#the racket

[youngrobertmitchum]

Robert Mitchum and Joyce Mackenzie in a publicity still for The Racket (1951)

[thatstormygeek]

But it isn’t worth getting lost in the pedantic details; details that even Trump doesn’t waste time on. What matters here is the overall image he and his coterie wanted to paint: an image constructed by surrounding the doddering, terrified 78-year-old manchild with comic symbols of hypermasculinity (Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—the latter of whom was last seen drunkenly slapping his wife in a Mexican night club on New Year’s Eve); by Trump kissing the fireman’s uniform of his “fan” killed by a stray bullet at his rally, and wearing the comically oversized ear bandage to remind everyone of his near-brush with death. It is the image of Trump as God-appointed leader, the nation’s savior, and protector against the violent “un-human” hordes. Major media, parroting the Trump team’s pre-spin, had promised for days that the speech would be an exercise in “unity,” reflecting a newfound humility that Trump had allegeldy gained from his brush with assassination last weekend. Racket readers were better prepared: As I argued on Tuesday, Trump’s obvious move would be to follow the example of fascist leaders before him —including Generalissimo Francisco Franco and, yes, Hitler — in claiming that his near-death experience was “proof” that his authority was sanctioned by the divine.

The New York Times tried to “contextualize” Trump’s threats a few days ago, noting that the “costs and hurdles would be enormous.” But this is, again, missing the forest for the pedantic trees. The point isn’t that it would be easy or legal to round up 20 million people, any more than it was going to be easy or possible to “build the wall” during his previous term. It’s that this is the direction he wants to drag the entire country in. And don’t be confused about this: Rounding up 20, or even 10 or 5, million people is a project that will touch every aspect of life in the United States. It will mean checkpoints and random raids at workplaces and in neighborhoods; it will mean mistakes, wrongful detentions and deportations, racial profiling and state violence at an unprecedented scale. I can tell you from having covered past threatened mass expulsions, particularly in the Dominican Republic, that even when the full extent of the government’s threat is not realized, in practice it is an exercise in terror and a virtual carte blanche for violence against the targeted minority, up to and including outright lynching. The Times wrote that “consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term.” But what legal barriers? The Supreme Court just ruled that a president can do whatever he wants, so long as it is an “official act.” And who says Trump — who, again, tried to overthrow an election by force — will allow himself to be limited to just one more four-year term? And I guess, at root, that’s why I and other political observers sat through all 92 minutes of the longest, most rambling, incoherent speech by a major party nominee in televised history. Because if the Democrats, media, and the rest of the supposed pro-democracy opposition don’t get it together and figure out how to stop this immediately, it will be a preview of the next chapter of our lives.

[forthegothicheroine]

New-to-me movies seen in 2024: The Racket (1951)

"Born with an alibi in your mouth, huh?"

The Big Noirvember: Starring Robert Mitchum

[frommybookbook]

I watched The Racket tonight and I gotta say, 10/10 would recommend! The plot was solid, the acting was great, and it was so delightful to see William Talman and Ray Collins in non-Perry roles.

sidenote: one of these days I'm going to do the math on how many Perry recurring actors (people who were in at least 2 episodes) were also former contract players at RKO because damn.

[songspiral]

"The Racket" by Lucy Rose

[junglejim4322]

This is how all crypto people sound to me

[herpsandbirds]

Peruvian Racket-tail (Ocreatus peruanus), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, Ecuador

Some ornithologists consider the Peruvian Racket-tail to be a subspecies ofthe Booted Racket-tail, O. underoodii.

photograph by James Gan

[akkpipitphattana]

poor glakao 💀

[transhuman-priestess]

I’m never going to win the hearts and minds of everyone but I can try my hand at appealing to one specific demographic: millennials jaded by enshittification.

Do you miss Microsoft office 2000? Did windows vista ruin your life? Are you as lost as I am when you open Microsoft word and get greeted by a splash screen and thirty templates you’ve never needed?

Use LibreOffice!

LibreOffice Writer looks and behaves exactly like Microsoft Word did a quarter century ago!

Download it now and stop letting Microsoft mine your data and waste your cpu cycles to make a word processor look flashy.

[ozarkthedog]

Paging Dr. Abbot

[lizziebartfest]

I love doodling!!!!!

[bad-comic-art]

As someone who fell into the vveritas man hole slightly before you started posting about it, I am waiting on tenterhooks for you to bring up vvertias man's love interest. Her being hated by feminists because it's 'unfair she keeps winning' has me in near hysterics every time it's brought up.

you know what I'm kind of glad you sent this because Melissa Krugger doesn't actually show up in any of the comics (well she got a oner but Weritas man isn't in it) so this give me a chance to talk about her!

so first off I do have to say it does take the wind out of the sails of the whole things because she's likely a stand in for a real life, possibly underage girl (he age is stated multiple times as too young for Weritas Man and that they'll be together "in a few years" but never explicitly underage), Leal is attracted to or I guess at best some kind of teenage girl sex tulpa so if you're uncomfortable about that you can stop here and know she doesn't appear in pretty much any other Weritas man stuff

in Leal's own incoherent ramblings words

Melissa Krugger, young tennis player who never loses, never lost. Granddaughter of Edwin.

Melissa is a little bit crosseyed and toothy, but very beautiful. Apparently she has a perfect life, she’s very rich, has a perfect body and is the best tennis player ever, a rising star entering in the professional athletes at this time, but SJW seeks to turn her life in hell because they don’t tolerate someone who never lost a match.

Melissa will fall in love with Camilo, but he won’t do anything until she got a little bit older, that’s the biggest problem for her heart.

I'm going to put more random pictures under the cut (there's so many more but these are some of the better ones where he's not just drawing her with her big ol' bubble butt out) but yea she's basically an expressions of some of Leal's defining traits, his extreme hornyness, his zealotry, his vague unfocused hatred and deep inability to understand or process the world around him

also here's probably my all time favorite Weritas man picture

I don't want to support his A.I. nonsense but this is unfortunately hilarious I'd love to see his prompts

that's her and the lead singer of Echosmith, you may remember their hit song Cool Kids

[thatstormygeek]

But one key group was left out. The Uncommitted Movement, the antiwar, pro-Palestinian action that placed second to Joe Biden in this spring’s discarded primaries, had spent weeks trying to move the convention, both in matters of symbol and substance, against the U.S.-armed slaughter in Gaza. In the end, their efforts had boiled down to one extremely achievable ask: to give a Palestinian-American — any Palestinian-American — or a doctor who had witnessed the suffering at the hands of the Israeli military a brief speaking slot, at any time during the four-day-long national pep rally. ... But the word that had come down on Wednesday turned out to be final. No Palestinian would be allowed to speak. ... Nevermind, too, that there was already a tearful presentation on the horrors of October 7, from the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American veteran of the IDF who is still being held hostage in Gaza — a presentation that the Uncommitted delegates made sure to attend in solidarity with the families of Israeli hostages, by the way. ... The refusal to platform a Palestinian speaker echoes nothing so much as the refusal, on orders of then-President and candidate Lyndon Johnson, of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, under the leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer, at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, sixty years ago this month. It similarly ignores the substantive divide between the protesters outside the convention and the uncommitted delegates inside — the fact that the latter are trying to work within and in coalition with the institutional Democratic Party. While some, like some in the MFDP, will likely continue to work for Harris’ election this fall, the refusal to give the reformers even a token platform on the main stage fuels arguments that the party, and perhaps the entire political system as it stands, is too hopelessly corrupted to work with, and thus must be challenged or overthrown.

It seems that those instincts are now operating — that the Harris-Walz campaign and the convention planners decided they could afford to alienate Palestinian-Americans and their ever-growing contingent of allies on the antiwar left. That it would be better to disappoint and insult them than to challenge, in the mildest of ways, the pro-Israel contingent or the reactionary center. It was clear from last night’s programming that their play is going to be to appeal to disaffected Republicans and so-called “moderate” independents, by focusing on militarism, police, and Harris’s career as a prosecutor, locking away criminals and “securing” the border. She telegraphed that in the foreign policy section by declaring with almost Reaganite bravado: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” I really think they could have done both. I don’t think that having a Palestinian woman, hijab and all, deliver what was at bottom a bog-standard Democratic convention speech, with a shoutout to her father’s Jerusalemite origins where others shouted out their Hispanic or Native American heritage would have necessarily detracted from that pivot. I think they could have shored up part of the Michigan Arab-American vote without scaring away the voters they hoped to gain by trotting out ex-Republican congressmen and the Genesee County sheriff. I want to believe that sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Gazans, along with the other Omelas children of the world, in Haiti, Congo, and elsewhere, is not really the intractable trolley problem — a trade between potential victims of American fascism at home and the victims of American militarism abroad — it is made out to be. But maybe I’m naïve.

[roach-works]

Why did wheat become a widespread staple crop given that it's difficult to harvest/transport/etc? This is not meant to be snarky or combative in any way, it's a genuine question. Are there any books you'd recommend for learning more about this kind of economic and technological history? Thanks.

sorry, i've long since forgotten all the actual books i've read about it, but i will always recommend This Guy:

also as very much a non-expert, my semi-informed opinion on Wheat is that growing complicated and difficult compared to going to the grocery store, and doesn't stack up very well to living in a food forest like north and south americans managed, either.

however, wheat is a grass, and grass grows in a lot of places that people also like to live in, and so wheat farming isn't as crazy a venture as it might otherwise seem.

in a lot of climates, it's possible to plant the grass, harvest the grass seeds, and store the seeds long enough to get you through the part of the year where there's nothing much to eat. if you manage your social and material technology right, you can store a lot of the seeds, and you can even transport them around before they rot, meaning you can now export the seeds from places where grass grows into places where it doesn't. the stalks of the grass that you can't eat provides food for the animals you need to help you grow the grass. and transport the seeds, too.

the social structure required to grow wheat in bulk (a steep and violent hierarchy) does three things: feeds everyone in it with enough extra that the guys on the bottom of the organization can survive to grow more wheat next year, and allows the guys on the top can sequester the rest as profit, consolidating their power. the third thing is that as land is converted to wheat fields, it stops yielding any other food but wheat, which locks people into the system for good. once a people depend on a staple cereal grain for their main source of calories, there isn't an easy way back: forests are chewed away for more wheat fields and those woodlands that remain are shifted towards hardwoods for agricultural tools, rather than food forests with fruit/nuts/shrubs, and even those maintained as game preserves still can't support the needs of entire villages.

in arid and semi-arid conditions, it's even harder to step away from dependence on grain farming because there the agricultural development is along rivers where the land can be irrigated, and the population of people supported by grain production is extremely concentrated into those small areas rather than spread across the entire biome.

in the northern parts of eurasia where grain couldn't be produced at scale because it was too rocky and too cold, people mostly went fishing, and when they grew stuff it was hardy root crops like beets and turnips.

DISCLAIMER: this is all very approximate. but now you know as much as i know.

P.S actually here's the last thing about wheat: it probably all started as a way to reliably source and produce beer, which was invented a long time before bread. bread was invented from wheat when the guys who were producing the beer seeds wanted to start exporting beer seeds to people who wanted beer far away, so they baked the seeds into tablets you could easily transport and then ferment with water once you got to your destination. eventually the traders who were transporting the beer kits started eating them, too, and crackers as a snack food really took off. look up the wikipedia article on beer if you don't believe me.

[lorenzonuti]

Maintenance Break.

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[ohyoufool]

I just know that retired Jack Zimmermann does NOT play about pickleball.