You might find something like this on your property or along public forest trails. It’s about the same size and shape as a ketchup packet and smells like rotten fish. Believe it or not, this little packet protects you, your pets, and your family. The USDA drops these in areas (including Hamilton County) where raccoon-variant rabies has been known to occur. Raccoons find the packet and eat the contents, and it provides them with immunity to rabies. If you find one, simply leave it where it is, or, if it’s in an area accessible to a pet or child, just put on a pair of gloves and move it. Don’t worry, though— even if it was handled by a human or pet, it doesn’t pose any danger besides an unpleasant odor.
King Arthur Baking Company is coming under fire for holding a competition exclusively for people of color-owned businesses and brands.
According to the company’s website, “Baking Pitchfest 2024” offers a product edition geared toward baking brands founded and owned by people of color across the U.S., and a bakery edition, which focuses on people of color-owned bakeries in the Northeast and Washington state.
“Half mentorship, half competition, Baking Pitchfest is an accelerator program designed to foster greater inclusivity and creativity in the baking world by providing equitable opportunities for People of Color entrepreneurs,” the website states, adding that winners will receive financial support, mentorship, and exposure.
But the initiative has generated outrage amongst conservatives online, who have blasted the competition eligibility rules as discriminatory against white people.
One X user critical of King Arthur Baking’s contest posted an email she received from the company in response to her complaining.
“Helping build joyful, equitable communities that celebrate diversity is an important part of who we are as a company,” the email states, later adding: “We love baking with anyone and everyone. Our simple expectation is that everyone show respect for one another.”
Their product is also remarkably consistent! If you've ever baked something and it just didn't come out right, it's probably because the protein content of your flour wasn't the same as what the recipe author used. King Arthur has the protein content listed right on the bag, and you get very consistent results!
Here’s the English transcription, found behind a paywall at the link below:
Mr president, Mr prime minister, ladies and gentlemen ministers, my dear colleagues.
Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is crumbling, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.
Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fuelled jester in charge of purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.
The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is all about. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down before Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.
This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.
I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to submit or resign.
Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.
And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the south are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.
What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with its first principle being the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.
Mine is Greenland, Panama and Canada, yours is Ukraine, the Baltics and Eastern Europe, his is Taiwan and the China Sea. This is called, in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, “diplomatic realism”.
So we are alone. But the talk that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated.
Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves and the demographic collapse show that it is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.
The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds out, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.
This will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, with, of course, the United Kingdom.
Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we must build the neglected European defence, to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is to recognise that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.
It remains to be built. It will be necessary to invest massively, to strengthen the European Defence Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, to harmonise weapons and munitions systems, to accelerate the entry into the Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, to rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, to relaunch the anti-missile shield and satellite programs.
The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed.
Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.
But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the extreme right and the extreme left.
They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defence.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain at Putin’s beck and call.
The peace of the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.
Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken in the last month have finally made the Americans react.
Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, the parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.
But in American history, the freedom fighters have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine is being played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means for their common defence, and to make Europe the power that it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at great cost.
The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.
Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
A French senator has given a powerful speech setting out how the continent must deal with the twin threats from America and Russia
USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.
Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.
If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.
i think this is my favorite video of all time. ive been utterly enamored with it for years – i really believe it captures such a genuine, delightful aspect of humanity and culture from the 2000s, and its so fun to watch!!
I could tell instantly from the way he was positioned on the bar that this video was going to showcase some serious skill. I was nonetheless cometely unprepared for what happened.
We have 30 days until the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) laws are rescinded. This is the 50-year bedrock of American conservation. Normally, these actions take years but the administration has provided 30 days for public comment gutting clean water and clean air. Drop what you’re doing, before you make any more calls or read any more social media posts, please populate the Federal Register with dissent.
A. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/25/2025-03014/removal-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-regulations
B. Click on the green rectangle in the upper right corner ("SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT") .
C. Fill in your comment, and info at the bottom, and SUBMIT COMMENT.
I just did that (2/27/2025), and the message on that website said:
The comment period ends March 27, not March 30!!!
I strongly suggest (in your own words) couching your dissent in Trump's (and followers') own rhetoric. Here's what I said:
Removing these regulations will make America sick again, cause neurological and intellectual impairment in children (due to less regulation of lead), and raise the level of preventable cancers in adults (due to less regulation of known carcinogens),thus reducing American productivity and greatness.
We have 30 days until the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) laws are rescinded. This is the 50-year bedrock of American conservation. Normally, these actions take years but the administration has provided 30 days for public comment gutting clean water and clean air. Drop what you’re doing, before you make any more calls or read any more social media posts, please populate the Federal Register with dissent.
A. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/25/2025-03014/removal-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-regulations
B. Click on the green rectangle in the upper right corner ("SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT") .
C. Fill in your comment, and info at the bottom, and SUBMIT COMMENT.
I just did that (2/27/2025), and the message on that website said:
The comment period ends March 27, not March 30!!!
I strongly suggest (in your own words) couching your dissent in Trump's (and followers') own rhetoric. Here's what I said:
Removing these regulations will make America sick again, cause neurological and intellectual impairment in children (due to less regulation of lead), and raise the level of preventable cancers in adults (due to less regulation of known carcinogens),thus reducing American productivity and greatness.
Actually thinking about my time spent in purgatory, aka “the service industry”, I had some wild fucking events over the course of a decade.
There was the time a bride decided she didn’t want to go through with the wedding and tried to make her escape through the back kitchens of the venue and wound up sitting out back in the drizzling rain, bumming cigarettes from the delivery drivers, pristine white dress turning to mulch as she sat on an over turned catering crate. After a good half hour the groom came and found her and asked if she was okay. When she said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go through with it he just nodded and said she should get out the rain because it was cold. The two of them ended up going back inside together, skipped the wedding part and basically had the most expensive party of their lives with all their friends and family.
There was another bride who could never decide on place settings, so in the end just turned to the coordinator and said “surprise me”. So we mismatched everything and called it “boho chic”. She loved it.
There was the groom who got caught in our supply closet during the late night reception…with the best man. And then there was also the father of the bride who absconded with the mother of the groom and had to be asked nicely to put their clothes back on and get out of the wine cellar.
At the same wedding.
There was the drunk best man who proposed to me using an umbrella cocktail and told me he was heartbroken when I told him I was flattered but married. He wore it behind his ear the rest of the night dancing like a mad man and telling anyone who would listen about “the one that got away”.
There was the Indian wedding with 800 guests. We rotated them in batches of 200 to fit them between spaces. All I can remember is never having enough drinks to hand out.
There was the arch bishop who only liked his coffee ground by hand because the effort of the worker “made it taste better”.
There was the time I took out the crystal drop of a chandelier with a champagne cork because the runners shook up the bottles for a joke.
There was the funeral party where the body couldn’t be delivered to the crematorium because the crematorium caught on fire.
There was the other funeral where a fist fight broke out over something our Jeanie said to our Mary 40 years ago, but then it turned out Mary was the one who said it.
There was the wedding where in a room of 200 people, the bride and groom only had eyes for each other.
There was the christening where the godmother kept crying to me over mocktails because she never thought she could love something as much as she loved “that bald little head”.
There was the old man at the wedding who came alone and smiled very kindly at everyone and always said please and thank you and who told myself and a coworker he’d been married to his wife for over 60 years and how she would have loved to see these two finally tie the not. She’d only passed the week before. He’d brought a picture of her so she could enjoy it in spirit.
There was the really tragic funeral where everyone kept hugging each other and saying “I love you” and us staff had to take frequent breaks to breathe because grief is tangible but so is love.
There were the times when nothing in particular happened at all, but they stand out so much because everyone there was happy.
Of course there was also the times when someone threw up on your shoes, or you got groped while serving the table, or someone was rude or snide because you were “the help”.
[id: a short comic featuring a feathery dinosaur. In the first panel, they are sewing something on a table, then think “I should put away this Very Interesting project and go to bed now.”
The dinosaur then throws back their head and screams as they run away from the table and down the hallway past the door — with a short break to *brush brush brush* their teeth at the sink — then all the way to bed.
Lying tucked in bed, they think to themselves “I DID go to bed! good job me.
“that took as much effort as lifting an entire car with one hand i think.”]/end id.
Former federal employees from various organizations who were affected by the Trump administration’s mass firings share with @stephruhle on @11thhourmsnbc the significance of the work they did and their motivations for entering civil service.
If the Democratic Party had any damn sense, they'd be doing this day in and day out. You wouldn't see a D congressperson appearing to make a comment or speech without a fired federal worker next to them. They'd be hammering on this point over and over.
Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA17) is making a major point of doing this. His office is taking calls and stories from Feds and facilitating media appearances like this one. (He's also been publishing op-eds on a weekly basis advocating for our civil infrastructure and our Feds.) He's not my rep, but I've been really impressed by his efforts to turn his media access towards our federal employees so that more of the public hears about the important work they do.
SoCal folks, if Khanna is your rep, give him a call and thank him!
There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.
I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.
As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.
The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.
The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.
As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.
I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.
The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.
I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.
I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.
All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.
I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.
My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.
If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.
Sources:
• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
"Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope."
"Each of us from the moment of his or her birth exists in an environment in which it is easy to do evil and hard to do good.... If I know somebody very well, in ten minutes, if I set my mind to it, I could perhaps say to them things so cruel, so destructive, that they would never forget them for the rest of their life. But could I in ten minutes say things so beautiful, so creative, that they would never forget them?"
- Bishop Kallistos Ware
Making a Fuzz About This @theexplaintdepartment - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
