Here’s the new site.

Here’s the email I sent out this morning through Ghost. I am pretty sure you don’t have to do anything even paying subscribers. It will all just switch over.

I gotta get out of here man

Hello. I am leaving Substack and switching over to another newsletter platform called Ghost which you are looking at right now. Ideally this won't change anything for you the subscribers in any way. At least that is what they tell me. If something does seem wrong on your end let me know. All of the old posts were ported over here as well and some of them may look janky here and there. Ghost requires a bit more technical know-how and I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Hope I don't completely eat shit and fuck up my means of making a living!

I suppose the savvy move in terms of marketing would be to flail around melodramatically and try to turn this into a whole fucking thing to generate publicity for myself for like one half day but I cannot emphasize strongly enough how little I want to take part in never mind be the subject of one single more conversation about "free speech" on platforms and cancel culture or whatever. Substack can do whatever they want I suppose. I've certainly shared my thoughts on how they handle things with them over the years regularly and sometimes they have listened and sometimes they have not. In any case it is no longer my problem.

I know a lot of you have decided you didn't want to pay for a Substack account any more and I completely understand that. Perhaps you'll come back. For what it's worth Ghost is a non-profit and open source and not funded by VC tech guys who want to make the line to go up forever. Could be that there are things about Ghost that fucking suck that I will find out soon but I'll deal with that as it comes.

Here's a link (that I think should work?) for 25% off a paid subscription.

I sometimes think it's a little unfair that Substack has become synonymous with transphobic and anti-vax and reactionary shit because there are hundreds or maybe thousands of people doing very good work on there that get drowned out. Nevertheless here we are.

That's what we were hoping to push back against the past year or so with our collective work at Discontents. I don't think it moved the needle unfortunately.

They were also good to me personally over the past four years and I do appreciate that.

Despite thinking about it constantly I don't have a logical and airtight argument about regulation of content on platforms or whether or not there's any means of ethical posting. I guess for a while now it's just felt like a bummer to be on there. The vibes as they say are off.

All that said it's important to keep in mind that what we're talking about here is a guy using a different email company to send out his sad little emails.

I hope you'll continue reading either way. Thank you as always for your years of support it means the world to me.

Hello. How was your weekend?

Personally I spent a lot of time reflecting on this:

Also this:

And also this:

Remember how proud we all were of healthcare workers there for a while? It was a whole thing. Clapping for them and shit. Big sappy TV ads thanking them. As we enter what may be another surge (?) I thought it might be worth checking in with one of the people who was “on the frontlines” over the past two years to remind ourselves how much it fucking sucks to die from Covid and what those workers went through trying to save us. Our man today is an ICU nurse in San Diego.

“When the whole unit was all Covid patients, we would have iPads at almost every bedside,” he said. “You would hear this chorus of families talking. It would be like: Uncle, I watched the Raiders last night. I was rooting for them for you. Or: Dad, don’t worry, your grandson is learning to ride a bike. All these little snippets. It’s like … fuck.”

We talked about the difficulty of building a wall inside so you don’t have to carry so many deaths around with you, public health policy and what the fuck Leana Wen’s deal is, whether or not having loved ones there when you are dying makes a difference, and some other stuff.

“We really do see very sick patients,” he said. “Some get better. But this just felt like every patient fucking died. I think you have to find a way to put it in a box. Put that box away. You have to check in with your people. It’s important to me that I have close friends I went through this with, but you gotta be able to function. If you let every death affect you the same way you would get burned out so, so quickly. It’s not like you don’t care. I care a lot.”

What kind of nurse are you and where do you work? 

I’m a staff nurse in the surgical ICU. Our patient population is pretty broad. We take care of trauma patients, patients who need neurosurgical interventions, patients with cardiac surgery, and other critical needs. 

There are two level one trauma centers about two blocks from each other in San Diego. We serve a large urban population. We get a lot of patients from the border. East of San Diego is very rural and there aren’t a lot of hospitals with the capacity or technology, so we get patients transferred from there too. 

How bad did you get hit by Covid?

Our worst surge was the winter of 2021, after Christmas through February. During that surge we ran out of rooms to put patients, so we converted the whole unit to negative pressure. So your whole twelve hour shift, when every patient in the unit had Covid, you’d wear an N95 the entire time, a face shield. You’d spend twelve hours proning patients. It was fucking crazy. 

Read more

Today’s main feature is a dispatch by Andrew Quemere from an anti-carceral protest this week in Massachusetts against the proposed construction of a massive and expensive new women’s prison. Quemere writes the newsletter The Mass. Dump Dispatch which you should subscribe to if you care about public records and government transparency.

Bill Shaner reported on the burgeoning movement for Hell World back in September.

If you appreciate what you get out of this newsletter you know what to do.

Subscribe now

In late February in the early days of the Russian attack on Ukraine I spoke with a friend who had been holed up in her apartment not too far outside of Kyiv.

We spoke again this morning and I’m happy to report she and her friends and loved ones are alive and staying busy. She caught me up on how the past few weeks have been.

It sounds like you are in ok spirits?

Yeah absolutely. We are like in the war spirit right now. 

You’re still at home?

So it’s now the 49th day and we are still here.  

It’s relatively safe where you are?

Right now it’s much better than it was before. Before in March we had a lot of rockets flying around us. It was very loud. Nothing happened exactly in my village, but other places we could see a lot of damage from the rockets. 

We see all these towns and cities that have been destroyed. Do you ever wonder why a certain place and not here?

Because I am close to Kyiv. The towns that you saw like Bucha and the others are a little bit farther. They were on the way for Russian soldiers to Kyiv. Our army stopped them and didn’t let them so close to where we are right now. 

You did some traveling around though?

Not just traveling. We are delivering food, medication, to people that lost their houses, or still don't have electricity or water. Yesterday we delivered probably, I couldn’t even say, 100 gallons of water to the villages because they don’t have anything. 

Is that what these photos are?

Yes that was from yesterday. 

Along the way you saw destroyed tanks and buildings?

Yes. War is much more scary than just the pictures. It’s what people are telling us. It’s very sensitive. You have to try not to cry in front of the people who lost their houses. Most of the people who stayed in the Bucha area are old. Sixties, seventies, they don’t have a lot of good health. And they don’t have income at all. And even if they did have income their stores are closed because of no electricity. Only from our help, not just my help but the people all around, humanitarians from other cities, other countries, they save their lives. 

What my group did, in our small community where we live, there are fifteen of us. We asked for donations, and we brought food and toothbrushes, toilet paper. Plus we cook warm food in the house. We did it only with our own money. Nothing from the government, only our neighbors. One of our vehicles was so old, we fit so many things inside, it was so heavy it was broken in the woods. We lost one vehicle. We offloaded the water and food all this stuff. 

Doing this gives you a purpose I imagine.

Absolutely. You remember the girls that were living in my salon? They were living there until April 4, but they went back to their apartment. So now I have more time to do other things around. Plus we have the space right now. My salon is now the place to meet and make small bags for different people. We put one meal, one soup, we made, I will tell you, probably 100 portions. Then we open the door of our vehicles. Borodynka is the city where we went. There were destroyed buildings. It looks even much scarier than Bucha. But about Bucha everybody knows. I don’t know why with Borodynka people aren’t talking about it too much. 

Bucha is near you? What did you see and hear about that happened there?

About twenty minutes. Everything that was in the public was true. It’s only probably 10% what you see. Such terrible things. People can’t even show the pictures. Yesterday I met a woman who lost her son. She walked outside her small house and I saw her with a black scarf on her hat. She said to me I lost my son. She said the Russian soldiers shot her son in front of her eyes then left the house. This woman and her neighbors buried her son right in the front yard of the house. No other chances. Then Ukrainians came back and removed the body and today they will have the normal funeral ceremony. 

How are you getting along with your neighbors? 

I feel like it’s real family. In our first talk I told you it’s amazing how people try to help one another. They don’t even ask they just come and do everything what they could. 

Did you ever think it would still be going on this long?

In the beginning I thought it would be over in one month. Now I see it will be months and months. I hope not years. 

Do people feel like you want to fight to the death or are people becoming sick of it and just wanting it to be over? 

Of course people are sick of the war, but we don’t have another choice but to fight up to the end. If we will not save our independence it’s not worth being alive. These people, how they have broken the houses, how they have stolen everything.  

Once you live through this do you ever get to be the same again?

Nobody will be the same again. Even in a safer place here it’s still the war for all of us. All of the masks on the people are melted right now. You can see their real faces. You couldn’t save the mask with the war, you have to have your real face. Not all of the faces are very pleasant I’ll be honest with you. Some people I trusted and have the sympathy for I don’t even say hi to them. And the opposite too. 

What do you mean?

Because of what they have done. They just showed their real faces. I don’t even want to tell about this. For example there were situations where humanitarian help was stolen and sold. It’s probably only one in a thousand situations, but even that… 

Some people become the best version of themselves and some become the worst. 

Absolutely. It’s more for men. Who before the war they say oh, I am such macho, I can do this, I can do that. Now they have been sitting somewhere far from the war far away and don’t even offer material help like money.

Other people who emigrated they keep sending the money so we can help other people. It’s what we need most right now.

Our stores here are open. We can buy food but we don’t have income. Me and my husband are working. 

You’re still cutting hair?

No, I am the cosmetologist. I do facials, all the beauty stuff, and my husband he does the massage, more like a chiropractor. 

I imagine it’s like a nice brief respite to be able to go get a facial or whatever. And also for you to be able to stay busy. A little bit of normalcy. 

Yes. Coming up today I have a woman on my schedule for a facial. You have no idea how much I am enjoying my real job right now. I can do something with my hands. And make somebody’s beauty. And you see the result right away. 

A little pocket of beauty inside of the ugly. I’m glad you’re still there. Stay safe. 

Thank you for remembering us.

Today April 14 is Ruination Day the date of the Black Sunday storm of 1935 that gave the Dust Bowl its name. It’s also the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination and the sinking of the Titanic.

A couple years back I wrote on the infamous date in here.

When the dust storm finally subsided birds and rabbits and cattle were found all over strangled by the dust. People contracted a “dust pneumonia” that led to their “coughing up mud.” Estimates say that anywhere from a few hundred to seven thousand people would die from it. Hundreds of thousands would flee the region for more forgiving terrain.

“It's like Welch invented the opposite of a holiday, like a time and date that functions as a black hole sucking in awful events,” my friend the great writer Ryan Walsh said.

No new women’s prison — and no old one either

The state wants to build a $50 million women’s prison, but activists are fighting back — and you can help

by Andrew Quemere

MCI-Framingham, built in 1877, is the country’s oldest women’s prison still in operation. And it is, by all accounts, a wretched shithole where no one — woman or otherwise — should be forced to live. The latest report from the state’s Office of Health and Human Services found an endless string of code violations, including 84 repeat violations. Inspectors probably would have found more if they had been able to access the entire facility, but the issues they did document are appalling. Problems with plumbing, sinks with no hot water, lights not functioning, dusty and broken fans, rust.

And don’t forget the mold — moldy showers that prison officials didn’t bother cleaning after the previous inspection more than a year earlier. Mold is ever present at MCI-Framingham. In 2020, the State Auditor’s Office released a report concluding that the Department of Correction was failing to provide medical care to prisoners in a timely manner. The auditors weren’t looking for mold, but they found it anyway — their report noted that some medical files at the women’s prison “were quarantined and could not be obtained for review” due to an infestation.

The state’s answer to these problems is the construction of a new prison with a price tag of $50 million.

But activists have a rallying cry: “No new women’s prison!”

And many of them want to close the old one too. Their other slogan: “Free her!”

Dozens of people showed up to the Framingham Village Green last Saturday to oppose the construction project. They want the state legislature to pass a bill that would establish a moratorium on the design and construction of new jails and prisons, blocking the project and others like it from even being considered for five years.

“[I]t’s important that people realize that this bill isn’t going to prevent anyone from improving the [existing] prisons,” said Stephanie Deeley, a co-chair of the MetroWest Commission on the Status of Women who helped organize the rally. “We know that MCI-Framingham and Walpole are both in terrible condition. So you can’t blame this bill for terrible conditions. … And we in the commission support this 100 percent.”

Mallory Hanora also helped organize the rally. She is the executive director of Families for Justice as Healing, which has been the loudest voice against the proposal. The group “is led by incarcerated women, formerly incarcerated women, and women with incarcerated loved ones” and is on a mission “to end the incarceration of women and girls,” according to its website.

“Five women in their seventies [are] inside Framingham. Unconscionable,” Hanora said. “Women with significant illnesses and conditions like dementia incarcerated right down the street. Moms, grandmas, friends of ours that we just miss and love. And we just want them home, and we just need them home.”

MCI-Framingham’s population has dropped sharply in recent years, from 561 in 2015 to 166 in 2021, according to annual reports from the DOC. That 70 percent decrease is an opportunity for prison abolitionists like Hanora to make their vision a reality.

“[W]e should have a conversation with every single one of [those women] and say, ‘What do you want? What do you need? What did you need that you didn’t get? And how can you come home? Who can come home right now?’ That’s the question that we continue to ask,” Hanora said.

Fiona Hoffer, a volunteer organizer with Building Up People Not Prisons, said the state could put the $50 million to better uses.

“[E]ven if you don’t [know someone who is incarcerated], maybe you know what it’s like — because we all do — to live in a community where we are not investing in what we need to be investing in. We all know what it’s like to live in an America where we see people sharing GoFundMes for necessary healthcare,” she said.

Hoffer said she recently saw a Facebook post by a teacher asking for calculators. “This is horrible. We don’t need to live that way. There are enough resources for everyone. And we need to take them back from where they have been stolen.”

It costs taxpayers $162,260 a year to incarcerate each woman at MCI-Framingham, according to the DOC’s 2020 annual report.

For that amount of money, Hanora said, “we could pay [an incarcerated woman’s] mortgage, she could go to Harvard, that’s a guaranteed income for her. She could do whatever she wants with her life, and she should have that opportunity.”

The moratorium bill (H.1905) is currently being reviewed by the state legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary and has a reporting deadline of April 15 — this Friday.

Only a few committee members have signed on to the bill so far. Representative Chyna Tyler, the House committee vice chair, introduced the bill. Representatives Brandy Fluker Oakley and Jay D. Livingstone are cosponsors. Senators Sonia Chang-Díaz and Jamie Eldridge, the Senate chair, are cosponsors of a Senate version of the bill (S.2030).

(The Senate bill is currently before the Senate Ways and Means Committee. If the House version is not approved by the Judiciary Committee, Ways and Means could still send the other version to the Senate for a vote.)

Eric P. Lesser, the Judiciary Committee’s Senate vice chair, and Michael S. Day, the House chair, did not respond to requests for comment.

On Saturday, volunteers asked Framingham residents to call or email their senator, Karen Spilka. Although Spilka is not on the Judiciary Committee, she is president of the Senate and her support could help move the bill forward. Spilka’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Supporters of the moratorium bill can also contact members of the Judiciary Committee, their own legislators if they are not on the committee, and House Leader Ronald Mariano.

Justice As Healing

Families for Justice as Healing was founded by Andrea C. James while she served a two-year sentence for wire fraud in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

“During my [daily five-mile] jogs, I would listen to my commissary-purchased radio and would hear that many media outlets were finally discussing mass incarceration. But they were missing the point,” James explained in a 2017 piece for Time magazine. “What I wasn’t hearing was about the real issues that incarcerated women — the fastest-growing segment of the prison population — face every single day. So, my sisters inside and I decided that we wanted to do something about [it].”

Hanora, the group director, explained the concept of justice as healing this way: “[I]t speaks to the total illegitimacy of the criminal legal system. It’s not a place of truth or justice. It’s not a place of healing. It’s not a place of repair. … So justice as healing is a totally different framework of asking, first of all, what do people need? What do people need to live their lives in a healthy way in [a] community? What do people need to thrive? … And without punishment, without cages, without cops, without courts — but with transformative justice.”

The resources that are invested in incarceration could instead go toward services that uplift people, she explained.

“People need housing, and people need to access that housing regardless of what’s going on in their life. So housing for all people. Housing for people who are in recovery, housing for people who are using drugs, housing for people that is dignified and safe for women and their children,” she said.

She continued: “And we also need money for economic development to fund people’s small and cooperative businesses. We need money for childcare. We need money for schooling and education. So there’s so much that we could do with [$50 million]. And importantly, rather than a top-down decision-making process about that money, we need to be talking to people who are living in the most directly affected communities who should be leading the process of distributing those resources.”

Families for Justice as Healing has been instrumental in impeding the new women’s prison project. The DOC and Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, which works with state agencies on construction projects and building upkeep, withdrew two calls for contractors — one in 2019 and another in 2020 — after the group protested the secretive processes the agencies used, according to DigBoston.

The DOC and DCAMM soon issued a third call for bids. According to the “Study and Design of a Correctional Center for Women” document, the state wants to build a women’s prison in Norfolk for between $20 and $40 million.

Families for Justice as Healing believes the project will cost $50 million, like the original 2019 proposal stated, or more.

“We anticipate it [will] be more,” Hanora said. “And I should say that the state’s argument is that that $50 million is actually more economical than repairing Framingham. … [P]eople are all of a sudden concerned about [the condition of] a place that has been a toxic hellhole for decades. Framingham has never been a safe place to live for women. A prison never is.”

Hanora is fed up with fighting against the continuous prison proposals.

“[P]art of the reason why we want this moratorium bill is because we don’t want to play this kind of defense for five years,” she said. “[S]o much of our time is consumed by having to fight back against this project and projects like it that we just need a pause. We need breathing room. We need to shift our focus and really be able to have the time and energy and the resources to grow what alternatives look like rather than trying to fight back against a totally unpopular, unnecessary, immoral, and irresponsible prison project.”

A “Trauma-Informed” Prison or a Trauma Factory?

The state’s proposal says the new women’s prison “must utilize the principles of trauma-informed design to create welcoming and therapeutic spaces. Landscape design should be incorporated to play a role in breaking down the institutional feeling of the correctional center by generating an outdoor environment of healing and peace in a safe and inspiring way. The Designer is expected to capitalize on an effective process to create a correctional center that contributes to the health, wellbeing, and rehabilitation of its occupants.”

But the very concept of a “trauma-informed” prison is an incoherent insult to one’s intelligence — a change of scenery doesn’t change the nature of the institution.

“The women in Massachusetts just need a little help, not to be locked away like animals. No ‘trauma-informed’ prison alternative to Framingham can accomplish these goals,” said Lauren P., an acquaintance who spent three months at MCI-Framingham in 2016 (and asked that I not use her full last name). “If we have the money to waste on a bigger, shinier cage, we have the money to invest in communities, education, and hope.”

Lauren had not been convicted of any crime during her time at the prison. She was arrested on drug-distribution charges after overdosing, then her bail was revoked when she was arrested for driving with a revoked license. As a result, she was sent to the prison’s Awaiting Trial Unit for 90 days.

After she was released, she eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser possession charge to avoid the $10,000 expense of a trial and the possibility of a mandatory-minimum sentence that would have sent her back. The Middlesex District Attorney’s Office did not seek any prison time as part of the plea deal, and she was sentenced to three years of probation. She was released from probation early on good behavior.

“The dehumanization process starts upon entry at MCI-Framingham,” Lauren said.

She remembers being strip searched upon her arrival. “Then they remove everything you need to function, in my case contact lenses,” she said. “I spent half my time at MCI-Framingham blind and with no recourse to enable me to see, besides going through the process of seeing a doctor weeks later and waiting weeks for glasses.”

A prison official asked Lauren’s cellmate to help her walk to and from the meal hall without falling.

“My cellmate was kind, but I could not read, get around, or recognize faces for at least five weeks,” she said. “Most women in prison are kind. She did not need to be there, nor did I.”

Lauren said many of the women she encountered at MCI-Framingham were, like her, there for charges related to their drug problems.

“They weren’t bad people. In fact, we supported each other more than anyone on the staff did,” she said. “The trauma, dehumanization, and long-term effects on the recovery of anyone is devastating. I still have nightmares and the walls still close in.”

Health problems were common. Lauren developed gastrointestinal issues after contracting Giardiasis, a disease caused by a parasite. A cellmate caught MRSA, a contagious staph infection, and she said prison staff did nothing to prevent it from spreading.

During her 90-day incarceration, Lauren gained 40 pounds. “The food they serve is all carbs and sugar, and when there is meat, the chicken floats in an unnatural way. Diabetes is a common problem for women who have been there for a long time,” she said.

Recently, Lauren was in an emergency room being treated for COVID-19 when she ran into another former prisoner. “She was energetic, spritely, and funny when I knew her,” Lauren said. “She had tried to cut carbs in Framingham and ended up getting kidney failure.” 

The staff could be cruel. She saw a prison officer send a woman to solitary confinement for having a seizure.

“When I walked out those doors, there’s nothing that I wanted more than to leave them open behind me,” Lauren said. “The thing we all talked about [in MCI-Framingham] wasn’t crime or violence. It was how much we wanted to see our families. Mothers sharing photos of their children around the table. All these women want is to be with their families again.”

She said the plan to build a new prison is “ludicrous.”

“How many supportive programs, halfway houses, jobs programs, and the staff to run them could we fund with [$50 million]?”

Lauren did not even see the worst MCI-Framingham has to offer.

In 2020, the Department of Justice released a report detailing the results of a two-year investigation that found the DOC responded to mental-health crises with solitary confinement instead of care. The treatment was so torturous that it exposed prisoners to serious danger of self-harm and violated the Constitution.

DOC put prisoners in crisis on a “mental-health watch” that “functions, in all but name, as restrictive housing,” according to the report. Prisoners were confined to a cell for 23 or more hours a day, were kept there longer than necessary, and were provided with little help from mental-health clinicians.

“A prisoner on mental health watch is housed alone and has no interactions with other prisoners unless he yells through the crack in his cell door,” the report states.

The prisoners were supposed to be given 15-minute checks or constant one-to-one supervision, but “both officers and prisoners consistently [said] that officers do not interact with prisoners while observing them.”

The report documented a number of horrifying incidents at prisons throughout the state, including three at MCI-Framingham.

One woman was kept on mental-health watch even though staff knew it was causing her to feel suicidal, and she eventually tried to kill herself. “This incident occurred on her ninth consecutive day of mental health watch, where she remained for another 19 days,” the report states.

Another woman repeatedly harmed herself “while on mental health watch because the isolated conditions exacerbate her auditory hallucinations. … Between September and November 2018 at MCI-Framingham, she was treated at an outside hospital five times, all for injuries to herself while on mental health watch.”

In the worst incident at MCI-Framingham documented in the report, a transgender man killed himself while on mental-health watch after repeated suicide attempts. DOC staff “knew that restrictive housing settings exacerbated [his] mental health issues, yet confined him to mental health watch, where he felt particularly isolated, and also the Restrictive Housing Unit, causing him to decompensate, for the month prior to his suicide.”

“[The DOC] has cooperated with our investigation from the beginning and we look forward to working with state prison authorities to implement reform measures,” then US Attorney Andrew E. Lelling said when the report was issued.

But it’s not clear what, if anything, has changed since then. And even if anything has changed, the fact that sickening systemic abuses like these were happening at all and that it took a federal investigation for the DOC to act speaks volumes.

A DOC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

“Free Miss Angie”

“I’m a little emotional. I’m not gonna lie,” Shanita Jefferson, another rally attendee, told the crowd on Saturday.

Her mother, Angela Jefferson — known to supporters as Miss Angie — was convicted of first-degree murder and received a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Jefferson, 20 years old at the time, confronted her boyfriend, 21-year-old Anthony Deas, at the Dorchester home of another woman and stabbed him in the chest in June 1990, according to the Boston Globe. Last year, Eva Jellison, Jefferson’s lawyer, filed a motion in Suffolk Superior Court arguing that Jefferson did not receive a fair trial and either deserved a new trial or a reduction of her conviction to manslaughter.

This year, during a January 31 hearing before Judge Janet Sanders, Jefferson’s first-degree murder conviction was reduced to second-degree murder, according to Renee Algarin, deputy press secretary for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.

The reduced conviction made Jefferson eligible for parole.

“[My mother] is right over there in MCI-Framingham,” Shanita Jefferson said. “She has been for 31 years. Right now, we have hope. You know, we’re getting ready for her parole hearing that’s happening on Tuesday.”

She continued: “I have to say that without these people, all of you people, none of that would be possible. I literally grew up expecting my mom to die in jail. I’m from Dorchester. I said, as a little girl, I’m going to move to Framingham so that I can be close to my mom. Now, I live in Weymouth. I have my own child. And we still are back and forth here in Framingham, 31 years later — but with hope.”

Shanita Jefferson was three years old when her mother was sent to prison. Her father was murdered in Brockton a few months later. She told the Boston Herald last year that Angela Jefferson has been an “outstanding mother” and earned an associate’s degree, became a certified cosmetologist, and became a dog trainer while in prison.

“I always say she didn’t even get a first chance,” Jefferson told the Globe last year. “She made one mistake that ruined her life. And there was no consideration of who she truly was.”

But now, after decades, Jefferson’s mother has that chance.

“I mean, it’s just, it’s incredible what the power of the people can actually do. Because I never had a clue that it was this strong,” Jefferson said on Saturday. “And this is free. This is not anything that I had to sign up for. I just had to be a part of the movement, and I’m so happy that I did it.”

“We believe that she’s coming home,” Mallory Hanora said. “Miss Angie has mentored so many of the women that are in Families for Justice as Healing that did time with her. She was like a beacon of hope and love and energy and compassion to fellow women that were incarcerated, and she’s a perfect example of a grandmother who needs to come right home right now. And then women need to keep coming home right behind her.”

Angela Jefferson’s initial parole hearing was held on Tuesday.

“Miss Jefferson focused on expressing remorse and discussing her rehabilitative efforts at the hearing,” said Jellison, her lawyer.

Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden declined to comment on whether he supports Jefferson’s bid for parole.

Braving the Elements

On Saturday, it began to rain as the rally concluded, but some of the more dedicated activists gathered in a church parking lot where they prepared to canvas neighborhoods and inform Framingham residents of the prison proposal and the moratorium bill.

Fiona Hoffer, who had spoken at the rally, worked with Sage Chase-Dempsey and Ashley “Smashley” to explain the do’s and don’ts of canvassing and hand out packets of information sealed in plastic bags to protect them from the elements. After the huddle, the canvassers split off into pairs and headed out to different parts of the city.

Hoffer joined up with Chase-Dempsey, another volunteer organizer with People Not Prisons. As Hoffer drove them to their destination, they wondered if they would encounter any MCI-Framingham employees. They discussed the high suicide rate for prison officers and said they hoped the guards could find less traumatizing, more fulfilling work than caging their fellow human beings.

Hoffer drove past the Temple Street Stop & Shop and turned left onto Salem End Road. By the time she parked on a side street, the sun was out and the rain had stopped. She and Chase-Dempsey applied sunscreen as they psyched themselves up to knock on doors and speak with strangers.

They talked with a few people who seemed receptive and left flyers for those who weren’t home. But things did not go as well as they had hoped. They didn’t get chewed out by any corrections officers or pro-carceral creeps — but the weather did not cooperate.

Soon after they started, it began raining again. Then it began to pour. They heard thunder directly above them. It even started to hail. Hoffer was wearing white sneakers, which were very much not waterproof, but Chase-Dempsey had thought ahead and was wearing rain boots. Still, both were drenched, and they ended their canvassing early.

But they agreed that it wasn’t a total waste of time.

“There’s several people who didn’t know about it before who know about the new prison now and the moratorium,” Hoffer said. “Several people that hadn’t joined us before got trained on how to [canvas]. So I’d say it was a success. You always wish that rain wouldn’t get in your way, but sometimes it does, and you just keep going. Because this isn’t the only time we’re going to be door knocking.”

“I also think, comparing this week to last week, we had greater turnout,” Chase-Dempsey said. “And when you add up everyone who was out talking, … it’s kind of a large amount of people.”

“And one person knowing that this is happening and getting emboldened to change the situation is better than none. And it does add up,” Hoffer said.

Elizabeth Whalley had more luck canvassing — she found a resident willing to put up a yard sign.

Another canvasser thought she convinced two people to call Karen Spilka. “That’s not nothing,” she told her fellow volunteers back in the church parking lot.

Some of the activists intended to return on Sunday for more canvassing, and some planned on calling residents in the group’s phone bank during the week.

Speaking of which, have you called yet?

Seriously, have you called yet? These folks braved a thunderstorm and even got pelted by hail on a Saturday just to talk with a handful of people and pass out a few dozen flyers — spending a few minutes calling some state legislators is the least you can do. And if you’re phone shy, you can always send an email. Massachusetts deserves better than a $50 million house of horrors.

Look up your own legislators and reach out to them, whether they are on the Judiciary Committee or not. Reach out to Senate President Karen Spilka and House Leader Ronald Mariano. Tell them you support H.1905 and don’t want the state to build a new women’s prison — now or ever. And do it right away, because the reporting deadline for the bill is tomorrow.

UPDATE (4/15/2022): On Friday, the Judiciary Committee voted to extend the House moratorium bill’s deadline to June 30, according to Senator Jamie Eldridge’s office.

“I fully oppose the construction of any new prisons or jails in Massachusetts. Our state has one of the lowest rates of incarcerations in the country, and the prison population has declined drastically, which is why I was so encouraged that Governor [Charlie] Baker announced the closure of the MCI-Cedar Junction (Walpole) prison this month,” Eldridge said in a statement. “I support the moratorium on building new prisons in the Commonwealth, and … the committee is continuing to review [the moratorium bill].”

The extension means activists have more time to rally support for the bill and lobby committee members.

If you haven’t read enough about what an awful place MCI-Framingham is, check out the two lengthy DigBoston articles on the subject by Shelby Grebbin and Isha Marathe, one from 2020 and the other from 2021.

Andrew Quemere writes the newsletter The Mass. Dump Dispatch. You can follow him on Twitter @andrewqmr.

The Mass. Dump Dispatch

A newsletter about public records in Massachusetts — about the fight to keep state and local government transparent.

By Andrew Quemere

Greg Ginn said he would press the Black Flag record himself.

And just like that I have exhausted my capacity for analogizing Mrs Dalloway to hardcore punk bands. Uh… they both spend all day wondering how the party is going to go later that night and thinking about a girl they kissed one time (?)

That decision of Ginn’s is the lynchpin for the story I’m sharing here today. It comes from a great new book called Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records written by veteran music journalist Jim Ruland which you can purchase here if you like.

Music fans will of course know SST Records as the one time home to legendary bands like Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden and many others.

As the marketing materials I’m copying from here say SST “was the most popular indie label by the mid-80s–until a tsunami of legal jeopardy, financial peril, and dysfunctional management brought the empire tumbling down. Throughout this investigative deep-dive, Ruland leads readers through SST’s tumultuous history and epic catalog.”

As most of you will know Hell World turns into a music publication from time to time in part because it’s good for both myself and the readers to take a break from staring into the hole in the earth and in part because I spent the bulk of my early career as a music journalist and I occasionally miss it. Very occasionally.

Speaking of two of those aforementioned SST bands you may enjoy these pieces if you never read them that I wrote after the passing of Mark Lanegan and Chris Cornell.

Welcome to Hell World

As much as I craved some temporary oblivion

“Our Next guests are a Seattle band, and tonight they’re making their network TV debut with us,” David Letterman says. “This right here is their newest album, it’s entitled ‘Sweet Oblivion…

Read more

4 years ago · 34 likes · Luke O'Neil

Welcome to Hell World

When you can sing like that it would be criminal not to

It’s the anniversary of Chris Cornell’s passing so I thought I’d revisit this piece I wrote in 2017. This newsletter isn’t usually about music but it also kind of is. Please subscribe. Chris Cornell and the band he rode to fame, Soundgarden, were always something of a dichotomy. Birthed from the Seattle punk scene, but clothed in the trappings of metal …

Read more

5 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Luke O'Neil

Both are behind the paywall but you can grab a nice little discount here.

Get 20% off forever

Subscribe today for a year of Hell World and you’ll also get a six months paid subscription to Foreign Exchanges by Derek Davidson and Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman included. Please reply and let me know and I’ll set it up.

Real quick before we get to the book excerpt though:

I somehow just found a page on my Substack dashboard that is maybe new or maybe I just never saw that has a couple dozen messages from people that I guess the software prompts you to write when you don’t want to or can’t pay for this anymore. I’m sorry I never responded because I had no idea they were there and most of them are so nice! There’s a lot of I love reading this but I am simply broke right now and I hope to be back. Some are like this shit is too depressing I can’t handle it. Others are like I don’t want to give any of my money to Substack anymore.

Stay tuned for some news on that front soon.

Ok here’s the book thing. Stick around for a bit more from me down below.

SST vs. Bomp! The end of the ’70s

1

Greg Ginn was frustrated.

The Hermosa Beach guitarist had spent the better part of two years pouring his heart and soul into his band—a noisy quartet called Panic!—and had nothing to shor it. Panic! was faster than the Stooges and heavier than Black Sabbath. The band had its own gear, rehearsed in its own practice space, and wrote its own material, which was part of the problem because venues wouldn’t book new bands that played original music. From the clubs in Hollywood to the bars along Pacific Coast Highway, bookers were looking for musicians who could play Top 40 hits. “I thought of music as kind of a scam,” Ginn said.

Ginn didn’t get into music until he checked out the action at the Lighthouse—a nightclub down the street from his parents’ house that happened to be the most important venue for jazz music on the West Coast. Ginn played guitar during breaks from his studies at UCLA, but after seeing the Ramones play at the Roxy Theatre in the summer of ’76, all he wanted to do was make his own noise.

Ginn started writing songs—both the music and the lyrics. It took him a while to find people who were as serious about being in a band as he was. His younger brother Raymond struggled through the songs on bass guitar, but he wasn’t a musician. He had his own ambitions as a visual artist and christened himself with the pen name Raymond Pettibon. Ginn’s abrasive yet commanding style developed from not being able to rely on other players. “I was doing songs that could be held down by lead guitar,” Ginn said.

Ginn found his singer, Keith Morris, at the local record store. Morris knew a rock and roll drummer named Bryan Migdol, the younger brother of a close friend who’d died in a car accident. They started jamming in Ginn’s garage. Things began to click when Gary McDaniel of Würm took over on bass. McDaniel, who would change his name to Chuck Dukowski, let them use his band’s practice space in an abandoned bathhouse on the Strand dubbed “the Würmhole.”

The Hermosa Beach police decided this was too much excitement and kicked everyone out. Ginn rented a space in a strip mall on Aviation Boulevard, not far from one of the bait and tackle shops Morris’s father owned and operated. The band went back to work, conducting marathon practice sessions that lasted late into the night and occasionally attracted crowds of friends. When the calendar flipped from 1977 to 1978, Panic! still hadn’t played a single show, which was becoming a source of frustration. 

Panic! participated in the burgeoning punk scene that had taken root in Hollywood and was spreading to every corner of Southern California. Morris even made the drive up to San Francisco to see Johnny Rotten detonate the Sex Pistols at Winterland. Despite the band’s engagement in the scene, Panic! Was spurned by Hollywood punks. “They considered us to be nothing more than beach rats,” Morris said. “If they were competing in the Sid Vicious lookalike contest, we were competing in the Peter Frampton lookalike contest. That didn’t sit well with a lot of those people.”

The band’s appearance defied fashion-conscious Hollywood insiders and helped define its own aesthetic. The members of Panic! didn’t dress up to go to punk rock shows or to play gigs. They wore the same clothes on stage as they wore when rehearsing or going to work. This translated to a lack of opportunities in Hollywood. “There was a kind of anti-suburban vibe in the early LA punk culture,” Dukowski said. Ginn believed the best way to get people to take his band seriously was to put out a record. Panic! couldn’t get a gig because it didn’t have a record, but how do you get a record deal when you’ve never played a show?

Glen “Spot” Lockett, a recent transplant to Hermosa Beach who worked at the Garden of Eden vegetarian restaurant where Ginn frequently ate lunch, offered a solution. “I was writing for the Easy Reader and doing music reviews,” Spot said, “and one day he was eating there and he kind of called me out on one of the reviews I wrote. So we got into a discussion, talking about this stuff.”

Ginn and Spot learned they had a great deal in common. They were passionate guitar players, and both of their fathers were military aviators who’d flown combat missions overseas during World War II. Ginn’s father, Regis, served as a navigator with the US Eighth Army Air Corps in England. Spot’s father was a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen: the first Black aviators of the US Army Air Corps.

Spot suggested that Ginn record at Media Art, an art complex with a darkroom where Spot developed his photos and a recording studio where he recently started working as a sound engineer. Best of all, it was right down the street. Ginn said he would look into it. Spot didn’t know how serious Ginn was, but he would soon find out.

Panic! assembled at the studio late one night (when the rates were cheapest) and recorded eight songs—all originals. Because the songs were so short, it wasn’t nearly enough material for an album, but more than enough for an EP. The record was engineered by Dave Tarling with assistance from Spot. It was the first of many projects Spot would have a hand in making with Ginn. Panic! sent a tape of the recording to Bomp! Records and received a favorable response: Greg Shaw was interested in signing the band and offered to put out the EP.

Things were finally moving forward, but the band was in a near-constant state of flux. Bryan Migdol parted company with Panic!, and Ginn put an ad in the paper for a new drummer. Roberto “Robo” Valverde responded and immediately started rehearsing. In September, Bomp! sent Panic! a recording contract for the eight songs. Ginn crossed off four of them—“No Values,” “White Minority,” “I Don’t Care,” and “Gimme Gimme Gimme”—and in an accompanying letter indicated his preference for “Nervous Breakdown” to appear on Side A with “Fix Me,” “I’ve Had It,” and “Wasted” on the flip side. Ginn wasn’t worried about the brevity of the songs. “I was rebelling against these people who try to establish their manhood by composing prog rock opuses,” Ginn said. “My goal was to create a concise listening experience.”

Ginn promised to send photographs to help promote the record, which he did the following month. Ginn’s correspondence with Shaw was typed on stationery for SST Electronics, his mail-order company, and signed “Gregory Ginn.”

More changes were afoot, this time involving the band’s name. Pettibon caught wind of another band with the same handle. “I remember telling my brother, ‘There’s already this band named Panic from England,’” Pettibon said. “‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to have the same name as some other band.’”

This created an opportunity to rename the band. Morris recalled Ginn wanted to call the band Rope, which he wasn’t too thrilled about. Pettibon had another idea. He suggested Black Flag, which conjured up a number of associations: It was both a symbol of anarchy and of piracy on the high seas. Black Flag was also the name of a popular insecticide. But it was Pettibon’s simple but innovative logo that sealed the deal: four staggered vertical bars forming a stylized flag rippling in the wind; individually, they resembled the pistons of an engine. Ginn took it and ran with it.

With a new drummer, a new name, and a new logo, Black Flag was ready to go, but Bomp! was slow to respond. Pettibon suspected Shaw wasn’t in favor of the name change. After months of delays, Ginn considered putting out the EP himself, but he didn’t know anything about making records. He did, however, know of another band in Hermosa Beach—a pop-infused garage band called the Last—and he decided to give them a call.

2

The early punk rock records made in Los Angeles were few and far between, pebbles cast into an ocean of corporate-controlled rock and roll, but even the smallest stone creates a ripple.

In July 1977, the Germs released what many regard as the first LA punk record. The band recorded the single “Forming” in Pat Smear’s garage on a reel‑to‑reel recorder. Chris Ashford, a friend of the band, volunteered to help the Germs put out the record. As the night manager at Peaches Records and Tapes on Hollywood Boulevard, Ashford knew a lot of people in—or at least adjacent to—the music industry, but he didn’t know anything about pressing a record. Through his experience at Peaches, Ashford knew that Rhino Records released novelty and compilation records under its own imprint, so he went to Richard Foos at Rhino for advice. Foos recommended that Ashford take his project to Monarch Record Manufacturing Company on West Jefferson Boulevard in West LA.

Ashford was in business. He chose the name What Records? for his label and pressed one thousand copies of the Germs’ debut at Monarch. “Forming” was backed with a live recording of “Sex Boy” at the Roxy Theatre from the night the Germs auditioned for the Battle of the Bands sequence in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. “We never had any idea that it would ever amount to anything,” Ashford said. “We got onto this thing the universe put us into and it kind of took off.”

Through his contacts at Peaches, Ashford got the record to new fanzines, like Slash and Flipside, cropping up around town. Despite the crude quality of both the recording and the musicianship—or perhaps because of it—“Forming” caught the attention of the underground punk press. The bemused review by Claude Bessy (a.k.a. Kickboy Face) in Slash helped spread the word about this noisy, rambunctious band. “First of the hard-core LA groups to come up with a single, the Germs have recorded (I think that’s the word) one of the most mind-boggling songs I’ve ever heard. They take monotony to new heights and push the absurdity factor further than almost any other group.”

Not everyone liked the record. “We gave the single to Back Door Man,” Ashford recalled, “and they hated it. We just took that as, ‘This is great. We’re getting bad reviews here, bad reviews there. It’s selling the record.’” Back Door Man was an influential rock zine run by Phast Phreddie Patterson and Don Waller out of Torrance in LA’s South Bay. Back Door Man’s writers took a hard stance against soft rock and roll with screeds from the first generation of LA music writers. Although Back Door Man wasn’t a punk zine, the editors covered it with cautious enthusiasm and even included a centerfold poster of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols in the March/April 1978 issue.

Despite its mixed reviews, Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records took an interest in “Forming.” Bomp! had its roots in the spirited underground music zine Who Put the Bomp, which he and his wife Suzy founded in 1970. Who Put the Bomp helped launch the writing careers of Lester Bangs of San Diego, Greil Marcus of San Francisco, and Richard Meltzer of New York, and it ran until November 1979.

Who Put the Bomp reflected Greg and Suzy Shaw’s passion for rock and roll: how it was made, played, written about, and celebrated. They sought to start a conversation about the music they loved that had little to do with access to the musicians or even the industry itself. The Shaws viewed punk as the latest manifestation of ’60s garage rock and psychedelic music, and they were early champions of the LA punk scene. Bomp! distributed the Germs’ debut single along with the Dils’ “I Hate the Rich,” which was issued in September 1977. Both singles hit Record World’s New Wave Chart. Although What? would go on to release records by other early LA punk bands like the Eyes, the Skulls, and the Controllers, Ashford didn’t regard it as a proper business. He had been inspired to make records the way others were motivated to pick up instruments, take photographs, or create zines. It was his way of participating in the scene. The notion of creating a commercial enterprise came after the fact, if it came at all.

Still, that a crudely recorded single by a band many didn’t take all that seriously could catch the attention of fringe elements of the media and register a minor blip in the music industry demonstrates how ready LA was to shake up the status quo. For Ashford, it was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. The Masque, the practice and performance space in the basement of the Pussycat Theatre that served as ground zero for the early LA punk scene, was right next door to Peaches.

Hyperbolic descriptions of punk rock shows in Slash lent a mirage-like quality to the scene, another overhyped manifestation of the LA dream machine. But watching the Germs play at the Masque and then seeing the band’s single in the bins at Peaches alongside records by the Sex Pistols and the Ramones galvanized scores of people to start their own bands and create their own labels. The release of “Forming” in the summer of ’77 sent a message that a local band could make a record and be recognized for it—and you didn’t even have to know how to play your instruments.

As bands proliferated like bacteria in a petri dish, it didn’t take long for indie labels to start popping up around LA. Dangerhouse Records and Posh Boy Records issued releases the following year. Slash got into the game with the first EP from Slash Records: Lexicon Devil, also by the Germs. In 1977, Bomp! released Destroy All Music, the first EP by the Weirdos, who were arguably LA’s most popular punk rock band at the time.

These labels bolstered the fractious scene and proved that punk rock was more than fucked‑up kids with blue hair playing dress‑up with the dregs of Hollywood’s faded grandeur. They provided the oxygen the scene needed to breathe and enabled bands to break through the barriers imposed by the record industry. Without these labels, there’d be scores of bands like the Screamers who flamed out without leaving a proper, band-sanctioned release as vinyl proof of its white-hot existence. These labels operated for reasons that had nothing to do with the rock and roll fantasy of getting rich and famous: to make art, to document the scene, to create something new and in doing so prove that anyone could do it.

3

It was a bad time for rock and roll. If the government wanted to ban kids from forming rock bands, it couldn’t have gone about it any more effectively than the music industry did in the 1970s.

After World War II forced big bands to downsize, rhythm and blues began to flourish. While New York and Memphis both claim to be the cradle of rock and roll, no city had more record labels than LA, where R&B, gospel, and Latin bands played to packed houses, often sharing the same stage.

In postwar America, the radio disc jockeys who brought these new sounds to the public had an enormous influence. In cities big and small, the most popular DJs were bona fide celebrities. They were personalities who made regular appearances at dance halls and nightclubs and were frequent guests on local television shows. In the song-based music industry, if a DJ liked your single, they’d play it on the radio and listeners would buy it. Sometimes these DJs had a hand in getting bands booked for a showcase or a matinee performance sponsored by the station. In this culture, hundreds of bands thrived in cities across the country, and the best of them broke through to the national stage. It was a flawed system that often exploited songwriters, but with a mix of luck, pluck, talent, and perseverance, bands could make the leap from garages to the airwaves.

Then everything changed. When the dust settled after the payola scandal—the practice of rewarding disc jockeys with cash, gifts, and even royalties in exchange for airplay—radio stations took the power away from their DJs and started negotiating with the labels themselves. The record labels worked with program managers to ensure that only predetermined “hits” were broadcast. People in suits dictated the songs that would get the most airplay and inserted commercials at regular intervals, which also generated income from corporations that wanted to reach their target audiences. Gone were the days of DJs spinning whatever records they wanted, whenever they wanted, for as long as they wanted. Welcome to corporate rock and roll.

Naturally, the commercialization of radio favored national touring acts over regional bands. It no longer mattered what was happening in New York, Chicago, Miami, or Los Angeles. All across the country, everyone was listening to the same thing. This environment eschewed risks and put a premium on appealing to the greatest number of people, dumbing down the music and paving the way for easy listening, a genre of music so innocuous that no one could possibly be offended by it.

As the public’s listening habits changed, the venues that featured live music acted accordingly. They stopped booking local bands that played original music. For musicians in the ’70s, there were plenty of opportunities to perform—as long as they played other people’s music. For artists with something to say, there were far fewer outlets for creative expression than there had been just a decade before.

This shift was felt in the large sprawling exurbs of major American cities. Bars and nightclub owners who featured live music insisted their acts play covers of Top 40 hits. Sometimes a booker would give a local band a chance, only to get cold feet when the audience complained. It was a frustrating time for musicians, and the South Bay was an archetype of this dynamic.

The South Bay wasn’t your typical suburb but a densely packed network of sub-cities that stretched from Los Angeles International Airport to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Suburbs, by definition, are urban-adjacent bedroom communities where people live but don’t work. The post-suburban “edge cities” of the South Bay were entirely self-contained, with jobs, schools, stores, industry, and clusters of single-family residences all packed together. The suburbs of the twentieth century were defined by movement from place to place, but in post-suburban America you could find everything you needed within a few square miles. Nowhere was this truer than in LA, a city without a center and with more single-family residences than anywhere else in the country.

The southwest corner of Los Angeles County sits on parts of Santa Monica Bay, the Pacific Ocean, and San Pedro Bay, and is home to the Port of Los Angeles, which is still the busiest port in the country. After World War II, the South Bay became headquarters for the burgeoning aerospace industry with its many links to the military and defense. The Beach Cities were also the playground of world-class surfers like Dewey Weber and Greg Noll and played an important role in the popularization of skateboarding and roller skating. Yet this same region was once home to a dynamic music scene.

In the ’60s, the South Bay was known for its jazz clubs, coffee shops, and bars where one could hear the latest sounds in bebop, folk, and psychedelic rock. But by the mid-1970s, this was no longer the case. The sounds coming out of the clubs were as uniform as those on the FM dial. This was especially frustrating for songwriters and musicians in the South Bay because of its proximity to Hollywood, the heart of the music business. These were dark days for musicians who wanted to play their own material. Either you fell in line or found something else do. For Joe Nolte, neither option was acceptable.

4

Joe Nolte wrote songs, sang, and played guitar with his brothers Mike and David in a Hermosa Beach band called the Last. They played an unclassifiable blend of neo-psychedelic pop and up‑tempo garage rock to create a sound as all-American as the Beach Boys—who, despite revolutionizing surf music, were actually from Hawthorne, several miles inland. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to play. “It was a closed circuit,” Joe explained. “There was no way in, especially if you wanted to play rock and roll because you’d be dead. We’d let this rebellious music roll over and die with a whimper.”

Joe was no stranger to the Hollywood punk experiment. After reading about New York bands like Television, Blondie, and the Ramones, he sought out this new genre of music and liked what he found. Like Shaw, he saw punk as rock and roll’s best hope, and he was determined to be part of it. Joe and his brothers regularly attended shows at the Masque and badgered the proprietor, Brendan Mullen, to book them, but they weren’t having much luck.

Joe decided to do what other independent-minded bands were doing and put out a record. He didn’t have to look to Hollywood for insight; he found inspiration much closer to home. Back Door Man was now putting out records through its own imprint. Earlier that year Back Door Man had released a seven-inch single of “He’s a Rebel” backed with “You’re So Strange” by the Zippers, a power pop band with big hooks and a jagged sound whose members were from all over the South Bay.

When it was time to make a record, Joe turned to his bandmate Vitus Mataré, who played keyboards and the flute but also had a passion for recording. Mataré’s mother was a classical harpsichordist who had a two-track recorder and a pair of microphones. Mataré had recorded the Last once before: a song called “Light Another Candle” at Randy Neece’s house in Brentwood. Neece, an acquaintance of Mataré’s, had performed in the Young Americans, an internationally acclaimed show choir whose image was as wholesome as its name. Neece was always encouraging Mataré and his bandmates to write and record their own music.

Mataré asked Neece to sing on a song and help them record. Neece agreed, but when they realized they needed another guitar, they turned for help to Neece’s neighbor, who happened to be the Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh. Not only did Walsh lend them a Les Paul guitar and a combo amp for the recording, but he also offered to run a mic cable from his house to Neece’s. “The coolest dude ever,” Mataré recalled.

In the fall of 1977, the members of the Last gathered at the band’s practice space at Scream Studios in the Valley to record the backing tracks. Then they convened at Mataré’s mother’s house in Brentwood, where he’d set up a home recording studio in the pool house. The Last recorded eight songs before Joe’s amp caught fire. “His amp shorted out and was smoldering,” Mataré said. “I carried it out to the backyard and dropped it into my mother’s pool.”

For its first single, the Last settled on “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” backed with the Clash-inspired “Bombing of London.” Mataré consulted with Neece, who suggested they get the recordings mastered by Hank Waring at Quad Teck and pressed at Alberti Record Manufacturing Company in Monterey Park. Mataré took heed of Neece’s advice, and on November 7, 1977, three hundred copies of the Last’s debut single were ready to be picked up. They called the label Backlash.

Joe dropped off personalized copies of “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” with Kim Fowley, who organized a series of New Wave Nights at the Whisky; Mullen at the Masque; Patterson and Waller at Back Door Man; and Shaw at Bomp! Records. Lisa Fancher, who worked at Bomp! and went on to start Frontier Records, loved the single: “I still think it’s one of the greatest LA songs ever,” Fancher said. “It gives you a feeling like the Modern Lovers when they sing about Massachusetts. ‘She Don’t Know Why I’m Here’ is just an absolute classic.”

The Nolte brothers had written enough songs for an LP, and they hoped their single would catch the eye of someone willing to put it out. Joe and David were at the Masque one night when a triumvirate of tastemakers—Patterson, Mullen, and Shaw—told Joe they’d listened to the record and liked it. In his enthusiasm, Shaw expressed interest in releasing it. Joe was overjoyed. “It was the culmination of what I wanted for so long,” he said. “It was insane!” David was a bit more circumspect: “Greg might have said, ‘Yeah, I want to put out a record by you,’ but I think he said that to a lot of people.”

The Last’s fusion of ’60s garage rock and ’70s pop was perfectly suited to the label’s psychedelic sensibilities. On paper, Bomp! was the ideal home for the Last, but Shaw lacked the financial capital to follow through with his plans. “I think that was his nature,” David said, “not just with us, but with everybody he worked with back then. That was part of what he did. Just Greg being Greg.”

Shaw wanted to re‑press “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” on the Bomp! label and bought out all of the remaining copies of the single. What had seemed like a demonstration of the label’s good intentions struck the band as a bad move once Bomp! began to drag its feet. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, the Last was playing more shows but didn’t have any records to sell.

In June, the Last went back to Alberti to press the band’s second release: “Every Summer Day,” an homage to the Beach Boys that name-checks Hermosa Beach in the lyrics. The Last’s new record helped get the band noticed around Los Angeles, including in its hometown. In the fall of 1978, David answered the phone and Ginn was on the line. He wanted to talk to Joe about the Last, but Joe was at work, so he spoke with David instead.

David had heard about Panic! from Bill Stevenson, his classmate at Mira Costa High School. Although Bill was a grade lower than David, they were enrolled in the same Spanish class. Stevenson was an avid fisherman, and he knew the band’s singer through the Hermosa Tackle Box, Morris’s father’s shop on Pier Avenue, which Stevenson had been going to since he was eight years old. “Within a few weeks of Bill telling me about Panic!,” David said, “Greg called the house to ask about the Last and how we put out our record. He said he had a thing going with Greg Shaw and was maybe going to do a deal with him to put out the Nervous Breakdown EP.”

David recalled they had a good conversation, and he shared his band’s experiences with Ginn: gigs they’d played, record stores that carried their music, and—most importantly—where they pressed their records. Although Ginn hadn’t completely soured on Shaw, he was exploring his options. “He was starting to get the sense that Shaw was promising the sky and couldn’t deliver,” David said.

The news that there was another punk rock band in town came as a welcome surprise to Joe, who believed Hermosa Beach’s “entire punk rock contingency could fit in my car.” David was trying to do something about that by turning his classmate on to punk rock. He made Stevenson tapes and finally had a breakthrough with Devo’s “Mongoloid.” David took Ginn up on his offer to come by the practice space on Aviation, and Stevenson and the Nolte brothers joined in on a jam session that included the Devo song, KISS’s “Love Gun,” and riffs that would eventually coalesce into Black Flag’s “Room 13.” For Stevenson, it was an earth-shattering experience: “That was when I realized, ‘Oh, you don’t have to play covers, you can play your own things that you come up with?’”

Over the course of this impromptu session, Greg Ginn and Joe Nolte discovered they had a lot in common. They shared their frustrations with the lack of opportunities to play in LA and the limitations imposed by the music industry, which now included Bomp! Both musicians were concerned that it was taking too long for the label to put out their records. “We needed to capitalize on the momentum of ‘She Don’t Know Why I’m Here’ by getting a record out,” Joe recalled. “Panic! is supposed to have their record released on Bomp! That didn’t come out either. So we’re both in a holding pattern. We’re frustrated as hell.”

Joe wasn’t going to let his opportunity to put out a record with Bomp! Slip away. He was determined to hold Shaw’s feet to the fire, even if it meant some unpleasantness. His patience was rewarded when Bomp! Records finally released the Last’s debut, L.A. Explosion!, the following year.

Ginn’s situation was different. Black Flag, which still hadn’t played its first show, didn’t have the Last’s track record. In addition, the Last’s pop-infused melodies on songs like “Every Summer Day” were at least palatable to bookers and promoters; Black Flag’s frenzied, ear-bashing chaos was not. In 1978, Black Flag was virtually unknown outside its small circle of friends in the Beach Cities. Joe briefly discussed with Ginn putting Nervous Breakdown out on Backlash. Ultimately, Ginn decided to follow the example of his Hermosa Beach neighbors and do it himself.

This was a crucial step for the growth of the band. It also proved to be a pivotal connection for countless Southern California punk and hardcore bands that followed Black Flag’s example and pressed their own records for decades to come—all thanks to an unlikely string of connections between the Last and Black Flag that went back to a forward-thinking song and dance man named Randy Neece.

Excerpted from CORPORATE ROCK SUCKS: The Rise and Fall of SST Records by Jim Ruland. Copyright © 2022. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Subscribe to Ruland’s newsletter Message from the Underworld here.

You will remember the video of police in Buffalo violently shoving an elderly man to the ground during the protests in the summer of 2020. In a shocking twist an arbiter hired by the city has clear the cops of any wrongdoing.

The Buffalo News reports:

Arbitrator Jeffrey M. Selchick said he found that Officers Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe did not violate Police Department regulations and did not intend to injure Martin Gugino during the protest outside City Hall on June 4, 2020.

Torgalski and McCabe testified before the arbitrator that they were trying to protect themselves and denied that they were trying to hurt Gugino during the protest.

The officers’ use of physical force was “absolutely legitimate,” wrote Selchick, who added that, in his analysis, Gugino was “definitely not an innocent bystander.”

The arbitrator said the officers testified that they were only trying to move Gugino out of their “personal space” and physically keep Gugino away from their weapons.

The arbiter said that the cops were scared the old man was getting close to his gun and also that one of them was scared he might catch Covid from him so the shove was necessary. The one other thing cops do besides lie is get scared. It’s very bad for all of us when either thing happens.

Here’s a good thread on the subject:

Look at this video of cops trying to pull over a driverless car in San Francisco. They don’t know what to do because there’s no one to shoot at or to pull out of the car and beat up. Maybe driverless cars are good after all.

Meanwhile these motherfuckers on Fox are 100% trying to get teachers and/or trans folks (both similarly evil under the “groomer” umbrella now as far as they’re concerned) hurt or killed.

Here’s Media Matters:

Fox News has aired 170 segments featuring discussions about transgender people in the past three weeks, with Fox anchors, hosts, and guests incessantly fear mongering about trans people and spreading dangerous misinformation, including the lie that most trans kids “have been led to where they are by adult predators.”

This shit is going to get a lot worse real fast. Maybe the idea they used to push about arming teachers wasn’t so bad after all. Just for different reasons.

A reader wrote in on how the expiration of the child tax credit payments has impacted his family.

“So I will preface this with my family is middle class and doing okay and there are definitely people doing worse who were affected more,” he started and I certainly understand that impulse to qualify things. I do it myself. Often times when people write to…

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This is probably fine!

How have you all been sleeping? My god I just cannot sleep through an entire night anymore. I don’t know if that’s the bounty of external bad news creeping into my brain and infecting me like a spectral gas when my guard is down or more like a reverse phenomenon with the bad news seeping out of my pores like sweat in the other direction.

Probably just that I’m old as shit now.

Here’s some bad news I just read. Not surprising news necessarily but bad all the same. It turns out that people living in poorer counties died at almost twice the rate of people living in richer ones over the course of the pandemic according to a report by the Poor People’s Campaign.

“Crises do not unfold independent of the conditions from which they arise,” they write. “The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated preexisting social and economic disparities that have long festered in the US. Widespread and unequal distribution of wealth, income and resources prior to the pandemic created the conditions for many of the negative outcomes associated with the virus.”

I’ve said as much over and over again in here like so in this piece about the abuses of temp staffing agencies from February:

…it’s a problem that’s only gotten worse during the pandemic. How many times have I written that exact sentence in here by the way? “The pandemic has only exacerbated things…” Everything that was bad was always bad but now we’ve seen how the bottom can drop even further. We’re on one of those amusement park rides where you stand around waiting for it to plummet and then it does and everyone screams holy shit and then it plummets again.

Anyway outside of the first wave of Covid which pretty much fucked everyone everywhere the subsequent waves hammered counties with lower median incomes. The third wave during the winter of 2020-2021 was especially bad with death rates four and a half times higher in the poorer counties. Not as bas the the Delta variant wave however which was fives times worse.

Not really hard to draw a connection between the concerted push to “get back to normal” from the wealthier political and media classes around that time. By then they had started to figure out that they were all likely safe.

Some other findings from the report include that in the 300 counties with the highest death rates 45% of the population lives below the poverty line.

The hardest hit area in the country was Galax county in Virginia they reported with a staggering 1,134 deaths per 100,000 as compared to the 299 per 100,000 nationally. Median income there is $33,000.

It doesn’t seem to be a story of blue states versus red states either. Or even of vaccination rates. The Bronx in New York was devastated as well. Half of the people there live below the poverty line and they suffered a death rate of 538 per 100,000.

“The neglect of poor and low-wealth people in this country during a pandemic is immoral, shocking and unjust, especially in light of the trillions of dollars that profit-driven entities received,” William Barber the director of the Poor People’s Campaign said of the study.

You can read the rest of it here including an interactive map broken down in detail county by county.

I don’t know though something called the Poor People’s Campaign sounds like they might be biased in one direction or the other. Maybe we shouldn’t trust them.

It feels weird saying this but elsewhere in New York there was actually some very very good news this week with workers at the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voting to unionize. It’s one of the most significant victories for the labor movement in this country in recent memory.

That doesn’t mean the behemoth company is eager to let something like that happen again though. According to documents obtained by Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept the company plans to ban a series of words that pertain to organizing among other things on its forthcoming internal messaging system.

An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon’s working conditions, like “slave labor,” “prison,” and “plantation,” as well as “restrooms” — presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.

The list of banned words is almost hilarious until you remember what they’re actually trying to do here.

What’s your favorite? I’m a “I don’t care” with a “restrooms” rising.

“This is dumb” indeed.

Perhaps feeling the heat from the Amazon victory Starbucks is continuing with its own shitty labor busting tactics. Most recently they fired a union leader in Phoenix named Laila Dalton. More Perfect Union calls the firing “an act of retaliation that caps two months of unrelenting harassment against the 19-year-old shift supervisor.”

They report:

The dismissal comes just one day before the National Labor Relations Board sends union election ballots to workers at Starbucks’ Scottsdale and Mayo location, where Dalton has worked for several years.

According to a notice of separation provided by two district managers, Dalton was fired for recording audio on her phone while performing inventory in the backroom of the store. 

As More Perfect Union has reported, Dalton has been accosted by her managers on multiple occasions; footage of the harsh discipline sessions have repeatedly gone viral and stoked outrage at the company. In March, the NLRB issued a formal complaint against Starbucks for subjecting Dalton to a series of abuses meant to disrupt the union campaign and force her to quit. 

Shaken by these regular reprimands, Dalton had begun recording when working by herself or in close proximity to her managers.

“I’m always expecting it, because I’m harassed every single day,” she told More Perfect Union. “I never know when someone’s going to come harassing me, so I always want to be recording.”

This fucking guy. Do you remember when this guy wanted to be president lol.

Assaulted by the threat of unionization.

I think we all know who we have to call in for one last job here.

Here’s a cool letter I got from my doctor’s office yesterday. Can anyone translate any of this for me?

The best I can make of it is that it says while your physical is supposed to be free under the law it’s not going to be if we actually do anything.

My best option here if I want to avail myself of this generous allowance under the Affordable Care Act without having to pay for it would be if I pass by my doctor in the hallway and she asks how I am doing and I say I am fine and keep walking straight out the door.

They probably have a code to charge for that too to be honest. Drive by wellness check.

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Police lie. Constantly. If there’s any point at all I’ve managed to convey with this newsletter over the years I hope it is at least that. And they could not spread those lies so effectively without the help of the media and in particular local news who — I’m repeating myself here — far too often consider themselves duly sworn deputies in the public relations branch of law enforcement.

Speaking of which you may have seen the latest entry in a long line of police lies about fentanyl. Here are some cops from Orange County, Florida dressed like they’re preparing to land on fucking Mars for the first time after maybe possibly coming into contact with some small amount of the stuff.

I guess dogs aren’t susceptible to it.

(Those guys aren’t to be confused with the cops in Orange County, California who have been embroiled in a massive scandal over their routine mishandling of evidence.)

This whole thing where cops are rushed to the hospital after touching some fentanyl is one of the more easily debunked lies among the many that they like to tell but no matter how many times doctors and scientists and some reporters explain that it is very unlikely to happen this way there will always be a new round of news stories contributing to the panic. That’s because the opposite of what I said about the news media thinking they’re cops also holds true: Cops think they are — and often act as — assignment editors for local news.

They might as well be the way their press releases are passed along without any pushback.

None of which is to say that fentanyl isn’t actually dangerous when used and (I know you know this) anyone out there using right now should be especially careful. It’s just that it quite simply does not attack you like a sentient alien molecule riding on the air from host body to host body as the cops would have us believe.

The reason they want us to believe it does is obvious to anyone reading this but just to lay it out anyway the more dangerous the job of a cop appears and the more that idea is laundered through the media the harder it becomes for people to push back against anything they say or do never mind get anywhere remotely near something like defunding them. After all look at how valiant they are out there risking their lives every day to rid the streets of the scourge of dangerous drugs. For us.

It also provides further justification for destroying the lives of the people they arrest for possession of said drugs. If people like this can use drugs this dangerous they must naturally be inhuman.

Our guest contributor today Zachary Siegel gets a lot more in depth on all this below. Siegel is a writer for Substance a newsletter about drugs and crime which you should check out.

Please consider a paid subscription to help me pay our great cast of contributors. Thanks as always for reading.

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If you missed this one the other day about how everyone’s drinking has been going check it out.

The cops and local news won’t stop lying about fentanyl

by Zachary Siegel

The first news clip I ever saw about a police officer who claimed to have overdosed on fentanyl just by touching it was almost four years ago, in May 2017. The harrowing story went national, then viral, because of course it did. But it started how most of these stories start: in the local news. 

Under the headline, “Traffic Stop Almost Turns Deadly for ELO Officer,” Ohio’s Morning Journal portrayed a cop’s near brush with death after flicking a speck of powder off of his uniform after a routine traffic stop turned into a minor drug bust. A patrolman named Chris Green with the East Liverpool Police Department in Ohio was back at the station with his police buddies, amped up after taking drugs off the street, and giving some poor guys with a bad drug addiction a felony charge in the process. 

Here’s officer Green’s recounting of his “overdose,” dutifully printed by local reporters and reprinted by national outlets:  

“When I got to the scene, he was covered in it [fentanyl]. I patted him down, and that was the only time I didn’t wear gloves. Otherwise, I followed protocol,” Green said. Back at the station, one of Green’s buddies told him that he had something on his uniform. “Yeah, whatever,” Green said, casually dusting it off. Within a few minutes, Green said he “started talking weird. I slowly felt my body shutting down. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t respond. I was in total shock. ‘No way I’m overdosing,’ I thought.”

By this point, the guy they arrested had told the cops he wasn’t feeling well, probably because he was going into withdrawal. That’s what often happens when you arrest somebody with an addiction, they get sick, because they’re suffering from a physical illness that in America is somehow considered both a brain disease and a crime at once.

The reporters then dramatize what happened next: 

“Patrolman Rob Smith grabbed Green as he began to fall to the floor… and the ambulance crew already there for [the arrestee] began working on Green, quickly administering him a dose of the opioid antidote Narcan. Green described how his head felt “like it’s in a vice grip, my heart feels like I got kicked in the chest and my stomach feels like I have a case of the flu. I can’t wrap my head around [why anyone would take the drugs].” 

Green went on to say that these drugs “are not only killing the people willing to shove it into their own veins, now they’re killing people like me and my family.” 

Green’s boss, police chief John Lane, said Green was lucky “the effects” of the drug hit him in the station before he went home.

“If he would have been alone, he would have been dead. That’s how dangerous this stuff is. What if he went home and got it on his family members?” 

“God was surely looking over me,” Green told the reporters. 

Chief Lane then said, “It only takes one granule [of carfentanil] to kill an adult. These people (emphasis mine) have no regard for anybody, not themselves, not the police, not their kids. Their priority is not about anything but that next high.”

Wow, fuck off. These guys so openly loathe people who use drugs.

As I’ve written dozens of times, most recently for a newsletter I co-write called Substance, this whole supposed overdose incident is a chemical, biological, and physical impossibility. But that hasn’t stopped news outlets from keeping the myth alive. 

This week has been a busy one on my particular beat. 

In the last few days a prosecutor in Ohio allegedly overdosed after being “exposed” to a substance in a courtroom, just as cops in Florida had to call a hazmat team after finding fentanyl at a crime scene and they started feeling “dizzy.” 

Days before these two bogus stories ran HBO’s John Oliver did an entire segment about harm reduction, and thoroughly debunked the “horseshit” notion floated by cops and repeated by news outlets everywhere, that fentanyl can kill you just by looking at it. 

To understand how unreal all of this is, just listen to the supposed overdose symptoms of East Liverpool’s Green. He got the wind knocked out of him? His head was in a “vice grip”? He said it felt like he had the flu? 

Sounds real as hell. That type of thing only happens if you’re in withdrawal, not when you’re overdosing. 

Finally, he said he was “in shock,” which is probably the only true thing he said in the whole story. Because police have been told by their bosses and federal authorities for so many years that touching fentanyl will kill them. So here the guy went and touched it, then he got scared and panicked. 

Cops are trained to feel threatened and use force if somebody near them makes any movements. They’re also trained to think fentanyl is as deadly as anthrax. In both cases the most important underlying message of any police training applies: You are in constant danger. 

In reality fentanyl is indeed a potent synthetic opioid, but it only poses any danger to those who inject it, snort it, or smoke it, i.e. people who are buying it on the street and using it to stay well because they have no other choice, because all the pills and heroin are gone and all that’s left is this ungodly garbage cooked up in underground labs. Garbage that does, to be clear, kill tens of thousands of people every year. Just not the cops you see on the news who spent ten seconds in the general vicinity of it. 

In journalism school, my professors told me to watch out for stories that are “too good to check.” Back then, as a naive nerd who wanted to be a Serious Science Writer, I thought that sounded insane. Who wouldn’t double and triple check what they’re told by sources? Especially when those sources are cops, an authority with a history of lying longer than a CVS receipt. 

But it’s true, news outlets really will just say fuck it and run with anything the cops say. 

I’ve studied the anatomy of how these stories go viral, and have co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles that statistically illustrate the role local news and social media play. Analyzing social media shares for one study, we found between 2015 and 2019 that there were 551 news articles containing false information about fentanyl. On Facebook alone, these stories received more than 450,000 shares, reaching an estimated 70 million users. Making matters even worse, we saw that stories that added corrections were viewed significantly less than the original bogus story. We decided to publish all these results for free on a website we created called Changing The Narrative, a project aimed at helping reporters avoid making these kinds of mistakes. 

Without bothering to consult any skeptical chemists or doctors or toxicologists — not even any users — national news outlets like CNN, CBS News, and The Washington Post blasted Chris Green’s story to millions of people. 

Check those links, seriously. There’s no correction on any of them!

Hammering the nail in the coffin — and likely leading to my iminent premature death due to daily onset brain damage via whirlwinds of idiocy — the most listened to podcast, The Daily by the New York Times, had officer Green on the show to talk about how bad the opioid epidemic is in Ohio. What they really meant was how bad it is for cops like him. 

It’s not just the press who spread this impossible unscientific story far and wide over and over again. Politicians can never resist either. Politicians like Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who used the incident to tout how his hawkish drug policies are going to solve the overdose crisis. There were roughly 70,000 overdose deaths in 2017. In 2020, there were more than 100,000 drug poisoning deaths. If Reefer Madness style propaganda were going to do anything to stem the tide, surely we’d have seen some progress by now. 

It’s the year of our lord 2022 and these local news stories that paint cops as valiant heroes who risk their lives fighting the drug war are still being debunked every time they crop up. But Chris Green’s story was debunked all the way back in 2017, mostly by doctors and toxicologists on Twitter who a) know what fentanyl actually is and b) know how the drug actually works. Plenty of drug users also know right off the jump that these overdose stories are fake. If fentanyl was really deadly to the touch or somehow magically defied gravity and lingered in the air, people everywhere would be dropping like flies. And yet, it’s only cops who seem susceptible to fentanyl’s magical properties. 

In 2018, my friend and harm reductionist Chad Sabora even taped himself pouring fentanyl on his bare skin to demonstrate that touching fentanyl is not deadly. 

But bringing facts and science to a viral news story like this is like bringing a super soaker to put out a burning house. These stories go viral because the facts and science don’t matter. What matters is the story, perhaps the singular story that the entire political spectrum of the American mainstream media, which ranges from the right wing all the way to the slightly less right wing, can agree upon, which is this: Cops risk their lives every day to save drug users from addiction. And to save the rest of us from whatever they might do as a result of those addictions. Editors everywhere are more than happy to run with this line simply because it must be true that drugs are bad and cops are good. 

As I wrote in Substance, a story so implausible is widely believed because it fits into already existing and deeply ingrained tropes and stereotypes about drugs in America: 

The fear, the panic, can really only be understood through understanding the racist and dehumanizing history of drug policing. These fentanyl exposure stories are really stories about dehumanization, about courageous heroes and dangerous villains.

Cops are trained to feel threatened, and news stories like these reiterate how dangerous a threat drugs are. Not to drug users mind you, but rather to the brave cops fighting the drug war. The quotes from the Ohio cops in the story above illustrate my point to a tee. The one about drug users having no concern for the lives of anyone else in particular. You see, only dead-inside junky zombies would behave this way. 

But get this. In 2019, a couple years after officer Green went viral and became Super Cop, the citizens of East Liverpool decided they were fed up with his shit, and they sued Green for being a lying, conniving officer of the law, high on power in the way so many abusers are. By 2021, officer Green was no longer employed. He was terminated by the East Liverpool Police Department. 

A public records request revealed that Green had dozens of violations on his record, including “dishonesty, discourteous treatment of the public and gross misconduct.” 

Cops like this lie regularly. They lie about everything. They’re lying to the public when it comes to these stories too.

Zachary Siegel is a freelance journalist covering drug policy and harm reduction. He co-writes the Substance newsletter with Tana Ganeva. His work has also been published in The Nation, The New Republic, Slate, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. 

This essay by a Konstantin Olmezov a young Ukrainian mathematician and poet printed in n+1 is worth your time. To be clear it concerns a lot of talk of suicide. In fact Olmezov himself died by suicide shortly after it was written.

HELLO. My name is Konstantin Olmezov. As of this writing, I am of sound mind and memory, and if you are reading it, most likely I will never write anything again.

Once, a long time ago, when I was first thinking seriously about that which cannot be named on the Russian internet, I started looking for self-help videos. In one such video, a psychologist says that the main thought that drives almost everyone who intends to do this is: “The world owes me and the world has not lived up to my expectations.” I took this idea to heart and realized that, given the situation at the time, such a position was inappropriate—and the problem was solved. I returned to life relatively quickly.

But now, I think exactly this: “The world owes me and the world has not lived up to my expectations.”

The world should strive to correct errors. And it doesn’t. The world should be comprised of thinking, empathetic, and responsible people. And it isn’t. The world should permit creative freedom and freedom of choice. And it constantly takes them away. The world should consider these demands normal. And it considers them excessive.

That which began on February 24 changed certain existential positions within me. It is more than horrible how people who only yesterday seemed to be leading quite mundane lives so easily acquired all the characteristics I’d read about in books. I am afraid our language doesn’t yet have words to reflect the extreme nature of what is happening. It turns out that in order to start resembling characters from books and songs, all you have to do is not read or listen to them; and millions of people are capable of doing this.

Here’s some other news good and bad from around the country.

Usually I like to share songs I like at the end here but I wanted to make an exception today. I have no strong feelings about this guy one way or the other. Obviously 40 something dudes who take punk and heavy music way too seriously are not his target audience. But good god man. Why try singing this?

Today’s thing is about the increase in alcohol related deaths during the pandemic. But first I was reminded yesterday by Mary about the talk that we had about a year ago concerning the high cost of living with epilepsy in America with or without insurance.

I just went back and read it and it remains infuriating. Check it out here if you never read it.

Having suffered from seizures since she was very young Mary von Aue has become all too familiar with the cruelty of the American healthcare system. Sometimes almost as scary as the seizures themselves are the medical bills that follow soon after. The first thought she has now when she wakes up is relief at still being alive. The second thought is about how much having lived is going to cost her.

“I’m paying $450 a month for health insurance, and I’m still waking up from seizures thinking that if I didn’t hit my head that hard I’ll just risk it and not go in at all,” she told me. “Or if I did hit my head hard, fine, I’ll go, but I’m taking an Uber.”

She’s learned that lesson the hard way all too many times over the years considering how expensive it can be to have your life saved in America: a $15,000 bill in D.C. years ago, a $6,000 ambulance bill in Massachusetts, and to further highlight how insane our system here is, an experience receiving top notch medical care after a seizure in Turkey that set her back a grand total of $145.

More recently she found herself on the hook for $300 for a hospital visit in New York. Not terrible relatively speaking unless you consider that while there she received zero care whatsoever. After refusing to pay for nothing she started to get hounded by bill collectors.

Also a reminder to read Paul Bowers on the death penalty from the other day.

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The number of deaths in America in which alcohol was a contributing factor rose by 25.5% from 2019 to 2020 according to a just published study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. You may remember 2020 as the first year of the pandemic which thankfully is now over and we don’t have to think about anymore.

In raw numbers that meant a jump from 78,927 to 99,017 people gone.

An increase in alcohol related deaths had been observed every year between 1999 and 2017 they reported but it was at a much less stark 2.2% per year.

While rates increased across all age groups the biggest rise in death was among adults aged 35-44 — going from 22.9 to 32 per 100,000 (39.7%) — and those aged 25 to 34 — going from 11.8 to 16.1 per 100,000 (37.0%).

Thankfully I will not be in any of those age groups for much longer so at least I have that to protect me.

“Deaths involving alcohol reflect hidden tolls of the pandemic. Increased drinking to cope with pandemic-related stressors, shifting alcohol policies, and disrupted treatment access are all possible contributing factors,” the researchers from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism wrote. “Whether alcohol-related deaths will decline as the pandemic wanes, and whether policy changes could help reduce such deaths, warrants consideration.”

“The assumption is that there were lots of people who were in recovery and had reduced access to support that spring and relapsed,” Aaron White one of the authors of the report said.

“Stress is the primary factor in relapse, and there is no question there was a big increase in self-reported stress, and big increases in anxiety and depression, and planet-wide uncertainty about what was coming next,” he said. “That’s a lot of pressure on people who are trying to maintain recovery.”

I’ve already seen a lot of people use this study to retroactively confirm their priors about how we handled Covid. See!? I told you we shouldn’t have had such draconian restrictions etc.

We did not in fact have very many draconian restrictions.

I have no doubt that so many of us spending so much more time isolated and away from our normal routines had a very bad effect on our mental health — it certainly has on mine — but on the other hand there was actually a very deadly pandemic raging throughout the world from which over a million people died in this country alone so I’m not sure a fuck it do whatever policy would have made things any better in terms of lives saved.

I guess we’re going to find out since fuck it do whatever seems to be where we’re at now as far as the government is concerned about Covid funding.

Either way we’ve lost way too many people. Both of the famous and talented variety and regular assholes like you and me. The news about Taylor Hawkins’ death this weekend has fucked a lot of people up pretty good as did the passing of Mark Lanegan a few weeks ago for me which I wrote about at length here.

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As much as I craved some temporary oblivion

“Our Next guests are a Seattle band, and tonight they’re making their network TV debut with us,” David Letterman says. “This right here is their newest album, it’s entitled ‘Sweet Oblivion…

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4 years ago · 34 likes · Luke O'Neil

Two years ago this week almost absurdly early into the pandemic when we knew nothing about anything I did a piece in here in which I asked readers to write in with how they were handling the first two weeks of stress and increased isolation in terms of their substance use. A lot of us including myself made the decision at the time to let it fucking rip vis a vis drinking. I wish I hadn’t done that.

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Entire days are slipping away

I was curious about how people who are sober have been handling the isolation and lack of traditional resources available under the quarantine and the outsized stressors all around us right now but also about how people who are decidedly not sober have gone too far in the other direction which may or may not apply to me personally at this time. I asked …

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6 years ago · 6 likes · Luke O'Neil

In light of the new study about the fall out of that sort of behavior I wanted to pose the same question again with a couple of years of perspective.

(To be clear here I don’t want to die and I don’t want any of you to die either so please know that there is help available for you out there when you are ready for it although I’m probably not the best person to be delivering that advice at this time. If you’d like to read a newsletter with a much healthier outlook on recovery please check out one of my favorites The Small Bow.)

Here’s what people told me about how the first two years of Covid changed their drinking habits for better or worse.

• For me it was like that scene in the Simpsons where Marge has nothing to do and sees a pack of smokes and thinks “Well, I suppose I could have a cigarette...” I was home, the beer was home, there was nowhere to go, I drank. I was never one to shy away from booze to begin with, but this wasn't a six pack at band rehearsal or “Oh shit, lol I've had 1,2,3...8 and it's only the third quarter!” This was abandon. Even if I didn't fully realize it, every beer was a fuck drained.  It probably took until April? May? Around the time that this new reality had settled in, so had my new hobby.

  Anyway, it lasted a while. It helped that I was “essential” and could keep relatively busy — and there was never any driving or working drunk — but my off time was just hazed up. I figured the memories were going to be cloudy anyway, I guess.
  

  I've stopped now, the frequency, but it's still a different game. I had one of those “before we knew” cases in Jan/Feb 2020, and have been in and out of doctor's offices with “long covid” since, but this is my biggest scar. Fucked.

• Our household essentially gave up drinking at-home a while before the pandemic, which is fortunate. Instead, we went from casual weed smokers to blowing through probably $100 of edibles a week, plus an eighth or so of flower a fortnight. It has been... surprisingly good, honestly. Has it affected my ability to do my job day in and day out? Maybe, probably, but given everything else going on in the world, I don't know that you can blame just the weed for that. (I don't go to work high and I don't use on the job, strictly off-the-clock because I'm a good boy who enjoys having gainful employment and the health insurance that comes with it.) On the other hand, it has absolutely made our marriage better in some ways; we're more open with one another about lots of stuff, we have essentially a nightly hour-plus window where we're just talking to each other and blazing it, and of course it's taken the edge off of the horror of continued existence in late capitalism. I'm really fucking lucky in that regard, and I do not envy you the task of reading the emails from people who were not so lucky.

  I didn't think I was going to become A Weed Guy but I don't think any of us really had any sense of what we were about to be in for, much less what we'd be like two years later. If you can get it cheaply and legally where you are, I strongly encourage it over alcohol, but also I am not an addiction counselor or anything like that, just a dude who felt like shit when he drank a lot and feels less like shit when he smokes out. 

• I used to be pretty good with self imposed rules to moderate. I would limit myself to beers on the weekend with only a lapse here and there if there was a game or show or occasion mid-week. During Covid it all went out the window and I spent most of the first 18 months drinking 5-6 nights a week. That led to me building a big tolerance. I'm just now since the first of the year starting to get back to cutting down, but it's not nearly as limited as it used to be, and I find excuses to bend my rules much easier. I have also developed anxiety and a slight tremor on those days when I do abstain. So far the withdrawal effects themselves haven't been a reason to bend the rules. If I get to that point I really will be worried. On the positive side I really am doing better than I was six months ago. I really can't believe I got to this point though where it actually feels like I don't have 100% control of myself. I don't think I would be here if not for the last two years.

• I effectively quit drinking in December 2020. I was already drinking less than usual during the first six months of the pandemic and the idea of non-social drinking became less and less appealing with every passing day at home. Add in the layer of sedentary malaise Covid wrought and it was an easy decision. I don't think I'll go back. 

• Towards the start of Covid lockdowns I honestly thought I was going to drink myself to death. Not on purpose, but I hit this stretch of like nine or ten straight days in April 2020 where it seemed like maybe I'd beat Covid to the punch. Then I got violently ill, my body just gave out, and I couldn't drink for a while, which started a push-and-pull/invasion-and-repulsion/on-off dynamic that crested in August 2021 with a real bad time with my wife and kids that was all my fault. 

  
  Since then I've focused on finding other ways and outlets, which has worked really well for overcoming my impulse towards self-destruction. Microdosing, kratom, kombucha, constructive therapy sessions (i.e. not just bitching about everything), going to live shows, new writing projects. Mostly just awareness, though, and cutting myself some slack for not being perfect and the multitude of ways I'm fucked up has gone a long way the last six months to getting myself together. 

  
  Having grace, too, for everyone, and what we've all been going through. It's so difficult just to be here now, whether someone can admit that or not. All the death and destruction, violence physical and psychological, disregard and ignorance. As far as I can tell, grace and kindness are the best we can do for one another. Drinking too much too often takes that away from me, and without it I can't manage. So, I pay attention now, and do my best. I can't believe where I've wound up after all this, but I'm glad I'm still above ground, and am glad that you are, too.

• When the pandemic started I was already trying to get sober “my way,” i.e. not very hard or successfully.  Pandemic started and I gave up trying. It got worse, I got laid off, then it got worse, and I couldn't hide it like I had before. My wife and I were now home all the time. Then my wife got fed up and asked me to take the kids and leave, to go and move in with my brother and his wife. I was there about three weeks. It shook me up and I got sober. Not strong sobriety, and I relapsed after four months.  Three months after that relapse I went to rehab. I’ve been sober over a year since, one day at a time, thank god. 
  
  In a sense [having to spend so much time at home was a blessing in disguise]. It brought the bottom on a lot faster: confrontations with my wife, not being able to hide it and continue half-assing my way through AA, etc. Wanting to save my marriage saved my life. I have no idea if in an alternative universe I would have gotten sober without rehab. I never in a million years would have gone if she didn't make it absolutely clear that I needed it (to her credit, she never said "go to rehab or I'm out" she wanted me to make the choice. But I wouldn't have gone without her, and she wouldn't have said that if we weren't both home all the time). 

  
  It's a little hard to get my mind around the idea of it being a blessing in disguise, because it was such a hard year plus, and I haven't really thought of it that way before. But yeah, if things had just been going along like before, no pandemic, it's really unlikely I'd be in as good of a place as I am now. Just sucked getting here. Thank goodness I had/have the support to have made it through.

• Pre-Covid I was in a bad work situation in higher ed. I would typically go through a four-pack or two of Hazy IPA tallboys in a week, so, a decent amount. When things hit the fan I started working from home for a few months, and I was furloughed in May for the summer. I was able to get cases of craft beer shipped directly to my house, so of course I did that. I would go through several four-packs a week during that time, with not much else to do and nowhere to go. Then, seeing the writing on the wall with a shitty supervisor who I clashed with regularly, I assumed I would be jettisoned, so I started looking for a new job mid-pandemic. Luckily, I found one, but it was with a brewery! Now I had basically unlimited free beer at my disposal, so I started housing multiple four-packs a night. Needless to say this has not had healthy benefits. I've gained weight, worsened my GERD, developed (or hastened) apnea, and my blood pressure is that of a much unhealthier person than previously. My mental health was shit so I'm (finally) now on antidepressants, and the alcohol helps none of this.

• I'm a schoolteacher and during the first couple weeks of quarantine when school was fully shut down I took the time to work out more and generally practice a lot of the “self care” bullshit that gets pushed in every staff meeting and across every social media platform. Over time though the quarantine didn't lift and all I was asked to do was upload a lesson once per week and otherwise stay indoors, so I found myself doing a lot more drawing.
  
  Ideas come to me easier when I drink usually. So quarantine turned into a lot of day drinking. Then day drinking bled over into evening drinking because “Look, we're all stressed out. I need to unwind.”

  
  I'm lucky that I live with my fiance who kind of made me pull my head out of my ass. Being faced with the wall-to-wall failures of our major institutions to address Covid made me sink pretty low. I pulled it together over the summer before the following school year. We had to be on Zoom with the kids and I realized I couldn't run classes hung over on camera all day. 

  
  My fiance and I are both teachers so there was a lot of psychic damage being taken. The early pandemic hero worship turned into “let them back in the building you monsters” real fast.

• March/April 2020 probably featured the highest percentage of days that I consumed alcohol in my entire life. I was going on so many Zoom dates. Multiple dates every night at times. I am someone who only drank like once a month in college for context. The combination of it being a rare period of my life being single and probably being holed up in an apartment by myself every day were likely the main sources. I often find myself thinking, "I responded really well to early quarantine compared to most people in my life" before remembering oh right the initial month or so was spent drinking with strangers on Zoom who were also losing their minds. Eventually I started seeing someone exclusively from one of these meetings (we're engaged now!) and instantly my desire to drink resumed its normal, mostly non-existent levels. Drinking historically is just really something I do to take the edge off in social situations to cope with social anxiety. 

• I was drinking heavily before the pandemic. I was working then. When I say drinking heavily I mean drinking hard liquor at home by myself. I lost my job shortly before the pandemic. This would have been around February of 2020. By then I realized that I couldn't keep doing what I was doing. I quit and I haven't taken a drink since. I'm much better off. 
  
  If I had continued to drink like that during lockdown who knows what would have happened. It's very easy to see why so many people are dead now from substance abuse. Booze is a fucked up lethal narcotic that society treats as a joke.

  
  This period got a lot of people. Quitting booze was much harder than quitting hard narcotics. You have a liquor store on every corner and social life revolves around drinking. American drinking culture is disgusting. It's not healthy at all. 

  
  There is a very good book called Smashing the Liquor Machine about alcohol prohibition movements. It goes without saying that alcohol prohibition is as bad as drug or gambling prohibition, but the repulsive way that the government allows Big Alcohol to addict and exploit the population is a strategy of suppressing the population. It always has been.

  
  It's not unique to any one country. With weed legalization finally we have a healthier alternative but a huge deal more needs to be done to protect people.

• Nothing too dramatic for me, but maybe a data point. I was doing pretty well for a few years of not drinking during the week for general New Years Resolution-y reasons. After a couple weeks of lockdown, I was kind of like, “fuck it, it’s a pandemic” and started having a beer or a cocktail before bed. Sometimes less, sometimes more. I don’t think it’s had any really negative effects beyond undoing any good that my not drinking had previously done. Then again, I’ve seen a pretty stark deterioration in my mental health and resilience over the past two years, so who knows what effect any individual factor has had. I dunno. Everything kinda sucks.

• Rough seas over here, but still plugging along five and a half years sober. Four people in my life have drank themselves to death since the start of the pandemic. A friend of my ex wife's, a female co-worker, my own maternal uncle and the brother of one of my best college friends. They're all white working class. That's the common thread between them. Varied in age, gender, etc. 

  
  The co-worker, she spent weeks in the hospital, and they told her if she didn't stop drinking she would die, and she fucking died, man.  Didn't stop drinking until her fucking organs gave out. 

  
  [Looking at the picture in her obituary] This is rough but she looked nothing like that. So thin, skin barely hanging on, hair falling out. We all wanted to just shake her and say stop but wtf do we know? 

  
  My uncle hanged himself in his backyard after being unable to quit. He was in and out of psych wards his last few months. My mom and her sisters were devastated but they all saw it coming and couldn't push him off the track. It's crazy how common this is becoming

• Covid definitely altered/increased my and my wife's drinking habits. We used to go out and get hammered twice, maybe three times a week. With Covid that eventually turned into every day. Not hammered, but definitely higher overall consumption week over week.
  
  It's kinda taken the fun out of it. It's just something to do because for so long there was nothing else to break up the monotony of wake up, work computer job, make and eat dinner, sit on the same couch watching the same TV. 
  
  For a while either the wife or I could convince the other to take a night off here and there, and of course last spring/summer with the vax we felt a lot safer going out. But the fall/omicron put the kibosh on that. 
  
  I’m pretty much resigned to the idea of having drinks every night, but on the plus side I've learned to drastically reign in how many I have on a given night and that's helped.

• My husband, never a big drinker, has continued not to be a big drinker. By which I mean he buys a six-pack of hard cider or pilsner or whatever and drinks one a week until it's done, just like he's always done since we first moved in together. Which is to say the pandemic fucked him up just like the rest of us, but not in the alcohol-dependency category.
  
  I don't think I was ever a “problem drinker,” but the pandemic and all these people bent on destroying the planet/marginalized peoples/themselves got me really depressed and anxious, and lately I've been wondering if I'm losing my grip on reality? But I am more terrified of the cost of a “hey don't harm yourself or others and maybe lay off the crying until you hyperventilate” 48-hour hospital “visit” than of anything I might do to myself. We are so broke and what if my legacy to him was a massive hospital bill? Anyway, however reasonable a drinker I'd been before, with the panoply of meds I take now I can't even have half a glass of a low-ABV beer. It makes me immediately pass-out-standing sleepy or fully hungover. So cool, I love it, my medication regimen is definitely working and I don't stay up nights crying about the kids we won't have and the climate disasters we can't stop and all the senseless deaths.
  
  The best (“best”) part is my psychiatrist isn't just open to suggestions, he makes them himself, so after going through some real fucked-up stuff in 2016-2017 and being put on klonopin for the anxiety, I'd been responsibly and carefully tapering the dose till I was at 0.25mg a few times a week by the end of 2019. Now I'm back up to 2mg a day just so I don't claw my skin off. I wonder how many other people have benzo addictions now due to “getting help” for their pandemic etc anxiety. I wish I could just have a whiskey soda again.

• I was always a big drinker. I only drink beer. Liquor is too unpredictable and wine makes my guts sour. I come from a long line of big drinkers. In November 2019 a high school buddy of mine flew up from Missouri to Worcester so we could go see The Cherry Poppin Daddies in concert (don't laugh, they slapped 25 years ago when we were in high school). And it was like... he's my oldest buddy and he has a wife and kids and a shitty job and car payments and is like a normal dude. After he visited I was convinced it was time for me to go straight, stop smoking, drink less, maybe lose some weight, get in the market for a couple of kids and a white picket fence and all that. I was going to turn my shit around. I kept it up until mid-March. Then with the pandemic... I mean I started drinking heavy again because there was nothing to do. In the literal sense, I couldn't go out any place, but also in the figurative sense, we live in this shithole nightmare society and there's nothing to do about it, what's the goddamn point, I might as well get bladdered on the couch every night if it passes the time. 
  
  So anyway it's been a little over two years and there's not a single day I haven't drank less than a six pack every night and the hope inside me that things will ever be any different is dead. I don't mean that like a sob story boo hoo I got problems or anything like that, it would just be nice to know that not being this way is an option even if I keep being this way but it's not so here we are.
  
  Oh, P.S., I know six beers a night is not like, hardcore. I don't even have the guts to hit full Bukowski or whatever but still it'd be nice to take a solid dump now and then. 

  ---

See you later.

There was a study out this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed a big spike in alcohol related deaths in 2020 which happened to be the first year of the pandemic. I’d like to hear from some of you about how the past couple of years of living through Covid has altered your drinking habits if you’d like to share. It will be anonymous.

Today Hell World South Carolina correspondent Paul Bowers writes for us on the recent news about the death penalty in his state.

Previously for Hell World he interviewed Fred A Leuchter Jr., aka Mr. Death.

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The death squad will be made up of volunteers

by Paul Bowers

The last person to be killed by a firing squad in the United States was Ronnie Lee Gardner in the state of Utah in 2010. Hundreds of cops volunteered for the job of shooting him in the chest. Five were chosen.

I met Ronnie’s brother Randy last year at an event in Columbia, South Carolina, organized by the death penalty abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. This was late May 2021, and the state of South Carolina was making preparations to electrocute two of the inmates living on its Death Row. At the time, the South Carolina legislature had also opened up the possibility of a firing squad, but the Department of Corrections hadn’t assembled a team yet.

Last week the SCDC announced it was all set to start shooting prisoners, clearing a legal roadblock after a court ruled last year that they must give the condemned an option between the electric chair and the death squad. They say they have rigged up the death chamber in Columbia with bulletproof glass, a firing squad chair with restraints, and a portal that will keep witnesses from seeing the three shooters. Unlike in traditional firing squads, all three rifles will be loaded with live ammunition; no one gets to shoot a blank “conscience round.”

As for the shooters, the Post and Courier reports: “The death squad will be made up of volunteer Corrections employees who meet certain criteria, the agency said, without specifying the qualifications.”

Back in May 2021 when I met the Death Penalty Action organizers, we sat in the parlor of a historic house less than a mile from the Statehouse. The meeting began with our host playing “Amazing Grace” on her piano, after which speakers whose lives had been marred by the death penalty took turns testifying. The group included the Rev. Sharon Risher, who had lost her mother, two cousins, and a lifelong friend in the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME church. She was fighting to stop the state from killing Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who had shot her loved ones to death.

When Randy Gardner got up to speak, his words were clipped and his sentences short. He told us how hundreds of law enforcement officers had volunteered to shoot his brother — and yet, sometime after the execution when he met one of the five who had been chosen for the job, the shooter expressed regret.

“It ruined him,” Randy said of his brother’s executioner.

On the coffee table in the parlor, I noticed Randy had brought along a cardboard tube, the kind that nicer bottles of liquor come in. Talking with Randy in the kitchen afterward, I found out what was inside it.

After his brother’s death, Randy had to fight the state to obtain autopsy photos of his brother’s body. When he finally got them, he had them printed on large format glossy paper. Now he carries the prints with him around the country, displaying them for people who want to see.

I told him I wanted to see. He unrolled them on the counter one by one. One of the photos was of a blood-soaked prison jumpsuit. Others were incoherent closeups of the bullet wounds, the torn flesh of his brother’s ruined body.

Executions used to happen in front of crowds in public squares, not in chambers with limited seating and a handful of witnesses. That started to change as we moved on from hangings and beheadings to more modern techniques. In 1890 inside a chamber at the prison in Auburn, New York, the state tried to execute William Kemmler using an electric chair designed by a dentist. There were only 17 witnesses watching as the first shock failed to kill him and the second caused his flesh to cook, filling the room with an acrid smell

“They would have done better using an axe,” the inventor George Westinghouse quipped. 

In a 1994 review of the legal and technological history of the electric chair, Deborah W. Denno wrote that executions didn’t become truly private affairs until 1937, when the last legal hanging took place in Missouri. “This evolution from public to private … evidenced some recognition that common execution methods were repugnant even if they did not resemble methods used in the past,” Denno wrote.

For a stretch of the late 20th into the early 21st century, it became common practice for states to kill prisoners with poison. That began to change when, caving to international pressure, pharmaceutical companies stopped selling drugs like pentobarbital, potassium chloride, and sodium thiopental to state governments. In some states like Ohio, doctors refused to attend executions and perform the required time-of-death duties, effectively bringing the practice to a halt. When my state, South Carolina, ran out of its supply of lethal injection drugs in 2013, our leaders got their heads together and started brainstorming on how to kill prisoners creatively. They wound up bringing back older techniques that are more “repugnant,” aesthetically speaking, than the apparent clinical administration of lethal injection.

The first person I heard talking about shooting imprisoned people to death was a fresh-faced young Bible college graduate named Joshua Putnam, who held a state House seat representing a district in the Upstate. In April 2015 after the drugs ran out, he introduced a bill to authorize firing squads.

Rep. Putnam wanted us to bracket off the morality of capital punishment for a moment and find a practical solution for the problem of how to kill Death Row inmates.

“I know people that are against capital punishment altogether, and I understand where they come from, and I’m not trying to change their beliefs,” Putnam said when I interviewed him for the Charleston City Paper in 2015. “We currently have capital punishment on the books, we currently do capital punishment, and I’m trying to, number one, find a solution to the problem the state faces right now, and also find a more humane way of doing it.”

Putnam was a low-ranking rookie in the General Assembly, and his bill stalled out in committee. In the intervening years, leading GOP luminaries have proposed a few other ideas. Governor Henry McMaster pushed for a “shield law” that would have authorized the state to make clandestine drug purchases, but that bill failed. Senator William Timmons introduced a bill to put every Death Row inmate in the electric chair, without offering the option of lethal injection.

Finally last year, a bipartisan group of statesmen passed a bill that technically allowed three options: lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad.

We have heard a lot of dithering here about the most moral and humane way for the state to murder someone. I posit that there is no moral or humane way to do it, for the same reasons listed by the ACLU and my local DSA chapter: It’s cruel, arbitrary, and expensive. It leads us to kill innocent people, and it is not even an effective crime deterrent. It’s also deeply racist in practice, a fact that members of the South Carolina Black legislative caucus knew well when they filibustered for 6 days in 1977 against a law bringing back the death penalty after a hiatus.

In the states still carrying out the death penalty, we are left with legal maneuvers and debates about the proper technology for killing. It’s hard to say who is correct in these debates because, outside of certain fascist regimes, people have rarely devoted much scientific research to the most effective or “humane” ways to end the lives of captive people. Not coincidentally, some of our leading lights on the subject are people like Fred A. Leuchter Jr., a.k.a. “Mr. Death,” the self-taught electrician and Holocaust denier who sold death chamber equipment to at least 27 states in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The truth is that the United States has never had a system of clinical precision for executing the condemned. Instead we have a patchwork, pell-mell system of death contraptions devised by hobbyists and often built by prison labor, or staffed by volunteers in the case of firing squads. We shamble on, killing as best we can, ruining ourselves.

Paul Bowers (@Paul_Bowers) is a writer and former newspaperman from North Charleston, SC, who is working on a book about brutalist architecture in the American South. He runs a newsletter and podcast called Brutal South.

Ok that’s all for today. Be back in a few days. Here are two songs I liked this week. Goodbye.

Hi. Hello. Yearly subscribers who would like to try a six months paid subscription to Foreign Exchanges by Derek Davidson and/or Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman for free please reply and let me know and I’ll set it up. Also let me know if you’d like access to the Discontents Discord channel. Thanks for being here as always. Ok here’s today’s thing.

I’d like you all to join me in sending prayers up for the big man.

Whatever the content of those prayers happen to be is none of my business.

I believe I mentioned this before but when I was an intern in DC in college they brought us over to meet Thomas due to he was an alumni of my school and we all went in there and stood around in our little junior professional outfits and ill-fitting suits and I think we were meant to be impressed by the majesty of it all and to become inspired to go on to do great things ourselves one day (sorry) but in reality we just shook his hand and took a picture and then were like well what are we doing next? Will there be lunch? It doesn’t matter how powerful a guy is you’re meeting you’re still going to be preoccupied with lunch. He barely even said anything in my memory. No big speech from the coach type moment. None of that go out there and get them lads shit. He barely even says anything on the court either so that makes sense in retrospect. To be honest I don’t really remember what I was thinking probably something like this fucking guy. I didn’t know shit at the time about anything I could barely find my own ass but I did know that. This fucking guy.

There were a couple of interesting stories published since I last checked in with you nice people on topics that are squarely in the Hell World wheelhouse that I want to highlight today.

This one from Teen Vogue on the absurd cruelty of student loan interest was quite good in particular. It goes like this in part:

Musician and zoologist hopeful William Criel took out almost $55,000 in federal and private student loans to attend Oakland University in Michigan. Since graduating a few years ago, Criel tells Teen Vogue, the interest rates on his loans have ballooned his balance to nearly $70,000. Despite working several part-time jobs and being on an income-driven repayment plan, Criel can’t afford to make regular monthly payments; even when he can, it isn’t enough to get past his interest.

“I wasn't making a large enough payment to touch the principal,” says Criel. “I was literally making payments on the interest just to prevent as much of it from building up. When you start with almost $55,000 and you're barely paying off half the interest every month, you get to the mentality — it's like, what's the point?”

Why is it young people aren’t buying homes and starting families again?

According to one 2019 analysis from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2005 graduates had repaid less than 40% of their outstanding loan balance a decade after graduating. For 2010 graduates, they had repaid just 9% of their overall balance five years after graduating. Not counting private loans, the country’s federal student debt burden was just under $1.5 trillion when the study was conducted; now that number sits at just over $1.6 trillion.

“Do people truly not understand and just believe that we have a whole generation of people that are just lazy and incompetent?” says Criel, who is now 29. Like roughly 42% of full-time students and more than 80% of part-time students, Criel also worked while going to school. “If you gave us any modicum of respect whatsoever, you would believe us when we told you it was this bad — but you don't.”

Let me just uhhh check real quick where my balance is with Navient at the moment.

$17,597.56

That’s after regular monthly payments for like twenty two years. Not bad! Gonna pay this baby off just in time for retirement. Just kidding I’m never going to be able to retire.

A lot of you are in the same boat of course. You may remember this Hell World on the topic where a bunch of you chimed in about how you cannot dig yourself out from under the avalanche of interest no matter how much you try.

Good news for anyone struggling financially at the moment though because Bloomberg is out with some great advice for anyone who happens to make under $300,000 a year. Not sure how many of us here that applies to.

Yes this is obvious hate-click bait and just the latest in a long line of articles like this encouraging poor people to tighten their belts but I’m mentioning it here because it’s got a few truly imaginative variations on the form that bring things to a whole new level.

Here’s some of the great advice contained therein:

1. Take the bus

2. Eat lentils and beans for dinner

3. Let your dog die

Yes that last one there is for real. Teresa Ghilarducci (economist in bio) explains:

If you’re one of the many Americans who became a new pet owner during the pandemic, you might want to rethink those costly pet medical needs. It may sound harsh, but researchers actually don’t recommend pet chemotherapy — which can cost up to $10,000 — for ethical reasons.

It’s not only sound financial advice she explains it will also help your brain.

Try to be as flexible and creative as possible. Scientists tell us our brain plasticity will improve by trying novel things. There's an advantage to mixing up what you consume to cope with unusual price spikes: You become more resilient as you create a locus of control and interrogate your habits.

Interrogate your habits. No more Netflix or living pets for you losers.

Speaking of finance brain what the fuck is going on here?

The way we handle dental care in this country is of course another issue that gets right up my fucking asshole. The Washington Post recently reported on the story of a dentist who got caught fucking with his patients’ teeth unnecessarily so he could charge them more for work they didn’t need. In short he did the one thing we all sort of suspect our dentist is always doing.

Scott Charmoli’s patients’ teeth were just fine, but fine wasn’t making him enough money.

So the dentist in Jackson, Wis., drilled into and broke his patients’ teeth in order to charge them for fixing the damage he’d caused, according to federal prosecutors. By doing so, Charmoli went from pulling in $1.4 million and affixing 434 crowns in 2014 to raking in $2.5 million and performing more than 1,000 crown procedures a year later.

On Thursday, following a four-day trial, Charmoli, 61, was convicted of five counts of health-care fraud and two counts of making false statements about his patients’ treatment. He’s scheduled for sentencing in June, when he’ll face up to 10 years for each of the health-care-fraud counts and a maximum of five years on the other two convictions.

…

Charmoli had assets worth more than $6.8 million at the end of 2020 and owned vacation properties in Wisconsin and Arizona, according to prosecutors, who allege he billed more than $4.2 million for crowns between 2016 and 2019.

Starting in 2015, Charmoli badgered his patients into getting crowns they didn’t need, federal prosecutors alleged. After intentionally damaging their teeth, he submitted pictures and X-rays to insurance companies as “before” photos to justify the treatment required to fix the damage he’d just done.

One of those patients, Todd Tedeschi, testified that Charmoli persuaded him to get two crowns during one sitting, even though his teeth seemed fine, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“It seemed excessive, but I didn’t know any better,” Tedeschi said. “He was the professional. I just trusted him.”

More on dental care from me here and here.

And then there was this development on the matter of what’s to be done about the state of South Carolina simply needing to kill its citizens. Turns out the firing squad is back baby. As the AP reported:

South Carolina has given the greenlight to firing-squad executions, a method codified into state law last year after a decade-long pause in carrying out death sentences because of the state’s inability to procure lethal injection drugs.

…

According to officials, the death chamber now also includes a metal chair, with restraints, in the corner of the room in which inmates will sit if they choose execution by firing squad. That chair faces a wall with a rectangular opening, 15 feet away, through which the three shooters will fire their weapons.

State officials also have created protocols for carrying out the executions. The three shooters, all volunteers who are employees of the Corrections Department, will have rifles loaded with live ammunition, with their weapons trained on the inmate’s heart.

A hood will be placed over the head of the inmate, who will be given the opportunity to make a last statement.

Being shot does sound like it’s perhaps quicker and “more humane” than slowly being poisoned or electrocuted to death but perhaps which specific manner of state sanctioned murder is nicer than the others shouldn’t be the issue at hand?

Over the summer I published this great piece by Paul Bowers on the death penalty issue in South Carolina and around the country including a new interview with Mr. Death himself Fred Leuchter. I’m hoping to have Bowers join us again later this week for a follow up piece.

I forget if I said this or not but I’ve been working on a project that I hope will turn into a book of short stories and/or prose poems(?) or whatever. The other day I shared the one about the grackle. Here’s another one down below the paywall for paid subscribers to read if you like.

Goodbye.

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I appreciate you reading. Thanks as always.

Two years ago this week give or take a day or two was when most of us first started taking the idea of the pandemic seriously. Now it’s over and we don’t have to think about it anymore (?)

I didn’t actually read any of those stories so maybe it’s fine and we don’t have to pay attention. Congratulations and/or condolences to all of us.

I did read this piece last week though and while it’s rare these days that I’m going to suggest an article in the Atlantic Ed Yong is one of the good ones. It’s called Why America Became Numb to Covid Deaths and it starts like this:

The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?

Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly.

Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver. Many people were denied the familiar rituals of mourning—bedside goodbyes, in-person funerals. Others are grieving raw and recent losses, their grief trampled amid the stampede toward normal. “I’ve known multiple people who didn’t get to bury their parents or be with their families, and now are expected to go back to the grind of work,” says Steven Thrasher, a journalist and the author of The Viral Underclass, which looks at the interplay between inequalities and infectious diseases. “We’re not giving people the space individually or societally to mourn this huge thing that’s happened.”

After many of the biggest disasters in American memory, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, “it felt like the world stopped,” Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters, told me. “On some level, we owned our failures, and there were real changes.” Crossing 1 million deaths could offer a similar opportunity to take stock, but “900,000 deaths felt like a big threshold to me, and we didn’t pause,” Peek said. Why is that? Why were so many publications and politicians focused on reopenings in January and February—the fourth- and fifth-deadliest months of the pandemic? Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?

I don’t know! I don’t know anything.

After that I was reminded of this piece that Joe Keohane wrote for me in here in November of 2020 that I’ve shared before but I think is worth revisiting:

It’s been said before the Covid-19 exploited some key American vulnerabilities: an individualism that can be indistinguishable from pathological selfishness. A society that moves around a lot. And, of course, a government ruled by vandals, paranoids, and dead-enders. But for me one of the hidden vulnerabilities was our national addiction to a certain idea of heroism. James Baldwin wrote this about cops during a protest march: “There they stood in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with most American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club, or a fist, or a gun.” The coronavirus crisis was incompatible with American hero mythology, with our idea of action. We simply did not have the psychological tools to cope with something that would not respond to violence, threats, or bombast. You couldn’t kick its ass, or root for the army to kick its ass, or even console yourself with fantasies of kicking its ass yourself--that sad but enduring Walter Mitty man-saves-the-day fantasy that I suspect provides much of the drive of the American male’s love for guns. No, with Covid there was no comfort in violent fantasy. You couldn’t do anything. You really could only do nothing. In fact, for the vast majority of us, nothing was the thing you had to do. And the country failed spectacularly, and 2020 feels like the year that will never end. 

Maybe it never did.

Many of you will remember around that time I got a bunch of friends together to write something about the last days before Covid became a constant presence in our lives. I thought those too might be worth taking a look back at now on the two year anniversary to see what we got wrong about how things were going to go and what we’ve forgotten now about how things felt at the time.

Some of you have already read all of these lovely essays but a lot of you haven’t so feel free to skip today if this is all old news to you.

You can jump to each individual piece here below. Some of them are behind the paywall. For paying subscribers I’ve included a PDF you can download down below to read them all together on your tablet or whatever it is that you do.

The Last Normal Day:
Part 1 by Samantha Irby
Part 2 by Zaron Burnett III
Part 3 by Luke O’Neil
Parts 4-5 by Chris A. Smith and Shane Ferro
Part 6 by Kim Kelly
Part 7 by Julieanne Smolinski
Part 8 by Josh Gondelman
Part 9 by Jeb Lund
Part 10 by Joe Keohane
Part 11 by Linda Tirado
Part 12 by Aisha Tyler

Here’s a little story I wrote about a tweet I saw.

Common Grackle
stoned to death by school children 
Quiscalus quiscula versicolor 
Boyd Elementary School, Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania 1980

We flew together in large flocks whistling and chattering and squeaking to one another of news and of nothing at all over large fields of corn ignoring the motionless human sentries meant to frighten us. We followed behind churning plows and foraged through their bountiful wake for worms and insects and mice and near water we plucked leeches off the backs of turtles who stared at us dumbly. We nested in trees nearer the humans and ate from their scraps which were plenty and the braver among us stole right from under their noses sometimes as much for sport as for sustenance. For this we were considered a nuisance. Some of us would raid the nests of smaller birds and even attack and eat them which I believe now is the sin for which I have been punished. 

Laying in the grass one day letting the ants crawl over me to rid my newly molted feathers of mites and biting lice a group of children approached and I thought little of it. These children with stone in their hands and stone in their eyes and stone in their hearts. Later the ants returned.

I’ve been writing in here about the show Raised by Wolves a lot lately and in particular how the second season has been kind of a let down. The first season did exactly what it is that I want sci-fi to do which is to fill me with a sense of wonder. The second season is basically just some people running around.

So naturally I was very happy to see this piece by Jeff VanderMeer about how he’s been similarly disappointed.

He wrote:

Season 1 invested impressive thought and equally impressive execution in planetary details, but more importantly the ecosystems had their own agency and purpose that neither we nor the androids can fully comprehend. The creepy critters stalking the settlement work to their own agenda; the seasons care nothing for the settlement’s needs. Preserving a sense of areas unknown and unmapped lent depth and breadth to the worldbuilding and ensured that the planet itself became a kind of all-encompassing character.

The last episode of season 1, “The Beginning,” brought the planet’s fauna/ biotech to startling ultra-life, in the form of a winged flying serpent born of Mother’s body that conjured up the mythology of Dragon in ways useful to the Mithraic legend.

Other science-fiction shows like The Expanse, with its weirdling proto-molecule, have flirted with this sense of wonder that’s also tinged with horror and a frisson of the unknown. But it’s no coincidence that the movie Prometheus is the closest mirror of season 1 of Raised by Wolves, considering Ridley Scott produced the show and directed some episodes. Scott and his fellow collaborators, in a sense, found a way to preserve everything mind-bending about Prometheus while giving us a much better story.

~~the ecosystems had their own agency and purpose that neither we nor the androids can fully comprehend~~

It’s always scarier not to know what the fuck is going on in my opinion. The coolest thing you can do which Raised by Wolves did (and I think Star Wars probably did at one point early on?) is to show some giant skeleton half buried in the sand matter of factly and you look at it and you go What the fuck could that have been?

Then later if you find out what the fuck it had been it’s a lot less exciting brain-wise you go like Oh it was a big snake or whatever. Who cares.

Anyway remember a couple years ago when I talked to VanderMeer in here about Annihilation and Florida and climate change? That was pretty cool.

I know we’ve been doing the 90s again for a good while now but the bands are reaching heretofore unseen levels of 90s-remembering at the moment and I think that’s just fine. Like so:

I also would be negligent in my duties as a certified Deftones Guy if I didn’t share this great cover of My Own Summer by Rid of Me:

This by Belly Up is also real nice for fans of grungy shoegaze.

Ok that’s all for today I gotta go do whatever it is I do all day.

Find the full The Last Normal Day series PDF down below the paywall here:

Get 20% off for 1 year

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Today we have a dispatch from Mexico City on the massive protests against violence against women. Real quick though this piece on commuting and being forced back into the office from last year seems newly relevant.

It speaks to the prevalence of the violence they face

by Madeleine Wattenbarger

In the Mexico City plaza where women gather before the International Women’s Day march the atmosphere feels like a mix of preparing for war and getting ready for a party. They pull balaclavas over their faces and line their friends’ eyes with green pigment. They adjust bandanas around their wrists and necks. They write their personal information across their arms with sharpies in case of arrest: name, emergency contact, blood type. They test out their stencils and spray paint, tattooing pink slogans across the pavement. Some carry Molotov cocktails and hammers in their backpacks. 

In the days leading up to the March 8 protest, for the last few years the date of the largest annual demonstrations in cities across the country, the president has warned of vandals staining the name of the movement. A movement that he says is, yes, of course, a just cause. We are all for the elimination of violence of all kinds, he says, and that includes violence against women. In accordance with that commitment the authorities have deployed not only Mexico City’s all-female police force, known as the Athenas, but also the Marines and the National Guard to monitor the march. 

This March 8 is an unseasonably hot day. The women are expecting tear gas and aggression from police and still they are fiercely jubilant. 

A peculiar kind of pop feminism has taken hold in Mexico in the last few years. It takes as its symbols Molotov cocktails and black balaclavas, its slogans the names of femicide victims. Not everyone shows up prepared for direct action, but those who do make up a significant number, and it speaks to the prevalence of the violence they face. In fact every day ten women in the country become victims of femicide according to a 2021 study from Amnesty International titled Justice On Trial. Authorities routinely dismiss and mock the cases that are brought. The killers of women often remain free. 

“Mexico is continuing to fail to fulfil its duty to investigate and, therefore, its duty to guarantee the rights to life and personal integrity of the victims, as well as to prevent violence against women,” the report reads. 

“Feminicidal violence and the failings in investigation and prevention in northern Mexico are not anecdotal, but rather form part of a broader reality in the country.”

A lot of young women had to be killed for so many of them to reason that setting fire to government buildings is one of the only remaining logical responses. And yet a lot of them have been and now a lot of them do. 

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I remain absolutely opposed to this brutal indiscriminate war but I think you’d see fewer people on the left in America bringing up our own sins in Iraq right now if any of the people responsible were ever held accountable at all. McCain is sainted. Bush is a goofy old painterly grandfather. Both he and Condoleezza Rice are on TV condemning illegal warmaking. Rumsfeld is in hell but still.

You will recall last week I spoke to a woman about what it has been liking hiding out in her apartment in Ukraine during the attack. “Right now we are just trying to survive,” she said. Thankfully she and her people have in fact survived so far. She shared with me a video of celebrating her birthday over the weekend.

This was pretty tough reading. The disconnect between families across the border about what is actually happening.

It reminded me of the opposite type of thing happening here. Where young people talk about their parents being scared for them living in what they believe is war-torn Portland or NYC or whatever.

Occasionally some of us in the Discontents collective share stories with one another. Today I’m publishing a piece that originally appeared on Discourse Blog. Sign up for free or with a paid subscription to support their good work over there if you can. Here’s a coupon for 20% off a yearly subscription.

More from me down below.

They've Had to Leave Behind Things That I Didn't

Talking to Jack Crosbie About Leaving Ukraine

by Jack Mirkinson

As many of you will know, our own Jack Crosbie has been in Ukraine for the last few weeks, covering Russia’s invasion and subsequent indiscriminate assault on the country. Crosbie’s dispatches—a couple for us and then a series of pieces for Rolling Stone—have focused squarely on the ordinary civilians caught in the middle of a bloody power struggle they did not seek and do not want. His work has been a welcome contrast to the chest-thumping banality (and retrograde politics) that has characterized so many of the responses to this conflict.

But now, Cros is leaving Ukraine and coming back to New York. On Saturday, I caught up with him as he waited in the city of Lviv, close to the Polish-Ukrainian border, along with thousands of Ukrainians trying to get to safety. We talked about his journey to the border, what covering the war has been like for him, and how it feels to be going home.

Jack Crosbie: I’m here.

I can’t believe it.

Yeah, yeah. It was a little interesting a couple of times, but we're here. We're doing fine. I'm in Lviv right now, which is the far western city everyone's evacuated to. So I'm completely safe. There's no war here at all really.

That’s good to hear! I'm just glad that you’re getting out.

Yeah, I mean, I feel kind of bad, because there's still, you know, a lot of stuff happening. And there's still a lot to cover. I think the problem right now is that access to a lot of places is getting really hard. It's just really hard to drive and travel around. Like, we somehow got extremely lucky today. We made a what, in normal peacetime, is like a six-hour drive in like nine [hours], I think, but I've heard of other people that have tried to go from Kyiv to Lviv and it's taken them literally two days straight on the road. There's other legs of the drive that we did today that some people have said have taken like 18 hours in the past. It's crazy. So there's a lot more that I want to do, but I don't think there's a whole lot else I can do right now really.

How many people are making the same journey as you? Or are you on a less populated route?

Google Maps was on one today and it took us through some crazy route that somehow avoided a ton of the traffic. Yesterday we went [on] what should have been a three-hour drive probably, and we were on the road for like 10 hours or something. And the day before that it was the same thing—we drove for, I think, 12 or 13 hours for only 300 miles or something like that. So yeah, there's a ton of cars and a ton of traffic. There's checkpoints everywhere, so that just hugely holds up traffic in a lot of places, especially if you get a particularly exuberant one where they're searching a lot of cars and they blocked off a lot of the road.

These are Ukrainian troops who are doing these checkpoints?

Well, it kind of depends on where you are. Sometimes [it's] Ukrainian troops, sometimes local police, sometimes it's [a] civilian militia. Or sometimes it's a mix of all three. In the East it's all Ukrainian troops because that's the actual war zone. As you go further west, it can be just, like, random dudes around a burning trash can with two shotguns and like a pitchfork. And they're just stopping people and being like, “are you a Russian spy?” And we're like, “no.” And then they ask, “do you have any weapons in the car?” My reporting partner out here keeps making the joke that “no, we don't have any weapons, only javelins,” and no one gets it, but yesterday one guy laughed at it and he was really happy about that.

I'm like, is that exactly the moment to be trying out your one-liners? But I'm not there.

You gotta keep it light with the guys. You just kind of try and assess, like, how drunk and how rowdy they're being exactly. Honestly, we got super lucky getting here. The security readout that we got before was like, “the first drive is like eight hours, checkpoints not too bad. [The] second drive [is] 18 hours and the checkpoints are crazy.” So we were expecting the drive today to be really gnarly. And for some reason, it just wasn't. I don't know if we took a different route or if the Ukrainian military got to those checkpoints and was like, guys, calm down. [A TV network crew] who did basically the same route maybe three or four days before us got completely worked over by a bunch of dudes. But the big TV network crews roll around in giant vans and Suburbans. They have all these ex-military [people] sitting in them. We were just, like, two English-looking dudes in a rented VW Golf, so we didn't get too much hassle.

I kind of want you to be running around with the human tanks or whatever that the networks get, but it might actually be safer doing what you're doing. Less conspicuous at any rate.

Yeah, I go back and forth because the security guys are very cautious.

What would you say your risk appetite has been during this period?

On this trip, very low. And I tried to keep it very low. My partner really wanted to go down to Odessa, but the roads were just so bad on the first day and [it] would have been another, like, full day to get down there. It's super exposed down on the south coast, and the only point of going there was [we were] pretty sure the Russians [were] going to attack it any day. And that seemed like a bad scene. So I nixed that. And we just came back here because I want to go home.

I feel like everyone has been pretty stunned by the ferocity that has unfolded. Certainly from outside the country, everyone's jaws are just on the floor about how this has gone. Have you felt that from inside the country, that this went places that you were not anticipating?

Yeah, 100 percent. Everyone has. Every single person I've talked to, you know—and I don't even ask the question anymore, because after the first three interviews [asking] “did you expect this to happen?” everyone's like, no, fuck no, of course we didn't. Russia has been saber-rattling and doing military buildups on Ukraine's borders half a dozen times at this point. They did one earlier this year and then backed off. And they also invaded the country eight years ago and have been consistently at war with it, albeit through proxies, but, you know, for eight years, so I think everyone in the country was just like, of course it's not gonna happen.

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I watched a video of an osprey hunting a fish just now. It was a magnificent and terrifying thing to behold the type of thing you’d say holy shit about if you saw it transpiring in real life. You’d say holy shit if you only saw it on a video too but with a little less oomf behind it.

Ospreys which can reach about five feet long in wingspan circle above bodies of water and their eyesight is such that they can spot a fish from up to like 100 feet in the air and when they do see one they hover and hover then begin what looks like a headfirst dive bomb but at the last second before impact they adjust their bodies so that they’re actually plunging in feet first to complete the strike and next thing the fish is absolutely fucked.

In this particular instance the osprey was successful it grabbed what looked like a pretty sizable fish some people said it was a shark but then other people said it was a dogfish and then other people still said a dogfish is actually a type of shark fucking dumbass why don’t you go kill yourself etc. You know how conversations go online.

So it has the fish now and this was a curious thing to me because I would have figured it would have flown off directly to its nest or a perch somewhere to begin eating it but instead it circled around and circled around over a beach where people were swimming and sunbathing oblivious to the drama overhead with the shark or whatever it was in its grasp which you would assume would be dead or close to it but then you see the shark wriggling around like it’s still alive and I got the idea and I know that I am anthropomorphizing things here that the bird was giving the fish something like a tour in its final gasping minutes of a world that it had never had cause to know existed. This fish that had never even seen land was perhaps beholding albeit briefly the entirety of the sky and I thought there could be worse ways to go all things considered. I thought of Jodie Foster struck dumb with awe thinking they should’ve sent a fish poet.

Everyone is talking about the war almost exclusively right now and that is certainly understandable. I wonder if it persists for weeks or months more if the TV news will lose interest at some point? Wars tend to stay in the news longer than other stories because the TV guys get to put on the little helmet and vest and they love that shit more than anything. Wars that we acknowledge are happening in the first place anyway.

People are also talking about nuclear war and so I broke out the old copy of On the Beach to poke through here and there this morning. It’s a novel written by Nevil Shute (and yes he’s British with that name if that’s what you’re wondering) in 1957 during the Cold War and it concerns an American submarine officer and a group of people he meets while stationed in Australia after nuclear war has broken out across the globe and they are waiting for the fallout to reach them. They get to live a little while longer than everybody else does.

Commander Dwight Towers befriends a woman named Moira Davidson who reacts to the knowledge of impending doom at first by drinking heavily and despairing which I can relate to because that is how I spend most of my time and it’s not even the end of the world yet.1 Towers tries to keep his shit together for the most part even though he knows his family back in the States are likely dead by now. At one point the two are discussing how the winds will eventually carry the radiation southward toward Australia. If they had blown more directly they would all be dead by now already he tells her early in the book.

“I wish we were,” she tells him. “It’s like waiting to be hung.”

“Maybe it is,” he says. “Or maybe it’s a period of grace.”

I suppose those are the two ways you can look at a normal life in general as well. We’re all born waiting to be hung and we can either despair over that fact or consider the interim a gift. Every day a last minute reprieve from the governor. I think we all know which one I’m going to personally do but you can do it differently it’s your life buddy.

“There was a little silence after he said that. ‘Why is it taking so long, Dwight?” she asked at last. ‘Why can’t the wind blow straight and get it over?’”

And then he talks about how the wind patterns work for a bit and she says it’s not fair they never did anything they never dropped any bombs and he says no it isn’t fair but it is how it is.

“There was a pause, and then she said angrily. “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, Dwight. We’ve all got to do that sometime. It’s all the things I’m going to have to miss...”

She turned to him in the starlight. “I’m never going to get outside Australia. All my life I’ve wanted to see the Rue de Rivoli. I suppose it’s the romantic name. It’s silly, because I suppose it’s just a street like any other street. But that’s what I’ve wanted, and I’m never going to see it. Because there isn’t any Paris now, or London, or New York.”

He smiled at her gently. “The Rue de Rivoli may still be there, with things in the shop windows and everything. I wouldn’t know if Paris got a bomb or not. Maybe it’s all there still, just as it was, with the sun shining down the street the way you’d want to see it. That’s the way I like to think about that sort of place. It’s just that folks don’t live there anymore.”

She got restlessly to her feet. “That’s not the way I wanted to see it. A city of dead people... Get me another drink, Dwight.”

What a luxury to be able to read books about war instead of living through one. As the bombing in Ukraine seems to be getting more intense and indiscriminate I was reminded earlier of this piece in the New Yorker about the bombing in Syria and what a bomb actually does to a body.

For almost a year, Syrian government helicopters had been lobbing barrels filled with shrapnel and TNT onto markets, apartment blocks, schools, and hospitals. Welded tail fins guide the barrels to land on top of an impact fuse. The methods of targeting are so rudimentary and indiscriminate that, in Aleppo, many residents have moved closer to the front lines, risking sniper fire and shelling, because the helicopters don’t drop barrels near government troops.

That part kind of fucks you up there doesn’t it? To move closer to the people trying to kill you because you know at least they will be a bit more discriminate about what they’re exploding from the sky in that particular area.

When a large bomb explodes, it destroys bodies in consecutive waves. The first is the blast wave, which spreads air particles at supersonic speeds. This can inflict internal damage on the organs, because, Nott said, “the air-tissue interface will bleed. So your lungs start to bleed inside. You can’t breathe. You can’t hear anything, because your eardrums are all blown out.” A fraction of a second later comes the blast wind, a negative pressure that catapults people into the air and slams them into whatever walls or objects are around. “The blast wind is so strong that in the wrong place it will actually blow off your leg,” Nott said. He showed me a photograph of a man on the operating table, whose left leg was charred mush and mostly missing below the knee. “It’ll strip everything off your leg. And that’s why people have such terrible injuries. It’s the blast wind that does that, followed by fragmentation injuries,” from bits of metal shrapnel that rip through flesh and bone, and the flame front, which burns people to death.

In the aftermath of a barrel-bomb attack, Nott said, “as you walked down the stairs to the emergency department, you just heard screams.” Barrel bombs blow up entire buildings, filling the air with concrete dust; many people who survive the initial explosion die of suffocation minutes later. Every day, patients arrived at the hospital so mangled and coated in debris that “you wouldn’t know whether you were looking at the front or the back, whether they were alive or dead,” he said. “Every time you touched somebody, the dust would go into your face and down into your lungs, and you’d be coughing and spluttering away as you were trying to assess whether this patient was alive.”

After that I read this poem that my buddy Paul shared on Twitter today. “Kurihara Sadako was a poet who survived the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima,” he wrote. “In 1946 she submitted proofs of her poetry collection Black Eggs to US censors during the occupation. They redacted entire poems, including ‘What Is War?’ which you can read below.”

The only thing scarier than bombs are people.

Later in On the Beach Dwight echoes Moira’s line about how we all eventually have to die anyway but with less anxiety and more acceptance.

“I’ve got used to the idea, I think I’d rather have it this way,” he says.

“We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I’ll be fit and well up till the end of August and then—home. I’d rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I’m seventy to when I’m ninety.”

I guess!

There have been a lot of fucking unhinged bloodthirsty takes on what’s to happen next with Russia but this guy who was the Obama administration’s ambassador to Russia has been really setting the bar pretty high lately.

I wonder if that same imperative to protest imperialist wars applies within our own country now or if it is still frowned upon like it was with Iraq and Afghanistan? Fuck it we can’t even protest the police without being accused of treason and hating the country these days never mind protest the troops who as everyone knows are braver and more sacred than the cops.

That reminds me I really liked my Discontents colleague Katie Way’s latest from her newsletter All Cops Are Posters on Blue Grief.

If Indigenous teenagers and Black trans sex workers and homeless people are the less dead—marginalized to the point that when they die violently, it’s par for the course—then cops are the more dead, because every cop’s death is reflexively treated like a tragedy. That’s why every officer flatlining on a ventilator because he didn’t want to comply with his city’s Nazi vaccine mandates dies “in the line of duty.” A cop’s death automatically matters, and the only decent response—according to his fellow cops and the God-fearing Americans who love them—is to show unwavering respect to both the deceased cop and the institution of policing in the wake of this profound loss.

And the institution of policing knows how to make its losses unignorable—by making its grief spectacular. Take the funeral processions for two NYPD officers, Wilbur Mora and Jason Rivera, killed in January 2022 after responding to a domestic disturbance call in Harlem. NYPD cops in their dress uniforms mobbed the streets of New York City for Rivera’s wake, then Mora’s, blotting out whole blocks of pavement in the middle of Manhattan with a swarm of navy blue bodies. The resulting scenes were best viewed from above.

Most of you remember this of course but it was so easy to get some random guy ready to beat your ass for not being enthusiastic enough about the Iraq war at the time and this is a country with all of its faults where it’s exponentially easier to take to the streets than in Russia. Have you thought about what it was like back then recently? I still have this vivid memory of a couple years into the war — and this is pretty much why I stopped going to live sporting events — of not standing and saluting hard enough for some dumb fuck parade of troops at a Patriots game and the entire section around us was ready to do a The Day of the Locust on me and my friends. You’re either with us or against us.

It’s hard not to think about the concept of protesting against unjust imperial violence perpetrated against civilians and not think about some of the largest civil rights protests in recent history in this country and around the world just a short couple of years ago culminating thus far in this the other night from Joe Biden:

Hard to imagine how we could somehow possibly spend more money on our cops than we already do but maybe we’re almost there. Maybe we just need to top them off a little more and they’ll finally figure out how to stop crime?

Who is this “fund the police” shit for? Republicans are still going to pretend like Joe Biden is going to Suicide Squad serial killers into teaching kindergarten and anyone who was going to vote Democrat no matter what is going to vote Democrat no matter what already. This is nothing more than a demoralizing fuck you to the left which is I suppose what the Democrats are always best at doing no matter the scenario.

Look at this guy:

Swalwell almost immediately started pushing for the idea of expelling all Russian students from the country once the first bombs dropped in Ukraine. Thousands of them who have nothing to do with anything.

As Osita Nwanevu wrote on Swalwell the other day in The New Republic:

A just society cannot punish people, on the basis of their nationality, for actions they aren’t responsible for and may not even support. Those who can’t grasp this exceedingly simple principle should consider whether it would have been fair for American students to have been mistreated or inconvenienced abroad over the policies of Donald Trump. Opening a book—or even a Wikipedia article, whatever their minds might manage⁠—on internment during World War II would also be worthwhile.

After watching the video of the osprey again I was reminded of this poem of sorts by the actor Vincent D’Onofrio on Twitter.

“Pigs can't look up. But I could pick a pig up one night and raise it into the sky and tilt this pig ever so gentle. I can make sure this pigs eyes line up with the stars. Imagine seeing the stars 4the first time.I want 2b treated that kindly and see the stars for the first time.”

That is a lovely thought and some extremely Vincent D’Onofrio shit to say but sadly I guess it’s not technically true. While pigs can’t look directly up they can in fact still see the sky from certain angles and also especially can see it when they roll around on their backs in the mud which is one of the more famous things that pigs do. A poem doesn’t have to be true to be true though.

Then that all reminded me of this poem by Laura Gilpin which I have shared in here before but is always worth reading again.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, he sees
twice as many stars as usual.

The time I shared that Gilpin poem in here previously I also wrote about Ash Wednesday which it was yesterday apparently. It was 2019 and I had to try hard to remember what the specifics of the day even are then and now three years later I remember even less. Every day I become somehow less and more Catholic at once.

I wrote:

I remembered what they used to say to us before they blessed us with the ashes which was remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return, which is a pretty fucked up thing to say to a LEGO playing nerd who can barely do division.

The prayer is based on a quote from Genesis which goes like this:

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech because I was busy catching up on the second season of Raised By Wolves which if you’re unfamiliar is a science fiction series created by Aaron Guzikowski but executive produced and directed for a couple of episodes by Ridley Scott. The story concerns two androids named mother and father (filled with Ridley Scott milk blood!) who are tasked with raising a number of human embryos on a distant planet after two warring factions have rendered the Earth largely uninhabitable through war. In the first season when it was at its best it was something like Scott taking a stab at a Prometheus do-over and attended to a number of similar themes such as the origins of human life as we know it beginning on another farflung planet. Also like Prometheus at its best it was the type of story that dug deep inside of me and changed how I think about existence in a lot of ways. Sometimes unfortunately and especially in the second season it is further like Prometheus in that there’s always some fucking guy doing something so fucking stupid and you gotta sit there thinking come on with this fucking guy and it’s almost bad enough to ruin all the good parts.

The reason I bring it up is that it’s also in large part about something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately since I watched the Swedish film Aniara (which I wrote about in here recently and which fucked me up pretty bad) and read the book The Sparrow (which I also wrote about in here) and even the silly joke tag at the end up Don’t Look Up which is the concept of being able to flee Earth on a spaceship and arrive at a planet that you are fairly certain is habitable. Not safe per se but habitable.

There’s a common trope in sci-fi when humans first arrive on an alien planet after traveling an unfathomable distance where they slowly take their helmets off and realize they can breathe and there’s all manner of majestic looking plants and rock formations around them and sometimes waterfalls and shit. Some kind of space bird flies overhead and cries out. A tree that is much bigger than you would expect a tree to be. Sometimes the terrain is harsh and desolate and they’re like ah fuck what now but they have nonetheless arrived somewhere else. They are standing on another planet millions of miles away in the galaxy and they are alive. I never understand why they don’t all fall to their knees and weep every time. Every sci-fi film should just be scenes of everyone crying in awe for 90 minutes.

Would you want to do that if you could? Maybe the world is ending or maybe you have an idea it is going to soon and someone tells you you could get on a ship and while there is no guarantee what will happen — this is a very dangerous business this space travel stuff — you have a very good chance of reaching another Earth-like planet. Of getting out and walking around for who knows how long. Maybe the rest of your natural life. Then again perhaps you’ll be immediately snatched from the ground by a space pterodactyl or whatever and hoisted up into the sky screaming but you still made it to Earth 2. In those last terrifying seconds you might see the expanse of the new planet for miles around you toward the horizon and think my god this is beautiful.

I think I’d do it.2 If only just to at long last know this right here wasn’t all there ever was.

For the most part I have been trying my best to practice shutting the fuck up on social media over the past few days as the Russian assault on Ukraine continues. First time for everything right? Mostly because I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about when it comes to the geopolitics of the region and it’s difficult even when you are trying to be circumspect to be taken in by bullshit and propaganda during any conflict or to get a little too horny for the grand spectacle of death and violence from the safety of your own home thousands of miles away — in the United States of all fucking places — like it’s some televised sporting event. Also because the opportunity to absolutely eat shit by saying something stupid — or like many journalists around the world have been — saying something downright racist and Islamophobic is unparalleled right now and people just cannot help themselves from doing it over and over.

I also can’t stop feeling unsettled about how Americans seem to be identifying so strongly with the defiant and overmatched underdog Ukrainians here. I’m not certain that’s the correct analogy for who we usually are in wars like this buddy!

🤔🤔🤔

I did want to hear from someone living in Ukraine right now about what it’s been like the past week however and so I called a friend of a friend who happened to live in a town nextdoor to mine in Massachusetts for years. “People are not sleeping but we must be strong,” Olena Vink who runs a beauty salon not far outside of the city of Kyiv told me while hunkering down in her apartment building. She’s scared but inspired by the spirit of community that the people of her town are showing.

Read our talk below.

But first be sure to follow my Discontents colleague Jack Crosbie who has been reporting from Kharkiv for Rolling Stone the past few days.

We spend the night in the garage sleeping on disintegrating blocks of padded insulation that is thankfully not fiberglass. At around two a.m. I give up and go sleep on a couch cushion on the floor in the lobby, behind a row of couches and well away from all of the windows. No one has turned the elevator music off so I toss and turn to smooth jazz until sometime past five a.m. when I fall asleep. I wake up at seven on Sunday to one of the hotel security guys nudging my cushion with his boot. He tells me to go back down to the garage and mimes shooting a gun. When I get down there I check my phone and there are reports of Russian soldiers in the middle of the city. The shelling picks up again. We come upstairs after half an hour and huddle in the dark, checking the news on our phones. No one can do any reporting because there are gunfights in the streets but we have no idea where. The street in front of the hotel is calm but you can hear both shells and guns coming from somewhere sort-of-nearby. At some point a little after noon it slows. The news claims that the Ukrainians have won, wrested back control of the city from a Russian incursion, but that there is now a city-wide 24-hour curfew – anyone still out on the streets will be assumed to be a Russian saboteur and could be shot. A group of armed men piles out of a police car a block away and three or four of us poke our heads out of the lobby doors to look at them. They look at us and we look at them and then I decide to go back inside the hotel because when a person with a gun looks at you for long enough it gets a bit uncomfortable.

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Where are you right now? 

Right now I am very close to Kyiv, in Hatne, probably just 15 minutes from the border of the city. We have a small complex of apartments here. We are trying to survive. What I want to tell you, and probably nobody around you is talking about this, is how Ukrainian civilian people are helping each other. It’s amazing. For me it’s especially amazing, because I spent twenty years in the United States, and right now… it’s very different. I don’t want to say anything bad about Americans, but I never felt so much support from strange people [whose faces I never knew before]. I lived in Massachusetts, but I was born in Ukraine in Kharkiv, in the east of Ukraine. My mother is still there, my mother in law is still there. That is the place right now that is very scary. 

That’s where much of the fighting is happening right now. 

Yes. I spoke with my mother twenty minutes ago. 

They’re being bombed there right now?

Yes. 

We are seeing lots of reports, but when it’s a war it’s hard to tell what’s real sometimes. Are civilian buildings and residential buildings being attacked?

Absolutely. Absolutely. This is the truth. I can swear for you. 

You are in a tall building?

Yes. I live on the tenth floor. 

Are you not told to go to the basement or anywhere?

I gave the basement to my friends and neighbors who have a small kid. And who are really scared. All the nights I have spent in my apartment. 

You don’t want to go to a shelter? Or is there one?

What is the reason? Listen, if I lost my place to live I don’t think I would survive for a very long time. We don’t have shelters. Our shelters are the basements in the buildings. People are sleeping on the ground, in a sleeping bag. No beds, no nothing. In my same complex I am the owner of a beauty salon, so I gave my beauty salon for the other people who need it more than me. 

Are stores open? Are you able to get food?

Sometimes. Sometimes. And not a lot. Most of the stores closed. The pharmacy is closed. On the weekend everything was closed. Everything. For food, I will tell you the story of how I spent the last hour. We have a friend, the owner of the small store here, she was evacuated to the west of Ukraine. Right now she’s not able to come here. She asked my husband to break down the door and give the food to the people who need it. It’s what I have been doing for the last hour. Sharing the food for everybody. Nobody is asking for money. They say, ok, the war will be over, we will help one another again. Right now, even the stores that are open are cash only, but you cannot get the cash. It’s no ATMs open, no banks open. No currency exchange open. 

So people are sharing food from stores?

Yes. Sharing everything. Whatever they have. 

That’s inspiring to see. How else are people coming together?

Right now in my salon there are a couple families which I never saw before. People just brought them from other areas in Kyiv, because here we are a bit out of the center, so it’s more safety. They didn’t have anything. So our neighbors gave to them food, blankets. I gave to them a nice warm place. Thank you lord we still have electricity and water. 

On the second day of our war, one of our security was trying to chase a suspicious person. But it was really thin ice, so he drowned. So we had our first loss. You have no idea how many people came to my place and brought the money for his funeral. Everybody came and gave whatever they have. Right now we couldn’t even bury him. His mom is on the west of Ukraine, but we don’t know her wish. Maybe she wants to see him. 

Our guys made this themselves to close the road to our community.

Have you been paying attention to social media? What are people saying there? 

Russians are just lying. I’ve been here in Ukraine for the last four and a half years. If they say we have here Nazis and everybody should speak only Ukrainian languages? No. It’s not true. My first language is Russian. I still speak Russian with everybody. My salon has prices in the Russian language. 

I’m sure there’s some bad people, Nazis, in Ukraine, but there are bad people everywhere. We have plenty of bad people in America too. 

Yes. Especially right now. We have some situations right now where some robbers, who put stickers on doors to say that the people were evacuated. So everyone in our area would go to those buildings and take the stickers away. It was planning for a robbery. 

People were robbing the buildings? 

They were preparing for it.

So not everyone is coming together?

Mmm. Most of them. 99.9%. 

There are always going to be people trying to take advantage. 

Absolutely right. 

Everyone in America seems to be very taken with Zelenskyy right now. What do people there think?

Absolutely he is a hero. He stayed with us, with our nation. 

Has that made people feel more like you’re in this together, to see the president? 

Yes. 

Was he popular before?

I would say so-so. Before the war it was so-so. But right now he is our hero, the face of our country. 

Has there been fighting on your streets yet?

No. Our men who have stayed with us who are not in the army, they are [patrolling around] every night. In the first few days, in the beginning, I don’t know if it’s true, but the rumor was some Russians who came here before the war would make marks for planes, for bombing for the future. People are watching and looking for anything suspicious. There are not too many guys left here because most of them went to the front, they are in the military. But even civilians are helping to keep calm. For example, from today, no alcohol is legal right now. We made this decision for ourselves. Just to make sure people will be acting correctly. 

You would think people are so stressed out they would want to drink. I know I would. 

Yes. But, you know, we have a lot of weapons around right now. 

Did your town hand out weapons? 

Yes, but not for everybody. Only to the men who [are healthy] and they can prove they can defend. 

Are you worried that the fighting is getting closer to you?

We’ll see. I don’t know. Right now we are just trying to survive. 

Was there any thought of trying to escape to Poland or anywhere?

There’s no chance anymore. It’s too late. I don’t think other people should try to escape. I propose you stay here. I have my place where I can live, electricity. I think it’s safer to stay right now. You don’t know where you will meet with Russians right now on the road. You can stop with kids in the middle of nowhere, in the forest, you don’t have food, you don’t have heat. It’s still the winter. Still pretty cold here. 

Do you have children? What are you telling children in the area? 

No. The parents are trying to keep them calm. Ok, I have a dog, and he’s pretty funny, so sometimes I come up to them and they play with my dog and try to forget there’s war around them.

Are you allowed to go outside?

Yes. There are some hours you can’t go outside, but nobody will say you shouldn’t stay home right now. It’s for everybody to be safe. 

This is much worse than usual, but it’s not the first fighting going on in the country in recent years. Why do you think people are paying so much more attention now?

I think it’s almost World War III. Putin will not stop. He will not. Ukraine is just the beginning. Listen, we are a small country. Peaceful people. Ukraine has never been fighting people. Look at Georgia. Look at the other countries around. He’s always trying to keep his politics in those countries. 

Hopefully his talk about nuclear weapons was just posturing. But the United States is stupid and belligerent too. I just hope we don’t do anything to make things worse. 

I know, but… Putin lost this war already. The plan was to put Ukraine on its knees in two days. Now we are on the sixth day of the war. Right now all the world knows they are attacking us. They’re not trying to save Russian people here. No. He is the aggressor. 

That seems to be what they were telling the Russian soldiers, that they were going there to save civilians that were being mistreated. That was a lie it seems. 

Absolutely. It’s a nice beautiful country. Listen, I’m a U.S. citizen too, but I made my choice and I came to my country. My age right now is fifty. I have been living in peaceful Kyiv. Trust me, it’s beautiful. A lot of musicians in the streets, restaurants, cafes open. People walking, smiling, no aggression. I could speak the Russian language all the time. Nobody ever corrected me. 

What are you hoping happens next? 

I think the Russian people, civilians, or some other politicians will stop it, will stop Putin. Because it’s only his idea. Here, the Russian soldiers, they’re dying much more than Ukrainians. The Ukrainian army is very strong. In my basement there is a girl whose husband right now is fighting. She saw some kind of message over the phone, that Russian soldiers were in some certain area. She called it to her husband, and her husband said to his commanders, and they sent the flight and bombed that column. A girl sitting in the basement and she is still fighting for the whole country. Because of this probably twenty hard vehicles were stopped. 

Well more than anything I hope this fighting stops soon before it can get too much worse. Please stay safe. 

Thank you for your support. Thank you America. 

“Our Next guests are a Seattle band, and tonight they’re making their network TV debut with us,” David Letterman says. “This right here is their newest album, it’s entitled ‘Sweet Oblivion,…

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Gig work and rideshare companies have already begun pouring tens of millions of dollars into a looming conflict in Massachusetts. Their hope is to continue to exploit drivers by side-stepping labor laws and misclassifying them as independent contractors rather than employees. If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the same tactic companies like Uber and Lyft used to push Prop 22 through in California in 2020. Opponents of such a move here in Massachusetts, which you are if you are reading this newsletter, say the tech companies want to codify what has become the norm in gig work into law, continuing the Uber-ization of labor as we know it. 

Specifically what form the fight will take remains to be seen here. Attorney General Maura Healey has been in the process of suing these companies since 2020 for cheating workers out of benefits and protections that she believes they are rightfully owed. A bill (H.1234) supported by the tech companies is also currently under consideration in the State House. Then there’s the possibility if they don’t get their way through legislation that the collection of anti-worker tech shitheads will push a question onto the ballot this November, which is where the real blizzard of propaganda dollars will be spent on confusing voters with phony appeals to the supposed ideals of worker flexibility and independence and so on much like they did in California. 

Seeing how things played out with Prop. 22, a broad coalition of groups in the state, including the ACLU of Massachusetts, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the National Employment Law Project, and dozens of others are working together to oppose a repeat, Wes McEnany, the Director of the umbrella opposition group Mass Not For Sale told me. I asked McEnany to explain more about what’s at stake here. 

This whole issue is confusing, and that’s by design I think. Can you frame the basic stakes for us? This is about rideshare companies trying to prevent the workers they routinely exploit through labor loopholes from being classified as employees, rather than independent contractors, correct? 

Yes. Massachusetts has one of the strongest labor laws in the country. We have the ABC test, which they also have in California. And so our argument, and the Attorney General’s argument, as she’s suing the companies, is that [Uber, Lyft etc] have been misclassifying workers. As a result they’ve skirted 100 years worth of civil rights protections, payroll taxes, OSHA regulations, benefits, and minimum wage laws, to be able to claim that these drivers are just independent contractors. But more importantly it’s about them not paying any taxes, not granting drivers any rights. 

These companies are so ubiquitous and have amassed such insane amounts of wealth, that they’ve realized they can raise $100 million to buy a law. So it’s not really just about the drivers, as much as the companies want to claim it is. Obviously drivers are getting a raw deal. But as we saw in California, where they passed Prop 22 in 2020, this year they’ve come back with a ballot initiative for healthcare workers that would essentially turn nurses, anything below a doctor, including in the veterinarian space, into an independent contractor. So hospitals, some of the biggest, wealthiest “non-profit” and for profit systems in the country, would then not have to pay any payroll taxes, and wouldn’t have to guarantee the licensure of nurses. After Prop 22 happened they saw this with grocery stores. The first thing they did was a bunch of union grocery store workers that delivered groceries got independent contractor status. They went from being union workers with a ton of rights, a pension, healthcare, to not having any of those things. 

We’re talking about DoorDash and Lyft and those type of workers here in the Massachusetts issue, but in the bigger picture, this is like a Trojan Horse type of thing, to kind of sneak in and turn everything into gig work. 

Yeah, big tech has figured out they can replace a taxi dispatcher, a human being, with an app, so they can sidestep 100 years of labor laws brought about by worker struggle, and they can make that the whole future of the workforce. 

Are they using the same playbook they used for Prop 22 in California here? Also, wasn’t that recently ruled unconstitutional? 

One of the things they put in the initiative there was that it could never be changed, and that was recently ruled unconstitutional. Now the legislature is working on taking it back, which is exciting, but also kind of goes to show you they’ll spend as much money as they can trying to pass laws that aren’t legal using this process. So it’s pretty messed up. I think it is the exact same playbook they used in California. They’re trying to paint this as sort of like a black and brown workers liberation, but really what it is is turning those workers who haven’t had opportunities for better jobs into an underclass. To ensure that those workers don’t have the same rights as other workers have. 

That’s a particularly shady thing they’re doing here. The language they’re using, couching it in this false liberatory type thing. “Giving workers the freedom they demand and deserve” kind of thing. It’s all doublespeak, which is what makes it confusing to the average person. 

This happened in California. Through my work with the Campaign to Organize Digital Workers I know a lot of people in California, and a lot of people voted the wrong way thinking they were voting the right way. They thought they were voting for workers rights, not realizing they weren’t. And that was because of the onslaught of the $250 million big tech spent confusing the issue. They’re going to try to do the same thing in Massachusetts. 

What we’re going to do differently is lift the hood on this and try to explain to voters that this is about big tech trying to do a number of different things. There’s a climate angle here too. How is the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts and the country going to meet any of the emissions standards if we continue to have, at least in this space, 60,000 cars on the road? 

The reality is there’s also a ton of safety concerns. I’ve talked to a lot of women drivers that have been assaulted, that have been scared, stuff like that.

You probably saw the Boston Globe article about Will Good? He played in a bunch of punk bands in Boston, known him for fifteen years, kid from Southie. He takes an Uber home, the Uber gets in an accident. Uber says we’re not responsible in any way. Now he’s a quadriplegic, and they basically say tough shit. You should’ve taken the MBTA if you didn’t want to get into an accident. So, we want to talk about that. We want to talk about the safety aspects. And frankly, they want to exploit this moment of racial reckoning in this country, but we want to have a conversation about, well, what about voting rights and democracy in this country? This initiative is supposed to be a direct democracy initiative, where citizens can sidestep the legislative process. Instead they’re spending a vast amount of foreign resources — and it shouldn't be lost on anybody that Uber is half capitalized by a Saudi state investment firm — that this is also a blatant attack on democracy. 

Already Lyft gave the biggest one time politician donation in Massachusetts history to influence this issue right? 

Yeah, $14 million. Their side has pledged that they’re ready to spend $100 million to pass this law. 

Another way this all gets confusing is there are different prongs. Healy is suing them. Then there’s a couple different bills we might vote on in November. Are they solidified yet? 

They’re going to need to collect another 12,000 signatures to get certified on the ballot, which they shouldn’t have a problem doing. They paid a firm to collect all the signatures so far. There’s a couple bills in the legislature around this issue, but neither of them are probably going to go anywhere. And we’re not going to cut a deal here. We’re not going to cut a deal to sell workers out. We have the best laws for workers in Massachusetts and we’re prepared to defend them. In 2023 we’re very interested in passing our own law that codifies what we think is the right classification for these workers, and to really go after these companies. We feel very strongly moving on a legislative strategy in 2023, regardless of whether or not we win in November. 

A lot of these consulting groups the rideshare companies are paying are the same ones from the last time we had some big contested initiatives a couple years ago. The right to repair law and the nurses staffing issue, there was a huge amount of money spent then too. Anyone here probably remembers the constant fucking ads. These are the same slick fuckers who are going to be working on this issue too right? 

100%. They’ve hired some of the same consultants. They’re prepared to put slick ads together and bombard people. Right to repair was the most expensive ballot initiative ever. 

The thing with those questions, hearing the ads, they threaded the needle in such a way where even I was like, wait, which is the good thing here? It’s hard for the average person, the way they talk about this shit, to tell what’s reasonable. 

They’re banking on that. That voters will be confused, and voters will think they’re voting for the right moral side of the issue. One disadvantage in California was that four of their media markets are in the top twenty, six were in the top fifty, so their money went a lot further than I think it will go here, because we have only one media market. To be competitive getting our message out won’t take as much money. What we have that they don’t have is the biggest political coalition that’s ever been established in Massachusetts. You can look on our website, there are dozens of organizations that have signed on including the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the National Consumer Law Center. 

One thing it seems like the rideshare companies are trying to do is give a little ground so it seems like a fair compromise. They’re going to pay more than the minimum wage they say, but it’s actually only going to count for when drivers are driving, not waiting for their next assignment. There are a couple of things baked into what they want to pass that seem decent, but it’s a bit of con. 

Yup. The flexibility issue is a huge one. It’s a huge one for drivers. But the company sets the schedule, they don’t need to misclassify workers in order to do that. And for the benefits they say they’re going to offer, through our analysis, it would be something like less than 10% of workers would qualify to even enter into the benefit pool. It is a con. 

Where is opinion landing amongst drivers as far as you know? I’m sure there are plenty who just want to work when they want, they enjoy the supposed ideals of gig work. 

They’ve published some polls with supposed numbers. But I think a lot of drivers are confused. They’ve been propagandizing them through the apps, trying to scare drivers, telling them if this doesn’t pass they’re all going to lose their jobs. It’s complete nonsense. 

How many people are there in this category in Massachusetts? 

Somewhere around 60,000. 

What if a guy just drives five or eight hours a week. Would you still want him to be counted as an employee?

Absolutely. Part time workers in all other industries have rights. These workers don’t. These workers, under this bill, wouldn’t be eligible for any of the benefits the companies are advertising. 

I did a piece on temp workers in here recently. How routinely they’re exploited. Is there a common ground for how this all could benefit temp workers too?

I think temp workers are in a similar dynamic. It’s another attempt by multinational corporations to sidestep labor laws. If you can put workers into these other kinds of classifications, then all the benefits that people think they have, protections against discrimination, civil rights, all these things, won’t exist.

A lot of people have probably come to think of these apps as an essential part of their lives. More convenient and so on. Do you think there’s any putting the genie back in the bottle so to speak?   

I think there is. A bunch of European countries have outlawed the business model. The CEO of Uber recently said we’ll make any model work. And they have. They made it work in the UK. They made it work in Spain and across Europe where they’ve been taken the carpet for some of these worker misclassification issues. One of the differences here is that in Europe your benefit status, your pension, that stuff isn’t tied to your employment in most countries, whereas it is here. The companies aren’t forced to make any of those kinds of contributions here, and because they don’t pay any taxes through loopholes they’re off the hook. Drivers still have to pay 1099 taxes, but the companies don’t. 

What do you want people to do? 

They can sign up on our website to volunteer. We really need to get the word out. Once people understand what’s going on here they support our side. We need small dollar donations and people to get involved in the campaign.  Again, they’re going to try to make this seem like it’s just about drivers, but it’s not, it’s about all of us. If you’re a scheduled employee, it's especially going to affect you. Retail workers, mechanics. Already in California, some of the diesel mechanics outfits, high skilled workers, have turned some of their mechanics into contractors via apps. This is about all workers. People should talk to their friends and family and not let this be a confusing issue. It’s about big tech trying to buy a law, not paying any taxes, and not be on the hook for any of the bad things that come with their business model. 

Earlier this week Matt Crowley left his job at The Onion. Normally a guy leaving a job wouldn’t exactly be news, but in a Twitter thread announcing his departure the five year staff writer had some choice words for Jim Spanfeller, noted herb, and the man largely responsible for fucking up a suite of everyone’s favorite websites like Deadspin and the AV Club and Jezebel to name a few. Being a fellow Spanfeller-disliker myself I wanted to talk to Crowley about how the site changed for the worse under his direction, as well as all the other important stuff you’d want to ask someone at The Onion such as why they never hired me a few years back. We also talked about the satirical site’s unionization effort, the difficulties of writing comedy about Trump and Biden, and what happened to all of the images on some of The Onion’s best jokes.

You will have to be a paid subscriber to read the whole talk below but here’s a bit of it. And here’s a very steep discount good until tomorrow.

Get 25% off for 1 year

Before we get to that here’s something funnier than The Onion could have ever written. It was tweeted out by the NYPD last night then swiftly deleted after it was mercilessly ridiculed.

It’s already embarrassing enough when cops share photos of busts like these with like one gram of dirt weed, a few plastic baggies, and a pirate gun from 1843 that they confiscated, but this is something else. I honestly don't get it even from a dumb fuck cop’s perspective. Based on everything I know about cops and every cop show I've ever seen wouldn’t these guys know they would get goofed on by their own boys for this type of thing? Ay it’s the diaper squad over here etc. We may never come to know what transpires inside of the average cop’s brain.

In other shitty media news, you may remember a few years ago when I reported on something called WorkMarket and FastFunds. It was a payment service used by a number of media companies, including the Huffington Post who I had recently written for at the time, through which freelancers could avail themselves of a very generous offer to be paid less than they were owed somewhat sooner than they would be otherwise. Here’s what my specific offer looked like:

It was absolutely fucked. Long story short, after I wrote about it, some of the media companies involved said they were going to stop using it (then started up again later). The New York Times denied that they were going to be using the service at all despite evidence to the contrary that they were planning to. Now, a few years later, it looks like the Times had decided to forge ahead with offering their freelancers payday loan style services from a different company, as noted by writer Abby Lee Hood on Twitter.

Pretty cool. Here are some perhaps related stories:

Hood wrote to me on Twitter that the Times currently owes her $750. “Last week my internet was shut off for 16 hours because I had to drum up the $ for the bill.”

Ok here’s my talk with Matt Crowley.

What were the circumstances behind you leaving?

It’s kind of a long story, but the short version is I was moving back to LA, and The Onion is based in Chicago, so they weren’t able to accommodate a remote position. There is such a position as writer-at-large, which people have had in the past, but two other writers moved to LA after I did, so accommodating three wasn’t doable. 

[A very loud horn version of La Cucaracha plays in the background] 

What is that? Is that a gag or something?

Yeah it’s a very hilarious gag on my part. No, a truck just went by. 

I’m confused because wasn’t there something that was the opposite with the AV Club where they wanted everyone to move to LA, or is that unrelated? 

It seems pretty clear that that decision was made to try to purge the staff, because they weren’t offered a cost of living increase to move to LA. Also, they were given a certain date to decide, but even prior to that date all of their jobs were listed on job boards in LA. So it was pretty clear they didn’t expect anyone to move. Even beyond that, there was a staff member who was living out in LA, working for the AV Club, doing interviews and stuff, and about a month before they told the AV Club they all had to move to LA they fired him. So, you know, it suggests it really wasn’t about having them live closer to the entertainment industry. 

Sounds like some classic Spanfeller bullshit. You tweeted this about him: “Onion Inc. under Spanfeller’s watch has been a disaster. I’ve watched a place that was flawed but brimming with creative joy turn into one of exhaustion, anxiety, and fear. Spanfeller is a perfect avatar for the destruction of digital media: capricious and pigheaded, issuing edicts from on high without thought or consideration to anyone in the company.”

Some people might say that’s an understatement!

Well, yeah, I didn’t want to just be like “Fuck Jim Spanfeller!” I worked at a number of different companies before The Onion, and I’ve never, ever seen management be as hostile and condescending to its employees as I did at this place. 

How long were you there? 

I was there just over five years. I started right after Trump got elected actually. It was owned by Univision at the time, then they sold to G/O Media. No one was really happy with Univision as an owner either. I think they really didn’t know what to do with the brand and the company, but they did throw a little money at it. So there was the opportunity to do some videos, and more creative output. We did this podcast A Very Fatal Murder, which was a parody of Serial. So that was good. Then G/O Media came and Spanfeller gave an interview where he said “We’re not going to cut our way to success,” and then two weeks later they fired a bunch of people. That kind of set the tone for things to come. 

Digital media jobs are already precarious under good stewardship. Did it feel like there was always a sword hanging over everyone’s heads there, especially after the Deadspin thing happened? 

I think even prior to the Deadspin thing they had fired a bunch of Clickhole writers. I think the comedy brands had always been a little more protected. But that was some of our good friends, again, without any warning, like, boom, you’re gone. Even some people from Onion Labs, the inhouse advertising agency, people who were going and getting clients and bringing in money to the company were fired. It was very confusing. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. But certainly once the Deadspin thing happened…yeah. That was another kind of bridge, and it just continued from there. 

I suppose comedy writers are used to being poor. Until you get to Hollywood and become a TV writer and lose your ability to be funny on Twitter. But was it harder to be funny under those conditions? I know what it’s like to put out news and reporting under shitty conditions, but I wonder if there’s a difference with, like, I have to go to work and be funny today at my job that’s kind of miserable and the boss sucks. 

I think there is some of that, being frustrated with management and everything. But more tangibly they were very concerned about hitting targets in terms of traffic, so we had to generate a lot more content, do more slideshows and stuff like that. I think it’s a real testament to everyone at The Onion that we were able to maintain as much quality as we have. But it’s challenging, and you feel exhausted. Certainly during this last year, and the first year of Covid in particular. We’ve had this fellowship program for a long time where we bring in two additional people who we can help train, and it’s more energizing for the staff and everything, and they got rid of that. Everyone on staff signed a letter to management saying we think the fellowship is very valuable, we understand there are issues with it, but we think it’s important it be brought back in some form. They said we can’t do it because it’s like having a staff writer but not paying them as much as a staff writer. So we came back and said, ok, what if we paid them more? They were like: no. 

The thing that stood out to me reading your thread on Twitter, and I think a lot of people took this as the headline too, was that they tried to institute a dress code? 

I mean, it is a patently absurd thing. 

What did it entail exactly?

Read more

Earlier this week Matt Crowley left his job at The Onion. Normally a guy leaving a job wouldn’t exactly be news, but in a Twitter thread announcing his departure the five year staff writer had some choice words for Jim Spanfeller, noted herb, and the man largely responsible for fucking u…

Read more

Did you miss this Hell World about qualified immunity and our unaccountable violent cops from the other day? Check it out here if so.

I haven’t seen the film Open Water since it was released almost twenty years ago so I cannot tell you if it is “good” or if it “holds up surprisingly well” or whatever it is people say about movies. I can tell you however that I have thought about it regularly since then and I’ll probably think about it for the rest of my life. I thought about it just yesterday in fact while swimming my clumsy little laps in the community pool while the snow fell outside and a dozen scuba-divers-in-training floated silently in the deep end a few lanes over. I’ll think about it next time I go out on a boat or jump into the ocean. Fuck it I’m going to think about it even more than usual right now.

If you never saw it yourself the film concerns a couple who go on a scuba diving vacation somewhere in the Bahamas I think. Somewhere near there. Near enough to there that it doesn’t matter. They go to the ocean anyway. At some point ocean is just ocean. Due to a miscount by the person leading the scuba expedition the couple emerge from the depths to realize the boat has left them behind. Goddamnit.

At first they presume that the mistake will be rectified in the way that we all do when something goes wrong. Well this is fucked but certainly order will be restored presently we think.

“Other people go on vacation and spend their days just laying around,” the husband Daniel says at one point. “We have a story we’re going to be telling for the rest of our lives.”

Indeed they do it’s just that their lives don’t end up being as long as they had imagined they would be. As I’ve said in here before a day is very long but a life is so short.

As they float further and further away from the original dive spot they bicker and blame one another and grasp for something different they could have done that would have saved them from this ordeal as if logic is a shield against chaos but eventually the realization that there is no order to things and that two people can in fact be left behind like this dawns on them.

I guess it’s partly based on a true story about a couple in Australia this happened to although I don’t think that matters for the film. It’s true either way.

So thirst sets in quickly and the sun burns their faces as they bob on the tide and swarms of jellyfish sting — “It hurts.” — and sharks begin to circle. All that’s left is for the two of them to continue living born along on the waves for as long as they can not knowing which of them is going to die first. To watch it happen and to describe it makes it sound horrific which it of course is but it’s also just a sped up version of how life works anyway maybe. There’s no rescue boat coming and the sharks have spotted us. You hope you go before the person you love because you can’t bear to watch it happen when there’s nothing you can do for them.

It made me think just now about how nearly a million Americans have died over the past two years from the pandemic. Their loved ones sitting by helplessly watching and waiting for a different kind of drowning to begin.

It’s probably not a spoiler to tell you how the film ends anymore so than it is to spoil how any life ends which is that it ends. It’s the waiting though. Every moment thinking even now even now even now someone might be coming over the horizon to save you.

Alternatively if you wanted to experience the sense of the rushing onset of your own mortality you could have simply watched the Super Bowl halftime show last night featuring Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and all them. I thought it was great by the way but then again I am in my forties so I have a conflict of interest here. What a night! Sopranos and Lebowski ads and middle aged rappers. This must have been what it felt like to be a boomer all those years. Yes it’s cynically having your own nostalgia sold back to you but on the other hand at least someone is recognizing you exist.

Sorry I imagine that was all pretty depressing to read on a Monday morning up there so to cheer you up please join me in learning about the name of the recently resigned head of the London Metropolitan Police Federation a certain Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick. People in London loved to be named Cressida Dick. I don’t really have a full grasp of what the story is there apparently there was some sort of “row” with the mayor of London. People in London also love to get into rows. I can tell you after reading about it briefly though that the cops are crying about something big time which cops in any country of course are very good at.

Speaking of cops what are you doing for Valentine’s Day today? Hopefully anything besides this suggestion by the Holden, MA Police Department.

We never should have let police get on the computer. That or let them get sleeve tattoos. Yes police were always bad before then but something turned sour real quick in the aftermath. It’s unseemly man.

Here’s some other great police work from the brave boys in blue in Chicago. There’s a lot going on in here but what it is about is the cops taking six months to finally arrest a woman who had vandalized a memorial to a dead cop by crumpling up her photo. This is a felony apparently. Tearing up some paper.

It gets worse from there in the next tweet though.

It’s hard to talk about how gross this type of shit is without sounding like an insane person but what’s going on here is what has been going on with the way we treat police and the troops as a separate class of revered and sainted warrior priests in this country for a long time now. You see it in this case with the sacred and symbolic idol — a printed out picture of a cop — being treated with devotional reverence as well as in the use of the handcuffs as a blessed artifact representing the spirit and power and symbolic strength of not just this one cop but of all cops everywhere. It’s something like the sacrament after it’s been imbued with the body of Christ through transubstantiation.

This is all part and parcel of our slavish devotion to our American civil religion which Nora Reed laid out for us in a Hell World from a couple of years ago. It sounds somewhat obvious as a concept but if you’ve never thought about it like this before everything sort of starts to click together. I’ll quote a good chunk of her explanation here because I think it’s worth revisiting.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, American civil religion refers to the thing where Americans are indoctrinated from a young age into treating the flag like a religious idol, and the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as religious texts. The way Americans think of the ‘founding fathers’ as sort of elevated demigods — and the backlash that results from pointing out historical details like the fact that many of them owned slaves and/or were rapists — is a component of this. Rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem at sporting events, letting members of the military off the plane first etc. are all aspects of American civic religion.

The civic religion is a big part of why it's incredibly easy to manipulate Americans by accusing people of disrespecting the troops or being unpatriotic; both the vague ideas of ‘the troops’ and ‘patriotism’ are treated as sacred values and when I say that the idea of ‘the troops’ is vague I'm referring to the fact that people can engage in all the rituals of standing for the National Anthem etc. and can demonize people who don't, and still feel comfortable supporting politicians who won't fund the VA.

Most of the popular strains of Christianity make room for the civic religion, though there are always a handful of groups who identify stuff like the Pledge of Allegiance as idol worship, but one of the reasons that Muslims are so feared/hated is that Islam is seen as incompatible with the American civic religion. This is one of the reasons why screaming about ‘sharia law’ is such a successful tactic. …

9/11 has been a fucking godsend to the civic religion, which is why political figures have replaced any actual memorial to the people who actually died with this mushy ‘sacred’ nonsense and shit about respecting troops and cops. Co-opting deaths to use for the civic religion isn't unique to the ‘never forget 9/11’ phenomenon; look at the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. in the popular imagination vs. anything he actually stood for.

Doing the civic religion publicly and loudly while never acknowledging its religious-ish nature is something both Democrats and Republicans do; it's basically a requirement to be a politician. There's a long tradition of conservatives accusing anyone less conservative of them of demonstrating inadequate Loyalty To America, which among politicians is always responded to by Loudly Demonstrating They Are Loyal. Asking the question of what America has done to earn that loyalty and whether loyalty to America is actually a virtue is verboten. …

Not sure if this is related to all of that there but did you know that 2021 saw the most police killings of any year since the Washington Post started keeping track? It was about three people killed a day. It’s been about 900 a year since 2015.

Even knowing how bad everything is even being aware of how things work I have to admit I am still somehow shocked at how they are getting away with treating Steven Donziger. If you’re not familiar with Donziger’s persecution by a partnership of our corrupt judicial system and Chevron — and you very well may not be because I don’t see it in the news every single day like it should be — then read more in this Hell World here.

The woman in Chicago is a political prisoner much like Donziger is.

If someone were to ask you if XYZ type of worker was routinely and systematically being fucked over by their employer you and I would say yes of course they are. We might not know how but we would know they were. The spice of American life is finding out the specific manner in which they’re being fucked that none of us ever really had a reason to know about or to ever imagine. Take the case of flight attendants which I literally just heard about.

This Change.org petition lays out the details. Apparently and again this had never occurred to me flight attendants are not paid while planes are in the process of boarding which seems like a fairly busy time for them as best I can tell. Guess not!

Flight Attendants are currently not paid for boarding. They are paid what is deemed as “hourly rate,” which is below minimum wage. Until the door is closed and the brakes are lifted flight attendants are paid on average $2.00/hour. Even though they are required by their company and the FAA to be there and perform crucial job-related safety and customer service duties. Airlines are taking more and more of Flight Attendants' time. In the past decade, boarding has gone from 30, to 35, to 40 minutes. These decisions were made by management and no flight attendants were consulted during this decision-making process. 

Never underestimate the myriad and mysterious ways employers in American will conceive of to scrape every last nickel from the people performing the actual labor they profit off of.

Covid is over if you want it!

I thought this piece by Steven Thrasher in Scientific American on the very rational and wise OPEN ‘ER BACK UP COVID IS OVER pundit gang was good. It goes in part like this:

Is it rational to ignore the high communal viral load in American society and to not do more to lower it so that fewer people are exposed, become sick, transmit onwards and possibly die?

Is it rational for the Times to be advertising an event happening in March hosted by Leonhardt called “The New Normal, a Virtual Event on Life and Love After Omicron,” which might just coincide with the timing of the millionth American officially dying of COVID?

Well, it depends on what it is you are trying to rationalize.

If you’re trying to get people to accept that what the nation is doing right now is okay, and 50,000 deaths per month should be normalized, then it’s rational.

If you don’t want people to wonder why in just two years, the U.S. death toll for COVID is about 130 percent the size of the death toll of four decades of HIV—while global COVID deaths are less than 20 percent of the world’s AIDS deaths—then it’s rational.

If you want to manufacture consent for looser pandemic measures in the U.S. rather than more comprehensive ones as the communal viral rate demands, then making these claims is rational.

But it’s not ethical to manufacture what I call a viral underclass, and it’s incorrect to pretend as though the news media have no role in creating it nor in persuading the public that so many deaths are inevitable.

I am going to get a job at the New York Times writing a new story every other day about different places I think I should be able to smoke cigarettes again. Every Airport Should Have One of Those Disgusting Little Prison Cells They Let You Rip Heaters In Real Quick Before Catching Your Connecting Flight.

The safety-ists and cigarette scolds have had their way for too long. It’s time to fire up some heaters. If you don’t want to breathe in my secondhand smoke then you can stay home.

Also on the OPEN UP subject I thought this piece by a fella known as @BartenderHemry was pretty funny:

The way forward is clear: in order to free our society from the tyranny of these mental restrictions and return to normal, the government must intervene. A program of encouragement would be a good start, with politicians constantly and annoyingly urging people to go out and party, and providing light financial incentives that scale up based on the number of people each citizen socializes with every month (this could replace the Child Tax Credit, an enormous misstep that encouraged parents to stay home with their rotten kids). We don’t need to ban working from home outright (after all, some of us deserve to do it) but we should consider a messaging campaign that encourages people who are doing it because of COVID to perhaps consider themselves “idiots” and “a blight on society.”

The stick to these carrots could be a host of new taxes on anti-social activities, such as making food at home, excessive zoom-calling, adopting pets that require too much attention, etc etc. Those new tax revenues could then be used to extend crucial financial assistance to restaurant and entertainment businesses so they can do what I have termed “opening harder”: universally extending their hours to a Vegas-like 24/7. In areas where there are shortages of workers for these new hours, deploy the National Guard to tend bar, wait tables, and, if necessary, to pole-dance. If at any point occupancy at these establishments falls below 50%, these same guardsmen can be deployed throughout the neighborhood to simply and effectively “encourage” the residents to get out there and live their lives, free from the damnable scourge of fear.

Ok that’s all for today goodbye and I’m sorry. Feel free to chip in if you like what you read here.