… abortion rights have been on the ballot in seven states. [T]he pro-choice position has prevailed in all of them.“
… says BOO first in rural Washington State:
The Columbia County Rural Library District could be dissolved by voters after a community member filed a petition to close the library amid a censorship fight over LGBTQ+ books aimed at teens.
Better dead than read, baby. You won’t want to miss America’s inaugural community bonfire, where you can join hands in the big circle and cremate Shakespeare while journalists and historians mill about recording the event. No more pencils no more books no more teachers’ dirty looks children will chant in the moonlight while sparks fly upward and hitlers from the hollers whoop whoop de whoop.
Patrons, who sign up as much for the prestige as the workouts, pay $900 per month to learn her Tracy Anderson Method – a dance-based workout in a room heated to 95 degrees with 75 per cent humidity.
… [O]n top of their hefty monthly membership costs there is also a fee to reserve a mat for the summer – which essentially allows people to save their favorite spots in class.
[I]n 2018 the price was already a hefty $3,000 but, as of this year, it has risen to a staggering $5,500.
… [Employees’] bodies were pushed to ‘breaking’ point with the level of intensity demanded from [them], with the heat of the studios also leaving them ‘exhausted and dehydrated.’
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UD notes that one popular way to differentiate/massively overprice yourself in postmodern American markets is via deadly perversion. You take a straightforward location/experience (workout studio, restaurant, coffee shop, tourism outing) and you utterly psychotically fuck it up so it might poison your clients or give them heat stroke or bankrupt them or generate homicidally competitive self-display. (See David Brooks on “dial-an-ordeal.”) People won’t tolerate your insane jacking up of the price unless you make them feel they’re in a sudden unforeseen windstorm on Everest that’s going to kill them.
… is two-fold.
One, she must prepare herself optimally for this year’s “highly-anticipated” Perseid meteor shower.
The Perseids are known to treat viewers to a fantastic display, and coupled with a particularly dark sky, this year’s show is shaping up to be one you won’t want to miss.
To that end, she has placed herself on Tilghman Island in the Chesapeake Bay this weekend, for the peak of the peak of the peak of the best meteor shower of them all.
Yes, she could have placed herself in the Utah hinterlands, or, even better, the Atacama Desert, but she will make do with the lower tip of Tilghman.
Two, she must prepare herself psychologically for the possibility that despite the hooha the shower will be a disappointment.
[Kenneth] Chesebro … contrived a scheme (later adapted by [John] Eastman), which included misusing the very parts of my treatise that Chesebro had helped me with as a research assistant, … thereby casting me falsely as a supporter of a ludicrous reading of the Constitution that Chesebro and Eastman both apparently sought to normalize so that it would make it easier for Trump to get away with circumventing the [Electoral Count] Act.
Tribe goes into the sort of excruciating detail you go into when you’re really really angry.
But Tribe is the least of Chesebro’s problems this morning.
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From a comment on the NYT article:
The goal was not just to overturn “Biden’s win”, but to overturn and permanently end the practice of meaningful democracy in America. If this scheme had worked, establishing the principle that the incumbent vice-president can selectively choose which candidate to award any “disputed” states’ electoral votes, coupled with partisan schemes to selectively manufacture “disputes” at will, no vice president would ever again allow the opposition party to win an election.
Und so weiter. Take your pick of today’s headlines about the THREE MILLION Ohioans who came out to vote in the middle of August in a seemingly obscure bureaucratic referendum.
BUT one that would make it more difficult to defend abortion rights, see, which seems to have fired up a whole lotta people.
[Voters] overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, an amendment that would have raised the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent, as well as complicate the process to bring citizen-initiated ballot measures to voters in the first place. Though it had profound implications for a number of issues, it was widely seen in the state as a way to thwart November’s measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.
The measure’s defeat now gives abortion-rights supporters a clearer path to victory.
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Protecting abortion access is extremely popular in the United States. Efforts that would make it harder to ensure abortion rights can help voters understand how Republican politicians are trying to tilt elections to thwart majority rule.
An adorably capricious Florida school board has changed its mind: And Tango Makes Three can stay in the library … for now! As soon as another patron catches wind of the book’s panting homoeroticism, it’ll be whisked away again. So get it while you can.
… Knesset.
They could have apologized long long ago
Or filed no appeals and settled it (doh!)
They could have let up on destroying the shop
But no one and nothing could make them stop
And now the school weathers yet more horrid news
Insurance won’t pay so they’re going to sue
Yes, more crushing payout for many more years
All because Oberlin stopped up its ears
… sears your arm as you slide back the deck door. The storm’s coming up fast.
We’ve brought in cushions and we’ve stabilized chair frames and potted plants. I called an elderly friend who lives alone to make sure she knows we’ll come over there after to check on her. She didn’t know about the storm. “I’ll head down to the basement. I’ll call you if.”
5:28 PM and it’s suddenly pitch black. Really pitch black.
An administrative court in Germany has ruled against her complaint about not being able to drive like this, but she’ll probably appeal to a higher court blah blah. ‘The judges do not think the ban violates the German Constitution, as it does not “severely restrict religious freedom.” Instead, the practice of religion is “only restricted in a narrowly limited life situation that is typically not essential for freedom of religion,” the verdict continues.’
Well but that assumes a woman not ruled by a man who will kill her if anyone gets a glimpse of her nose.
BTW: UD can’t help but notice that this woman’s hands are uncovered!
Give Wyomingites guns and they’ll kill themselves. Give them cars and …
Hell, why don’t your basic rodeo boy just kill himself by smashing his Chevy Suicido into a lightpole?
I’ll tell you why. First and most important when you use a Glock that ol gun will survive pulping your head fully intact, to be handed down to your suicidal son and his suicidal son ad infinifuckinitum. OTOH you’re definitely gonna total the truck. The truck’s goin down with you.
Secundum: It takes a whole lotta planning and a whole lotta luck to stage a successful trucko-da-fe. Maybe you’ll just go the paraplegic route. Maybe you’ll kill other people. The whole thing’s a big ol mess. At-home pulping, especially if you do it in the bathtub or shower, is neat and sweet and one hundred percent effective. State park pulping, a popular option among Wyoming’s rugged outdoorsmen, is even neater, and leaves you, as you expire, not with views of yourself careening agonizingly into a hard surface, but of calm majestic Tetons.
Thirdly: The whole public/private thing. The wreck’s gonna traumatize onlookers; and because it’s a news story it’ll make the local tv shows. Some guy popping his top at home is no news at all in Wyoming. Furthermore, beyond the extra expense your family will bear making you coffin-ready with your whole body pulverized vs. with just a little hole in your head, there’s the whole embarrassment on top of grief thing as the kinfolk deal with the community curiosity whipped up by the newspaper pix of your twisted truck/body.
The Martha’s Vineyard library wars rage on. My headline is from 2022; this year, the female genital mutilator’s best friend has again been dissed by his bookish neighbors and is again screaming about how he doesn’t care that he’s been frozen out of the island’s book fair because he’s so great and but but but he’s going to sue the library for a quadrillion dollars anyway and shut it down forever so the elderly matrons of the Vineyard will have to find someplace else to volunteer haha.
He says the maltreatment’s cuz he’s all in with Trump and all; but really if you’re looking for reasons to dissociate from an unacceptably malsain person, Dershowitz offers so much more than that, from his way-close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein to his eager legal defense of some of the scuzziest humanoids on the planet. This is a man who calls Germans who oppose male circumcision Nazis. He has weathered years of being accused of plagiarism. He has just been sanctioned. Etc. When it comes to reasons to cancel Dershowitz, take your pick.
Until recently, a large majority of Israelis tolerated the [ultra orthodox]. Sometimes they gritted their teeth, sometimes they griped, but they went on shouldering the security and economic burden of the state on behalf of the haredim. The events of the last few months, and the conduct of the government, in full partnership with the haredim, will likely change all that. Utterly blind to reality, the haredim have now gone even further by proposing a new Basic Law: “Torah Study,” which would give draft dodgers a status similar to those serving in the IDF.
… Faced with yet another step which the majority of Israelis, the burden bearers, perceive as unfair and exploitative, the tumult of recent days may pale in comparison to what is to come. True, the haredim can do whatever they want under the current government, but short of a complete dictatorship here, they will pay the full price when the next government takes power. The budgets that finance their way of life will be slashed, government support for those who don’t prepare their students for a productive life will be terminated, and rights will be denied to those who don’t serve in the army or at least in civilian national service.
Andrew Sullivan’s final, parenthetical, mention of John Eastman is the most interesting part of this paragraph. (No link.)
Giuliani’s nothing. A sloppy drunk. Powell is something, but only one thing: The reincarnated Jean Harris, described by Diana Trilling at her murder trial as having the fixed expression “of the classic belle indifference of morbid hysteria, the corners of the mouth turned up in the fixed beginning of a smile.”
Sullivan’s right that of the weird sisters only Eastman deserves a treason trial – one, because he is neither insane nor strung out; and, two, because he and he alone both conceived and plotted the treachery.