On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The operation was named “Grossmutter gestorben” (Grandmother died). The operation was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of Polish anti-German saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Gestapo murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer, known for sympathising with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo and dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection and given gunshot wounds. Honiok was left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was then presented to the police and press as proof of the attack. Several prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were drugged, shot dead on the site and their faces disfigured to make identification impossible. The Germans referred to them by the code phrase “Konserve” (canned goods).

What? You thought your life of ease and privilege as a Citizen of the decadent New Rome would last forever? Struggle, Run, or Die. I’ve been warning you since 2005.

Trump says he’s blocking Postal Service funding because Democrats want to expand mail-in voting during pandemic
By Felicia Sonmez and Jacob Bogage, Washington Post
August 13, 2020

President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

“Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”

During the Wednesday briefing, Trump told reporters he would not approve the $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs. But he went further in remarks Thursday morning, blaming Democrats’ efforts to make it easier for Americans to vote amid the pandemic.

“There’s nothing wrong with getting out and voting. . . . They voted during World War I and World War II,” Trump told Bartiromo.
…
“In the legislation we had $25 billion,” Pelosi said. “That is the number that is recommended by the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service. . . . In earlier covid bills, the president has stood in the way of any money for the Postal Service.”

Pelosi noted that the among other things, the Postal Service delivers many prescriptions, which is particularly important in pandemic times.

“So they’re hurting seniors; it’s a health issue. . . . So, when the president goes after the Postal Service, he’s going after an all-American, highly approved-by-the-public institution,” she said.

The campaign of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden criticized Trump’s statement, saying Trump was “sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon.”

“This is an assault on our democracy and economy by a desperate man who’s terrified that the American people will force him to confront what he’s done everything in his power to escape for months — responsibility for his own actions,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

Democrats earlier in the spring had rallied to the Postal Service’s defense when it sat on the brink of insolvency. Postal officials warned at the outset of the pandemic that declines on mail volume could have led the agency to run out of money in October.

As Congress agreed to a $13 billion emergency grant for the USPS in an early round of coronavirus relief spending, Trump threatened to veto the bill — worth $2 trillion and full of funding for unemployment benefits, small businesses and national security industries — if it included any direct funding for the Postal Service.

We used to go out to Michigan every Summer. I found it boring and painful which I supposed spoiled it for the rest of the family, though how many times is deep fried Chicken from Frankenmuth exciting (for the record the first Girlfriend who let me get to Second Base was from Frankenmuth and that was plenty exciting!)?

We’d drive through Canada, which despite its quirks (Well Done Hamburgers? Really?) is an all together better country than we are.

Canada is a better country than we are.

Thank you. At least they have better Beer which covers a lot, including Poutine. One of the features of our annual migration, at least for the other members of my family, was driving through the Cherry Orchards at Harvest Time.

Me? I hate Cherries. Not allergic, just don’t like them.

But some people do and we’d stop at every road side stand and pick up another gallon or two. Unfortunately what was not instantly consumed ended up poisoning every dish for the next month.

The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks
By Brooke Jarvis, The New Yor5k Times
Aug. 12, 2020

Consider the cherry. Consider this cherry, actually, this one here, hanging off the tree at the very end of a long, deep green row. Look at how its red and gold skin shines in the bright sun. It’s a famous hybrid variety, a Rainier, which means it has sweet yellow flesh and that you’ll have to pay a premium price to eat it. If you do, it will be delicious, the very taste of summer. But first it will have to get to you.

So far, this cherry has been mostly lucky. No disease has come for its tree, though there’s a bad one, little-cherry disease, stalking nearby orchards. No frost kept its springtime blossoms from giving way to fruit. No excessive rain has fallen in the short time since it ripened.

That could have been a disaster, because water likes to pool in the little divot by the stem. There it seeps into the flesh, making the cherry swell. Too much, and the cherry will burst through its own skin, causing splits; whole harvests can be lost this way. So dangerous is poorly timed water that cherry growers rely on fans, wind machines and even low-flying helicopters to dry ripe fruit before it is lost. Yet wind presents its own peril: It can knock cherries against one another or into branches, bruising them so that they’re rejected on the packing line, where fruit is sorted for size and quality with high-tech optical scanners. Rainiers, because of their color, are particularly prone to showing their past with telltale “wind marks,” tiny incursions of brownness on that golden skin. This cherry has just a few.

But it’s not to market yet. The window in which a sweet cherry can be picked for sale is excruciatingly narrow. Cherries don’t continue to ripen once they’re off the tree, the way a peach does, and once picked they don’t store for very long, even when refrigerated. If they’re too ripe, they won’t make it to the packing house, the truck or the airplane, the grocery-store display, your summery dessert. The sugar content must be Goldilocksian — neither too high nor too low. Wait even a couple of days too many, and it may be too late.

Paige Hake, the second generation of her family to farm this orchard, considered the cherry. Then she considered its neighbors, with their own wind marks, in the lambent heat of a June afternoon. She looked down the long green row of trees, lined with its strip of white plastic fabric, meant to reflect sunlight onto the undersides of the cherries, helping them color evenly. She consulted with her father, Orlin Knutson, who has been growing fruit on this stretch of dry sagebrush steppe near Mattawa, Wash., for 41 years, the last 31 of them organically. There was a refrigerated truck waiting by the gate, with a growing stack of full bins next to it. There was rain in the forecast, as well as more heat, and sugar levels in the cherries were rising as they spoke. They wanted to get these cherries harvested today; they were far enough along that it was probably now or never, a whole year of investment and work leading to this one afternoon. But it was getting late, and there were a lot of other cherries that needed to be picked, and today the crew of people available to pick them was smaller than they would have liked. She turned to me and pointed to the wind-marked cherry, still unsure whether it would be worth the cost of trying to get it to market. “Would you buy that at Whole Foods?” she asked.

The yellow cherry was one of a great many across the orchards of Washington State that were just beginning to ripen. Karen Lewis, who works with growers as a tree-fruit specialist for the agricultural extension service of Washington State University, has tried to calculate exactly how many individual cherries need to be picked during a whirlwind season that Jon DeVaney, the president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, calls “eight weeks of craziness.” Multiplying all the millions of boxes by the number of cherries they can hold, Lewis determined that as many as 24 billion individual cherries must be plucked, separately, from their trees and placed carefully into bags and buckets and bins, each and every one of them by human hands.

Lewis thinks that people who aren’t used to thinking much about the source of their food, or who assume that the food system is as mechanized and smoothly calibrated as a factory, spitting out produce like so many sticks of gum, ought to spend some time contemplating that figure and what it means. “I’m here to tell you that people do not think we harvest everything by hand,” she says. But hands, belonging to highly skilled workers, are needed for every last cherry. During the harvest, many thousands of people are out picking by dawn, nearly every day, their fingers flying as they watch out for rattlesnakes under dark trees. (Compounding the labor crunch, this is also the time when workers in the region must hand-thin more than 100 million apple trees, so that the remaining fruit can grow larger.) Later in the season, many of the same hands will pick and place each peach and plum and apricot, every single apple — five and a half billion pounds, just of apples, just in Washington, just last year. “I think those numbers are staggering,” Lewis said.

The cherry industry has done everything it can to squeeze every possible bit of extra time into the season. Growers plant at a range of different elevations: Every 100 feet above sea level, one orchard manager says, buys you an extra day until maturity. And they choose different varietals that ripen at slightly different speeds — most red cherries are marketed to the public simply as “dark sweets” but are actually a genetically distinct array, whose different sizes and tastes and unique horticultural personalities are intimately known by growers and pickers. If everything bloomed and matured all at once, Lewis said, there’s no way there would be enough bees, enough trucks, enough bins, to make the scale of the current cherry harvest possible. Most of all, there wouldn’t be enough people. There already aren’t.

Some people take their fruit very seriously.

For years, the tree-fruit industry in Washington — like the salad industry in California, the blueberry industry in New Jersey, the tomato industry in Florida and countless other sources of the things that we eat — has been struggling to find the workers it needs to keep producing food. Across the country, the number of farmworkers is dwindling. Current workers, who are often immigrants without legal permission to work in the industries that are reliant on them, are getting older; those who are able to are leaving an industry that’s poorly paid and physically damaging and often exploitative; and crackdowns at the border mean that there are fewer new arrivals to take their place. To cope, some growers have turned to a ballooning visa-based “guest worker” program, which comes with its own significant problems, while many others have simply buckled under debt and rising costs, going under or selling their orchards to ever-bigger companies. “Everyone’s squeezed pretty much to the limit,” Knutson said, surveying the dark leaves, the shining fruit, the clear blue sky. “It’s kind of an ugly time.”

Such was the state of things before the coronavirus pandemic arrived, bringing with it a host of new troubles. When I called Lewis early in this year’s cherry harvest, she had just sent out a newsletter that, along with the latest updates on cherry disease and apple varieties, included information on suicide prevention. Piled on top of everything else, she said, “this is enough to take people to their knees.”

In March, when the United States began to lock down to slow the spread of the new virus, some workers noticed a change in how the government talked about them. As leaders planned for closures, it became clear that many of the lowest-paid and least-respected jobs in America were, in fact, the most important: the ones that could not be paused or interrupted or bypassed if society was to keep functioning. You could not, as Knutson put it, simply close the door to a farm for a month and then reopen it. People who had regularly been called illegal suddenly found themselves rebranded as essential.

Harvest seasons were underway or rapidly approaching across the country; without enough workers, the nation’s food would not be produced. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it would “temporarily adjust its enforcement posture,” narrowing its focus to people involved in criminal activity rather than arresting anyone who was undocumented. In California, where labor-intensive fruit-and-vegetable crops account for about 85 percent of the state’s crop sales, farmers handed out letters that workers who feared attracting the attention of law enforcement by going to work during lockdowns could carry with them: not papers by the usual definition, but a paper to show that they were, informally, and just for now, legitimate by virtue of being indispensable.

So it’s kind of a systemic problem where Neo Liberal Apex Capitalism undervalues its Labor Inputs (again) and “Just In Time” supply chains fail.

It’s very instructive if you don’t mind reading about Cherries.

For the Flies.

Frontline

Vice

How far up your ass is the hand, puppet?

Yeah. All 33 Minutes. Like, not old. Yesterday.

And Cat Sufferage!

So on Friday I’m going to miss the Memorial Service for my Aunt.

It’s too bad really. I liked her a lot, thought she was cool because she drove a Corvette and wore Designer Ripped Blue Jeans.

She did other things but was a Professor at Michigan State University and many of her friends and family live near enough to Lansing, not us.

It’s easy to ascribe deliberate malice to this decision since it came from the Lannister side of my Clan, but it’s probably mere thoughtless selfishness. It’s not the kind of schedule I or my Right Coast Diaspora could be reasonably expected to meet without Corona, now it’s an invitation to a Leper Colony.

Coronavirus outbreak at Michigan college bar infects at least 85 people
By Robert Gearty, Fox News
6/28/20

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases tied to a popular Michigan college bar has climbed to 85, according to reports.

Local health officials are now advising those who visited Harper’s Restaurant and Brew Pub, near Michigan State University’s campus in Lansing, between June 12 and June 22 to self-quarantine for 14 days and get tested for COVID-19.

“Cases linked to Harper’s are currently at 85 total,” the Ingham County Health Department said on its Facebook page Saturday.

Eighty of the cases involve individuals who visited the bar and then tested positive, WLIX-TV reported. Most of those infected have only shown mild symptoms. At least 10 have been asymptomatic.

College students without masks could be seen in photos on social media crowded together on a line to get into Harper’s after the bar reopened June 12 when Michigan eased coronavirus restrictions that had shuttered bars and restaurants for three months.

The business closed again June 22, shortly after two people tested positive for the coronavirus, the station reported.

The owners of the bar plan to install a new heating and cooling system, and an app to help manage the sidewalk line and control crowds, the station reported.

The Detroit Free Press reported Sunday that 30 new COVID-19 cases 100 miles away in affluent Grosse Pointe have been linked to the Harper’s outbreak.

According to the paper, an individual who went to Harper’s and became infected came in contact with a friend who held a huge house party in Grosse Pointe Woods, where dozens of friends partied without masks and social distancing.

That host was symptomatic during the party and became more ill over the weekend before being tested for COVID-19 on Monday. The next day, he shared that he was positive, according to the paper.

“I’m just so frustrated,” said the mother of a 19-year-old daughter who tested positive after attending a bonfire with friends in Grosse Pointe. Attendees of the bonfire had been exposed to the students who were at Harper’s.

“I’m so sad. We stayed home as ordered and then let our guard down — and now this,” the woman told the paper.

Keep in mind this is the same Crew who saw nothing wrong with drinking Lead straight from the Tap. Accounts for the Brain Damage.

Richard was actually surprised when I told him Lansing was a Corona Hotspot, “They closed the Campus.” he said. Kinda. Sports and associated (Band for 0ne) were running their usual pre-Season and even deserted there are over a Thousand “Essentials” who keep the place from crumbling to dust. Plus the MSU culture plants a lot of MSU students as renters of collective year around off Campus private housing in a slum of “Animal Houses” nearby.

I suspect that is not dissimilar to many Division I Schools.

Until now there has been some question about whether there will be a Fall Division I Season at all. In College Football there are 5 “Power Conferences”, Big Ten, American Athletic Conference (the American or AAC), Conference USA, Mid-American Conference (MAC), Mountain West Conference, and the Sun Belt Conference. They get all the attention because they generate most of the money.

The MAC has already cancelled the Fall Season and now the Big Ten follows suit.

Big Ten becomes first major college football conference to cancel fall season
By Emily Giambalvo, Washington Post
August 11, 2020

The Big Ten Conference has postponed the 2020 football season because of safety concerns stemming from the novel coronavirus pandemic, the league announced Tuesday. The Big Ten is the first of college football’s elite Power Five conferences to decide against playing football this fall.

After sports halted in March, college athletic departments and their conferences have gradually moved toward returning to competition this fall. But the number of coronavirus cases in the United States began rising in June and multiple schools dealt with outbreaks within their football programs even before formal practices had begun.

The Big Ten’s decision to cancel all fall competition also affects all other fall sports — men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country, field hockey and women’s volleyball. The conference said it will continue to evaluate options regarding these sports, including the possibility of playing in the spring. The Big Ten has not made a decision regarding winter sports, such as men’s and women’s basketball, which begin their seasons in November.

“The mental and physical health and welfare of our student-athletes has been at the center of every decision we have made regarding the ability to proceed forward,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said
in a statement. “As time progressed and after hours of discussion with our Big Ten Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Big Ten Sports Medicine Committee, it became abundantly clear that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”

With the Big Ten’s decision, 41 of the 130 FBS schools have either said they will not play this fall or are in conferences that have made that decision. The Mid-American Conference postponed its football season Saturday, becoming the first league to do so in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of college football. The Mountain West Conference followed Monday, canceling all fall sports.

In addition, the University of Massachusetts, an FBS independent in football, announced on Tuesday that it was canceling its season. Last week, the University of Connecticut became the first FBS program to shut down its 2020 season, which would have been its first as an independent. Old Dominion, a member of Conference USA in most sports including football, canceled all fall sports Monday.
…
Football players returned to their campuses in June for voluntary workouts held in small groups. Michigan State and Rutgers each had to quarantine their entire team after a spike in cases inside their programs. Big Ten teams resumed practice last week, but the conference announced Saturday morning that until further notice, football players could only practice with helmets and no pads. With four weeks until the start of the season, the conference’s statement said, “We understand there are many questions regarding how this impacts schedules, as well as the feasibility of proceeding forward with the season at all.”

Unlike in professional sports, college football programs cannot keep their players inside an insular environment that limits contact with the public. Instead, these athletes would have, in some cases, attended in-person classes with their peers before congregating with their teammates for meetings and practices.

I imagine the MAC Conference is saying, “What are we? Chopped Liver?”. Well, yeah.

A bunch of other bone heads are saying “I want to play.”