremony full of lies, mistruths, and hostility towards both gun owners and the right to keep and bear arms.

 

Attorney General Rob Bonta took a break from getting his rear end handed to him by federal judges who’ve recently ruled against several of the state’s gun laws (including its ban on “large capacity” magazines, microstamping and other “safety” requirements, and a law punishing those who create marketing materials that could appeal to minors) to kick off the press conference with the telling statement that you “can’t be tough on crime if you’re not tough on guns”.

Of course, it’s gun owners, not guns that these bills are cracking down on. Bonta claimed that the right to carry increases violent crime by 29%, even though violent crime rates have plunged across the country for the past 30 years even as a majority of states have adopted first shall-issue and now permitless carry laws.

State Senator Anthony Portantino made it clear that California gun owners are the real target of these bills when he said the state legislature is defining what it means to be “law abiding” through SB 2; the Bruen response bill that imposes a wide variety of “gun-free zones” as well as new criteria for obtaining a carry license.

“If you can’t get three character references to say you’re an upstanding citizen, you shouldn’t have a gun,” Portantino told reporters while gun control activists nodded in agreement.

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Well, he’s bizarre, so……

Biden’s comments on gun violence truly bizarre

After nearly three years in office, there are a lot of things I’ve come to expect out of the Biden administration. Coherent comments by the president aren’t among them.

Yet in announcing his new Office of Gun Violence Prevention, Biden had to open up and discuss so-called gun violence more broadly. He couldn’t just announce the office and leave it there, he had to explain to the press–the same guys who wanted this for years, mind you–why it was supposedly needed.

In discussing “gun violence,” however, Biden was his typical self, saying things that raised more than a few eyebrows.

On Friday, while touting his strict gun control laws, Biden continued his trend of lying when he claimed he has been to “every mass shooting.”

Biden furthered his support for restricting the Second Amendment, saying, “If you need 80 shots in a magazine, you shouldn’t own a gun.”

Yeah, buddy. That happened.

First, no, Biden hasn’t been to every mass shooting. Especially if you consider the definition of mass shooting that his party tends to prefer, which is the Gun Violence Archive definition that is just based on the number of people shot, not killed.

This definition inflates the number of mass shootings into a huge number, one that would make it impossible for Biden to visit every mass shooting.

Further, Biden offered no real qualifiers on those mass shootings, so even if we use the more traditional definitions that are based on the number of people killed, it’s unlikely he visited every mass shooting that ever happened in the US, much less the planet as a whole.

Because while people like Biden tend to pretend that mass shootings are uniquely American, they happen everywhere.

Then we get to the whole “if you need 80 shots in a magazine, you shouldn’t have a gun.”

First, there aren’t any 80-round magazines out there, though I suspect a company like Palmetto State Armory might be cooking up one right about now.

Yet even if there were, so what?

There is nothing in our Second Amendment that seems to support such a supposition. If we need X number of rounds, we shouldn’t have a firearm? Why is that? Under what criteria would we be allowed to have a gun? Is the limit 79 rounds? Five rounds? What exactly?

Now, generally speaking, people haven’t needed that many rounds for any lawful situation they might find themselves in. Many defensive gun uses take place with zero rounds being fired.

But many others take a lot more than some might think.

The truth is that no one who has survived a gunfight has ever said, “Gee, I wish I’d had less ammo.”

See, the problem with Biden’s myopic comment–and this is me trying to be charitable here–is that it doesn’t account for individual circumstances. There’s a difference between some guy pulling a gun on a mugger and someone who has angered an organized mob that wants their head.

Further, let’s remember that the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting or even muggers, specifically. Yes, the Tyranny of the Thug is a thing, but the amendment was essentially penned as an insurance policy on the rest of our rights. It was meant as a bulwark against tyranny as a whole.

Our Founding Fathers had just fought a war that started when the tyrannical government marched on a town to seize arms from them. It’s really unlikely that they intended to make it easier for a tyrannical leader to do the same again.

So no, there are no exceptions to the Second Amendment, no matter how many rounds you need in a magazine.

But since Biden clearly has never read the Second Amendment and definitely dismissed the Bruen decision, we’ve clearly got a long fight on our hands.

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Pushback: California county sued for using cellphones to track movements of church-goers

They’re coming for you next: Santa Clara county in California is now being sued by Calvary Chapel San Jose and its pastor Mike McClure for using without warrant the GPS data from the cellphones of the church’s members to track their movements without their knowledge.

On August 22, 2023, a lawsuit was filed by Advocates for Faith and Freedom on behalf of Calvary Chapel San Jose against Santa Clara County, California, for utilizing geofencing methods to spy on church members during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Santa Clara County imposed a $1.2 million fine against the church for not abiding by the State’s and County’s COVID-19 restrictions.

Santa Clara County utilized an investigative method known as geofencing. Geofencing is a technological tool the government uses to track people relative to their location and likely locations. This tool is typically used in police investigations of criminal activity and, in these instances, requires a warrant– which is not always granted.

The lawsuit complaint can be read here [pdf]. As it notes:

Unbeknownst to the public, Defendants embarked on an invasive and warrantless geofencing operation to track residents in the County. The Defendants used this tool under the auspices of researching so-called superspreader events and activities.

Geofencing is a location-based tool used by the government to track individuals through their cell phone data. This tool is generally used in police investigations of criminal activity and requires the government to obtain a warrant, which is limited in time and scope.

The Defendants specifically targeted Calvary Chapel San Jose (“CCSJ”) to demonstrate the church was a large superspreader. The County hoped to use this information in its ongoing state enforcement action against the church. To this day, the County cannot trace one COVID-19 case to the church.

The Defendants put multiple geofences around the church’s property so they could track when and where individuals were on the premises. This operation took place over a year with seemingly no oversight, boundaries, or limitations – meaning the Defendants could track churchgoers in the sanctuary, prayer room, or bathroom.

This type of expansive geofencing operation is not only an invasion of privacy but represents a terrifying precedent if allowed to go unaddressed. As it stands, the Defendants are effectively arguing that, as long as they call it research, any level of government can target and spy on any individual or group at any time for any duration, and, if they so choose, they can wield the collected data against said individuals or groups who oppose their orders. This is not just un-American; it is downright Orwellian. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is the bottom line. Despite imposing a $1.2 million fine against the church for continuing its regular meetings during the COVID lockdowns, the county has yet to document any evidence that the church’s defiance caused COVID to spread at all. If anything, the county’s illegal data-gathering proved it did not, unequivocally.

Of course, any rational person could have told the county this. The lockdowns did nothing to stop COVID, so there was no reason for the church to stop its Sunday services. In fact, the county’s attempt to forbid religious services (while allowing many other group activities to go on), its totalitarian fining of the church, and its illegal surveillance all strongly suggest that county officials had no interest in stopping COVID, but were actually implementing an anti-religious campaign to suppress religious expression.

The county can deny this accusation, but the evidence tells us it is true. Santa Clara County officials decided to use COVID as an excuse to squelch the religious freeom and first amendment rights of this church and its members. In doing so, it is also attempting to establish a precedent that will allow the government to spy on any citizen for as long as it wants, without warrant and for any reason, and then use that data to condemn that citizen.

Note too that the surveillance was without cause, and could not have gotten a warrant even if the county had tried. The church members were not committing any crimes by going to church. If anything they were simply exercising their first amendment rights, guaranteed from this kind of government interference by the Constitution itself.

The lawsuit demands nominal and compensatory damages as well as attorneys’ fees, claiming the county violated the church’s first and fourth amendment rights. I hope a jury gives the church an award that exceeds the county’s fine by many millions.

Never, ever place any trust in “The Internet of Things” “IOT”

BLUF
If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.

The Man Amazon Erased.

On Thursday, May 25, Brandon Jackson, a software engineer in Baltimore County, Maryland, discovered that he was locked out of his Amazon account. Jackson couldn’t get packages delivered to his home by the retail giant. He couldn’t access any files and data he had stored with Amazon Web Services, the company’s powerful cloud computing wing. It also meant that Jackson, a self-described home automation enthusiast, could no longer use Alexa for his smart home devices. He could turn on his lights manually, but only in the knowledge that Amazon could still operate them remotely.

Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who’d come to his house the previous day had reported hearing racist remarks from his video doorbell. In a brief email sent to Jackson at 3 a.m., the company explained how it unilaterally placed all of his linked devices and services on hold as it commenced an internal investigation.

The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell’s footage, he saw that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. At a loss for what could have prompted the accusation of racism, he suspected the driver had misinterpreted the doorbell’s automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?”

Submitting the surveillance video “appeared to have little impact on [Amazon’s] decision to disable my account,” Jackson explained on his blog on June 4. “In the end, my account was unlocked on Wednesday [May 31, six days later], with no follow-up to inform me of the resolution.” By now, many months later, Amazon’s investigation into the matter appears to have concluded though the issue remains far from resolved. Contacted for a response, the company wrote: “In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”

It was only Jackson’s technical skills and particular automated home setup that saved him from what could have been a larger lockout. “​​My home was fine as I just used Siri or [a] locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light’s color or something of that nature,” he explained. His week of digital exile amounted to a frustrating inconvenience only because, as a tech-savvy user and professional software engineer, he had the ability to set up his own locally hosted network that acted as a failsafe. But Jackson’s experience is a warning to the vast majority of Alexa users and smart home dwellers who, lacking his particular skills and foresight, are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.

“I came forward,” Jackson told Tablet, “because I don’t think it’s right that Amazon could say, ‘I know you bought all these devices, but we think you are racist. So we’re going to take [you] offline.’” On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; others said his criticisms of Amazon implied that he didn’t support a company protecting its employees. “People missed the main point,” he said. “I don’t really care who you are, what you do, or what you believe in. If you bought something, you should own it.”

Jackson’s story of being temporarily canceled by the tech behemoth spread across the internet after it was discussed in a YouTube video by Louis Rossman, a right-to-repair activist, independent technician, and popular YouTube personality. Right to repair, or fair repair, is a consumer-focused movement advocating for the public to be able to repair the equipment they own instead of being forced to use the manufacturer’s repair services or upgrade products that have been arbitrarily made obsolete. In the early 20th century, fair-repair advocacy began with automobiles and heavy machinery, but its tenets have spread as computer chips have come to undergird contemporary life.

Following Rossman’s initial video about Jackons’s case, Amazon alleged that Rossman had abused its affilate marketing program and placed restrictions on the YouTuber’s business account, leading him to speculate in a follow-up video that the corporate giant was retaliating against him for covering Jackson’s travails. Rossman alleges that this was the first time Amazon made any allegation against him of abusing its affiliate marketing program since he enrolled in the marketing program 7.5 years ago.

Jackson’s experience is a warning to Alexa users and smart home dwellers who are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.

The number of households adopting smart home devices in the United States is expected to reach 93 million by 2027 and most consumers rely on cloud services for their daily online use. But the cloud is not just a metaphor to explain a connected network; it describes the complete reorganization of digital life under the power of remote centralized databases. Light switches, lightbulbs, locks, thermostats, coffee makers, air conditioners, speakers, exercise equipment, and virtually every other piece of equipment you can find in the average home can now all be operated as interconnected pieces of a single digital network, run by an outside host, such as Amazon, which operates the massive server banks that make up “the cloud.” For consumers, this arrangement offers convenience and optimization. You can turn on the heat in your house from another state, or reorder a household good with a simple voice command. But the cost of that convenience is that consumers no longer independently control how their tech—or their homes, since the two are increasingly integrated—is operated. As Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and another right-to-repair activist put it, “Who really owns our things? It used to be us.”

Brandon Jackson

Brandon Jackson

Alexa’s terms of use includes a clause stating that Amazon is permitted to terminate “access” to Alexa at the company’s discretion without notice. Jackson was told by a customer relations executive over the phone that he needed to assure the company that he would not ridicule or put future delivery drivers in harm’s way. Nearly a month later, Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, only apologizing for “inconveniences.” Given absolute power over its users, there is no pressure on Amazon to explain its decision. Indeed, the company used the same statement Tabletreceived for an earlier June Newsweek article regarding Jackson’s lockout.

Amazon’s claims of being concerned about the safety of blue-collar workers strain credibility. According to a 2021 article published in Vice, when minority delivery drivers faced violent threats and racial harassment, the company’s penchant for efficiency took priority over worker safety. Unsustainable demands from delivery drivers have translated to drivers peeing in bottles and defecating in garbage bags, a problem Amazon internally acknowledged even as it publicly denies the allegations. Inside its “fulfillment centers”—the term the company uses for its warehouses—workers suffer 5.9 serious injuries for every 100 workers, an 80% greater injury rate than competitors. Indeed employee turnover is so high in these facilities that a leaked company memo from 2022 warned that the company was on track to deplete its number of available workers by 2024.

Amazon’s intrusion into Jackson’s life, then, should not be understood within the context of protecting workers—which might begin by giving them adequate time to use the restroom—but rather as part of an emergent regime of technological control. The culmination of years of debate about political and civic norm moderation on social media and in public discourse has created a new normative standard in which “innocent until proven guilty” is now viewed as an oppressive and antiquated relic. As the new unelected masters of public discourse, tech giants like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, have been encouraged to execute summary punishments of users for mere accusations of racism or “disinformation.”

Amazon’s enormous power in the global economy and ubiquitous presence in the U.S. supply chain and cloud computing sectors allows the company to take the power of surveillance and cancellation even further. Unlike purely social media companies like X (formerly known as Twitter), Amazon’s suite of smart home gadgets and services gives it a direct physical presence inside of people’s homes. That means that when Amazon wades into cultural issues, or decides to punish people based on offensive speech, its political values are mapped onto objects and processes used in the real world.

In Jackson’s case, in order to regain access to things he had already paid for, he was forced to submit the surveillance video from his home to Amazon to prove his innocence. Somehow, in the new cloud-based networked world these corporations are building for us, the solution to every problem always involves individuals handing over more of their private data.

Debates over censorship, free speech and its limits typically revolve around social media use. But Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, suggested to Tablet that Jackson’s case shared a similar architecture to conversations around content moderation. Companies can choose not to allow certain forms of speech, but in doing so they can no longer be treated as neutral platforms. Tsukayama argues that social media users are offered a recourse, even if the process is stacked against them. “If [Amazon] is going to look at customer behavior as being part of the terms of service,” she said, “they [should] make that clear and set up a process that’s perhaps not unlike what we see at Facebook, YouTube or others who deal with content takedown.”

But, of course, we now know that millions of social media users had their accounts censored or banned without explanation or recourse for posts, including many that were classified as “disinformation” at the time of the alleged offense but contained statements that authorities later acknowledged as true. In that light, placing more trust in a content moderation model seems like a dangerous gamble. It could also lead to even more surveillance online as companies like Amazon claim a need to monitor their customers’ every move so they can judge them “fairly.”

Like many digital technologies, the smart home offers connectivity at a steep price—it makes individuals passive subjects of the products that surround them, including the things they own. Few of us have any real understanding of the “terms of service” on the devices and services that we rely on. Consider how streaming services replaced physical media and how the arrival of smartphones, with all their wonders, also meant that the owners of such phones became incapable of replacing their own batteries, SIM cards, and physical storage. If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.

O’Keefe’s new organization seems to be doing just fine.

Project Veritas Is Dead. Cause Of Death? Pushing Out James O’Keefe.

Project Veritas Suspends All Operations Amid Devastating Layoffs and Fundraising Struggles.

Project Veritas, the conservative organization founded by James O’Keefe, suspended all operations on Wednesday after another round of layoffs, Mediaite has learned.

According to a letter titled “Reduction in Force” that was sent to Project Veritas staffers by HR director Jennifer Kiyak on Wednesday, the organization is putting all operations on pause amidst severe financial woes.

“In the interest of preserving the possible future existence of Project Veritas we need to put operations on pause and, as communicated since the Spring, another Reduction in Force (“RIF”) is necessary,” Kiyak wrote.

Six staffers were laid off from the embattled organization this week, sources said, including all remaining journalists and one development associate. One former Project Veritas staffer said just 11 people remain on the non-profit’s payroll, including CEO Hannah Giles.

Kiyak wrote in the letter that the group cannot “carry the present staff count any longer” and reminded those being laid off of their nondisclosure agreements.

O’Keefe, a right-wing activist who gained fame and notoriety for his sting operations against liberal groups, launched Project Veritas in 2010. He left the organization earlier this year amid allegations of improper spending of funds on personal luxuries. He was replaced by Giles as CEO, who has overseen the rapid decline of the once well-funded group that has in recent months struggled with layoffs, the resignations of board members, and fundraising struggles.

Earlier this month, Mediaite reported on an internal meeting during which Giles said the organization was “bankrupt.”

One of the journalists let go in the bloodletting on Wednesday is Bobby Harr, a former lead investigative reporter with Project Veritas. Harr told Mediaite he was “confused” when he was officially laid off on a phone call with Giles and Kiyak Wednesday afternoon – because he had already been let go from the organization last month.

“I was confused by this as my job was actually cut during the first round of layoffs while I was on medical leave,” he said. “I was locked out of my work phone and laptop as of that day and my paychecks stopped.”

Christian Hartsock, the former chief investigative journalist at Project Veritas who was laid off in August, said he was shocked to learn the organization was still running.

“I have no idea what ‘operations’ there are to suspend,” Hartsock told Mediaite.

Giles, he said, “canned the entire production staff of a production company, and the entire journalist leadership staff of a journalism company over a month ago. So what exact ‘operations’ has she been continuing with remaining donor money — given for the sole purpose of journalism production — for the past month?”

Harr said the collapse of Project Veritas has not come as a surprise given the events of recent weeks.

“Suspending operations is one of those things that we all knew was coming after the mass layoffs occurred, but still cut like a knife when it officially happened,” Harr said. “Lack of funding and poor management amplified the damage that James O’Keefe already did to the organization prior to the days of Hannah Giles, who then delivered the final blow.”

O’Keefe’s attorney Jeffrey Lichtman told Mediaite in a statement: “It appears that in the few months since Project Veritas ousted James, it continued to spend money at the same rate, blowing through the many millions of dollars James had previously raised for it — despite PV having no new sources of fundraising. This is highly suspect and we would welcome a full audit of PV’s finances to learn where that money was actually spent.”

Harr expressed disappointment with the mismanagement of the organization he spent more than three years working for.

“I was provided no severance pay,” he said. “The organization used to thrive and prosper. It’s truly sad to see what can happen to great opportunities with a surplus of resources when the wrong people are in power.”

It’s No Accident The Southern Border Is Collapsing, It’s Intentional.

A clip of comedian Louis C.K. on the Joe Rogan show has been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) this week in which he goes on and on about how opening up the southern border would be a good thing because Americans shouldn’t have such a high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, how poor people in other countries just want what Americans have, and how it’s not fair that we have so much. “It shouldn’t be so great here,” he says. So open the border and let them pour in.

It’s possible he’s joking, that it’s just a comedy bit he’s practicing. That’s what my friend Inez Stepman thinks. Get liberals to nod along in agreement and then expose the consequences of such an insane idea. You can judge for yourself:

I don’t think it comes off as a joke but as an almost perfect distillation of globalist liberalism. Louis C.K. cannot fathom why Americans should have a say about who comes into their country and who does not. He clearly has no real allegiance to his country or countrymen, and is actually embarrassed by their prosperity — and presumably his own as well.

There is nothing special about America, according to this view, and no reason the rest of the world should not enjoy her ill-gotten riches. Opening the border is the least we could do for the cause of justice.

Whether it’s a joke or not, the substance of what Louis C.K. articulates is the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It’s what the mainstream left actually believes — and the Biden administration has been actively working to accomplish at the southern border.

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Judge Denies Injunction Against the ATF’s Pistol Brace Rule

North Dakota District Judge Daniel L. Hovland sided with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) over the regulation of firearms equipped with pistol-stabilizing devices.

The Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition, Inc. v. Garland was a lawsuit filed by the Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition (FRAC) and 24 state attorney generals challenging the ATF’s final rule against pistol-stabilizing devices. The case made similar arguments as presented in three Texas cases involving the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), Gun Owners of America (GOA), and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). All three gun rights organizations obtained preliminary injunctions for their members against the ATF regulations, and a panel of three judges from the Fifth Circuit of Appeals also ruled against the rule.

Unlike the Texas Courts, the George W. Bush-appointed judge ruled that the ATF was well within its rights to pass regulations on pistols equipped with stabilizing devices. He stated that he was unpersuaded by the Fifth Circuit’s decision. He said he tended to agree with the Circuit Court judge that dissented from the majority decision.

To get a preliminary injunction, the Judge must find that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of the case.

Judge Hovland found that FRAC and co-plaintiffs were not likely to succeed in Court. This decision does not mean that the plaintiffs will ultimately fail. It just means that the plaintiffs didn’t prove their likelihood of a court victory.

The Judge rejected that the ATF rule violated the Second Amendment. He reasoned that “uniquely dangerous weapons, including short-barreled rifles, are not protected by the Second Amendment.” Judge Hovland stated that the Second Amendment does not protect “weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.” He ignored that there are more SBRs in circulation than stun guns, and the courts have ruled there are enough stun guns to be considered “in common use.”

The Judge also claimed that since pistol braces are not firearms, there are no Second Amendment protections. Judge Hovland compared pistol braces to suppressors, which he claims are accessories. That flies in the face of the ATF’s own determination.

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⇑When Russian commies realized socialism was bankrupt ⇑

⇓When American commies are too stupid to know socialism is bankrupt⇓

Just What Chicago Needs, Government-Owned Grocery Stores.

Luther, fear not, the era of government-run grocery stores may not be as dead and buried as it seems. The city of Chicago — already doing such a terrific job on handling crime, poverty, homelessness, and unemployment — is exploring the possibility of establishing municipally owned grocery stores.

City officials contend that a city-run grocery store would be better because they wouldn’t have to worry about making money. And Mayor Brandon Johnson is enthusiastically embracing the idea:

The City of Chicago is in the early stages of planning a city-owned grocery store in a neighborhood with limited access to fresh food, Mayor Brandon Johnson announced Wednesday.

The city is working with Economic Security Project, a national non-profit organization, on a feasibility study to create a roadmap toward opening the store. At least six grocery stores, including four Walmart locations,  have closed on Chicago’s South and West sides over the past two years, the city said.

“All Chicagoans deserve to live near convenient, accordable, healthy grocery options,” Johnson said in a statement. “We know access to grocery stores is already a challenge for many residents, especially on the South and West sides . . . I am proud to work alongside partners to take this step in envisioning what a municipally owned grocery store in Chicago could look like.”

Now, no doubt Chicago’s city-run grocery stores would have the same service, efficiency, and quality that Chicago residents have come to expect from the local government of a city ranked 149th in its financial stability, 67th in its education system, 71st in its health-care system, 80th in its public safety, 129th in the quality of its economy, or, credit where it’s due, 37th in its infrastructure and pollution. (That’s out of 149 U.S. cities.)

Call me crazy, but I think if you had safe streets and no shoplifting and petty theft, grocery stores could thrive in any neighborhood, because people have to eat. The good news is that so far this year, murder is down in Chicago, with “only”435 people killed from the beginning of the year to September 10, compared to 485 people in the same time period last year. The bad news is that overall, major crimes are up 30 percent from the same period last year. Motor-vehicle theft has nearly doubled from last year.

Who knows, maybe in a few years, we’ll see some Chicagoans marveling at the variety of products available in grocery stories the way Boris Yeltsin did.

Markey, Ocasio-Cortez ask Biden to create Civilian Climate Corps by executive order

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), two of Congress’ most vocal proponents for aggressive climate action, on Monday called for President Biden to establish a Civilian Climate Corps.

The CCC had been a key element in early versions of the Build Back Better Act, the sweeping environmental and infrastructure bill. It was not ultimately included in the slimmed down Inflation Reduction Act, which was nonetheless the largest climate bill in U.S. history.

Biden was a vocal backer of the Climate Corps early in his presidency, comparing it to the Civilian Conservation Corps introduced during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The original legislation called for $10 billion to launch the new program.

In the letter, timed to the 30th anniversary of the bill that created Americorps, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey cited polling indicating the idea has more than 60 percent support. The two have also reintroduced a bill to establish a corps legislatively, although the measure will almost certainly not be given a vote in the Republican-majority House.

“A central coordinating body, overseen by the White House, will be essential to create a successful and cohesive Civilian Climate Corps,” they wrote. “Through interagency collaboration, as well as coordination with state climate corps, other state entities, and local non-profit organizations, your Administration can realize the vision of a Civilian Climate Corps that establishes a unified front in the face of climate change — one that looks like America, serves America, and puts good-paying union jobs within reach for more young adults.”

The letter is also signed by members of Democratic congressional leadership like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

Also on Monday, a coalition of more than 50 progressive and environmentalist groups sent a separate letter calling on Biden to establish the CCC, citing its popularity among younger voters in particular.

“While previous Executive Orders and legislation under your administration demonstrate tremendous progress toward meeting our Paris climate goals and your campaign promises, this summer has made clear that we must be as ambitious as possible in tackling the great crisis of our time,” they wrote.

“We encourage your administration to create a Civilian Climate Corps through existing authorities, with existing climate funding, that can coordinate across relevant federal agencies.”

Vanderbilt professor: Climate change stories ‘cater to the white consciousness.’

A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”

Teresa Goddu  whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.

Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”

Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”

“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand […] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”

Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.

“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”

According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”

“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”

Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.

Navy Puts The Kibosh On Digital Recruiting Program After Discovering Enlistees Aren’t Into Drag Queens

The U.S. Navy confirmed on Tuesday it has discontinued an online recruiting initiative featuring an enlisted drag queen that was aimed at bringing new sailors into the service.

In May, The Daily Caller revealed that the Navy brought on Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley — an active-duty drag queen who goes by the stage name Harpy Daniels and identifies as non-binary — to be a “Navy Digital Ambassador.” The Digital Ambassador Pilot Program, which ran from October 2022 to March 2023, was reportedly “designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” for military recruitment.

In a letter sent to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday, Erik Raven, the under secretary of the Navy, confirmed that the branch’s Digital Ambassador Pilot Program “will not be continued.”

“The Navy learned lessons from the pilot program that will inform our digital engagement and outreach going forward,” Raven wrote. “Our digital outreach efforts will maintain the important distinction between Sailors’ official activities and their personal lives.”

Tuberville — who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee — previously sent a letter to Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, in May, demanding to know the identities of the officers tasked with funding and promoting drag queen shows aboard naval vessels. The letter was sent the same day the Alabama senator and his Republican colleagues submitted a separate communique to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on the branch’s embrace of Daniels and whether Navy leadership is encouraging its “digital ambassadors” and public affairs personnel to use TikTok — which the Pentagon banned its members from using on government-issued devices — “on their personal devices” in order to skirt the agency’s prohibition.

In his Tuesday letter to Tuberville, Raven claimed the Navy followed existing guidelines restricting the use of TikTok and that while some sailors partaking in the digital ambassador program “had [a] personal social media presence on TikTok,” the branch did not issue government devices for purposes of participating in the venture. Raven further contended the branch will “continue to communicate” to its members the “national security risks associated with their use of TikTok on personal devices.”

The Navy’s embrace of Daniels — which generated backlash among many military veterans — comes amid the branch’s failure to meet existing recruiting targets. On Thursday, acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti confirmed that the Navy is expected to miss its fiscal year 2023 recruiting goals by roughly 7,000 sailors. The revelation came days after the Air Force announced it would miss its “active-duty recruiting goals for the first time since 1999.”

The U.S. Army and Coast Guard are also expected to miss their respective fiscal year 2023 recruiting targets.

Grisham responds to backlash, ruling blocking her order

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham had to know that she’d get pushback with her declaration of a “public health emergency” regarding violent crime in Albuquerque and the subsequent order banning the lawful carry of firearms there.

I mean, it’s a gun order. There’s literally no way that she could be oblivious to the fact that a lot of people weren’t going to like it.

However, Grisham got a lot more than she likely bargained for.

I mean, members of her own party pushed back. Then, on top of everything, a court issued a restraining order stopping enforcement of the rule.

But Grisham isn’t taking her lumps and learning from them. No, she’s trying to push back.

The governor told “GMA3” earlier Wednesday she has the “courage” to take a stand against gun violence in response to backlash over her emergency public health order.

“Everyone is terrified of the backlash for all of these political reactions,” Lujan Grisham told Eva Pilgrim on “GMA3” Wednesday. “None of those individuals or groups focused on the actual injuries or deaths of the public.”

“They aren’t dealing with this as the crisis that it is,” she continued.…

“How would you feel in a city or a community if people had handguns in their belts, on parks, near schools, on public trails, at the grocery store?” Lujan Grisham told “GMA3.” “It’s outrageous and it must stop. And I will keep doing everything that’s based in science and fact and public safety efforts to clean up our cities to make this the safest state in America. And I will not stop until that’s done.”

The thing is, it’s not the bad guys walking around openly carrying. Criminals never open carry so far as I’ve seen.

If this is what Grisham is pushing then it’s about theater, not safety. It’s about giving the illusion of making things better. What’s more, she knows it.

Of course, much of this is about responding to the pushback to her order.

She also had this to say following the restraining order being issued.

“As governor, I see the pain of families who lost their loved ones to gun violence every single day, and I will never stop fighting to prevent other families from enduring these tragedies,” Lujan Grisham said in the written statement.

“Over the past four days, I’ve seen more attention on resolving the crisis of gun violence than I have in the past four years,” she said.

No, she hasn’t.

What she’s seen is her entire party–at least those who spoke out–calling her out for this blatantly unconstitutional action. Everyone has been telling her that she can’t do what she’s tried to do and now a federal court has done the same.

Grisham’s problem is that she can’t see beyond her own partisan blinders. She can’t comprehend that there might possibly be ways to address violent crime in cities like Albuquerque that don’t involve restricting people’s rights.

Which is funny, because this whole “public health crisis” isn’t just about restricting guns. Among other things, it calls for state police to go to Albuquerque to help crack down on violent crime in the city. It actually does do a few things that might well help all on its own, and they’re far less controversial than trying to unilaterally restrict someone’s basic, constitutionally protected rights.

Then again, so many anti-gun Democrats can’t think beyond gun control for solutions to such issues.

And that’s a problem since gun control doesn’t really solve those issues.