There's a sucker born every minute - and two to take him.
Mar 22, 2025
Overheard
A woman told me: "I always pull a coupla hairs out of my head and leave them in every taxi or Uber I take. That way, if anything bad happens, there's a little DNA evidence to help the cops."
Something no man has ever even had to think about.
Blair Mountain 1921
The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in United States history and is the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia.
For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers (called the Logan Defenders) who were backed by coal mine operators during the miners' attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields when tensions rose between workers and mine management. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired, and the United States Army, represented by the West Virginia Army National Guard led by McDowell County native William Eubanks, intervened by presidential order.
Don't hurt anybody
Don't throw things
Don't set shit on fire
But get loud
Stay loud
Then get louder
Become passively ungovernable
... just remember
"I want you to be nice - until it's time to not be nice."
Mar 21, 2025
Overheard
hat tip - JD facebook
Whenever I feel down,
I just remind myself
that I could've been born
with an IQ low enough
to make me believe
Trump is awesome.
What'd I Tell Ya?
What did I fucking tell you?
Since 1607, Americans have been wheedling and weaseling different ways to enslave people.
Indentured servants got to Jamestown within 10 years of its founding.
A couple of years later, in 1619, the first enslaved Africans were imported.
That shit went on, of course, thru the civil war, and beyond. Lincoln's proclamation of 1863 wouldn't take full effect until well after he'd been killed in 1865.
There was a brief period of a few years when freed black folks enjoyed some real liberty, but Americans (especially southerners) found their way around the law by enacting state and local ordinances that allowed white law enforcement to imprison black people and then rent them out as convict labor - in accordance with the 13th amendment - or firebombing "black districts" - or just straight up annihilating whole towns.
All that Jim Crow shit went on for another hundred years, and we're still not done fighting over it.
Hopefully, you already knew all that, and now I can get on to the next part, which is that we haven't stopped wheedling and weaseling, we've just shifted the focus.
We're not concentrating on fucking over black folks (although we'll continue doing that, because of course we will), but now we're going to get after all those conveniently disadvantaged brown immigrants.
And this isn't just about coin-operated prisons. We need laborers, and we're rounding them up in order to rent them out to Big Ag or whatever.
Kill the family farms, snap them up at the tax auctions, and then pay your buddies in the convict labor business a few bucks an hour for workers you can actually shoot if they try to quit their jobs and run away.
This is "unfettered free market capitalism" taken to its logical extreme.
This Is Good Bidness?
The thing has been out there for about a year, and they've had to issue like 8 recalls.
I think that means the "truck" is actually a hybrid - a cross between the Edsal and the Pinto.
This is the eighth time Elon Musk has had to recall the Cybertruck, which has only been on roads for just over a year.
Tesla, the electric car company owned by Elon Musk, is recalling most of its Cybertrucks due to an exterior panel that can fall off while driving ― posing a serious setback for a company whose shares already have been taking a nosedive.
Tesla announced the recall of more than 46,000 Cybertrucks in a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The recall applies to all vehicles built from November 2023 through Feb. 27 of this year ― accounting for nearly every Cybertruck in existence. In its filing, Tesla says that the cant rail, a stainless-steel exterior trim panel, can detach from the vehicle.
“A detached panel can become a road hazard, increasing the risk of a crash,” Tesla admitted in its NHTSA filing.
This is the eighth time Tesla has had to recall Cybertrucks, which have been on roads for less than a year and a half.
Tesla already has seen its stock lose about half of its value this year, in part due to rising competition and in part due to outrage over Musk’s job under President Donald Trump overseeing massive cuts to federal funding, including money spent on school meals for kids, national parks and forests, programs combatting infectious disease and research to help sick and wounded veterans.
Demand for used Teslas also has been plummeting, according to a survey from Cars.com that found searches for used Teslas dropped 16% over the past month.
A bizarre plea on Wednesday night from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for Americans to buy stock in Musk’s company massively backfired. After Lutnick’s TV appearance, in which he urged viewers to “buy Tesla” and promised them that the stock will “never be this cheap again,” the company’s shares dropped another 1.7% Thursday morning.
Lutnick’s sales pitch comes just over a week after Trump ― in an unprecedented and ethically dubious move ― shilled for Tesla by parading the company’s vehicles outside the White House in support of “great patriot” Musk.
This week, several families of victims who died or were injured in crashes involving Tesla’s self-driving technology wrote to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy expressing their concern that Musk’s influence in the Trump administration may weaken government oversight on automated vehicles, according to reporting in Politico.
The families said they were worried about the status of the policy from President Joe Biden’s time in the White House that required Tesla and other vehicle manufacturers to report crashes that involved advanced driver assistance technologies or automated driving systems.
“We fear this important measure is under threat given recent media reports and the influence of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company operates the most widely used [advanced driver assistance technologies] in America,” the letter reads.
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