Why UPS Didn’t Strike in Vegas
Mooning over glories, pitfalls of manual labor; expressing radical solidarity with down-trodden
It’s good being a Teamster
Vegas is a Union town
In 1830, Frances Wright, a Scottish writer and abolitionist who, in 1825, had just become an American citizen, delivered a lecture called “An Address to Young Mechanics.” “I have made human kind my study, from youth up,” she said. “The American community I have considered with most especial attention; and I can truly say that, wherever the same are not absolutely pressed down by labor and want, I have invariably found, not only the best feelings, but the soundest sense among the operative classes of society. I am satisfied, and that by extensive observation, that, with few exceptions, the whole sterling talent of the American community lies (latent indeed, and requiring the stimulus of circumstance for its development) among that large body who draw their subsistence from the labor of their hands.”
Understanding yourself in the context of manual labor can be difficult, even comical. I planned to speak …
Swifties
Pop Princess Takes Seattle
70,000 females fill football stadium at $1500 and up per ticket as glittery-eyed psychotics roam the streets
Will deliverance arise from the outstretched hand of Taylor Swift?
Picking glitter off the carpet of the Ace Hotel in Seattle in the dog days of August is the reward I get for leaving home and venturing into the great beyond. Every year, at around this time, I descend from my farmstead in order to report on what remains of the America I once loved, and still have strong feelings for, despite the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth. “They’re Taylor Swift fans,” the woman cleaning the floor beside me helpfully explains. “They’re very nice, but they leave glitter everywhere.”
Taylor Swift seems like the least of Seattle’s problems, though. It’s not that city people are rude by nature, as I explained recently to one of my neighbors. It’s that the math is different, when basic social interactions like stopping to say “hello” or give directions might bring you face-to-face with a being whose psychotic pain-ridden inner landscape hopefully does not resemble anything that is …
Agricultural Digest
In early August, a group of Iowa farmers sat down with three members of the House Select Committee on the CCP to discuss their allegations that the Chinese government is stealing proprietary American seeds. In 2011, the FBI famously caught one Chinese national doing just that; in fact, he was part of a larger seed-smuggling ring that is just one piece of the estimated $225 billion to $600 billion a year in intellectual property being stolen by China. Illinois Democrat Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi was sympathetic to the farmers, saying, “We can’t have a situation where we’re constantly developing secrets and research and doing the hard work of innovating — and then all of a sudden having that stolen from us.”
One of the farmers, a sixth-generation soybean grower named Suzanne Sherron, cautioned the group, noting that “one out of every three rows of soybeans you saw as you were driving here goes to China — …
