#People’s Postal Agenda

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Annie Norman

The public learned last fall of one particularly controversial element of United States Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the U.S. Postal Service that would be rolling out soon. Essentially, the function of sorting and delivering mail would be consolidated into regional centers, leaving empty former sorting space in the back of post offices. No layoffs were announced.

At first glance, this sounds innocuous, but seasoned postal observers suspect that with less activity happening at smaller or rural post offices, they become vulnerable to a reduction in hours or closure. This leads to the kind of job losses that initially present as don’t worry, we’ll relocate you to the regional center but are experienced by postal workers as if I don’t commute two hours there and back each day or more, I lose my job.

In response, The Save the Post Office Coalition, which I coordinate, wrote to the Secretary of the USPS Board of Governors to ensure the board was made aware of emails from 160,000 postal customers across the country urging them to stop the disastrous elements of DeJoy’s plan before it’s too late.

Among the several thousands of personalized messages, we highlighted a handful in our note:

“The USPS provides a service to the public. It was never intended to be a profit-making business. I’m disappointed & ashamed at where politics seem to be taking us.”

— David B. (veteran) Seattle, Washington.

“As a former United States Postal Service employee and as someone who regularly uses the [USPS], I ask you to do something about DeJoy, who continues to degrade everything about the postal service — especially the service part of it.”

— Kristin F. in Cottonwood, Indiana.

“It is important for seniors like me to be able to count on a dependable means of getting medications without having a further drain on our resources.”

— Peter L. in Los Angeles, California.

“I believe that a well supported and functioning post office is a hallmark of a healthy, advanced nation. Stop DeJoy’s undemocratic plan now before it’s too late.”

— Janet M. in Downers Grove, Illinois.

“We senior citizens depend on USPS. Please help keep it viable.”

—Joanne L. in Akron, Ohio.

“Our postal service should be about serving us rather than serving businesses that give it money.”

— Douglas L. in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

We have yet to hear a response or acknowledgement that the messages from the public were received, and DeJoy continues to make it clear that he doesn’t want anyone asking questions about his 10-year plan.

On the same day that USPS leadership received our coalition’s messages, the Postal Regulatory Commission issued a public inquiry order to DeJoy asking that USPS provide details on the sorting and delivery changes under his plan. In the order, the Commission said it “notes that stakeholders have expressed concerns regarding a lack of a forum to explore the impacts of these proposed changes.”

DeJoy responded with an objection to the Commission’s inquiry. On May 17, DeJoy delivered congressional testimony for the first time in nearly two years at a hearing of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations. Rep. Summer Lee asked him why USPS is objecting. In his response, DeJoy was openly hostile toward the postal regulator, accusing them of actively participating “in the destruction of [USPS].”

Just last month, DeJoy sat down with the press for a 90-minute interview where he once again doubled down with an adversarial attitude toward postal regulators who seek details for the public on his 10-year plan, calling the Commission’s inquiry “nonsense,” saying, “We don’t need to be babysat.”

On May 22, DeJoy delivered the keynote address at the 2023 National Postal Forum where he spoke at length touting his efforts to implement “dramatic changes” and increase the pace of his 10-year plan. The postmaster general told the audience that “dramatic changes must be done at a pace, and with a tenacity that is rarely seen.” However, these changes are a mystery to many, and for a public institution, this mystery is dangerous.

If the past is any guide, the effects of potential post office closings and reduced hours will be devastating, particularly to rural and Indigenous communities. The Save the Post Office Coalition organized a petition to the Postal Regulatory Commission and the USPS Office of Inspector General urging them to stop DeJoy’s “dramatic changes” and demand public input, and so far has received over 131,000 signatures from the public who regularly use the postal service.

The bottom line is that the public has a right to more transparency and input in the decision-making process at a public institution. This requires engagement with said public — which DeJoy is actively resisting. When you put a rich, white, private-sector executive who isn’t used to public accountability and cooperation in charge of a treasured public institution, such a clash might be inevitable. It’s plain DeJoy doesn’t have the temperament for public service.

Communities across the nation want dramatic change at the post office too, but that dramatic change is not to be secretive or a surprise; it must be a shift toward protecting and expanding the public footprint and services available at the post office to meet new needs and change with the times. The People’s Postal Agenda outlines a framework for an expanded USPS that includes things like postal banking, expanded nonbank financial services like bill payment and ATMs, WiFi in parking lots, and public electric vehicle charging.

We still remember former President Donald Trump’s plan to privatize the post office, right before he put his thumb on the scale to have his donor DeJoy appointed as postmaster general. We also remember DeJoy’s role in sowing public fear and uncertainty in the vote-by-mail process by slowing down the mail and then sending out mailers to voters that meeting their state’s deadline would not ensure their vote would arrive in time to be counted, causing him to be sued by the NAACP and Public Citizen, as well as secretaries of state.

There is nothing to suggest that DeJoy has abandoned the privatization vision of the people who got him the job. So it’s our job as citizens to make absolutely sure any upcoming “dramatic changes” to the post office don’t shrink and privatize the institution but protect and expand it for generations to come.

[kp777]

By Vishal Shankar, Revolving Door Project

Common Dreams

Nov. 18, 2023

President Biden has utterly failed to hold DeJoy to account for his internal attack on the US Postal Service.

In a time of historic distrust in government, the United States Postal Service has accomplished something extraordinary: it remains a universally beloved federal agency. Second only to the Parks Service in public favorability (a jaw-dropping 77% approval rating, per Gallup), USPS is arguably also the most frequently-interacted-with component of the federal government: packages and letters are delivered to Americans’ mailboxes six days per week. But these warm feelings – already under threat by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s continued destructive leadership – could quickly chill if the Postal Board of Governors has its way.

At least four times per year, the Board (the governing body that votes on DeJoy’s agenda and has the sole power to fire him) holds an open session meeting, its sole formal contact with the public. In recent years, these meetings have concluded with a well-attended public comment period, where in-person and virtual attendees have excoriated DeJoy for embracing a privatization-friendly agenda. Just this year alone, public commenters at Board meetings have decried the mail slow downs and price hikes, demanded changes to DeJoy’s gas-guzzling and union-busting fleet plan, raised serious concerns about transparency of DeJoy’s facility consolidation plans, and pushed DeJoy to expand community services offered at the post office.

The future of the people’s most treasured public institution depends on public participation and feedback

But when the Postal Board of Governors met this week for their final open session of the year, there was one major difference from its previous quarterly meetings: virtual and remote public comments were, without explanation, banned. This abrupt new barrier to public accessibility led the number of public commenters – which in recent meetings has been a double-digit tally – to drop to 4. The decline in attendance was also likely compounded by an unexplained shift in the meeting time: whereas past meetings have been held at 4:00pm ET, Tuesday’s session was held at noon – the middle of the workday.

The Board’s decision to not allow virtual comments at the November 14th meeting follows another alarming recent attempt to suppress public input. At the August 2023 meeting, each public commenter was allotted only 25 seconds to speak, in sharp contrast to the typical 3 minute time limit. And past meetings were not beacons of accountability, either. The Postal Governors never responded to any comments raised by the public, and the comment period itself was always excluded from the official publicly available USPS recording of the formal session.

But next year, the Postal Board’s accountability problem will get even worse. During Tuesday’s meeting, Postal Board Deputy Secretary Lucy Trout explained, starting next year, the Postal Board will only hear public comments once per year in November. In other words, though the next three Postal Board meetings (February, May, and August 2024) are ostensibly “public sessions,” members of the public will have no opportunity to inform the Postal Board about their concerns until a year from now.

And it’s not as if postal workers, customers, and public advocates don’t have anything pressing to alert the Board about. On the contrary, DeJoy has continued to advance a destructive agenda that includes:

Five successive postage rate increases, which have risked driving away business and failed to improve USPS financial standing, despite DeJoy’s promises.

A 10-year stealth privatization plan that is being advanced with zero opportunities for public input and would increase delivery times, slash 50,000 jobs through attrition, and cut operations at more than 200 post offices and sorting facilities, which could devastate rural and Indigenous communities.

A next-gen postal fleet contract with Oshkosh Defense that is nearly 40% gas-guzzler and 100% built with non-union scab labor. UAW workers from Oshkosh have regularly attended postal board meetings (including Tuesday’s) to call for an investigation into the company’s union avoidance scheme and for the Board to rebid a new, union-built contract.

Failure to protect USPS staff from a dangerous summer heatwave that killed one postal worker, even after members of Congress urged improvements to the USPS heat safety protection plan and letter carriers alleged their managers were routinely falsifying safety documents.

Refusal to support alternative revenue sources that could strengthen USPS, such as postal banking, grocery delivery, or electric vehicle charging stations.

President Biden has utterly failed to hold DeJoy to account for any of this, instead inviting him to White House stamp ceremonies and staying silent as the Postmaster General laughably reinvents himself as a “Biden ally” to credulous reporters. This is particularly egregious given the President’s power to nominate members of the Postal Board of Governors:

Biden has inexplicably failed to name replacements for two Trump-appointed Governors – including DeJoy-supporting Democrat Lee Moak – whose terms expired last December. This has allowed Moak and his Republican colleague William Zollars to stay on the board for nearly a full year (their holdover terms will expire on December 8, 2023) and continue occupying seats that Biden has been statutorily allowed to fill.

The Save The Post Office coalition has endorsed former Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence and postal expert Sarah Anderson – two strong critics of DeJoy’s leadership with decades of actual postal experience and policy expertise – for these positions. Biden has yet to indicate he will nominate anyone to these vacancies.

Though Biden has already nominated five of the Board’s nine governors (on paper, enough to fire DeJoy), at least two of his picks have been DeJoy backers: Democratic ex-GSA head Dan Tangherlini (who approved Trump’s lease of D.C.’s Old Post Office Building) and Republican Derek Kan (a former Mitch McConnell/Elaine Chao advisor). As I’ve written before, Biden’s choice to nominate Tangherlini and Kan (instead of two anti-Dejoy reformers) squandered a key opportunity to finally give the Board a pro-reform, anti-DeJoy majority.

The Postal Board’s restrictions on public comment are unacceptable. They must reverse course by allowing both in-person AND virtual public comments at ALL open sessions next year, and take further steps to improve accountability by responding to public comments and posting recorded comment sessions to the USPS website. Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration must publicly call out this shameful barrier to transparent government and fast-track filling the Moak and Zollars Postal Board seats with anti-DeJoy, pro-accountability reformers.

The future of the people’s most treasured public institution depends on public participation and feedback–that’s how public service works.

[asparklethatisblue]

actually fuck it, here’s the discworld books I’ve already read and my thoughts.

1. The Colour of Magic

It’s alright, funny but not as captivating as some of the others. I remember watching the movie as a kid without knowing what it was

2. The Light Fantastic

Liked it much more than Colour of Magic, there’s just something... more creative about it? Also baby turtles

3. Equal Rites

Fun! First Granny appearance, and I like the attempt at witch vs wizard as something distinct

4. Mort

I really liked it! I mean, who doesn’t love Death? The gender stuff is annoying, and I did notice that he writes straight couples in a more miss than hit way early on 

5. Sourcery

I do enjoy the Ricewind books. The weird stuff with the side characters going on in the background is always... eh? I love the theme of expectations parents put on you, and having to follow them despite hating it so much. Not sure if it worked perfectly all the time, but good book.

6. Wyrd Sisters

Fun! Loved it, I love Granny, and I like the plot as well, and how they solve stuff

7. Pyramids

8. Guards! Guards!

Ya. Vimes my love

9. Faust Eric ( did read this but don’t remember anything besides ONE joke, I don’t even know if I finished it)

10. Moving Pictures

11. Reaper Man

I loved it, I adored it. The quiet peace and sadness of it all... The quiet horror of being immortal and not wanting to be. I didn’t quite get all of the jokes I think, especially with the glass balls, but still so good.

12. Witches Abroad

GOOD. I really enjoyed the subversion of themes in fairy tales, and happiness vs being happy and also Granny being extremly willing to do horrid things to help people, or not to avert her eyes. I loved the New Orleans style and the magic and the gators. Good shit.

13. Small Gods

Struggled to put it down as I read it, I think I accidentally stayed awake till 2am finishing this, really good, made me feel things.

14. Lords and Ladies

AH. Very good. Delightfully creepy, I love the “Elves Suck” agenda. Genuinely scary. I believe Pratchett maybe wrote. Two. good hetero couples. All the others suck.

15. Men at Arms

I swear to god more miss than hit with the straights...

16. Soul Music

17. Interesting times

18. Maskerade

Good, when you get over the constant shit with Agnes and the fatphobe. Like? Was that???? NEEDED??? least favourite Witches Book.

19. Feet of Clay

I tried reading it years ago and my ADHD was too unmedicated and I didn’t know what was happening. Trans Dwarves! Golems in an actual respectful way? You know they’re a Jewish thing, yeah? Well this felt... right.

20. Hogfather

21. Jingo

Really good between the “Oh god is he gonna be weird...?” worries at the first readthrough. Man. I love how annoyed TP is by politics like this

22. The Last Continent

23. Carpe Jugulum

Sickass. I loved it.

24. The Fifth Elephant

I actually don’t remeber it as much for some reason? But I loved it!! The Dwarves! The Werwolves!!! AH! Vimes in trouble!

25. The Truth

Really good! I love the “Invention” books, they’re really fun, and I love Otto, I love the murder mystery and the commentary on people reacting to news, and what people care about or no.

26. Thief of Time

27. The Last Hero

28. The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents

29. Night Watch

Maybe my second favourite? Man....

30. The Wee Free Men

31. Monstrous Regiment

I have it on audiobook, I must have relistened to it like... 5 times last year. It was the first Discworld book I read and I adore it deeply.

32. A Hat Full of Sky

33. Going Postal

How dare you make me care about a man named Moist von Lipwig??? He is exactly the character archtype I go bonkers for

34. Thud!

YEAH BOY

35. Wintersmith

36. Making Money

same as for going postal. ADHD king...

37. Unseen Academicals

38. I Shall Wear Midnight

39. Snuff

I actually wasn’t sure at the first half of it, like... before the goblin plot kicks in, it felt kind of like making fun of something that isn’t relevant within the industrial setting of the Disc, so is double irrelevant now. But then it becomes amazing once the real plot starts.

40. Raising Steam

Good and fun but something is off and idk what

41. The Shepherd's Crown

[safelycapricious]

appreciate you catching up on your ao3 correspondence, which has now reminded me that i'm due to return some letters. i feel like a woman living in the 19th century setting out her writing desk and best pen, about to make the most of the robust postal system.

hello my darlingest mouseyest,

i had put off replying to comments for so long because i always feel so awkward about it -- because i say the same thing like eight million times, ya'know? just "thank you!" but I do genuinely mean it every time!

because it is so nice when people leave comments and engage and just -- i am an awkward little safely and do not use words as well in real life as i usually manage when i'm writing fiction.

but a brilliant friend in one of the discord servers i'm in (the jayde agenda, delightful) said they were going to try to reply to comments and talked about how they make it a game of trying to match the energy of the commenter and -- idk it was like a lightbulb moment and suddenly it didn't seem so daunting?

which was much needed because I had 1179 unreplied to comments!!! (i am now down to 67 -- i had 60 when I went to bed last night but surprisingly engaging people in conversation makes them write back -- but in any case, that's so good! i did so good! i am so proud of me!)

and like obviously i love long comments but like some of the sweetest things were just seeing the v. simple 'i love this' or emojis from the same person on multiple works over and over again and just

my heart is full

(it was also a much needed reminder to myself how much even the most simple comment can mean to the writer and i am going to be better moving forward -- even authors can be awkward about commenting and i certainly can be!)

i fully support you sitting down at your writing desk with your perfumed stationary (naturally) and quill pen and to engage with those who have been smart enough to engage with you

ily

[beardedmrbean]

LONDON -- Thousands of train workers in Britain staged a new round of strikes Thursday, paralyzing rail service across the country in an escalating dispute over pay and working conditions exacerbated by a deepening cost-of-living crisis.

Only around one in five trains ran across the U.K. as a result of the walkout by union members, who have already staged multiple strikes in recent months. A strike planned for Friday is expected to affect most of the London Underground subway network as well as bus service in the capital, while another walkout on Saturday is set to disrupt national train travel again.

Mick Lynch, leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, said rail workers, like socores of ther public sector employees in the U.K., are struggling to cope with soaring food and fuel prices.

He warned of “a wave of solidarity action" affecting multiple sectors after official figures showed Wednesday that the country's inflation rate jumped to a new 40-year high of 10.1% in July, higher than analysts’ forecast of 9.8%.

Unions representing postal, port and aviation workers have also announced strikes as the cost-of-living crisis bites into wages. In Scotland, garbage collectors and recycling workers in the capital city of Edinburgh began a 11-day strike on Thursday, saying a pay rise offer of 3.5% was far from enough to battle rising bills.

“People in this country are fed up with low pay. Many millions of people have not had a proper pay deal for decades," Lynch said Thursday at the picket line in London’s Euston train station. "So public sector workers in health care, education, transport, all sort of services, have been subjected to pay cuts and rampant inflation."

He blamed the Conservative government’s alleged “anti-union agenda” for prolonging the labor dispute and said railway workers would continue strike actions until a settlement is reached with train companies, which are privately owned but heavily regulated.

Lynch alleged that U.K. officials have used taxpayer funds to bail out the companies so they don't lose income from strikes, thereby removing incentives for executives to negotiate.

The government has argued it spent huge amounts in public funding to protect rail workers' jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials want to cut costs and staffing to make the train system financially sustainable for the future. They say a fair pay offer was presented to rail workers.

A Department for Transport spokesperson said union leaders were “opting to inflict misery and disrupt the day-to-day lives of millions” for the sixth time since June instead of working to reach a deal.

“We urge union bosses to do the right thing by their members and let them have their say on Network Rail’s very fair deal, which will deliver the reforms our rail system urgently needs," the spokesperson said. “It’s time to get off the picket lines and back around the negotiating table."

Some 40,000 rail workers including cleaners and maintenance staff walked off their jobs for three days in June to demand better pay, job security and working conditions, leading to the U.K.'s biggest transit strike in three decades.

Several other rail strikes have followed since, and no resolution has been reached between the government and workers.

[caffeineandsociety]

I want to talk about true crime, and how we discuss internet safety.

The way true crime stories are usually framed, especially in the mainstream, is...bad. We're talking about this lately on the internet after the shitshow with that one big Dahmer piece, and I'm really thankful it's picking up in volume. The sensationalist way most true crime pieces are framed tends to lead to greater support for aggressive policing, even when the facts of the case are, in no uncertain terms, that the police had every opportunity to do something much sooner than they did but just didn't care (suuuuure, Becky, I'm sure the reason the cops just handed one of Dahmer's victims right back to him is because they were understaffed and underfunded and giving them more money would totally stop it from ever happening again /s), and promotes white fragility and hypervigilance despite the fact that these shows and movies and specials tend to focus on some of the rarest types of violent crime out there (this is, in fact, the majority of why these cases are so fascinating and easy to sensationalize), often because they gloss over the fact that many of the victims were chosen because they were marginalized people the perpetrator (often correctly) assumed the police wouldn't care about enough to investigate fully, or because they just had convenient preexisting access to them, rather than being the random white women the media tends to target with these stories.

The fact is, as many of us already know, you're more likely to be injured by an abusive intimate partner (ESPECIALLY one who has had more than one date to "boil the frog"), or a friend or family member gone postal, or any number of other people you know than you are by a random opportunistic serial offender, and the overwhelming majority of serial offenders are people with easy access to targets and broad public trust like cops and nurses, yet the presentation of true crime media often ends up promoting the thought, "but what if it was me? What if it was my child? What if it was my friend? What would we do? How can we protect ourselves?" - which often ends up leading down a road to your parents' old ~Stranger Danger~ thinking. You end up worrying about random strangers on the street. Anyone who looks "shifty" (more likely to be a sign of disability than criminality, if it's not just your judgment of a Black or brown person existing) is suddenly A Likely Serial Killer You Must Avoid.

We can all recognize this is a shitty way to live, that the cost to yourself and others far outweighs the benefit of possibly avoiding one of the most obscure threats out there, yes?

Now let's look at how we talk about internet safety. There are a lot of dangers and bad actors you're likely to run into on the internet - garden-variety bullies, crowdfunding scams, hate group recruiters, cult recruiters, pyramid scheme recruiters, fascists and adjacent bigots who want to destroy the support systems of anyone who's not a white cishet man, ransomware and viruses and other malware, snake oil salesmen and other grifters and the disinformation pipelines they craft to sell you things, dangerous "diy projects" and "lifehacks" from content farms that are more likely to burn your house down than get you the result in the video, literal murder attempts via promoting poisons as emergency medicine (anyone remember the "put pennyroyal essential oil in this already dangerous tea for an abortion at home!" graphic that was floating around in July 2022?), people catfishing to stir up drama for reasons ranging from clout to money to pushing a hate agenda, the list goes on and on and on.

What do we focus on when we talk about internet safety?

Avoiding pedophiles and groomers.

Look. Yes, serial killers do exist, they do pop up from time to time, very rarely; similarly, yes, there are child predators who use the internet as a place to find victims with a lower risk of getting caught...but they are an extremely UNCOMMON threat. Since the advent of the internet, even after decades of fearmongering that this was going to become THE route by which Children Would Be Abused, it remains true that most child sexual abuse happens at the hands of someone the victim knows - a family member, a teacher, a religious authority, a sports coach, a doctor or nurse (which, incidentally, is also how the most prolific serial killers got their targets) - and yet we don't by default suspect everyone who goes into teaching or sports coaching or medicine of being a predator, as we shouldn't. The overwhelming majority of them are innocent. We know this. Yet somehow we can't extend the same belief to random people on the internet, despite the internet being a much more representative sample of the overall population - i.e., by definition, going to have a smaller percentage of predators, because so many people have just presented the idea that this common-sense-awful and fucked-up-beyond-normal-comprehension and thus easy-to-sensationalize type of offender is SO much more common than they actually are.

And just like how the presentation of true crime can, intentionally or otherwise, push an ableist and racist agenda and feed into white fragility and Stranger Danger, this obsession with ~PEDOPHILES~ as The Ultimate Online Threat also plays into bigotry - because just like most of your ~SERIAL KILLER RED FLAGS~ are just racist or ableist stereotypes, most of your ~PEDOPHILE RED FLAGS~ are just queerphobic (and frequently ALSO racist and ableist, for that matter) misconceptions.

We're out here with the far right using the boogeyman of ~PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS~ to attack trans healthcare, to pass bathroom bills, to censor queer media, to censor any history that makes them look bad while they're at it, to try to bring back the 3 articles law, to paint drag queens and transfems as evil rapacious monsters, to paint transmascs as poor stupid babies fallen victim to a cult (or themselves the evil indoctrinators confusing your poor godly children into self-mutilation, depending on which is most convenient), as a form of stochastic terrorism against queer people - who do you think you're serving when you use that exact language, those exact talking points, over the exact same "red flags" ("kinks, especially taboo kinks, are just abuse apologism at best and a simulation of raping kids at worst and if you engage in them it's only a matter of time before simulation stops being good enough and you ACTUALLY molest a child" "wearing anything I deem too kinky in public is sexual abuse don't you know there are CHILDREN out there if you won't think of the CHILDREN before exposing them to your DEVIANCE you must be a pedo" "how dare you object to porn being effectively criminalized outright why do you WANT CHILDREN to be exposed to this filth you clearly just WANT CHILD PORN you sicko") but not explicitly blaming them on the ~dirty corruptive queer cult~, especially in predominantly queer communities?

Hint: It's not kids.

If you want to keep kids safe online, worry more about the disinformation and hate pipelines, corporations trying to get them hooked on gambling, dangerous clickbait "crafts", and communities that encourage bullying. Any given person online is probably never going to end up meeting someone who might as well be from To Catch A Predator; meanwhile they're GUARANTEED to run into at least one of those things.

[enjoyyourdunghillbaal]

Keep talking your bullshit.

You and your bullshit to hold mirrors up to people and telling them it's a reflection of you or the person targeted for criticism.

You need to take a closer look at the house that I own, that I control the interior and exterior of, with MY resources.

This isn't a reflection of me nigger. This isn't a reflection of the house I keep nigger. Look at that carpet.

Is that interior house paint new? Is that cherry-stained baseboard and crown molding new?,IS THAT CARPET NEW? WHAT THREAD COUNT?

is it unwalked on by anybody but me for ten years? Unshat upon by some other "guests" pets, or people's spills? Is that my furniture standard living within my means and resources? Is this the quality standard i maintain or live by? Is this what my grandparent's home looked like? Is this a reflection of my grandparents' quality standard and how they keep their own home? Is that a real kitchen and countertop? Is that a real waste disposal?

Is that my own garage where I keep and take care of my things, instead of the landscapers taking care of my things with bad neighbors and Mexicans with dirt throwing leaf blowers?

Is that a real laundry room in my own house instead of a coin op laundry because somebody always wants somebody's money for something?

Maintained that standard for ten years without some dickhead redcoat trying to tell me what to do or how to govern or maintain the standards my home. Without complaints of lawlessness in the same g.d. postal or zip code.

What else does your mirror NOT show.

Your disrespect. Your denial of the Law and United States government. Your evil in your heart. Your sins against other people. your corruptability. Your lies, your dishonesty, your stealing, your stealing from homeless people, your drug habits, your racism based on social or financial class. Your racism based on health problems that you don't see and you don't know shit about, and only assume what you think you know about the person or the problems in their own life.

My respect for the Law when you don't have any respect for anything....my respect for other people's privacy and boundaries.... my respect for other life. My respect for other people in general.

Your reflection also doesn't show how the Law is dead here, by your own choice. Same as its been for the past 23 + years. The law is dead here and refuses to do their job when a crime occurs, too busy looking for reasons to not respect a person, as if it causes you pain. Too busy refusing to solve a case or make any arrests because you don't want to help them. Because you're too busy being aware of the victimization and criminal activity, and protecting their guilt, and allowing the abuse to happen. Cokehead Christians and porn industry people that spread addiction and destroy lives and contribute to life threatening violence are people too.. and are still good people even though they victimize others and should be protected because they contribute to society. And you don't, grandma. Go take "YOUR" medicine. because you're too busy trying to find fault with me, testing me to see what i can tolerate when peoole lie to me or steal from me, what i decide to do about it, what actions I make when I decide to take matters into my own hands, and make excuses to try to arrest me for any crime.

You don't want the Law to work, you want to take power from people and give it to people that it doesn't belong to.

He doesn't need the Law, we need to put something in the way of the law. Like church. Church first. Church above and before Law and Government. That fits with our agenda. Otherwise he gets smart on us. he needs a corrupt person that serves my agenda to play "caregiver" so he won't be a threat to our corrupt activity.

The war will never end as long as you keep losing a battle of wits. As long as you cannot win in a mental contest or agruement with me, Nigger.

Piece of shit redcoat.

Troublemak8ng Nigger.

[originalpackersandmoversblog]

Vital tricks to apply to your next moving plan!

Moving to a new home might provide you the feeling of confusion, that uncomfortable inclination that you don’t generally have a place there. Time will regularly assist you in overcoming your underlying stress. But initially, you will face the little burden of reaching the new atmosphere with new people. At this time Agarwal Packers would turn out to be your true moving companion.

The thing is that if you compose your time right, you won’t need to manage any upsetting or confusing circumstances. Prepared for some great post move agenda sections?

You know unloading your valuables comes straightaway, yet what about learning the insider facts of your new home? Of course, you’ll need to change your postal location, however have you discovered great medicinal services suppliers yet? What’s more, indeed, you should enroll your vehicle after your cross-country move, however isn’t making new companions your top need?

What to do after a move? How, when, and for what reason to do them all?

Arrange  and manage your post move time

Coincidentally, your expert movers i.e.,movers and packers didn’t cheat you, did they? Your post move period begins when you step over the edge of your new house or apartment. You’ll likely notification that the absolute first day in the wake of moving into another house is for the most part described by a sentiment of alleviation that the house move is at last finished and now you can at long last shake off that nerve-wracking development of pressure and nervousness.

Sadly, because of the huge number of activities while moving into another house, you won’t have a lot of time to get excessively agreeable, at any rate not yet. As a general rule, it’s significant that you sort out your post movement time the most ideal way. Do you recall what amount your own moving schedule made you exploit each hour of consistently before the private move? Presently you’ll have to accomplish something fundamentally the same as.

Unload Your Cartons

Other than the room and restroom, the kitchen ought to be the following space to unload.

In contrast to getting together your home for a move, the best thing about unloading is that you can really extend it in time and complete it at a substantially more agreeable pace. Unloading after the move is significant and its tedious nature shouldn’t be disparaged, however you don’t generally have a quick moving toward cutoff time (your moving day) to attempt to urgently fit into.

The absolute initially boxes you ought to unload are your fundamentals puts away loaded up with things of most extreme significance. At that point, you should fire opening up all the Bedroom and Bathroom named holders, as those are the two rooms you are encouraged to set up with need. All things considered, aren’t the considerations in your mind spinning around washing up and having a lay on your comfortable bed?

Get familiar with the privileged insights of your new home

Much of the time, your new home will be a totally obscure area for you, so it’s a great opportunity to bring the pioneer in you and set on an exploratory visit around the habitation. Search for any indications of previous harm, examine the funnels for holes, and keep your eyes open for disagreeable indications of invasion. Additionally, find the wire box and the fundamental water stop valve if there should arise an occurrence of crises, and afterward record the readings of your water-and power meters.

Change your postal location

Whether or not you moved just across town, migrated to another city in a similar state, or finished a cross-country move, the postal location of your new home will be extraordinary. Also, that essentially implies that except if you set aside the effort to change your location not long after the house move, you’ll keep on getting your normal mail at your old location, which is nothing more than a bad memory.

Register your kid at another school

In the event that you simply moved to another house with a young kid, at that point you should see that it is so critical to locate another school for the person in question, so they can proceed with their instruction. That new school must be a legitimate one as well with the goal that your child can get the most ideal beginning of their life.

In the event that you haven’t picked a decent instructive establishment for your child or little girl preceding the move, you need to do it now. Also, being something to do when moving to another city, it’s crucial that you complete that significant undertaking inside the set cutoff times.

Find appropriate Home Utility

In the event that you simply moved with a little kid, you will need to locate a decent pediatrician as well. No one can tell how your body and psyche will respond to the pressure of the ongoing move, or the states of the new city condition. One potential issue is that the social insurance supplier you knew and trusted for quite a long time can no longer observe you and view you should you get a bug, become all the more truly sick, or just need a particular archive from a specialist.

Register Your Engine Vehicle

Did you have your vehicle shipped for you? In the event that you simply crossed one or a few state lines to arrive at your goal, at that point you shouldn’t neglect to enroll your vehicle in the new state. For your data, you may need to move your driver’s permit too. The uplifting news here is that both these assignments are genuinely clear, so you should simply discover an opportunity to visit the neighborhood DMV office to deal with it.

Help your pet modify after the move

Outside play is the best post migration medication for your pooch. In the event that you simply migrated with a pet, or pets, at that point you shouldn’t ponder a lot about what to do after you move into another house. This is so just in light of the fact that one of the appropriate responses is excessively clear – you have to ensure your creature companion is feeling alright after the abrupt difference in view and sudden jump out of their usual range of familiarity.

Make new companions

Moving into another home can be hard for everybody included. A potential reaction of the ongoing private move is a wonder known as partition nervousness. The way that you moved away from old buddies and family is an explanation enough to make you pitiful, and even discouraged. Also, to exacerbate the situation, you presumably don’t know anybody in the new city. In any event not yet.

Go for visit exploratory strolls first in your neighborhood, and afterward all through the city itself. Get acquainted with the city tourist spots, become familiar with more about its history, and possibly put forth an attempt to see better how local people appreciate life by and large. To put it plainly, set out to step all the more frequently outside the solace of your new home and ideally you will before long be on agreeable footing with the city you simply moved to. Book Agarwal Packers and Movers to plan your move.

[readingsrantsrambles]

Postal Service Will Electrify Trucks by 2026 in Climate Win for Biden

Agency says it can spend billions to buy 66,000 new electric vehicles and related infrastructure now that its finances are in better shape

by Jacob Bogage for The Washington Post December 20, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/20/usps-ev-vehicles/

The U.S. Postal Service will buy 66,000 vehicles to build one of the largest electric fleets in the nation, Biden administration officials announced Tuesday, turning to one of the most recognizable vehicles on American roads — boxy white mail trucks — to fight climate change.

Postal officials’ plans call for buying 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” from defense contractor Oshkosh, of which 45,000 will be electric, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told The Washington Post. The agency will also purchase 46,000 models from mainstream automakers, of which 21,000 will be electric.

The Postal Service will spend $9.6 billion on the vehicles and associated infrastructure, officials said, including $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden and congressional Democrats’ landmark climate, health-care and tax law.

By 2026, the agency expects to purchase zero-emissions delivery trucks almost exclusively, DeJoy said. It’s a major achievement for a White House climate agenda that leans heavily on reducing greenhouse gases from vehicles.

“It’s wonderful that the Postal Service will be at the forefront of the switch to clean electric vehicles, with postal workers as their ambassadors,” said John Podesta, White House senior adviser for clean energy innovation. “It will get people thinking, ‘If the postal worker delivering our Christmas presents … is driving an EV, I can drive one, too.’”

The mail agency must replace its fleet of 30-year-old trucks, which lack air conditioning, air bags and other standard safety features. They get only 8.2 mpg. At an event Tuesday at Postal Service headquarters in Washington, DeJoy joked that the “Long Life Vehicles” were “best suited to museums rather than our hard-working carriers.”

He added that his agency would “immediately” begin prepping facilities to accept the vehicles, a process that began months ago as DeJoy led an agency reorganization to improve mail handling procedures and delivery route structures.

The eight-year journey to procure new vehicles has been arduous and marked by political battles. White House officials slammed an earlier procurement proposal and said that courts or Congress could intervene to block the purchase of carbon-belching delivery trucks that posed a permanent risk to the planet and public health.

Fleet electrification is a major pillar of Biden’s plan to fight rising global temperatures. Biden has ordered the federal government to purchase only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. With more than 217,000 vehicles, the Postal Service has the largest share of the U.S. government’s civilian fleet.

“It is setting the bar for the rest of the federal government, and more importantly, for the rest of the world,” Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said at Tuesday’s event.

EV boosters and environmental activists have said that an electric postal fleet could be a major lift for the auto industry’s investment in clean vehicles.

Biden administration officials hope it will persuade the Postal Service’s competitors to accelerate their own climate pledges, many of which rely on carbon-free delivery trucks.

“I think it puts pressure on them to up their game, too,” Podesta told The Post in an interview Monday. “If the Postal Service can move out with this kind of aggressive plan, the public expects these companies that have made these long-term announcements to catch up in the near term.”

Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post, has promised to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, and holds a close to 20 percent stake in electric truck maker Rivian. It is amassing an armada of 100,000 Rivian EVs that it hopes to have on the road by 2030.

The Postal Service will continue buying internal combustion engine vehicles because half of the fleet still consists of delivery vans and trucks that travel longer distances to ferry mail between cities and states.

The Postal Service is restructuring its vast mail processing and delivery network to minimize unnecessary transportation and fit facilities specifically for EVs. It will concentrate letter carriers at centralized locations rather than using small-town post offices to take advantage of existing infrastructure and cost savings associated with electric vehicles.

Members of Congress specifically cited an electric postal fleet as a sweetener to pass a major financial overhaul of the mail service in the spring. The Postal Service Reform Act eased the agency’s requirements for pension-plan funding, providing the financial flexibility to replace the delivery fleet, DeJoy said.

“As our financial trajectory improved, as our delivery strategy evolved, and with the help of the congressional funds to facilitate our ambition, we were very well positioned to move forward with more favorable plans that everyone can rally around,” DeJoy said Tuesday.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich), who worked with DeJoy to craft that legislation, said in a statement that EVs would make the fleet “safer, more energy efficient and cheaper to operate in the long run.” Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), a leading voice on postal issues, vowed to “keep up the pressure until 100 percent of USPS’s delivery fleet runs on clean energy.”

When the Postal Service published its first vehicle replacement plan in 2021, it was set to make only 10 percent of the fleet electric. The rest would have been gas-powered trucks — with 8.6 mpg fuel economy with the air conditioning running — that could be retrofitted to battery power later by swapping out parts under the hood. But postal officials quickly abandoned that strategy because of cost and technical complexity.

Democrats in Congress, state officials and environmental activists were infuriated. Sixteen states, plus the District of Columbia, sued to block the 10 percent electric plan, as did some of the country’s leading environmental groups.

Podesta said he confronted DeJoy about his agency’s plans when the two began talking in September. By then, the Postal Service said 40 percent of its new trucks would be EVs.

“I told him that I thought the original plans were completely inadequate,” said Podesta, who described the conversations as friendly and purposeful. “I just think we thought it was critical to our success and the overall [climate change] program. So we stuck with it, pushed it, he pushed back, and we pushed back.”

DeJoy said that Podesta was “receptive” and helped work through the mail agency’s chronic budget problems.

“Our mission is to deliver mail to 163 million addresses first, and to the extent that we can align with other missions of other agencies and the president, I want to do that,” DeJoy said.

Some of the postmaster’s fiercest critics praised the announcement. Adrian Martinez, an attorney at climate activist group Earthjustice who is leading a lawsuit against the agency over its vehicle procurement, called the new truck purchase plan “a sea change in the federal fleet.”

“In the course of a year we’ve gone from a USPS plan to buy trucks with the fuel economy of a late 1990s Hummer to a visionary commitment to modernize mail delivery in the United States with electric trucks,” he said. “We’re grateful to the Biden administration for stepping in to put us on course for an electric future.”

Shares of Wisconsin-based Oshkosh rose more than 1.4 percent Tuesday. In an October securities filing, the company cautioned that it was facing engineering and factory construction delays related to the new Postal Service trucks, as well as “challenges” with recruiting and training new workers to build the vehicles in Spartanburg, S.C.

The company’s decision to build the trucks there has rankled some activists and union officials. Oshkosh’s Wisconsin employees are represented by the powerful United Auto Workers, and South Carolina’s labor laws are less favorable to organizing.

“The fact that there were no commitments for the vehicles to be union-made is a glaring omission for an administration that prides itself on being union friendly,” said Porter McConnell, campaign director of the consumer rights group Take on Wall Street and co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition. “We will be looking to future announcements committing to the Oshkosh and the commercial off-the-shelf vehicles being union-made, which we know is entirely feasible.”

FURTHER READING:

The U.S. Postal Service: What you need to know

Biden ousts top DeJoy supporters: President Biden made two nominations to the Postal Service’s governing board to replace top allies of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

USPS FAQ: Why the Postal Service is about to charge you more for slower mail

DeJoy keeps financial ties to ex-business: XPO Logistics pays Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and family businesses at least $2.1 million annually to lease four office buildings

FBI investigation: FBI investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in connection with past political fundraising

FAQ: How the USPS governing board works

DeJoy’s 10-year postal plan: Includes cuts to post office hours and lengthened delivery times

True or False: Eight common misconceptions about the USPS

Poll: Americans say USPS should be run like a public service, not a business

Stamps: USPS raises stamp price to 58 cents

USPS trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning. They get 10 mpg. And they were revolutionary.

Biden’s zero-emission government fleet starts with USPS

Senate passes $107 billion overhaul of USPS, lauding mail agency’s role in pandemic response

FedEx has committed to carbon-neutral operations by 2040 with plans to completely electrify its pickup and delivery fleet by then. It has promised to purchase exclusively electric vehicles by 2030.

UPS has plans to go carbon-neutral by 2050 and use 40 percent alternative fuels by 2025.

[themoderndana]

Washington Day 2

On Friday, we got a bit of a late start - I did some work in the morning and some reading. By the time we rolled our bikes downtown, it was after noon. We had a very ambitious agenda, but detoured to check out a chunk of the Berlin Wall, which is in a confusing complex named after Woodrow Wilson and a number of other presidents.

I have seen the Berlin Wall in person before, but never as it was on the day the wall came down. This piece is right next to the security checkpoint which appears at the entrance to all federal buildings in DC. Stan was born in Soviet Ukraine and spent the first few years of life there, so the fall of the Berlin Wall has a little more significance to him than just an interesting historical event.

From there, we went to the old postal service building, which has been converted into a sumptuous Waldorf Astoria. It used to be Trump International but no one wanted to stay at it, and ownership finally transferred just this summer.

(Photo from an article about the hotel, where you can see its lounge and one of the rooms.) Today the National Park Service controls only the bell tower, which was our destination. There are three park rangers on staff: one on the ground floor, and one at the top of each of the elevators you have to take to the top.

In between the two elevators, is the platform where ten red, white, and blue bell ropes hang. It was explained that a quarter peal takes a half hour, a half peal takes an hour and a full peal takes three to six hours (or something like that). Bell ringers must be able to stand and go without food or water for the duration of the event. If they get dragged up to the ceiling by the rope, the other bellringers have to drag them back down. I'm not saying I would want that to happen if I were a volunteer, but that would be some story!

Here is some more information about English change-ringing bells - which is the distinct style of bell ringing practiced in the old post office tower - from the society in charge of ringing these bells.

View of the Capitol building from the belltower. The disappointing thing about the view was that it was interrupted every 1.5" by these wires that prevent people from falling out of the tower. So I didn't get many good pictures and we didn't stay long.

On the ride up in the elevator, we were joined by a dorky professor with a backpack who seemed to be playing hooky from a conference. While chatting about how we would get back down from the top (same elevator down?) Stan joked that we would actually be required to climb down, and the professor laughed. He made a crack about rappelling down and maybe that was a highlight of his trip. More banter ensured, each of us imagining our small group performing parkour off the bell tower.

Later Stan explained that what he tries to do is not just amuse people, but to have them imagine themselves in another possible life.

After the Bell Tower, we took a trip to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History! Science and curio!

Very large geode

Above, the wetlands display. This is what I was kind of expecting from a Natural History Museum. This is the way they used to make them. Catalogues of taxidermy with little to no explanation whatsoever.

The Smithsonian has progressed from a mere inventory of the natural world, pinned to a display case under glass, to containing loads of information about the world the animal lived in. More pictures will follow in a subsequent post from when I returned to the museum to snap more photos to remember more.

Here is a website about the Hope Diamond, which also appears at the museum. Apparently it is cursed. Even the mailman, who delivered the Hope to the museum, suffered an early and painful death!

Smithsonian Castle, below.

One thing I did not expect about DC is that is a very different climate with different flowers, trees and plants. I was expecting like the same variety as here, except "more fall colours". There are lots of gardens with everything they can grow on display. Bear in mind it was already the first week of October and there were still plenty of flowers out on display.

We walked through the Castle gardens on the way to the National Museum of the American Indian.

The States have a history of violent oppression, treaty breaking and wholesale land thievery just like Canada. They found all kinds of ways to be cruel and discriminatory and it's amazing that there are any Indians left today. The history of land dispossession took many forms; one was the Indian Removal Act passed fifty years after the American Revolution. Like in Canada, many Indian people in the states live in poverty while the lands they were forced off of provide wealth to the dispossessor.

The Eisenhower memorial was striking and it was one of my favourites. It is laid out in a long rectangular plaza and covers the man's life from boyhood to WWII; here is a small part of it:

To be a monument in Washington, there are 3 requirements:

Marble

Meaningful quotes in somber capitals

A place you can visit, observe, walk through

Just some very expensive public art that makes the city a better place to be.

The Museums all close at 530PM, and after that we rode home on Stan's bicycles. That evening Stan made us dinner (sausages and cauliflower roasted in the over and dosed with a healthy portion of salty spice mix. chef's kiss!) and afterwards we were supposed to go to a party for Ukrainians. I put my foot down and said I was going to stay in, too tired to have fun with the Ukrainians even if it was in Obama's neighbourhood and there could be passed canapes. Stan unexpectedly chose not to go out and we spent a really fun evening hanging out. I drank the best beer of my LIFE (a sour brown ale with an owl on the label) and listened to songs Stan would play if he were DJing in a dark bar in East Berlin where depressed people go to dance, if they must, whatever. We also heard some tunes from some local DC bands that were really great. It was an awesome night in and I ended up staying up much later than expected.

That was Friday!

Dana

[thedawgsblog]

AND HOW IS YOUR MAIL DELIVERY?

AND HOW IS YOUR MAIL DELIVERY?

Postal Service surveilled protesters with pro-gun, anti-Biden agendas The U.S. Postal Service monitored protesters across the country, snooping on Americans focused on issues involving guns and President Biden’s election, according to records obtained by The Washington Times. Postal inspectors tracked the actions of gun rights activists gathering in Richmond, Virginia; people preparing to…

[worldofwardcraft]

A government suffering from ETTD.

August 4, 2022

Former GOP strategist turned never-Trumper Rick Wilson (pictured above after his escape from the dark side) is famous for coining the admonition "Everything Trump touches dies." A sentiment that couldn't be more on the nose because, throughout his pre-politics career, any endeavor connected with Donald Trump inevitably perished due to his incompetence, corruption and criminality.

Then, upon becoming chief executive of the federal government, Trump discovered an even wider scope for his lethal destructiveness. And for four years he utilized every government bureau within reach to serve his personal agenda of getting himself reelected, enriching himself at taxpayers' expense and wreaking vengeance on his perceived enemies.

One such federal agency is the Department of Homeland Security, whose officers were used during the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, OR to kidnap people off the streets. As NPR reported,

Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation about why they are being arrested, and driving off.

You say you want more? How about the US Postal Service under Trump appointee Louis DeJoy failing to deliver mail-in ballots in several key states? Or Bureau of Prisons officers using pepper spray to clear protesters from DC's Lafayette Park so Trump could hold a campaign photo-op in front of a church? Or the Trump-selected administrator of the General Services Administration refusing to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election in order to impede his official transition as the new president?

There's also the IRS. We now know they conducted tax audits of two Trump foes in 2017 and 2019, Former FBI director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe, both fired and smeared by Trump for refusing to halt the investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia. According to The New York Times, out of a few thousand returns the IRS picked for audit (from more than 150 million), Comey's and McCabe's were among those chosen. The IRS says it was just a random coincidence. Sure, you betcha. Oh, and Trump lackey Charles Rettig still heads that agency.

Finally, we have the DHS inspector general, acting secretary and acting deputy secretary (all Trump stooges) reportedly covering up the deleting of text messages sent while Trump's mob was attempting the overthrow of American democracy. With the possible exception of the Bureau of Weights & Measures, just about every government organization has been fatally compromised and corrupted by Trump. Someone should come up with a succinct phrase for that. Oh, wait, someone did.

[fortunatelyfresco]

A Holistic Integration of Type 1 Narcolepsy into the Reading of Moist von Lipwig

Literary Interpretation, Disability, and Finding Yourself Between the Lines

As it goes, "I wrote this for me, but you can read it if you want." It might be a fun ride for anyone who is very interested in Moist von Lipwig, or narcolepsy, or both, and/or anyone who enjoys collecting small details from within a body of work and arranging them into threads that are supportable by the text, without being actually suggested by it.

Personally, I find it very interesting to read the meta behind different headcanons, and see how creators can unintentionally write a character who fits certain criteria. There are only so many traits, after all, and some of them tend to travel in groups! Humans are pattern seekers, etc etc.

The first step of reading Moist von Lipwig as narcoleptic is wanting to read Moist von Lipwig as narcoleptic. Being narcoleptic myself and relating heavily to Moist, this step was very easy. I invite you to take my hand and come along, at least briefly, if you were interested enough to click the readmore.

Once you have taken that step, things start falling into place. At least they do if you're intimately familiar with narcolepsy, or if you first learn about it in detail through, for instance, a Tumblr post with an agenda :)

I'll break this down symptom by symptom, citing only the ones I both have personal experience with and see textual support for.

I'll be using OverDrive's search function to catalogue "evidence" in (the American editions of) Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam, so I might miss passages that don't use certain keywords.

Please take any statements along the lines of "being narcoleptic means X" with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it's just more succinct. Narcolepsy can manifest in many different ways, and is still being actively studied. Don't base your entire understanding of it on a fandom essay I wrote to cope with the crushing pressures of capitalism. I have not even fully read the scientific studies linked here as sources.

Here we go! Spoilers abound.

I. Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS) and sleep attacks.

Being narcoleptic means (salt now, please) that your brain does not get adequate rest while you sleep, no matter how much you sleep. This is because of a disturbance in the order and length of REM and NREM sleep phases. This leads to constant exhaustion. Some sources describe narcoleptic EDS as "comparable to [the sleepiness] experienced by a healthy individual who has been sleep-deprived continuously for 48–72 hours."

(Source.)

Sleep attacks can come on gradually or suddenly. In my case, I become irritable and easily overwhelmed, and nothing matters except finding a place to lie down. A more severe attack, under the right circumstances, can put me to sleep while I'm actively trying to stay awake and engaged.

Moist refers to 6:45 am as "still nighttime." He is "allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day" and is "not good at early mornings," and the narration even cites this as "one of the advantages of a life of crime; you didn't have to get up until other people had got the streets aired."

In Going Postal, he repeatedly falls asleep at his desk. I can only find two instances, but the first one describes it as having happened "again," so it happens at least three times over the course of one week. Both of the times I found were after Mr. Pump cleared his apartment, giving him access to a bed, and I can't find any reference to the fire destroying it—just that his office is "missing the whole of one wall." His presumably wooden desk is still intact, even, just "charred."

There's also no build-up either time. No direct narration of the time right before he falls asleep, just retroactive accounting for it.

Which is primarily a function of stories not showing us every boring second, and secondarily one of the smaller ways we're shown Moist being overwhelmed and racing to keep up with himself, but tertiarily it's a great set dressing if you've already decided he's narcoleptic. Sometimes sleep is just a thing that happens, without any deliberate transition. Sometimes you sit down to catch your breath or get some paperwork done, and wake up several hours later.

I've found only one example in GP of Moist waking up in his actual bed at the post office: the morning after being possessed by all the undelivered letters. Presumably either they put him there, or Mr. Pump did.

There are two points in Making Money where Moist, in an effort to be a comforting and/or guiding hand, advises people to get some sleep. First Owlswick Jenkins, and then one of the clerks (Robert) who is worried about Mr. Bent.

I take the optimistic view that this is Moist genuinely caring about these people, not just trying to get them to do what he wants. He has always done some combination of those things (GP opens with him having befriended his jailers, after all), but there's definitely a thread of him learning to treat both himself and those around him more like real people. (See also.)

Looking at this thread through narcolepsy-colored lenses, you get Moist perhaps drawing from his own experiences in an effort to be helpful. In Owlswick or Robert's position, what is something he would want to hear from the man currently in charge of his fate, or at least his job? "Get some sleep."

If we accept this as a pattern, it culminates in Raising Steam, when Moist starts to worry about "Dick Simnel and his band of overworked engineers," fixating particularly on their lack of sleep.

What sleep they got was in sleeping bags, curled up on carriage seats, eating but not eating well, just driven by their watches and their desire to keep the train going.

[...]

"People are going to die if we push them any further," he said to Dick. "You lot would rather work than sleep!"

[...]

The young man swayed in front of him and Moist's tone became gentle. "And I see now that part of my job is to tell you that you need some rest. You've run out of steam, Dick. Look, we're well on the way to Uberwald now, and while it's daylight and we're out of the mountains it's going to be the least risky time to run with minimum crew. We're all going to need our wits about us when we get near the pass. Surely you can take some rest?"

Simnel blinked as if he'd not seen Moist the first time, and said, "Yes, you're right."

And Moist could hear the slurring in the young man's speech, caught him before he fell and dragged him into a sleeping compartment, put him to bed, and noted that the engineer didn't so much fall asleep as somehow flow into it.

Moist then recruits Vimes to help him talk the rest of the engineers into getting some rest. The two of them briefly commiserate about people not realizing how important it is.

"I have to teach that to young coppers. Treasure a night's rest, I always say. Take a nap whenever you can."

"Very good."

II. Insomnia.

This is a lesser-known but very common symptom of narcolepsy. Or a comorbidity, depending on how you look at it. It seems counterintuitive if narcolepsy has been presented to you as "sleeping all the time," but it makes sense once you know it's really a matter of disruption in the brain's ability to regulate sleep cycles.

The case for this symptom is flimsier, and I fully admit I'm just reading my own experience into it. But here are two excerpts from Going Postal that I find quite suitable for my sleepy agenda:

1. "A man of affairs such as he had to learn to sleep in all kinds of situations, often while mobs were looking for him a wall's thickness away."

I latched hard onto this detail the first time I read GP.

At my worst, I could not get more than a couple hours of sleep in my bed. I kept taking naps in the bath because it was one of the few places I could sleep. It seemed to fulfill some of the criteria (isolation, temperature control, etc) that my brain demanded in exchange for playing nice.

We're told over and over again, throughout Moist's books, that he functions best under pressure.

(Brief aside: This is often cited as a reason to interpret Moist as having ADHD, which I'm also fully on board with. Not coincidentally, narcolepsy and ADHD share a few symptoms, have a notable comorbidity rate, and are treated with some of the same medications. Source.)

So again, if you're already inclined to read Moist as narcoleptic, the following is an easy jump:

"Moist thinks he's good at sleeping in strange places under strange circumstances. This is because A) his basis for comparison is a disordered attempt to sleep in normal places under normal circumstances, B) something about danger satisfies his brain into running more smoothly, and C) he's a resourceful person who is 'not given to introspection,' and so is less likely to wonder why his body demands sleep at strange times and more likely to focus on finding a place for that sleep to happen, and chalk this up later as a skill."

And returning briefly to EDS: Why would someone like Moist waste time finding a safe place to sleep while people are actively trying to kill him? At the beginning of GP, he leaves Vetinari's office and immediately goes on the run. In multiple books, when he feels threatened, his brain instinctively launches into complex escape plans. We see him successfully blend into an Ankh-Morpork crowd at least once after becoming a public figure.

So why bother? After all, a safe place to sleep is also a safe place to change clothes, or at least remove whatever distinguishing features he's given himself. Why wouldn't he just become someone else and leave town immediately?

The obvious answer is that sometimes things just happen, and an author doesn't need to know or explain every single detail of a character's past.

I would suggest, though, that one of those things might be Moist reaching a point where sleep is just not optional. A point where he not only doesn't, but can't, care about anything else. Where he is too tired to think straight, too tired to talk his way out of trouble, too tired to even contemplate the long journey from one town to the next.

2. "Moist knew he ought to get some sleep, but he had to be there, too, alive and sparkling."

Sometimes (especially in combination with underlying mental health issues) narcoleptic sleep deprivation can bypass everything I've described so far, and lead straight into a manic state. You won't necessarily find that on Google, but it's been my experience.

That's obviously not what the text is implying. "Alive and sparkling" is just a very relatable description. And we do often see Moist getting away from himself, speaking without thinking, making absurd promises that he justifies immediately afterwards as Just Part Of Being Him, always raising the stakes.

And here are a couple of excerpts from Raising Steam that could be interpreted as Moist being a light sleeper, AKA struggling to get deep sleep:

1. "And slowly Moist shut down, although a part of him was always listening to the rhythm of the rails, listening in his sleep, like a sailor listening to the sounds of the sea."

2. "All Moist's life he'd managed to find a way of sleeping in just about every circumstance and, besides, the guard's van was somehow the hub of the train; and although he didn't know how he did it, he always managed to sleep with half of one ear open."

Moist is exactly the kind of opportunist to see that as a useful tool, isn't he?

III. Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations.

These are hallucinations that come on as you're falling asleep or waking up. They can also happen during REM intrusions while you're awake. My most memorable ones include piano notes, someone calling my name, being trapped in the waves of a large body of water, and a huge truck going over a guard rail and tumbling down a hill. These are often, but not always, accompanied by sleep paralysis (and sleep paralysis is often, but not always, accompanied by hallucinations).

In GP, Moist casually cites his own hallucinations as proof that what is happening at the post office is not one.

"They're all alive! And angry! They talk! It was not a hallucination! I've had hallucinations and they don't hurt!"

Obviously that's not true for everyone, but it's true for Moist, and he has enough experience that he immediately recognizes the difference.

At one point while awake, Moist "[snaps] out of a dream of chandeliers" to realize someone has approached him to talk, while he was busy having visions of what the post office used to look like/could look like again.

Now, that's cheating, because we're probably supposed to assume it's a side effect of being possessed, but... I'm putting it here anyway.

There is also perhaps a case to be made for the tendency of Moist's internal monologue to lapse into extremely specific and prolonged hypotheticals. The lines between hallucinations, waking dreams, and "regular" daydreams have always been very blurry to me. I'm especially curious about the example at the end of Going Postal, which goes like this:

"Look, I know what I'm like," he said. "I'm not the person everyone thinks I am. I just wanted to prove to myself I'm not like Gilt. More than a hammer, you understand? But I'm still a fraud by trade. I thought you knew that. I can fake sincerity so well that even I can't tell. I mess with people's heads—"

"You're fooling no one but yourself," said Miss Dearheart, and reached for his hand.

Moist shook her off, and ran out of the building, out of the city, and back to his old life, or lives, always moving on, selling glass as diamond, but somehow it just didn't seem to work anymore, the flair wasn't there, the fun had dropped out of it, even the cards didn't seem to work for him, the money ran out, and one winter in some inn that was no more than a slum he turned his face to the wall—

And an angel appeared.

"What just happened?" said Miss Dearheart.

Perhaps you do get two...

"Only a passing thought," said Moist.

In-universe... what is Adora reacting to? What did just happen? The fact that these incidents are not isolated to Going Postal is a point against it being some sort of literal timeline divergence caused by The Spirit Of The Post.

So maybe Moist visibly zoned out. Maybe he had some kind of minor but noticeable cataplexy attack (more on those later) as part of a REM intrusion, brought on by the intense emotions he's currently struggling with.

IV. Vivid Dreams.

Again, at least some of this is probably supposed to be part of the possession, but I've been professionally projecting myself onto the surreal dreams of magically afflicted characters for years. Do try this at home.

1. "Moist dreamed of bottled wizards, all shouting his name. In the best tradition of awaking from a nightmare, the voices gradually became one voice, which turned out to be the voice of Mr. Pump, who was shaking him."

2. Moist is uneasy about the Smoking Gnu's plan, and then he has an extremely detailed dream about the Grand Trunk burning down.

This culminates in "Moist awoke, the Grand Trunk burning in his head," followed by a paragraph of him thinking things through and starting to form his own alternative plan, followed immediately by "Moist awoke. He was at his desk, and someone had put a pillow under his head."

So he fell asleep at his desk, woke up from a vivid nightmare, was awake just long enough for a coherent train of thought, and then passed back out. Which once again is not "proof" of anything, but fits the predetermined interpretation like a glove.

V. Cataplexy.

Cataplexy is a sudden loss of muscle control, usually triggered by strong emotions. This is thought to be a facet of REM intrusion—waking instances of the atonia that is meant to stop us from acting out our dreams.

The most well-known manifestation is laughter making your knees buckle, but it's not always that severe. My own attacks range from facial twitching, usually when I'm angry or otherwise extremely upset, to all-over weakness/immobilization and near-collapse when I laugh. My knees have fully buckled once or twice.

This is the biggest stretch. This is the one that is absolutely only there if you've already decided to read entire novels between the lines. It's also not even necessary for the broader headcanon; plenty of people have narcolepsy without cataplexy (or such mild cataplexy that it's never noticeable, or very delayed onset, etc).

However. I am doing this for fun. So I want him to have it. It's also become a major part of how I imagine Moist engaging with emotion, and I'd like to make a case for that.

There are a few scattered references to Moist's legs shaking, or being unsteady, or outright giving way, but there's usually an external physical reason, and/or enough psychological shock to justify it without a medical condition.

The most compelling example I've found so far comes from Moist and Adora's conversation about people expecting Moist to deliver letters to the gods.

"I never promised to—"

"You promised to when you sold them the stamps!"

Moist almost fell off his chair. She'd wielded the sentence like a fist.

"And it'll give them hope," she added, rather more quietly.

"False hope," said Moist, struggling upright.

"Almost fell off his chair" at first sounds like casual hyperbole, but then "struggling upright" implies it was a bit more literal. It's also an accurate description of me recovering from my more severe attacks, supporting myself on a wall or my spouse, or pushing myself up if I've fallen over in bed.

That happens to me multiple times per day, by the way. It doesn't bother me, and I didn't realize there was anything unusual about it for a long time. I barely think about it, except to fondly note that my spouse is good at making me laugh.

Which is to say, even severe cataplexy is not always noticeable or debilitating. Sometimes it absolutely is! It can be downright dangerous, depending on where you are, what you're doing, and whether you have any other conditions it might exacerbate. I don't want to undermine that.

I am just hell-bent on justifying the idea that this fictional character could have repeated attacks throughout the canonical narrative that are so routine they don't merit an explanation, or even a description. Especially for someone who is used to hiding his few distinguishing features behind false ones that are much more memorable. (See also.)

(That link goes to my own fanfic. Sorry.)

On the milder side, between Going Postal and Making Money, there are three instances of Moist's mouth "dropping open" when he's shocked, upset, confused, or some combination of the three. This is the kind of thing that shows up a lot in fiction, but rarely happens so literally in real life.

(There's technically a fourth instance, but I'm not counting it because it seems to be a deliberate choice on his part to convey surprise.)

And then there's laughter. Or rather, there isn't. I could be missing something, but I've searched all three books for instances of laughter and various synonyms (not counting spoken "Ha!"s), and what I've come up with is:

Moist laughs once in Going Postal, when he receives the assignment for the race to Genua.

Two packages were handed over. Moist undid his, and burst out laughing.

There's also an instance earlier in the book where Moist nearly "burst[s] out laughing."

I find the specifics here interesting, and, for our purposes, fortuitous. Cataplexy is complicated and presents differently for everyone. In my case, when laughter triggers an attack, one of the effects (which is sometimes also a cause) is that I laugh very hard, with little or no control. "Burst out laughing" is quite apt.

Let's move on to Making Money, and start with a quick tangent:

Mr. Bent explains that he has no sense of humor due to a medical condition, and that he isn't upset about this and doesn't understand why people feel sorry for him.

Moist immediately starts in with "Have you tried—" before getting cut off by the frustrated Bent.

Out-of-universe, "Have you tried" is such a well-known refrain to anyone with an incurable condition, I'm not at all surprised to find it in a book written by someone who had at least begun the process that would lead to a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. And Pratchett has certainly never shied away from portraying ignorance in his protagonists.

In-universe, it feels a little odd. Moist's tongue runs away from him all the time, but usually in the form of making ridiculous claims or impossible promises. Moist's entire stock-in-trade is People Skills, and it feels strange for him to make this kind of mistake immediately after being told Mr. Bent is not looking for solutions.

But if one were reading with, for instance, the idea in mind that Moist himself has an incurable condition related to laughter and is enthusiastic about, but still relatively new to, the practice of drawing on his own experiences to help people... it is easy to imagine the gears in his head turning the wrong way, superimposing those experiences over the tail end of Mr. Bent's explanation. Disabled people are not immune to these well-meaning pitfalls.

There is another Mr. Bent moment that I want to discuss, but we'll circle back around to it later.

I found two instances of Moist himself laughing in MM.

1. "He said it with a laugh, to lighten the mood a little."

This is deliberate laughter, employed as a social tactic. A polite chuckle, probably. Not the sort of thing that generally triggers cataplexy.

2. "Moist started to laugh, and stopped at the sight of her grave expression."

The first and only involuntary laugh in MM. It doesn't always trigger attacks...

Which brings us to Raising Steam. Compared to the first two books, Moist laughs a lot here. I count nine instances. Two of them are "burst out laughing"s, a couple include him as part of a group, some of it comes off as deliberate, and some of it doesn't.

I've always seen a lot of... rage in Raising Steam. Combing through it for laughter, I realized Moist's emotions in general are much closer to the surface here, and he's much less concerned about letting people see them. He laughs with friends and acquaintances, he cries in front of strangers, he shouts at Harry King, he has that entire conversation with Dick that boils down to "I'm very worried about you," etc.

Opinions vary wildly and sharply on Raising Steam. I have my own hangups with it, as I do with most books in the series. (Every time I make a new Discworld post, Tumblr passive-aggressively suggests the tag "my kingdom for a discworld character who is normal about women and other species.")

But I like this particular change in Moist, and I choose to see it as character development. He's trading in the professional detachment of a conman for the ability to grow into himself as a person and make meaningful connections.

So, what does that have to do with cataplexy? A lot.

I don't want to get too maudlin, so I'll just say I have plenty of personal experience with emotional repression masking cataplexy symptoms. And so, I believe, does the version of Moist we've put together over the course of this post.

Which brings us back to Making Money, and Mr. Bent. He says something about Moist that I find very interesting: "I do not trust those who laugh too easily."

Unless I've missed something, at that point in the book, Moist has never actually laughed in front of him. And Mr. Bent is a man who pays very close attention to details.

So, what is the in-universe explanation for this? I'd like to propose that Moist is very skilled at seeming to laugh, without actually laughing. He smiles, he's friendly, and he makes other people laugh, which is another thing Bent dislikes about him. He gives the impression of being someone who laughs a lot. (He certainly left that impression on me; I was very surprised by the lack of examples in the first two books.)

Even staying strictly within the bounds of canon, it's easy to imagine why this might have become part of Moist's camouflage in his previous life. He wasn't looking to get attached to anyone, and he didn't want anyone getting inside his head. Engaging with people genuinely enough to laugh at their jokes would run counter to both of those things, but some of his personas still needed to come off as friendly and sociable.

Still working within the canon, it makes sense to assume he's similarly distanced himself from emotion in general. He sits in a cell for several weeks without truly believing he's going to die. He's bewildered when Mr. Pump points out that his schemes have hurt innocent people. He has no idea what to do with his feelings for Adora. Etc.

Interpreting Moist as having cataplexy adds an extra element of danger. Moist thrives on danger, but there's a difference between the thrill of a con and the threat of sudden, uncontrollable displays of vulnerability. And so it becomes even easier to see him stifling his own emotional capacity.*

We meet Moist at a moment of great upheaval. He is forcibly removed from his cocoon of false identities, and pushed out into the world as himself. And we are shown and told throughout Going Postal that he does not know how to be himself. (See also.)

He is repeatedly stymied by his own emotions. He gets tongue-tied and confused around Adora, he snaps at Mr. Pump, he lashes out at Mr. Groat, he gets lost in school flashbacks when he meets Miss Maccalariat. This thread continues in Making Money, where the sudden reappearance of Cribbins immediately rattles him into making an uncharacteristic mistake.

I called him Cribbins! Just then! I called him Cribbins! Did he tell me his name? Did he notice? He must have noticed!

Later in the same book, Moist misses a crucial opportunity to run damage control on the bank's public image... because he's excited to see Adora.

The Moist of GP and MM is not used to feeling things so deeply. It throws him off his game. I'm not at all suggesting cataplexy is the only (or even primary) reason for that, but I do think there's room for it on both sides of the cause and effect equation.

With or without the cataplexy, I find Moist's relative emotional openness in Raising Steam... really nice. (It's a work in progress. He's still getting a handle on anger.)

Cataplexy just adds another dimension. A physical manifestation of emotional vulnerability, which would have been especially untenable for a teenager on the run. Just one more facet of the real, human, fallible Moist von Lipwig who spent years buried beneath Albert Spangler and all the rest.

Another piece of himself that Moist is growing to understand and accept, as he learns to more comfortably be himself.

The Moist of Going Postal runs into a burning building to save lives without fully understanding why he wants to, and justifies it on the fly as an essential part of the role he's trying to play.

The Moist of Raising Steam mindlessly throws himself under a train to save two children, and then blows up at Harry King about the lack of safety regulations. Freshly traumatized by the murder of several railway workers and his own violent, vengeful response to it, he still offers, in the face of Harry's own grief, to be the one to inform their families. On a long and dangerous journey with plenty of moving parts to think about, he worries about Dick Simnel and the other engineers, and pushes them to take better care of themselves.

He also meets a bunch of kids who nearly derailed a train as part of a childish scheme. His admonishment is startlingly vivid.

"Can you imagine a railway accident? The screaming of the rails and the people inside and the explosion that scythes the countryside around when the boiler bursts? And you, little girl, and your little friends, would have done all that. Killed a trainload of people."

[...]

"I'll square this with the engine driver, but if I was you I'd get my pencil and turn any clever ideas you have like this into a book or two. Those penny dreadfuls are all the rage in the railway bookshops."

Maybe what he is also saying, between the lines, is:

I left home at 14 and began a life of smoke and mirrors. I was empty inside, and I thought everyone else was, too. It was all fun and games, and then a man made of clay told me I was killing people. Nip it in the bud, child. Write books.

------------

*There are studies suggesting that in addition to deliberately employed "tricks," people with cataplexy may experience physiological reactions in the brain meant to inhibit laughter. (Source 1, Source 2.)

Most of the information here is way over my head, but that second link also says "one region of the brain called the zona incerta (meaning 'zone of uncertainty') was only activated during laughter in people with narcolepsy, not in controls. Research on the zona incerta in animals suggests that it also helps to control fear-associated behavior."

The linked article about that (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03581-6) is also over my head, but I would certainly describe Moist von Lipwig as having unusual fear responses.**

**Narcolepsy is a fun roller-coaster ride of constant scientific discoveries about exactly which parts of your brain are paying too much attention, not paying enough attention, or trying to eat each other.

[robertreich]

The Coming Civil War Over Trump’s Ego

What is America really fighting over in the upcoming election? No particular issue. Not even Democrats versus Republicans.

The central fight is over Donald J Trump.

Before Trump, most Americans weren’t especially passionate about politics. But Trump’s MO has been to force people to become passionate about him – to take fierce sides for or against. And he considers himself president only of the former -- whom he calls “my people.”

Trump came to office with no agenda except to feed his monstrous ego. He has never fueled his base. His base has fueled him. Its adoration sustains him.

So does the antipathy of his detractors. Presidents usually try to appease their critics. Trump has gone out of his way to offend them. “I do bring rage out,” Trump unapologetically told journalist Bob Woodward in 2016.

In this way, he has turned America into a gargantuan projection of his own pathological narcissism.

His entire re-election platform is found in his use of the pronouns “we” and “them.” “We” are people who love him, Trump Nation. “They” hate him.

In late August, near the end of his somnolent address on the South Front of the White House accepting the Republican nomination, Trump extemporized: “The fact is, we’re here – and they’re not.” It drew a standing ovation.

At a recent White House news conference, a CNN correspondent asked if he condemned the behavior of his supporters in Portland, Oregon. In response, Trump charged: “Your supporters, and they are your supporters indeed, shot a young gentleman.”

In Trump’s eyes, CNN exists in a different country: Anti-Trump Nation.

So do the putative rioters and looters of “Biden’s America.” So do the inhabitants of blue states whose state and local tax deductions Trump eliminated in his tax overhaul. So do those who live in the “Democrat cities,” as he calls them, whose funding he’s trying to cut.

California is a big part of Anti-Trump Nation. He wanted to reject its request for aid battling wildfires “because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.

New York is the capital of Anti-Trump Nation, which probably contributed to Trump “playing down” the threat of Covid-19 last March, when its virulence seemed largely confined to that metropolis. Even now, Trump claims the US rate of Covid-19 deaths would be low “if you take the blue states out.” That’s untrue, but it’s not the point. For Trump, blue states don’t count because they’re part of Anti-Trump Nation.

To Trump and his core enablers and supporters, the laws of Trump Nation authorize him to do whatever he wants. Anti-Trump Nation’s laws constrain him, but they’re illegitimate because they are made and enforced by the people who reject him.

So Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine seeking help with the election was “perfect.” It was fine for Russia to side with him in 2016, and it’s fine for it to do so again. And of course the Justice Department, Postal Service, and Centers for Disease Control should help him win reelection. They’re all aiding Trump Nation.

By a similar twisted logic, Anti-Trump Nation is dangerous. Hence, says Trump, the armed teenager who killed two in Kenosha, Wisconsin acted in “self-defense,” yet the suspected killer of a right-winger in Portland deserved the “retribution” he got when federal marshals gunned him down.

It follows that if he loses the election, Trump will not accept the result because it would be the product of Anti-Trump Nation, and Trump isn’t the president of people who would vote against him. As he recently claimed, “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”

In the warped minds of Trump and his acolytes, this could lead to civil war. Just last week he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. His consigliere Roger Stone urges him to declare “martial law” if he loses. Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, warns “the shooting will begin” when Trump refuses to stand down.

Civil war is unlikely, but the weeks and perhaps months after Election Day will surely be fraught. Even if Trump is ultimately forced to relinquish power, his core adherents will continue to view him as their leader. If he retains power, many if not most Americans will consider his presidency illegitimate.

So whatever happens, Trump’s megalomaniacal ego will prevail: America will have come apart over him, and Trump Nation will have seceded from Anti-Trump Nation.

[ldcu-12stem2-group4mil]

Delivering News in the Present Age

What is NEWS?

The term “news” refers to information regarding current occurrences. This can be done in a variety of ways, including word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, and the testimony of event watchers and witnesses. To distinguish it from soft media, the news is oftentimes referred to as “hard news”.

Digital or Present Age, which we're currently living in. Today’s internet has a huge influence and that’s how news comes within. News depends on how they deliver and how they inform all citizens, and now, we will learn how news delivers in the present age.

How News Deliver in the Present Age

From newspapers, to broadcast television and radios, and into the World Wide Web, the conveying of news has been evolving from time to time. The internet exponentially expanded both the marketplace for ideas and the marketplace for information. It has brought extraordinary value to our societies and introduced new challenges - to our institutions, to our politics, and to journalism itself. 

In this time and age, we have technologies that can provide us with the news. Technology can offer us a variety of ways to get information, ranging from smart TVs to our mobile phones. However, because we have a lot of devices that give us the information we cannot avoid receiving one or two fake news once in a while. We have to be careful of what we read or see on the internet because it might have come from an illegitimate source. 

Not many people are aware that the information they were reading was fake, but this may be because of the popularity of the website. People may or may not know that the popular website that they read news articles on only got popular because it is constantly making fake information, articles, and news.  

Experts recommend avoiding the term ‘Fake News’ or at least regulate its use, as the term ‘fake news’ is closely associated with politics, and this association can unhelpfully narrow the focal point of the issue. Lots of articles that you read online, mostly on social media feeds may appear to be correct, often are not. False information is news, stories, or hoaxes created to intentionally misinform or deceive readers. Generally, these articles are created to either influence the individual’s perspective, push political agenda, or confuse and can often be a beneficial business for online publishers. 

Let's be frank that today's news sources make quick money by exploiting the news in inaccurate ways. They have broken all the laws that the media must obey while attempting to establish a progressive society in their drive to become the most popular and wealthy. The principles of the people and the nation they serve are no longer respected. Instead of merely guiding people as they are meant to, they strive to manipulate them with their persuasive methods. 

According to Cham, If the media was used for what it was meant to be, it would be a powerful force in the development of the country, but it is currently a profit-making business. Instead of providing critical information and educational programming, television is dominated by sensational portrayals of all-new stories, with the only purpose of gaining television rating points. Every topic is covered for a few days on most channels at the same time, but once the drama has died down, no station follows up to let the public know what's going on. They hide this by focusing on other contentious matters. Like Malcolm X said “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” So be a responsible author and user, because one wrong move when making news or information can lead to staining our country's name.

Digital news media is clearly all around us, and as contemporary technology improves, our dependency on it will only grow. Each member of society, on the other hand, must be responsible enough to exploit the new media’s power for nation-building and civic participation. The advantages of digital news media must be exploited via careful and reasonable use that strived to improve everyone’s quality of life. As part of being a responsible member of a digital community, any acts that are intended to cause harm to others must be reported to appropriate authorities.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2960.html

https://www.webwise.ie/teachers/what-is-fake-news/

https://www.google.com567025939-thoughts-in-a-bubble-media 

[bird-bureau]

Hi how am i supposed to chooss just one prompt. Uh 13, 31, or 37 for one of ur cryptids maybe

Aaa it's hard to pick just one from those three! They're all cryptids if you AU hard enough, but I'm going cryptid-adjacent for this one.

-

31. “I can’t keep kissing strangers and pretending that they’re you.”

-

Frustratingly, people kept giving Lyatriss their number.

The fact that there were enough numbers to be thought of as a collection made her uncomfortable. Sure, it was only three numbers, but that was three too many. One was on a convenience store receipt, one on a coffee-stained diner napkin. The third had been scrawled across the back of her hand in black eyeliner that later smudged down her forearm. She had no idea why she'd bothered writing it down.

Bullshit. All of it. Meeting people hadn't been on the agenda when she moved into the furthest livable shack within town lines.

(The agenda had been something like this: STEP 1. Delete everyone's numbers from my phone. STEP 2. Find property that is cheap as dirt and probably condemned. Buy it. STEP 3. Spend the rest of my life there.)

But against her better judgement, she'd called eventually, when she had things she wanted to forget.

The tap stopped and the woman from the convenience store came back into the bedroom. Lya didn't sit up -- her eyes were focused on a dark water stain on the ceiling.

"You're always looking up there. What, is the roof coming down?"

"It reminds me of something, but I don't know what.” Lya sighed. Her shoulders popped as she stretched. “It's stupid."

The mattress dipped. The woman's skin was cool from the chill of the AC, and Lya tipped her head to press into the hollow of her neck.

"You're thinking too much."

Lya grumbled in agreement. Then their lips met, and she didn't think much about the water stain after that.

-

Also missing from her agenda was STEP 4. Find a man-eating fish creature living in my pond.

The first time she’d seen him, a massive dark shape beneath the murky water, she thought his yellow bioluminescent patches were just swamp gas.

When she found the discarded leg of a postal worker buried in the silt, she knew she was either really imagining things, or she had a problem on her hands.

With a woodcutting axe in one hand and a trash can lid in the other, she walked to the end of the pier. Everything was still. Duckweed sat thick over the surface of the water, trees hung heavy in the windless air. Lya took a breath.

“Alright, you big fish, knock it off,” she called across the pond. “If the cops come out here to check out what happened to the mailman, I swear to God, I will fillet you with my bare hands.”

Nothing happened. Then, a few yards from the dock, he surfaced.

“I cannot, from a technical standpoint, be classified as a fish.” His voice was low and gravelly, as though he had not spoken for some time. 

He looked fishy enough for Lya. Iridescent violet scales covered his body, running down his arms, across his abdomen, along his powerful tail. Deep purple hair hung limply around his face like strands of water-thyme.

She took a step back, then sank, unable to stay standing.

 “What.” 

“It is also unlikely that you would be able to fillet me.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “The more probable outcome is that you would be overpowered and then consumed.”

“What.”

“Furthermore, the the appropriate tool for filleting is a fillet knife. You would find your axe unsuitable for the task at hand.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “You can talk.”

“That is correct.” He regarded her for a long moment. “I am capable of a great many things. Speaking is among them.”

“Well. Great.” She couldn’t stop looking at his teeth -- long, sharp things, meant for rending flesh from bone. She wondered what it would be like to be a bundle of bones stuck in the swamp mud and found it very unappealing. “If you eat me, I’ll kill you.”

“If I consumed you, you would be unable to carry out your threat.”

She stood and tried to brush herself off with her full hands. “Yeah, well. Go eat someone else. Away from here, please and thanks.”

He said nothing as he sank back into the water, but she didn’t find any more legs after that.

-

"Do you believe in supernatural shit?”

Lya was on her 3rd cup of cheap diner coffee. The place was usually clear by 11:30, which is why she made a point to arrive after 11:45.

The waitress gave a thoughtful hum. “Like ghosts?”

“Yeah. Or aliens, or merfolk, or whatever.”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“Just thinking.”

The waitress leaned down, both elbows on the counter. Lya liked the way her mouth twisted when she was thinking. “I mean, sure, why not? The world’s a weird place. Never seen one, though. But I’ve never seen a zebra in real life, and they’re real, so who knows.”

“Hm.” Lya downed the rest of her cup, and the waitress refilled it. 

“What about you? Ever seen something like that?”

“A zebra?”

“No, supernatural stuff.”

“Nah.” Lya took the cup back and took a slow sip. “So, when do you get off?”

-

When he wasn’t eating postal workers, Lya’s new neighbor was surprisingly easy to get along with.

Sometimes, when she sat out on the dock, he would surface nearby to watch her. She ignored him at first, but after a while, it felt weirder to ignore him than it did to acknowledge his presence.

“Why do you keep staring at me?”

“I am interested in what you are doing.”

She held up a tattered paperback. “Reading.”

“What is it that you are reading?”

A book, she almost snapped, but she stopped herself. “Just some sci-fi shit from a free bin. Why, you interested?”

“I am.”

That surprised her. “I didn’t think fish liked reading.”

“Firstly, as I have said previously, I am not a fish.” His gills fluttered as he sighed. “Secondly, as I have also said, I am capable of many things. Reading is one of them.”

“Huh.” 

“My eyes are not adapted to seeing above water, however. The visuals are... distorted. Reading is a particularly strenuous activity for me.”

“But you like it anyway.”

“That is correct.”

“I could read it out loud, if you wanted.” Anything to get in his good graces and out of his mouth. It was worth a shot.

It was his turn to be surprised. “I am admittedly intrigued.”

She opened to the beginning. “Alright then. Chapter one...”

- 

The man who’d written his number in eyeliner always went out onto the balcony for a smoke after he and Lya had finished. Through half-closed eyes, Lya watched the glow of his cigarette pulsing in the dark. 

She often thought about what it would be like to join him. She would rise and put on her shirt and underwear. The concrete of the balcony would be warm under her bare feet after a day in the sun, the metal railing even warmer. She would wrap her arm around his waist and steal a drag off his cigarette, and she would ask him what he saw across the horizon that held his attention so tightly.

In the bed, she tasted the smoke wafting in through the open window and rolled over.

-

Lya knew she was in too deep when she started going to the library for the creature.

“Creature” wasn’t exactly fair to him. His name was Quincy. A shockingly normal name for someone so abnormal, but who was Lya to judge? She was the one reading to him, which could hardly be considered normal.

His book requests were all over the place: travel guides, almanacs, field guides, academic texts, books on history and culture. Occasionally, he asked for fiction, or asked her to pick something she recommended. Whatever she chose, he listened raptly, still as a statue as he leaned against the side of the dock. 

When she asked why he requested so many different topics, he simply said, “They are all beyond the scope of my experiences, and thus they are interesting to me.” 

She felt a little more interested in even the boring books after that.

“Here’s the haul today,” she said, dropping her satchel on the dock. “Got you that travel writing collection you asked for. The book on desert wildlife is on reserve, but they did have this one on pyramids. I think it’s for kids, but the pictures are big, so if I hold it up, you should be able to see it. And remember, we cannot get any water on these. I’m not paying fees, okay?”

“Lyatriss.” He spoke slowly, as he always did. “Thank you. I sincerely appreciate the effort you went through to procure these. They all look wonderful.”

And oh, curse her, she was going to have to delete those numbers.