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August 2020

FINALLY, A PRESSURE POINT TO FIGHT USPS SABOTAGE: LOTS of calls and emails to USPS Board of Governors. Ready, set, go. We know how to do this. Be concerned, firm, polite. Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General and Trump appointee who is now dismantling the USPS on behalf of Trump, “serves at the pleasure of” and reports to the 6-member USPS Board of Governors. These six men have the power & duty to #StopDeJoy & prevent Election Day chaos. 5 of the 6 are Trump appointees, but retired Harvard lawyer (CCJ, @NastyOldWomyn) contributing this info on Twitter is clear that a relentless barrage of calls, emails, and other callings-out will absolutely get their attention. She says: · I’ve represented Boards as a lawyer, and I know “this kind of attention is not what they’ve signed up for. It’s disruptive to their day jobs, which is where they make their money.” · “None of the members wants to suffer reputational damage from overseeing the meltdown of USPS during a pandemic. They do NOT want to be in the spotlight, so SHINE IT BRIGHT!” · “Board members HATE being contacted, HATE having their phone mailboxes fill up with messages, HATE being inundated with emails and letters. And, oh, they would HATE being picketed at work, if someone decided to start a demonstration.” · In contacting these 6 Board members, “I plan to be polite but firm about my fury about the recent deterioration of USPS’s service, giving personal & family examples regarding medication & veterans services, & expressing my distrust of & dissatisfaction with the performance of PG DeJoy. In my experience, rudeness NEVER helps. Call & email each of the 6 USPS Board of Governors. Tell them who & what you are (a retiree? Veteran?), what you & family rely on the USPS for in this pandemic, how DeJoy’s changes are disrupting that & causing stress. Express worry about Vote-by-Mail. Their emails: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected].

Dear Sirs,

I write to express my outrage at the actions being taken against the USPS at this critical moment in our country’s history. The Postal Service is an important utility for many people, and any efforts to make it anything other than its best are reprehensible. Please consider speaking with Donald Trump and the Postmaster General about reversing the sanctions that have been put on the USPS in recent months.

Yours truly,

Your Name

And here’s a phone script:

Dear Mr. [Last Name] I am calling to ask you, as a member of the USPS Board of Governors, take action against efforts to slow down the mail service. The USPS is a vital institution to our country and making it less effective will cause irreparable harm. Thank you.

Also here are the phone numbers since it could be hard to tell from the picture:

Robert M. Duncan (606) 298-3511

John M. Barger (626) 460-6321 and (213) 629-8356

Ron A. Bloom (212) 417-7000 and (212) 978-1707

Roman Martinez IV (212) 634-1190, (917) 892-4008, and (917)-270-4608

Donald L. Moak (202) 838-3800

blatant antisemitism

I am monumentally tired of fighting. But I’m going to continue to do so for as long as I can.

Right now I am seeing long-time followers attack Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for picking her as a running mate. I know a lot of people look at this duo and see “more of the same.” I’ve seen so many intelligent people saying they are not going to vote.

It is absolutely critical that you vote the Biden/Harris ticket. I want you to remember that while you are pointing out the flaws, and here is why.

The current president is literally a fascist. He’s slow-burning, meaning he’s slowly moving the goalpost farther right. The only reason he’s slow-moving is because the Republican party still has the barest semblance of a conscience. Think of what would have happened if #45 said “we should delay the election!” and McConnell said “yeah okay that sounds cool.”

Do you know how terrifying that is? Because if he got congress to delay the election somehow, there would be no reason to ever have a federal election again. He could just keep delaying it forever.

“But CK,” you say. “The constitution says we can’t delay a presidential election!”

Checks and balances say a lot of things. Checks and balances say that bills are supposed to be voted on and go to the president for signing or veto. Currently McConnell has found a loophole and just has 400 bills sitting on his desk, ignored.

I want you to keep this in mind: Under fascism, the constitution does not matter. They will find a way around it. They’re trying to find ways around amendments, too, poking and prodding at free speech until they can find a way to shut it down.

And if #45 decides he doesn’t want to play anymore, he’s got a whole fucking army, and he’s just proven that the secret police he has in his employ will do whatever the fuck he says. I need you to recognized that this throwing people in Portland into vans thing wasn’t the ultimate violation of freedom. It was only one step in a massive authoritarian takeover. You cannot trust the secret police to do the right thing and say no. #45 has just proven they’ll listen to him like trained dogs.

He has already started talking about more terms. If he discards the constitution, there will be nothing stopping him from taking them. He’s currently, blatantly trying to rig a free and fair election. This has happened in other countries across the globe, and the same people who are posting “NEVER VOTE FOR BIDEN” are the same ones who post things like “JUSTICE FOR _______” when a despot steals an election.

If the incumbent president wins another term, this will be the last election we have. This will be it. This is how fascism works. This isn’t slippery-slope talk. This isn’t “potential worst case scenario.” We are in the middle of the worst case scenario now.

Please. For the sake of the millions of people who will die under #45. For the sake of people who cannot survive another 4+ years. Think of Biden/Harris as a road block. A barricade. Right in the middle of the road. It stops traffic and doesn’t do anything to get people where they’re going, but at least it stops them from careening off a bridge.

If you never want to have to make this choice again, you have to fight to abolish the US’s First-Past-The-Post voting system, but it is TOO LATE to do that now. No third party candidate can win. Study the election results from the last 40 years and you’ll see.

Mmkay. When?

When is your glorious revolution going to start? Please explain your plan to me. Explain how it will topple the current government. Explain how you will install something better in its place. Explain how the new government will legitimize itself and stay in power. Now, Explain how you will do this without killing millions of poor, disabled, and marginalized people.

Oh. You don’t have one of those plans? Then you have to deal with the government we actually have, not a fantasy version of it. You have to look at what you can realistically accomplish within the two party system that we have, not the fantasy multi-party system you want. You have to look at the REAL, ACTUAL candidates and say, “which one starts closer to my eventual goal, and which one can be moved by a sustained concerted effort?” And you have to say, “which one will kill the fewest people while we’re trying to fix the problems that gave us this system we hate in the first place?”

Because you cannot campaign for a ranked voting system in the eleventh hour. It’s too fucking late. That choice isn’t on the table for you anymore. Don’t whine and kick your feet and refuse to take the first step towards fixing things because that step isn’t big enough for you. There are hundreds of notches on the needle between Biden/Harris and all the things we want: racial Justice, indigenous land reparations, universal basic income, socialized medicine. Hundreds of notches. But if we cannot even agree to pull the needle ONE NOTCH FURTHER LEFT in unison, how the fuck are we supposed to get there? How do we ever reach a destination when half of us turn our noses up at a first step?

The Right got us here because they pull in unison. They’ve been doing it for decades and every election, the whole country slides. There are more of us but we refuse to work together. We refuse to just decide on a first step and take it. We refuse so hard we’d rather say “burn it down” than comprise our political purity. But I am here to tell you that no amount of philosophy is worth an ounce of praxis and your purity will not absolve you from the moral laziness of deciding your neighbors are acceptable sacrifices in the name of a brave new world.

Change requires realistic goals and sustained effort. It requires responsibility and involvement. It is measured in increments. It isn’t glorious.

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Between this and Trump’s refusal to commit to election results, he is deliberately undermining his base’s trust in the electoral process. By citing “voter fraud” as his reason to try to delay the election, now even though the election WILL happen on time, if (when) he loses, he can claim that the election was illegitimate- that it was voter fraud, that he warned us, that he knew it was rigged, that Congress didn’t do enough to stop all the ~fraud~ that he knew was there, and he will refuse to step aside peacefully. 

He has been placing armed mercenaries in major American cities run by democratic mayors, and he is laying the groundwork to claim that the election is illegitimate if (when) he loses. 

You need to vote, so that both the Electoral College and the Popular vote are against him, and when this asshole finally breaks the tradition of the peaceful transition of power (which is what he is planning), when you need to be willing to protest and fight more than you ever have before. 

This si why you vote blue even if you’re in a scarlet state with no hope of winning the electoral college. 

This is why you vote for Biden even if you loathe him with every fiber of your being. 

This is it. 

If we are to have any hope of maintaining a fair system and avoiding an all-out dictatorship, the numbers have to be absolutely unambiguous. 

But a vote for Joe Biden isn’t just a vote against Trump. It’s also a vote for all the positions that Biden would get to fill, rather than leave Trump’s people (like Barr and DeVos) in charge. 

It’s also a vote for all the judges Biden would appoint (Which is likely at LEAST 1 Supreme Court pick.)

 It’s a vote for all of the 700+ positions that the President appoints and Senate confirms (Not just being generally better than Trump’s picks, but ACTUALLY GETTING FILLED. Trump still had over 170 unfilled appointments as of this year.)

And honestly, at this point, it’s also a vote that says “You shouldn’t get to undermine our electoral process and threaten the peaceful transition of power and STAY IN POWER.” 

Joe Biden is a bad candidate, and I wish we had gotten nearly anyone else. But I do believe that he’s a candidate who like… generally respects our political process, who could competently staff an administration, who could be reasoned with and compromised with, and who isn’t going to try to crown himself Emperor. Biden probably won’t spend hours a day on Twitter instead of like, reading security briefings.  It SUCKS that we have to aim as low as “isn’t literally trying to power grab himself a dictatorship” but the other option is to forfeit your vote and let the dictator get reelected.

i’m so sorry