A Certain Morbid Necromancer

Snoopy (wet face) has decided he likes sticking his whole head in the water 🥲

So we commissioned one of my friends to make a wedding cake topper, and the result was amazing. Absolutely floored.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

“As late as 1990 the United States was home to over 12,000 independent clothing manufacturers. In 1996, the US textile industry employed 624,000 people. (Today it is only 120,000)”

Article implies that you can make clothing like nice mid-line brand-name items for cheaper. They ignore the cost of labor, and of course, they are comparing to $75 button-down shirts, not $15 button-down shirts.

Sewing our own clothing got a lot more expensive when

It was assumed that both adults in a household should have full-time jobs out of the house,

NAFTA gutted import laws and clothing manufacturing moved out of the US - with a result of cheap (in both senses) clothing flooding the market.

You could no longer justify “$25 for fabric + 4 hours of work” for a personally fitted shirt when you can get one off the rack for $15-$20 in 20 minutes.

The followup aftermath is: NOBODY has personally designed clothing anymore… except for people whose job is on camera.

And the skills to make and alter clothing are no longer taught. The fact that clothing adjusted to your body fits better, isn’t mentioned.

Pardon my language.

But we are f*cked. Yesterday (June 30, 2022), SCOTUS agreed to hear “Moore v. Harper” on its fall 2022 docket. This case deals with the authority of states to run elections (see more detail later on)*. The conservative-majority court will likely rule in favor of Moore, which would let Republican-held state legislatures appoint their own electors in the electoral college, ignoring the popular vote. In essence, Republicans wouldn’t have to repeat Jan. 6 in the future. They could simply use Republican-held statehouses to reject election results they don’t like, ending free and fair elections in the US.

Presently, there are not enough votes for Congress or the President to do anything to stop this. Congress could potentially impeach Justice Thomas for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection but the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority Senate vote to convict a sitting Supreme Court justice. Sufficient support for this does not exist in the Senate, and is not likely to exist at any time soon. 

There is only one real, legal recourse to this threat: obtaining a true Democratic majority in the US Senate, which we do not have. Senators Manchin and Sinema are unreliable at best and potentially plants at worst. They support neither the reform of or conditional exemption to the filibuster, nor “packing the court.” We need two additional Democratic senators to make their spoiler-effect opposition irrelevant. A 52-member Democratic Senate would allow the filibuster to be bypassed and open the way for the Judiciary Act to pass, which would allow President Biden to add four additional Supreme Court justice seats to reign in this current slow-motion right-wing coup. Don’t think abolishing the filibuster is right? See additional text later.**

How do we get two additional Democratic votes in the Senate? There are currently two highly-competitive Senate races for seats held by Republicans in the midterms this November: Pennsylvania (Dr. Oz (R) vs. John Fetterman (D)) and Wisconsin (party nominees undecided, primary scheduled Aug. 9, 2022). The Dems also need to hold onto every seat they currently occupy. This includes other highly-competitive seats in: Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. I’ve never campaigned for anyone in my life before but today I signed up to volunteer with John Fetterman’s campaign because I feel like this is important. 

I can’t tell anybody what to do this information, I can only provide it. But I hope that people who value laws, regulations, and policies that support the social, economic, environmental, and democratic wellbeing of a society can recognize when those things are at stake (and they are). The Republicans and their right-wing evangelical supporters know that the 2022 midterm and 2024 general elections are the last chance they have to impose their religious agenda on the country. They know the majority of Americans do not support an elimination of abortion, the banning of LGBT people from public life, or the continuous denial of the climate crisis. That is why they are using the Supreme Court to take action right before these critical elections. They should not get away with this. 

“I’m too anxious or burnt to do anything.” That’s true. It’s been an exhausting past two years. But, for myself, I hate to think of the regret I might have in 2024 when a Republican-held Court, White House, and Congress enact a nationwide federal ban on abortion or LGBT people. Do I want to ask myself at that time, “was there anything else I could have done?” “Electoralism doesn’t work.” I sympathize.*** Often times it feels we elect people who don’t ultimately do anything. But I guarantee that voting will become even more of a token gesture in the future under the likely Moore v. Harper ruling if it’s allowed to proceed unchecked. “The Nation is already f*cked, there’s no point in saving it. We should just let the inevitable balkanization of America happen.” While I think current inflation and supply chains are bad, I can’t imagine how much worse they will be when the nationwide networks of food, medicine, water, household goods, consumer electronics, et al. are subject to tariffs and various petty interregional conflicts that the federal government currently mediates. Yes, the US will cease to exist one day, but let that be a day when we decide that we no longer need the federal government to aid us in living healthful, rich lives, not because of a right-wing coup. 

Thank you for your time if you've read this far.

*Moore v. Harper is a Supreme Court writ of certiorari between Thomas Moore, the Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, and Rebecca Harper, a North Carolina citizen who is collectively filing with other North Carolinians against the Speaker. The case has to do with a Feb. 2022 North Carolina Supreme Court decision that threw out the State Legislature’s election map as gerrymandered. The NC Supreme Court ruled that the maps adopted by the NC Legislature violated the NC Constitution. The NC Supreme Court adopted remedial election maps in their place. Speaker Moore, in turn, filed a writ of certiorari with SCOTUS that it accepted June 30. The NC Republicans believe the US Constitution does not allow state supreme courts jurisprudence over elections and that state legislatures should be able to run and organize elections exclusively. SCOTUS has continuously ruled, however, since 1916 (Davis v. Hildebrant) and as recently as 2015 (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission) that the Constitution does not give unilateral election-running authority to a state legislature but rather to the public or a state’s constitution. The likely SCOTUS ruling in the fall on Moore v. Harper would overturn over a century’s worth of precedent and allow sitting state legislatures to blatantly gerrymander election maps and even the ability to ignore the popular vote.

**Don’t think abolishing the filibuster is right? The US Constitution does not support the use of the filibuster and does not require a two-thirds vote for laws. It only specifies that a two-thirds majority be used for: censure, expulsion, conviction, and treaty approval. The Senate has reformed the filibuster throughout US history. Senators used to be able to simply filibuster a motion out of the Senate without any accountability. In 1917, the Senate changed its rules to allow a two-thirds majority vote to end debate, the first such check on the filibuster. In 1975, the Senate changes its rules again and dropped this threshold from 67 to 60 senators. Clearly, the Senate has a history of changing its own rules as allowed by Article I, Section 5 of the US Constitution. It is perfectly reasonable and constitutional to either reform or end the use of the filibuster.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has suggested justices who may have lied to Congress should be impeached. The right is not happy about it.

Right-wing media are attacking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for suggesting that Supreme Court justices who lied to Congress in their confirmation hearings should face impeachment investigations. Their panicked reaction reveals the continued importance of the court in the conservative movement’s project to roll back an array of social and civil rights gained over the last half-century.