Turn on the blood spigot baby!

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The centrist media is in a frenzy over Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan the likes of which I haven’t seen since they were actually selling the war in the first place.  While it’s really hard to choose just one example among them I want to personally give a shoutout to CNN’s Jim Sciutto the winner of the Hell World This Fucking Guy of the Week award. This guy is showing so much of his ass it’s gonna be illegal on OnlyFans soon.

I also hate it when weiner civilian leaders get in the way of the military's purity of purpose and precision of skill.

First off I cannot stress how much this definitely happened. Secondly I’ve got a clock and a dumb little watercolor hanging on my office wall but this is normal too I guess.

I haven’t even turned on the cable news in a week I don’t think I could stomach it but here’s another of his CNN colleagues giving an alley-oop to some literal United States Marines’ propaganda.

There were nearly 50,000 Afghan civilians killed during the war via the Washington Post.

“In the first half of 2021 alone, there were 1,659 Afghan civilians killed and 3,524 wounded — a 47 percent increase compared with the same period last year — the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported.”

I’ve been so focused on the tenured lanyard kissing journalists thinking they work for the cops the past couple years I lost sight of how they also think they’re actual troops. These fucks spend every second of their lives acting as if they’re the unique neutral arbiters of reality until it’s time for war and then it’s turn on the blood spigot baby!! Bloodlust is of course the last acceptable bias in journalism.

All of which then gives them something to go report on and they can put on their little helmets and stand there in the desert looking concerned.

Maybe it’s just me but when you regularly talk to the put-upon for your reporting you foster a deep sense of empathy for the powerless and the righteousness of their cause. I wonder if that works the other way around for journalists when all your sources are generals and cop brass and war profiteers?

Please be sure to check out this piece from the other day by guest Harvey Day. Day laid out a case for removing the profit motive from our American death rituals. Why should it cost in the realm of $10,000 to simply lay a loved one to rest?

As an advocate for green burial and divorcing capitalism from death care, when I inform people that much of what I just described above is, in fact, optional, I’m met with a range of responses. One is, “Please, Harvey...we’re eating dinner, do we have to do this now?” Another is a mixture of shock at the cost of a funeral, anger that we can’t even die without racking up debt, and ideas about how they’d do their own burial differently. “You mean, I can actually decompose and become a tree when I die?” people often say.

The other reaction is something akin to disgust, and includes accusations that I believe people should be buried in the backyard like the family dog. Actually, I think that would be great!

The underlying current of this disgust seems to stem from two places: one is resistance to the idea that we should break away from the way things “have always been done,” and the other is a contempt for the idea of death itself. Like individual car ownership instead of mass transit, single-use plastic bags, and ketchup-flavored Pringles, capitalism has spent the past 150 years convincing us to buy the things we just can’t live, or die, without. From cradle to grave, we are born to consume, and if you aren’t able to outrun the creditors in death, then don’t worry, your next of kin can pick up the tab.

We die as we live, buried in debt.

But as with most of the ingenious advancements of capitalism, the practice of outsourcing our death, and having our dead bodies sold back to us, has only been with us for a relatively brief time.

After the piece some readers responded with their own experiences.

• Just finished funeral etc. arrangements for my mother, who died about a month ago, and the total is probably close to $8,000 — and she was cremated. Everything is 10 times more than it seems like it should cost, like $600 for one guy to give another guy the urn.

• My dad died unexpectedly in 2009 and everything was FAR more than what my then 24 y/o brain could comprehend but the one thing that stuck out as insane was that the tiny letters to put his name and dates on the square in the wall in the mausoleum were $14 each.

• When my mom died she was cremated and the guy still managed to upsell the coffin for the wake (I wasn't there). My notoriously frugal mother would have been pissed.
• We paid around $1000 for my father to be cremated and they misspelled his middle name on the certificate.

• Not cost per se but the most amazing thing when my dad died in January was asking at the funeral home about urns and they said “oh, just look on Amazon."

• Dad died in 2008. We couldn't afford any of the expenses so we ended up with the VA since he was a vet even though he absolutely hated his time in uniform. My aunt paid the $6k and got reimbursed from the VA for the burial. Never sat right with us since it wasn't what he wanted.

That one and the other Hell World I mention below are pay-walled. Grab a subscription for $4.66 a month here while it lasts.

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Josh Mandel — the guy proving just how much absolutely nobody likes or wants JD Vance — rather hilariously blew up the spot of a “patriotic” Ohio brewery on Friday when he posted a picture of himself with a server there who had come into work despite being ill. This was a good thing in his estimation and not an indictment of how we think about work in this diseased country. Never mind the part about you know embracing a stranger who just told you they are sick as the Delta variant surges.

Not long after the brewery deleted their entire Twitter account and Mandel turned on them accusing them of bowing to the woke mob etc etc.

For more on Mandel in case you’re not up to speed see the Cleveland Scene’s The Beginner's Guide to the Harrowing Soullessness of Josh Mandel about how he embodies the epitome of the post-Trump Republican.

It was quintessential Mandel – the implication of victimhood matched by vague, simmering anger. There was no need for details. For the GOP base, the important thing was to appear furious. And fighting. Josh Mandel: Standing Sentry Against Stuff You Don’t Like.

He jumped headfirst into the fraud of election fraud. Even Josh knew that after 60-some lawsuits, there was zero evidence of a stolen election. So he reframed his case along the lines of They’re Coming to Take Your Guns — as a threat that never actually occurs, but is bound to happen sometime, somewhere, if you just keep saying it will.

Those two bolded parts represent the entirety of the Republican persona and game plan respectively.

Aside from this all being very funny — Mandel also accidentally narced on a local barber working out of his house since he is seemingly determined to get every worker in Ohio in trouble —  it reminded me of a Hell World from earlier in the year in which a couple dozen people around the country particularly in food service told me about how regularly they are forced to go into work sick.

“I’ve never called in sick to work,” a career bartender in Boston told me. “Ever.”

“I’ve been doing this for twenty two years and can tell you stories about barely keeping snot in my nose while mixing drinks simply because there’s no room for calling in sick. Maybe you can get a shift covered, but more often than not you’re just working sick. If you try to call out, your management will punish you with worse shifts, less shifts, etc. Ownership does not give a fuck about us.”

It’s a situation that will sound familiar to anyone who’s worked in what we’re now calling “essential” jobs. Hell anyone who’s worked in anything besides the most privileged of white collar situations can relate. In America if you aren’t literally on death’s door — and sometimes even when you are — the degree to which you are expected to show up to work when you’re sick almost directly corresponds to how “unskilled” or “disposable” your profession is considered

Read that thread by Hank Single above and be sure to get to this part at the end:

“…when my uncle died, and I had to serve as his pallbearer, then skip the actual burial, and rush back to work, because, and I quote ‘your dad died last year, you can’t keep doing this.’”

You can’t keep suffering losses in your family it’s bad for the CVS bottom line.

It sounds almost absurdly ghoulish and almost unbelievable that a manager would say that right? But if you know you know. If you're a lower wage worker especially in the service industry your poor health and your family's poor health and/or death are almost always viewed as a scam you’re trying to get over on your boss and evidence of your laziness and poor work ethic. A reliable worker simply does not have deaths in the family too regularly.

Weird how being lower income is also a determinant for worse health! So it works like this: You have a shitty job and you can't take care of your health because you have to work so much then you get sicker then you get fired for finally calling out then you have to start the process all over again at the bottom at the next place if any of them are still willing to hire you. After all you’re probably not getting a good recommendation from your last job because you got sick that one time.

All the while you’re putting more miles on your body and letting problems go unaddressed with a doctor like how letting a minor problem with your car go unfixed turns it to junk sooner. We’re all broken down 2006 Toyota Corollas with 150,000 miles  a permanent check engine light on and a backseat full of Gatorade bottles.

It is much easier to take time off when you have a fancy white collar job of course.

But to be fair those people are trapped in a prison of their own design as well where taking a sick day can be used against them on their journey climbing the ladder. If they really wanted to grab the brass ring they’d think more like noted labor respector Bill Belichick.

Meanwhile they’re gentrifying the concept of working multiple jobs to survive out here looool.

OK that’s all for today. See you next time. Thanks as always for your support.