Atlanta, Georgia–Republicans in Georgia, fresh off their Election Integrity Law triumph, passed a law prohibiting alien abductions in the Peach State on Friday. The law, dubbed “The Alien Abduction Integrity Act,” which also outlaws the use of anal probes by extraterrestrial visitors on Georgia residents, sailed through both houses of the state legislature in a matter of hours, and Governor Brian Kemp declared he was eager to sign the bill next week.
While critics have claimed that alien abductions are an absurd myth concocted by mentally unstable people, Republicans insist that they are simply responding to the reasonable concerns of their constituents. “We have hundreds of sworn affidavits from our citizens who were taken aboard alien spacecrafts against their wills,” said Representative Slade Greenwall. “Many of them were subjected to scientific experiments while onboard those crafts, including being anally probed. It would be a gross dereliction of our duty not to pass legislation to protect them.”
Atlanta–Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed the sweeping election law passed by Republicans and named in honor of election integrity pioneer George Wallace on Thursday. While critics have argued that the law was designed to address baseless claims of election fraud and suppress the minority vote, Republicans have steadfastly maintained that not passing the law would have been a tremendous waste of their strenuous efforts to paint their dark phantasmagoria of nefarious voter fraud in districts populated disproportionately by African-Americans.
Republicans have also touted the fact that they struck the egregious provision for outlawing early voting on Sundays, which would have had a devastating impact on the “Souls to Polls” campaign, a program that provides group transportation to black churchgoers during elections, when it was pointed out how blatantly racist it was.
“It’s getting to the point that we don’t get any credit for taking out what was an obvious attempt to block black people from voting after its clearly racist intent was widely publicized and condemned,” complained Georgia Republican Representative Slade Greenwall. “It’s so unfair.”
Other Republicans argued that too much was being made of the law’s drastic reduction of ballot drop boxes around the state, and pointed out that there were no drop boxes prior to the advent of COVID 19 and the election of 2020. Although there was no evidence of drop box tampering in that election, the law Republicans pushed through cuts the number of drop boxes in Georgia’s largest county, Fulton, a county of more than a million people, by nearly 80 percent, going from 38 boxes to just 8. And these boxes are exclusively inside early voting sites accessible only during business hours. It was unclear how the fact that drop boxes appeared only in 2020 mitigated the reality that their removal would make voting far more difficult, particularly in larger, urban counties.
Also unclear is the need for the law’s provision that will enable the State Election Board to remove county election boards at will and replace them with interim election managers, effectively giving control of local elections to the Republican controlled state legislature given the fact that Georgia’s own Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, declared that he had discovered no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.
In the late afternoon of Saturday, March 25th, 1911, a lovely spring day in New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist (blouse) Factory, located in the ten story Asch Building in Greenwich Village, was nearing the end of its long work day. Triangle was notorious amongst garment workers for its crowded, unsafe factory floors, harsh working conditions, pitiful wages and hostility to the labor movement.
The owners had fired two hundred of its employees who had tried to join the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1909, and this had contributed to the discontent that sparked a massive strike by garment workers later to be known as the Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909. Female strikers were ridiculed as “streetwalkers” and thrown in jail with prostitutes and criminals. Others, such as strike leader Clara Lemlich, were brutally beaten on the streets by Tammany Hall connected thugs.
But on March 25th, 1911, most of its five hundred workers, mainly young Russian-Jewish and Italian immigrant women, were just looking forward to the end of their day, only a few minutes away. Shortly before five PM, someone on the eighth floor discarded a cigarette butt in a scrap bin full of fabric remnants.
The eighth floor was a virtual fuel storage tank: tissue paper patterns hanging from wires, piles of fabric, and wooden tables. The Asch Building itself, officially fire proof, was a death trap for workers with many of its doors locked from the outside (to prevent theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks), mounds of flammable scrap materials, inoperable fire hoses, and a rickety fire escaped that collapsed, sending workers hurtling to their deaths. As thousands of horrified spectators gathered outside the building, some forty-six workers, almost all teenage girls, leapt to their deaths as a hundred more were incinerated inside, many of them piled before the locked exit doors, all within a ghastly thirty minutes.
Outrage in the immigrant community and throughout the city led to demands for the reform of labor and fire safety laws. Both houses of the New York State legislature, however, were in the hands of Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic political machine that controlled the city and had stifled the efforts of reformers for years. These politicians feigned sympathy for workers but thrived on contributions and bribes from factory and business owners.
The public fury, however, was so great that in June of 1911 the state legislature created a Factory Investigating Commission. During two months in 1911, the commission sent teams of investigators into some two thousand factories. The investigations went beyond New York City and extended to the state’s nine biggest cities. By 1912 the commission had proposed fifteen new laws on fire and factory safety, the working hours and conditions of women and children, and eight of them were later signed into law. In the next three years, New York passed a record number of laws to protect workers all over the state. Many of these laws became the models for worker safety laws that would later be passed all around the country.
Amongst the throng of witnesses that day was Francis Perkins, who would later go onto to become the first Secretary of Labor and the first female Cabinet member in U.S. History. She would later remark, “The New Deal began on March 25th, 1911, the day the Triangle Factory burned.”
Sources
Richard Greenwald. The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) 2005.
David Von Drehle. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press) 2003.
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty: An American History, Vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company) 2008.
Washington, D.C. Republicans are righteously decrying the tyranny of the Democrats’ new voting reform bill H.R. 1, vociferously pointing out that the bill, which passed the House on March 3rd, would arrogate to the federal government powers traditionally delegated to the states.
“This bill evokes dark memories of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell thundered on the Senate floor Tuesday. “Just as that shameful piece of legislation allowed the federal government to force state governments to let anyone, even those who had been successfully prevented from voting for generations by those states, to vote, this bill will open the door to all sorts of unqualified and ineligible miscreants who invariably vote Democratic.”
Democrats have tried to justify their power grab with the threadbare excuse that Republicans in 43 states have proposed some 250 new restrictive voting laws in response to the election fraud they claimed took place in the 2020 election based on their super strong feelings rather than evidence.
The despotic, anti-democratic bill makes election day a holiday so workers would not have to take off work to vote, provides for a nationwide automatic voter registration which would allow voters to opt out rather than opt in, requires Super Pacs and dark money organizations to make their donors public, ends partisan gerrymandering, requires presidents to disclose ten years of tax returns, provides funds for publicly financed campaigns, and prohibits voter purges for trivial things such as not voting in a single election.
A classroom in a community center. A group of people sit in chairs in a half circle with JUDITH in the center. The group is a mix of adults of all ages, including CHRISSY, a pale, gaunt young woman with a shaved head and a nose ring and GEORGE, an impassive middle-aged man. Also in the group are the Biblical figures JOB and ABRAHAM. JOB is a middle-aged man with a long face and beard, shaved head and is wearing only a loin cloth. His body is covered with boils. ABRAHAM is wearing a traditional Biblical robe and seems somewhat moody. JUDITH, a woman in her forties, is dressed casually and she addresses the group with a sense of openness and sensitivity.
JUDITH: Welcome everyone to Wednesday afternoon group therapy. We have some new faces today so I’d like to welcome Job and Abraham to the group. I am Judith Levy, the therapist or facilitator if you prefer…but these sessions are not about me, they are about you. This is a non-judgement zone. We have limited time so what we’re looking for is a sort of emotional snapshot of where each of you are at right now. Everyone else is invited to respond with mindful, empathic and brief responses if they feel so moved. Chrissy, why don’t we start with you today?
CHRISSY: I hate my life.
JUDITH: Okay, that’s honest.
CHRISSY: I knew coming out of rehab and going back to work was going to be hard, but waiting tables sucks. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I started using again and I hate the smell of fucking waffles, you know, but Waffles Roundup was like the only place that would hire me with my priors. Two shifts a day, and then I go pick up Brittany yesterday after school, and she’s been in a fight again so–
JUDITH: Chrissy, I think you’re adjusting to your new schedule faster than you think.
CHRISSY: Why do you say that?
JUDITH: You’re saying “fuck” a lot less.
CHRISSY: Yeah, I guess you’re right.
JUDITH: (turning toward JOB) Uh, Job, would you like to tell us a little bit about what’s going on for you?
JOB: What?
JUDITH: Do you want to share your emotional snapshot?
JOB: Well, I don’t know…
JUDITH: It might help to talk about it.
JOB: Well, okay…um, I was a blameless and upright man. I had seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen…I was doing all right. One day, one of my servants shows up at the house and tells me the Sabeans killed my herdsmen and carried off all my oxen. He hadn’t finished his story when another one of my servants arrives and says that lightening has struck and killed all my sheep and their shepherds–the words are scarcely out of his mouth when another one appears and reports that the Chaldeans have seized all my camels–he gets cut off by yet another whose face is totally white, and he says that a great wind came up and blew down the house in which all of my children were feasting, killing them all.
JUDITH: Wait, this was all the same day?
CHRISSY: This sounds familiar.
JOB: It gets worse. Then I get afflicted with these boils, and my wife tells me, “Why don’t you just curse God and die?”
CHRISSY: That’s cold.
JUDITH: Spouses sometimes say things they don’t really mean when they are under a lot of stress.
JOB: You don’t know my wife.
JUDITH: You’re carrying a lot of pain with you right now, Job, and I think–
JOB: Yeah, I haven’t really been able to process it all.
ABRAHAM: Pain, you want to talk pain?
JUDITH: What’s that, Abraham?
ABRAHAM: Imagine if God told you to kill your son and you had the knife in your hand, you were ready to kill your own son, and then at the last second, an angel tells you, no, God was just “testing” your faith. How would you feel?
JUDITH: That must have been difficult.
ABRAHAM: Of course it was fucking difficult! I was ready to plunge a knife into my own flesh and blood just to prove my loyalty to a jealous and insecure God. (to JOB) I’d take your dead family, your lost wealth and all your boils and scabs over the mountain of guilt I’m dragging around here.
JOB: Listen to this guy! All my kids are dead, all my possessions stripped away, I’m covered with hideous, painful boils, and he’s going to one-up me in the suffering department with his mountain of guilt.
JUDITH: Guys, come on, this isn’t a competition.
ABRAHAM: You’re still blameless and upright. I’m a terrible father who would have butchered his own kid!
JOB: Come on, Abe, you’re an icon, widely respected by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Your sense of guilt is admirable but a touch histrionic, don’t you think?
ABRAHAM: Histrionic?
JOB: You’re the patriarch of three great faiths, the founding father of the covenant between Yahweh and the Jews. Your wife let you sleep with that hot young Egyptian handmaiden for God’s sake! Forgive me if I don’t lose any sleep over what might have happened to your kid when I lost ten of mine in one day through no fault of my own!
ABRAHAM: That’s just it–no fault of your own. I do lose sleep because I was culpable. I was guilty.
JOB: Oh, please, somebody cue the violins.
JUDITH: Gentlemen, please–
ABRAHAM: (rises) And you know what else? I’m sick and tired of you being the poster boy for suffering. Every time somebody goes through something bad they compare their suffering to Job’s suffering, Job’s afflictions, Job’s losses. You’re not the only one who’s suffered, you know? Try having God tell you to leave your homeland when you’re seventy-five years old and go found a new nation some place. See how much fun that is. And as far as the Egyptian handmaiden goes, I’d take a lifetime supply of your boils over my wife’s silent resentment in a heartbeat.
JOB: Oh, you’ll take my boils, huh?
ABRAHAM: That’s right.
JOB: You can’t even go out for dinner without everybody staring.
ABRAHAM: You can order out Chinese.
JUDITH: Gentlemen, gentlemen, I think it’s important to acknowledge that each of you has suffered terribly in your own ways. We’ll revisit this when you’re both less emotionally raw, but we really need to move onto somebody else now, all right?
JOB: Okay.
JUDITH: Abraham?
ABRAHAM: (sits down huffily) Fine.
JUDITH: Okay, George, would you like to share something with us today?
GEORGE: (in a cold monotone voice) Yes, yes, I would. You know, listening to Abraham made me feel a little better today.
JUDITH: Better? How so?
GEORGE: Well, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about this before, but a few weeks ago…well, God told me to kill my son.
The rest of the group suddenly becomes alert and turns their attention fully to GEORGE.
JUDITH: What?
GEORGE: Well, as you know, the government has been watching me for some time because of my research on chemtrails and they’ve even had people in my own family spying on me. God told me my son Jimmy was spying on me for the Deep State and that he must die so I picked up a bread knife and I…I started to…but at the last moment, I stopped myself.
ABRAHAM: (rises abruptly) Nobody told me there were going to be nutjobs here.
ABRAHAM storms out of the room as the rest of the group looks on, stunned.
God, also known as Jehovah, is stepping down temporarily as Supreme Being after a third woman has come forward with accusations of sexual harassment. The Lord, who had previously dismissed two other accusers as “publicity hustlers,” acknowledged in an interview Tuesday with Christianity Tomorrow that he may have at times “fallen short of the high ethical standards I expect of myself and acted in ways that could have been interpreted as inappropriate.” While denying any criminal conduct, God apologized “if anyone was made to feel uncomfortable by my well-intentioned but clumsy groping.”
Jennifer Ramsey, a medical assistant in Stockton, California, alleged that God materialized in her bedroom wearing an open bathrobe while she was praying to him for help with paying her rent and began trying to kiss her. When she rebuffed his advances, God reportedly asked her, “But you like living in this nice apartment, don’t you?”
God disputed Ms. Ramsey’s characterization of the incident, insisting she had invited him into her bedroom and mistaken his friendly hug for something else. Nonetheless, God announced Tuesday he was stepping down temporarily to take some time for self-reflection.
“While none of the charges against me are true, I now realize that I have at times naively put myself into situations in which others with possible agendas might have misinterpreted my intentions and my carelessness in fastening my bathrobe and that is unacceptable. I am taking some time to become the kind of supreme being you all deserve.”
The Carlton High School Prairie Dogs’ Cinderella football season came to an ignominious end Friday night when the team forfeited the championship game to the heavily favored Beaumont High Bison after Prairie Dog coach Hugh Jamison delivered a grim and disheartening pregame speech that starkly delineated the likelihood of a brutal and demoralizing annihilation at the hands of the defending champion Bison. It was all the more shocking to Prairie Dog fans since the plucky band of offbeat but lovable players had overcome so much during the season to turn a perennially losing team into a potential champion.
But Coach Jamison, unnerved while watching the Bison go through their pregame warmups, decided to confront his team with the bleak reality of their certain humiliation and he delivered a frightful stem-winder that led to his team’s immediate capitulation to the Bison before the game even started. One of the Prairie Dogs recorded the speech and the text follows below.
COACH JAMISON: Well, this is it, guys, the state championship. To be honest, I think we’re lucky to be here. Let’s face it, we’re a poor school with a long history of losing, crappy facilities and equipment, and kids from lower middle class families with low expectations and lower motivation. Your parents are factory workers, grocery clerks, mechanics, crossing guards, ignorant chicken farmers and truck-stop prostitutes. That team we’re facing…those kids all grew up playing in the elite Pee Wee and Pop Warner football leagues, attended the premier summer football camps staffed by ex-pros, and they’ve got the best facilities, equipment and coaching money can buy as well as a seamless pipeline to the latest designer steroids. Last night they stayed at the Hilton, were serviced by high end call girls and they’re favored by 27 points. We stayed at the Comfort Inn with bed bugs, and the gunfire outside kept many of us awake all night. In short, we haven’t got a fucking prayer. The only thing we have is our pluckiness. We’ve come through a lot together this season. Dilford, losing your leg in that tractor accident really put a crimp in our running game. Wallis, losing your sister to leprosy was a blow. Dimarco’s arrest on sexual assault charges left us weak on the defensive line. Kramer’s descent into madness really threw our kicking game off, although he’s doing a fine job as the team mascot. We overcame a series of racial and socioeconomic conflicts on the team by lip syncing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” together in the locker room. We persevered, and here we are, damnit!…But for what?…a soul-searing humiliation marathon in front of thousands of mocking fans? (he starts handing out cards) I want you all to take these cards with the suicide hotline number on it just in case it’s worse than we can imagine–in case? Let’s face it, it’s going to be a fucking slaughter. By the way, if any of you do decide to cash out early, I won’t think any less of you. I mean, obviously, don’t do anything foolish, but I’m just saying…I want you all to know that I’m proud of each and every one of you even though you are totally inadequate to rise to this moment. Okay, let’s get out there and try to keep them from running the score up too high, all right?
54 year-old Nathan Klebanov seems an unlikely TikTok star, yet his esoteric video lectures on Western Civilization have vaulted him to the apex of TikTok stardom in a few dizzying months. Last week he captured his 100 millionth follower to the astonishment of the winsome, bouncy teens and pre-teens who have dominated the platform up until now. So how has an overweight, balding history professor conquered a medium designed for short videos of dancing, singing, lip syncing, pranking your siblings and mocking your parents?
Klebanov became aware of TikTok through his eleven year-old nephew Kyle. As he watched an assortment of snappy, upbeat videos, he began to suspect that an intellectual hunger lurked beneath the cheesy dance moves, gestures, facial expressions and wild exuberance of the TikTokers. He thought that if he could tap into that hunger, he could share his knowledge of Western Civilization with a far larger group of people than he can with his courses at the university.
“But I knew I couldn’t just jump right into the development of cuneiform in Mesopotamia or the centuries long intermingling of Romans and Germanic peoples in the ancient world,” Professor Klebanov told reporters Monday night. “So I would lip sync a little song at first, you know, and I’d do silly things…like draw a heart in the air when I said ‘love’…and when I had their attention, I would subtly shift to my mini-lecture. They were spellbound.”
Klebanov’s videos have spurred a massive sudden interest in Western Civilization. Other TikTok stars known for their dance moves and pranks are now hosting brief book talks on issues related to Klebanov’s lectures. Amazon reported that sales of history books to adolescents are skyrocketing. Clothing lines featuring Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hammurabi’s code of laws are blowing up.
Klebanov is hoping TikTok will allow longer videos in the future. “It’s difficult to cover five-thousand years of history a minute at a time. And I think the attention span of TikTok viewers is growing rapidly.”
Republicans hope to see a lot less of this in the future.
Republicans around the country are celebrating Black History Month by proposing a raft of new laws that would restrict voting rights in their states with a particular emphasis on curtailing the votes of African Americans.
In Georgia for instance, House Bill 531 would eliminate early voting on Sundays, which have been used in the “Souls to the Polls” Democratic effort to bring black voters to the polls directly from their churches and would restrict it to weekdays and one Saturday. Another provision would outlaw so-called “line-warming” activities by non-partisan groups that offer water to voters waiting in long lines in the heat or blankets in the cold.
While some African Americans and voting rights advocates have decried the cruelty of such a provision given that black voters were forced to endure lengthy waits to vote during the June primary fiasco in the Peach State, Republicans have touted it as an invigorating outdoor period of self-reflection in which voters can ponder the issues at hand unhindered by any relief from their thirst or cold.
“It’s not like we’re making them pay poll taxes or take literacy tests,” Georgia Republican Representative Slade Greenwall said regarding the proposed legislation. “Nobody’s burning crosses on anybody’s lawns anymore. We just have to reassure the white people who were told for months that black people stole their votes with absolutely no evidence that everything’s on the up and up now. And the best way to do that is by making it a little bit tougher for them to get to the polls or to vote by mail. Now you can call that racism if you want, but I call it Making America Great Again.”
