Jul 5
^^^ Attendance estimate at Trump's Great American State Fair.
Though possibly also the temperature range there in degrees Celsius.
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^^^ Attendance estimate at Trump's Great American State Fair.
Though possibly also the temperature range there in degrees Celsius.
BACKING THE BLUE...MY ASS.
#249 You can live forever (2022)
Jamie se muda con sus tíos a un pequeño pueblo, su tía Angelika, la hermana de su madre, es muy comprensiva y cercana con ella, sobre todo, después de saber por lo que está pasando su sobrina. La muerte de su padre y que su madre sea internada en una clínica de salud mental, no pudiendo hacerse responsable de su única hija.
Lo cierto es que los tíos de Jamie son Testigos de Jehová, aunque no son muy estrictos, pero sí son participantes dentro de la orden.
Allí conoce a Marike, una chica de su edad que la ayuda a integrarse mejor, tanto en el instituto como entre los testigos, aunque sus padres sí son más estrictos y religiosos.
También conoce a Nathan, que no tiene nada que ver con la congregación y con el que pasa buenos momentos jugando a videojuegos, escuchando música y fumando hierba.
Jamie empieza a participar activamente en la iglesia por pasar más tiempo con Marike, pero no está nada convencida de las directrices de la iglesia, y eso hace que los padres, tan estrictos de ella, piensen que es una mala influencia, aunque no dicen mucho más. Por suerte, para Jamie su tía no es estricta ni pretende que sea una gran devota.
Aunque hacen labores en la iglesia y esta se convierte en la única manera de pasar el máximo tiempo juntas, ambas son conscientes de que encajan perfectamente, exceptuando por la religión. Aun así, Jamie accede actividades como lectura de biblia, venta de revistas, etc. Para recaudar dinero para la congregación y así estar más con ella.
Irremediablemente, ambas se enamoran, y aunque no se esconden demasiado, saben que no será bien visto por la iglesia, por lo que deciden hacer actividades en grupo y alejarse de la idea de ser una pareja. Pero, conforme va pasando el tiempo, no pueden evitar caer en lo que sienten.
Marike se siente celosa de la relación libre de Nathan y Jamie, e incluso de una fugaz relación que tuvo la chica en su pasado, justificando su comportamiento en que realmente no es libre para amarla como ella quiere. Pero conforme el amor se hace más evidente y fuerte más, podemos observar que no va a terminar bien.
Alguien ve a las chicas besándose y se lo cuenta al padre de Marike que es una persona con una fuerte presencia en la iglesia y aunque intentan alejarlas no funciona demasiado, pero de la nada Marike desaparece durante un par de días. Jamie va a la iglesia para poder verla y allí descubre que el padre de la chica da un discurso motivador diciendo que su hija se casará la próxima primavera con Simon, uno de los miembros de la congregación. Jamie sale corriendo.
En realidad Jamie tiene la oportunidad de volver a casa, su madre la ha llamado y le ha contado que se encuentra mejor, y que puede volver. Eso incluye empezar el año que viene la universidad, y poder "crecer" como ser humano. No quedarse estancada en aquel pueblo.
Antes de que Marike fuera a casarse, ambas había soñado con ir juntas a la universidad, viajar por Europa y vivir la vida plenamente. Ahora, con el anuncio del compromiso de su matrimonio, Jamie decide ir a hablar con ella y despedirse.
Ambas lloran todo lo que tienen que llorar y Marike le confiesa que ha sido ella quien ha tomado la decisión de casarse con Simon, que no la están forzando. Y que es lo mejor, así podrán seguir estando juntas, pero a ojos de los demás estará todo bien. Por otro lado, con la llegada del nuevo mundo, dentro de los Testigos, podrán estar juntas para siempre en el más allá. Jamie le dice que está arriesgando su felicidad por algo que no es real y que lo mejor es que se vaya a casa.
Jamie va la universidad, ahora solo le queda un año para graduarse. Se despierta en su cuarto de la universidad y deja allí a su novia actual en la cama. Coge un tren y va de vuelta al pueblo para poder visitar a sus tíos. Allí la recoge Marike que le ha preguntado a sus tíos si puede ir a por ella.
Cuando monta en el coche descubre a Luca, el hijo de año y medio de Simon y Marike. Toman un paseo largo en coche y hablan de que Jamie estuvo el año pasado viajando por Europa, que le queda poco para terminar sus estudios y que tiene planes.
Ambas afirman que siguen pensando diariamente la una en la otra, y se demuestran que la vida no es justa si no luchas por ella.
Marike confirma que se ha quedado congelada en el tiempo, siendo ama de casa y dedicándose a su familia y a la iglesia. Después lleva a Jamie a casa, pero no le deja quitarse el cinturón de seguridad. Ella le pregunta: "¿Vas a dejar que me vaya?", y, mirándose fijamente con lágrimas en los ojos, la otra responde que no.
Tim Campbell
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
January 7, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Jan 08, 2025
Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”
Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.
The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.
While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.
Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.
Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.
Those eager to get their hands on the land use the words “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”
But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.
Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.
Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.
In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.
In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.
Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.
Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.
Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.
But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.
Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.
But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.
Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”
The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.
It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Heil and jawohl, mein Hair von Drumpführer 卐.
Can't Fuck Bracket - Group Stage. Group 29: Canon Incels/Shitty Lays
Severus Snape (Harry Potter) versus Tim Campbell (Crazy Ex Girlfriend) versus Ace (Powerpuff Girls)
[ID: The unfuckable pride flag overlaid with the "no bitches" meme. Over it are pictures of the contestants. Snape is a white man with long hair that looks greasy; Tim is a white man in suspenders with short brown hair; Ace is a green man with a pointy face. Over them are sparkles and a heart with a butt, and in between them are peach emojis crossed out with the word "vs" in them. End ID]
Who is the LEAST fuckable and/or the WORST in bed?
Severus Snape
Tim Campbell
Ace
Propaganda:
Severus Snape: "Thinks being a dick to 11-year-olds twenty years after the fact is a reasonable response to a woman not wanting to sleep with him"
Tim Campbell: "He canonically is so bad at sex his wife immediately goes to the bathroom to “clean up” and he hears buzzing that she says is an electric toothbrush. He is later informed by his female coworkers that the buzzing from the bathroom is actually his wife’s vibrator. “Buzzing from the bathroom” is his only solo song, and it’s about how he has literally never made his wife cum after years of being together."
Ace: "back in 2018 the internet band gorillaz did a crossover thing where they had the character ace as a "guest musician" on their album and cartoon network let it happen with the caveat that he legally wasn't allowed to do drugs or have sex. his name is ace and he legally is not allowed to fuck."
Student loan forgiveness will allow graduates to move on to more adult responsibilities like homeownership
a good cartoon