Broken Toys

Alaska Congressman suggest Jews would have survived Holocaust had they been armed – NY Daily News

After Poland fell to the Nazis in 1939, the German occupiers found themselves the overlords of Poland’s Jewish population of some 3.5 million people. Over the next few years, the Germans concentrated them into ever-shrinking prison zones – “ghettos” and then finally, by 1942, began depopulating them and sending the residents en masse to extermination camps.

Word had gotten out, and the Jewish residents knew that submitting to deportation meant certain death. So, in one of the most tragic battles of the Second World War, in 1943 “Aktion Warschau” – Action Warsaw, the clearing of the largest ghetto, was met by desperate civilians who met the stormtroopers of the SS in battle, with pistols and rifles facing tanks and flamethrowers.

The ensuing fighting was desperate, brutal and short. Around 300 German stormtroopers died, as did 13,000 Jewish defenders. The surviving 60,000 residents were immediately deported to death camps, most of whom died shortly thereafter.

I’m explaining this because there are only two possible explanations for this news story – our “leaders” are so profoundly ignorant that you now know more about history than they do, or that they are well aware of this history, and using the genocide of a people to score political points and justify the lobbying of an industry that demands a total and complete lack of any regulation at all.

Both options sicken and enrage me. I’m not sure which does more.

Trump Administration Wants To Decide What Food SNAP Recipients Will Get – NPR

We’re in the William Gibson version of the future.

No flying cars (unless you’re Elon Musk). No post-scarcity space communism a la Star Trek. No democracy.

Instead, corporations will supply, to an ever-increasing proletariat isolated from the upper reaches of the economy, “Food” Products(tm). These “Food” Products(tm) will be supplied by the lowest bidder, may actually kill you and most assuredly will have only the slightest resemblance to anything you and I might call healthy, fresh food.

It’s “America’s Harvest Box!” (No, really, that’s the name, I am sadly not joking), a subsidiary of “Food” Products(tm), which Mick Mulvaney, first in line to the revolving door position of chief of staff to the President mainly because he has no ethical qualms about saying hilariously awful things like the end of this sentence, termed “a Blue Apron-type program!” with a straight face. You millennials love Blue Apron, right? Shut up and pay your college debt, we have a government to pillage here.

For, make no mistake, that is what this is. A tightly knit group of cronies (in both major parties) are manipulating the collapse of our government, solely with an eye towards short term profiteering. There’s no thought to why the government might supply a subsistence level of food supply (you know, to actually prevent mass starvation in what is still one of the wealthiest countries on Earth), just that it has money that can be better spent on them. Directly (tax cuts defunding government) or indirectly – directing what little government exists into increasingly ridiculous privately-run boondoggles like this that exist primarily as scams. Because I guarantee you Perdue Chicken will be a primary supplier of “America’s Harvest Box!”

And those not in on the pillaging will be fighting for the scraps of “Food” Products(tm). Maybe the mirrorshades will be affordable.