In yesterday’s SR I tried to give you a sense of the growing zeitgeist of civil violence I am seeing in a wide spectrum of media. This is particularly a White male Republican (what I now call TCP) phenomenon, and it is getting worse each day as we move closer to the November election. Here is an example of what I mean.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman Credit: screengrab / X
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman last week, according to the report, was asked by Donald Trump to hold an umbrella over the former president’s head during the wake for former New York City police officer Jonathan Diller.
Per the the Daily Beast, Blakeman and Nassau County Sheriff Anthony LaRocco last month “put an ad on the county’s website for residents to apply to be ‘Provisional Emergency Special Deputy Sheriffs,’” and the ad notes, “the deputized civilians must be ‘skilled in the use of firearms,’ and ‘within 45 days of appointment must be trained and qualified on service weapon and complete basic training at the Academy in the NYS Penal law and Use of Force.’”
Furthermore, The deputized citizens would be paid a $150 stipend each day they’re on duty.
According to Long Island News 12, the New York GOP leader “says he wants to deputize pre-screened citizens with gun licenses so they can be called upon in cases of ‘significant emergency’ to protect government buildings, hospitals, religious […]
The price of stamps is going to go up for a second time in a year even as mailings are going down. This is all part of the Dejoy plan to make the USPS a profit-making organization instead of a public service.
Forever stamp Credit: USPS
When it comes to stamps, the word “forever” on first-class mail doesn’t apply to prices.
The U.S. Postal Service is signaling that the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp will increase to 73 cents on July 14, 2024, up by a nickel from the 68 cents one currently costs.
When first introduced in 2007, a Forever stamp was 41 cents. The stamps were named as such so one knew they could use the stamp “forever,” regardless of when it was purchased.
The latest proposed changes — to be reviewed and approved by the governors of the Postal Service — also include a nickel hike to the price to mail a 1-ounce metered letter, to 69 cents, the postal service said Tuesday in a news release.
Mailing a postcard domestically will run you 56 cents, a 3-cent increase, while the price of mailing postcards and letters internationally are both rising by a dime to $1.65.
All told, the proposed changes represent a roughly 7.8% increase in the price of sending mail through the agency.
Notably, the price of renting a Post Office Box is not going up, and […]
One of the major mistakes the Biden administration has made during Biden’s tenure, one that has surprised me since it is so obviously a problem, is what Louis Dejoy, a Trumper, has done to the U.S. Post Office. What has happened to America’s oldest national institution is a scandal you rarely hear or read about. But, as this report describes, the damage Dejoy has done may have a negative effect on our being able to hold a fair election.
U.S. Postal Service trucks outside a post office in Wheeling, Ill. Credit: Nam Y. Huh / AP
In Virginia, hundreds of veterans had their colon cancer screening tests invalidated after the results took months to arrive by mail. An Atlanta college student missed an academic trip to Ghana when their passport with two-day shipping took a month to show up. A bride in Texas had to rent a dress for her wedding after hers spent weeks stuck in a Houston postal facility.
Across the country, residents and businesses have been reporting widespread slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service. The delays have become so persistent that members of Congress have gotten involved, urging the Postal Service to drastically correct course and raising concern about what impact the disruptions could have on mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.
The delays appear to largely stem from a new system the Postal Service began rolling out last fall that will eventually funnel all the nation’s letters and packages […]
The rich are laying plans to abandon the country their wealth and their funding of christofascist politicians and policies has driven into a crisis that may end what the United States has been for over two centuries. I think that should be taken as a very significant alarm bell.
The wealthy are building “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country.
Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who added a citizenship in New Zealand, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who applied for citizenship in Cyprus.
The top destinations for supplemental passports among Americans are Portugal, Malta, Greece and Italy, according to Henley & Partners.
Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk, according to a leading law firm.
The wealthy are building these “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country. Henley & Partners, a law firm that specializes in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.
“The U.S. is still a great country, it’s still an amazing passport,” said Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley & […]
I am very concerned about AI, and I think you should be as well. I don’t think we are headed down the road of The Matrix movies, but I do think AI is a major threat working to end our democracy. AI has become the key to the weaponization of misinformation in a nation where a majority of the population is only marginally literate and gets what news they do get from social media which has become a cesspool of lies, resentment, racism, and hate.
The “Posthuman” movement in tech has been normalized, but not everyone really understands what it would mean for humanity. Credit: Adobe
A long with inflation and the state of democracy, Americans are increasingly worried about human extinction. A survey from 2017 found that roughly 40% of the U.S. public thinks “the odds that global warming will cause humans to become extinct are 50% or higher.” Another survey published last year reports that 55% of us are either “very worried” or “somewhat worried” that advanced artificial intelligence “could eventually pose a threat to the existence of the human race.”
These concerns are not irrational. After all, the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists is that climate change will have catastrophic consequences in the coming decades. The people running artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, meanwhile, are explicit that the technologies they’re building could lead to the annihilation of our species. In a 2023 interview, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said that “the bad case — and I think […]
