Occasionally I post an issue of my newsletter Welcome to Hell World here. Here’s the latest.

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Did you miss this paid-subscriber-only piece from earlier in the week because it’s a really good one. It’s about how a corporate lobbying group in West Virginia representing Dow Chemical, DuPont, Proctor & Gamble and others successfully lobbied the state legislature not to reduce pollutant standards in the water since, as they argued, the residents there are too fat and don’t drink enough water to get cancer. Very cool!

Jose Martin Paz Flores was working as a drywaller for a company called Tara Construction in Boston when he fell off a ladder and broke his leg in March of 2017. While he was in the hospital his boss Pedro Pirez visited him which is very nice of him to do I think that is safe to say. Assurance Quality Passion is the company’s slogan after all.

Despite the fact that Paz was undocumented he was nonetheless still entitled to workers’ compensation under the law which is surprising to hear I didn’t expect that to be the case did you? You would think they would have closed that decent and reasonable loophole somehow by now and maybe they will and they just haven’t gotten around to it.

About a month after the fall the workers’ compensation insurance denied any coverage related to Paz’s injury because they said the policy had been canceled. They said they hadn’t been paid a premium they were owed by Tara so fuck you. Pirez must have thought he was going to be on the hook himself for the money somehow so he did what any of us would do in this situation which is he snitched on Paz to the feds in order to get him deported.

Surprisingly this week the Department of Labor announced that they’re suing Tara Construction and Pirez and the fact that a Trump-appointed Labor Secretary like Alexander Acosta is actually doing something seemingly good is pretty surprising isn’t it? Almost makes you wonder what the catch is.

If you recognize Acosta’s name it might be because the Department of Justice recently opened their own investigation into him due to while he was a U.S. attorney in 2008 he arranged a shockingly lenient plea deal for billionaire pedophile rapist and Trump and Bill Clinton pal Jeffrey Epstein.

According to the suit “Pirez contacted Boston Police Detective Juan Seoane approximately two to three weeks after Paz’s injury, and asked Detective Seoane to look into Paz’s identity. As part of that process, Pirez provided Detective Seoane with certain of Paz’s identifying documents.”

Seoane then passed the information along to Sergeant Detective Gregory Gallagher a Boston cop who works on an ICE/Boston Police Department task force which is rather weird to learn exists because Boston police aren’t supposed to be cooperating with ICE unless someone has committed a very serious crime. Mayor Marty Walsh has continued to insist that Boston is a sanctuary city after the passage of the Trust Act in 2014 that prevented police from detaining immigrants for ICE.

ICE and the Boston cops had some trouble tracking Paz down so they asked Pirez for help in finding him. He got in touch with Paz and said he had some money for him to help him out while he was recovering and why not come by the office and pick it up and woops turns out he also told the cops the day and time he would be coming and they arrested him.

In the meantime Paz has obtained authorization to remain in the country but one of the things the DOL is trying to do besides get him back pay and some other money they think he deserves is to reinforce the message that companies like Tara Construction cannot hold the threat of retaliation and deportation over the heads of workers who are injured on the job which is something that probably happens a lot more often then we hear about it because why would we hear about it.

“BPD’s alleged action dramatically increases the vulnerability of immigrant workers to exploitation and abuse, and it is highly inconsistent with the message that the City otherwise sends,” Audrey Richardson the lawyer representing Paz said.

“It is shocking that the BPD allegedly played a central role in helping an employer retaliate against a seriously injured worker, who simply sought medical care and workers’ compensation benefits that the law provides regardless of immigration status.”

I don’t know why you would have ever done this but have you ever combed through the catalogue of ways people have died on the job in America? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration compiles a list of all of them or at least they used to I’m not sure if they do anymore but you can go through and read them all. I did a a while back and wrote about it and it amounts to a grim sort of hypnotic poetry.

FY 2010,10/02/09,09/28/09, “Jacoby Feed & Seed, Melvin, TX 76858”, Employees were installing a tilt-wall into a trench. Decedent was inside the trench when the earth collapsed.

FY 2010,10/02/09,09/28/09, “Zachary Construction Corp., Mansfield, LA 71052”, Decedent was walking across a tank and fell through a hatch into a tank of boiling water. He either drowned or died of thermal burns.

In 2018 the number of OSHA investigations after a death or serious injury on the job was the highest it’s been in ten years according to the National Employment Law Project. That comes as worksite safety enforcement is declining and the number of safety inspectors is the lowest it’s ever been in its entire history.

“The latest data from OSHA is very alarming,” writes Debbie Berkowitz the program director at the NELP and a former OSHA official. “We’re seeing huge red flags in the continued drop in enforcement and staffing at OSHA, while the number of workplace fatality investigations is at a decade high. That’s a clear indication that workplace deaths are on the rise.”

Five thousand workers were killed at work in 2018 and nearly three million were injured or had an illness that required them to miss time Berkowitz says.

“Alarmingly, the number of OSHA inspections due to workplace fatalities or catastrophes in FY 2018 rose dramatically — a strong sign that workplace fatalities are increasing under this administration. At the same time, as if it were trying to disappear, the agency has all but stopped issuing enforcement-related press releases, abandoning the deterrent effect that this kind of publicity produces.”

FY 2010,10/02/09,09/30/09, “Weight Farm, Bellfonte, PA 16823”, Decedent was inside a silo loading the feeder from a ladder. He became wedged within the ladder cage in a fetal position and suffocated.

FY 2011,11/27/10,11/20/10, “American Fireworks Mfg Co. Inc., Utica, NY 13502”, Worker was struck by fireworks during a fireworks show.

Here’s a poem I just read. It’s by Naomi Shihab Nye who was born in America to a Palestinian refugee father. It seemed relevant as Israel carried out dozens of strikes on Palestine this week although I suppose that’s not much different than any other week.

Here’s another one from her I quite like.

FY 2010,09/11/10,09/08/10, “Woodwork Manufacturing & Supply, Hutchinson, KS 67501–5373”, Worker discovered a fire in a sawdust collection system and attempted to extinguish the fire by opening the dump doors on the bottom of the sawdust collector and a flash fire occurred, enveloping the worker in flames/burning sawdust.

FY 2010,09/11/10,09/07/10, “Unknown Contractor, Risingsun, OH 43467”, Worker was pulled into a tree chipper machine.

There’s a set of doors in my living room that lead out onto an enclosed front porch which would be nice to sit in but it’s where we store all sorts of shit we don’t need or want to look at anymore. It’s the place where you put things that are no longer your problem like an old couch or a picture that used to hang on the wall forever until one day you decided you didn’t need to see it you had seen it enough times.

However it is they built it it’s not very well insulated out there so the wind blows through and creates pressure that creaks the doors open and makes for a terrible draft that I sit in every day. Sometimes I push something heavy in front of it like the ottoman I just put there now but when the wind gets really strong it doesn’t matter it still blows open. I should probably have tried to do something to actually solve the problem but it’s been ten years now and it’s starting to look like I’m not going to get to the root of the issue and that this is just how I live now.

I just went outside to take a break and I saw my old friend creeping around in the bushes next to an empty whisky bottle which someone must have thrown there one night in the winter when it was all covered in snow and they thought no one was looking and it would just disappear.

Another thing to talk about is I went home to sort through all my old stuff like my mother has been asking me to for years and I thought you might enjoy this picture of me the king of the nineties at Woodstock in 1994. I’m going to write about it at length later on but it was such an unsettling feeling to be digging through the artifacts of my youth. There was little comforting about it it was more like being an archaeologist on an excavation uncovering the remnants of a civilization that was lost to time and whose language was unfamiliar.

I just read about a survey published in the American Journal of Public Health that said almost sixty percent of people who declared bankruptcy said medical expenses very much or somewhat contributed to it. According to US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau medical bills “were by far the most common cause of unpaid bills sent to collection agencies in 2014, accounting for more than half of all such debts,” it said.

“Despite gains in coverage and access to care from the ACA, our findings suggest that it did not change the proportion of bankruptcies with medical causes. That’s not surprising because the chronically poor — the group most affected by the ACA’s coverage expansion — have reduced access to credit, have few assets (such as a home) to protect, and face particular difficulty in securing the legal help needed to navigate formal bankruptcy proceedings. Moreover, medical costs continue to outpace incomes, 29 million remain uninsured, and many of those with health insurance face unpredictable and unaffordable out-of-pocket costs as copayments and deductibles ratchet up. And few Americans have adequate disability coverage, leaving them vulnerable to illness-related income loss that amplifies the financial distress caused by medical bills,” it said.

People who get hurt on the job for example.

Instead of trying to make things better the authors said the Trump administration is actively trying to make the situation worse. Sometimes you have to think Republicans aren’t just in this to make money right? Sometimes you have to think causing pain isn’t just a byproduct of unrelated greed but it’s actually the primary motivation.

I wrote about Tucker Carlson the famous racist this week for my Boston Globe columnand it already feels outdated after the vile shooting in New Zealand but here’s one thing I said about this particular brand of asshole in it:

“Fox News viewers aren’t tuning into Carlson or Hannity or Pirro’s shows in spite of the steady stream of xenophobia and racism and jingoism. They’re tuning in because of it. And efforts to boycott Carlson’s program are likely to embolden the Trump base, who are motivated by nothing more now than owning the libs, and see nothing worse than a show of weakness.”

Another thing the Trump administration has been up to is hearing from nursing homes that say it’s unfair how much they were being fined under Obama when they endangered or injured the elderly people in their care.

“The average fine dropped to $28,405 under the current administration, down from $41,260 in 2016, President Barack Obama’s final year in office,” according to Kaiser Health News.

After hearing how hard it is for them to pay such fines from the nursing home industry Trump said OK and rolled back what was fairly aggressive regulation and oversight intended to stop the homes which are often multimillion dollar companies from doing things like running out of medication or not disinfecting medical equipment in order to prevent infectious diseases from spreading.

The fucking porch doors are creaking right now and I’m so cold even though the sun is shining and I started thinking about Woodstock again. I don’t remember too much about it I would have been about seventeen and it would have been around the time that story I told about being sexually assaulted or whatever it was which we all thought was very funny was going on. I remember the mud. Everything was covered in mud and walking around and sleeping in a tent and trying to do anything was basically impossible until you came to the realization that you were going to have to stop trying to avoid the mud and that you lived in the mud now. I remember seeing Green Day and Salt-N-Pepa and Blind Melon who we all loved so much back then and then the guy died and people generally don’t talk about Blind Melon that much anymore. I guess the singer Shannon Hoon was addicted to cocaine and the band hired a counselor to travel with them but apparently he couldn’t get him to stop either so they fired him and then he overdosed a few days later in 1995 anyway.

I remember my friend Rich Cronin was there with us at Woodstock and Rich did some fun stuff later on in life like singing that song about Chinese food that everyone liked to make jokes about for a while with his band LFO. Rich died too in 2010 from leukemia and they had the funeral at the church I used to go to where we grew up in Kingston but I didn’t go to it and I don’t know why.

Rich was discovered by Lou Pearlman who was the manager of the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. Pearlman went to jail and died in jail after being exposed for running a massive Ponzi scheme. Another thing Pearlman allegedly liked to do was to get young men to have sex and to dangle the prospect of a career in music in front of them.

Rich talked about being at Pearlman’s “wonderland for guys” mansion later on on the Howard Stern show. He said “some guys allowed Pearlman to use his power to take advantage of them, because it would mean they would have better career opportunities,” MTV reported.

“Eventually he did [try and touch me sexually] … some other dudes went for it. And if you did, he took care of you. He’d buy them cars,” Rich said.

Vanity Fair reported on Pearlman’s predatory behavior years ago. One of the only people who would talk about it besides Rich was Steve Mooney who was his assistant for a time.

“Living at Pearlman’s home, Steve Mooney believed he saw firsthand the price many young men were paying. Pearlman’s bedroom lay behind a pair of double doors, and when they were closed, Mooney knew not to intrude. More than once, he says, he encountered young male singers slipping out of those doors late at night, tucking in their shirts, a sheepish look on their faces. ‘There was one guy in every band — one sacrifice — one guy in every band who takes it for Lou,’ says Mooney, echoing a sentiment I heard from several people. ‘That’s just the way it was.’”

Hmm this one might be getting away from me here vis a vis thematic consistency. Who is to say?

Here’s one more thing I wanted to mention and it’s that W.S. Merwin died. He was ninety one though so it’s not supposed to be as sad as when a younger person dies. He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize twice and was the Poet Laureate twice which is pretty respectable in terms of a poetry career you have to allow.

Merwin was an environmentalist and worried about nuclear bombs and the Vietnam War among other things but perhaps relevant to our concern here was his eschewing punctuation in much of his later work.

“He wanted his writing to be more urgent, so, to start, Merwin decided to do away with punctuation,” NPR wrote.

“Suddenly using punctuation felt like nailing words on a page,” his friend the poet Edward Hirsch told them. “He was seeking something like the movement and lightness of the spoken word.”

Here’s one poem of his I quite like and then after that I’m going to get going. I’m going to fix the porch doors so they stop opening I think. Yes I think I’m going to do it this time for good.

Please enjoy the latest issue of my newsletter Welcome to Hell World which I post on here from time to time. Consider subscribing here. You’ll like it buddy.

Ah fuck I gotta write this thing I guess so here goes. I was gonna start today with this story about two New York City detectives and what they did to an eighteen year old woman and I kept thinking about it and not wanting to write it but maybe I’ll start and see what happens no promises ok? That’s how these stories work right they’re so upsetting that most of us look away and pretend it’s not happening.

It was September of 2017 and a young woman and two of her friends were hanging out in a car near Coney Island when the cops slithered out of the midnight inky ocean or however it is cops arrive places. They were plainclothes narcotics officers and I’m not sure what happened to get them inside of the car but we can probably fill in the blanks in the timeline with an interstitial title card that says COP STUFF and in any case they found a bit of pot and some Klonopin on the girl or woman I can’t decide what to call an eighteen year old in a story like this and they arrested her and brought her into their unmarked van where she says they raped her while driving around the city. She said she remembered the route they took because she saw things she recognized out of the window like the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and her grandmother’s apartment.

After they were done with her they let her go and she went to the hospital where she told a nurse what had happened and other police arrived and they listened to her story and eventually arrested Richard Hall and Edward Martins who have maintained their innocence all along by saying the sex with the girl woman teenager they had arrested had been consensual and who knows maybe it was maybe a young woman out with her friends all of a sudden confronted by cops and nervous about the prospect of getting in trouble for drugs decided she wanted to have sex with two older men while handcuffed in a van driving around Brooklyn of her own volition or maybe it was the much more obvious thing that happened who knows.

A year and a half later which is to say this week prosecutors have decided to drop most of the charges against the cops due to they now think the woman wasn’t entirely truthful in her testimony in front of a grand jury and they say now that she had changed some of the details in her story a couple of times such as what she was wearing at the time and what the inside of the van in question looked like. I’m fairly certain that sort of confusion about specificity of detail can arise during a traumatic experience like that but I am not an expert on this matter or anything else.

Now the two cops are only facing a series of less serious charges including official misconduct and bribery of services according to the New York Times and they still might get seven years in jail for that although I wouldn’t necessarily count on it because you can murder a guy and not go to jail. Nonetheless that’s a lot better than the twenty five years they had been looking at as far as they are concerned and as an added bonus they get to talk about how the girl is a liar now at trial probably which is one of the classic defenses when it comes to sexual assault you point out how the woman has lied about one thing and then it’s only natural to start to wonder what else she might be lying about. So much of human communication whether it’s in trials like this one or discussions online or political disagreement comes down to finding an inconsistency in what someone had said or done before and then using that as a means to cast doubt on everything they are saying currently and that’s the one move it’s the only thing humans have devised in terms of dialogue after all this time bitching at each other. You would think we would have come up with a second rhetorical maneuver by now since we are really very good at inventing new things in various other realms but we haven’t.

While that story is bad enough on its own the particulars of it aren’t even what stand out here for me because did you know that back in the day many years ago all the way back in 2017 when this was happening that it wasn’t even illegal as of yet for police officers to have sex with people in their custody in New York? What the fuck? It was indeed a serious crime for a prison guard to have sex with an inmate but not this type of thing where the person was still relatively free where it was only the idea of prison that hovered over the entire proceedings. Then it was sort of a gray area under the law and you could get away with it and cops often did and may still.

New York has since closed that loophole in their state laws but as of last year according to the ACLU New York was one of thirty five states where consent could be used as a defense when a police officer is accused of raping someone they had arrested.

Writing on the story last year Buzzfeed reported that “of at least 158 law enforcement officers charged since 2006 with sexual assault, sexual battery, or unlawful sexual contact with somebody under their control, at least 26 have been acquitted or had charges dropped based on the consent defense, according to a review of a Buffalo News database of more than 700 law enforcement officers accused of sexual misconduct.”

Police sexual misconduct is pretty common you might not be surprised to hear.

“According to a 2010 Cato Institute review, sexual misconduct is the second-most-frequently reported form of police misconduct, after excessive force,” according to the Associated Press.

Sometimes they even get in trouble for it.

In 2015 the Associated Press counted almost one thousand officers between 2009 and 2014 “who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.”

That number was likely to be a vast understatement they said because it only counted officers who actually lost their jobs and many states including California and New York where there are quite a fair few number of cops didn’t have records about such things because why would they. In some states where they reported no firings for sexual misconduct they found cases through news reports or court records that it had actually happened so those states were lying or negligent or both.

“It’s happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country,” Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida who studied the issue told the AP. “It’s so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them.”

What’s more a significant percentage of these incidents involve particularly vulnerable people like minors or women of color or sex workers or addicts or in other words people who the police perceive as having even less power than the average person and are therefore less likely to make a whole thing about it.

As the Washington Post reported last year a study from the National Institute of Justice looked at over 6,700 officer arrests throughout the country over a seven year period and found half of the arrests were for sexual misconduct involving minors.

This part is even worse than all of that which is that cops often prey on women who are victims of domestic violence who call the police for protection.

“As one officer quoted in an investigative report by the Philadelphia Inquirer said, ‘I would see women that were vulnerable where I could appear as a knight in shining armor,’” the Post reported.

“He explained, ‘I’m going to help this woman who’s being abused by her boyfriend, and then I’ll ask for sexual favors.’ Another bragged that getting dates with such victims was like ‘shooting fish in a barrel.’”

It was Ash Wednesday yesterday which if you’re not familiar is the one day every year a couple of people show up at your work with dirt on their face and you’re like what the hell and then you remember it’s Jesus dirt. For Christians the day of repentance marks the beginning of Lent which is the forty day period leading up to uh I’m struggling to remember all this shit uh Good Friday which is the day Jesus was crucified and then Easter which is the day he was born again or as it was otherwise known when I was an altar boy a real fucking emotional whirlwind.

I was thinking about it yesterday not because I saw anyone with dirt on their face due to I barely left the house but because I remembered what they used to say to us before they blessed us with the ashes which was remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return, which is a pretty fucked up thing to say to a LEGO playing nerd who can barely do division.

The prayer is based on a quote from Genesis which goes like this:

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

By coincidence that song above by Oneohtrix Point Never with Iggy Pop just came on and it set the tone perfectly here. Here’s how that song goes:

Love, make me clean
Love, touch me, cure me

The pure always act from love
The damned always act from love

Every day I think about untwisting and untangling these strings I’m in
And to lead a pure life
I look ahead at a clear sky
Ain’t gonna get there
But it’s a nice dream, it’s a nice dream

Death, make me brave
Death, leave me swinging

The pure always act from love
The damned always act from love
The truth is an act of love

Some day, I swear, we’re gonna go to a place where we can do everything we want to
And we can pet the crocodiles

I was thinking this morning when I woke up way too early from too vivid dreams that when someone dies which is to say when they begin their journey back to ash that we can still look at them for a while typically. Their body is still there and after some hard work by a mortician remember that show Six Feet Under that was really good wasn’t it you can see them and remember them how they were. Maybe they have their favorite dress or a necklace they loved on maybe it was one you gave them many years ago. But they can’t speak and they can’t smile anymore and so the process has begun of stripping away the parts of them that made the person real to you and isn’t that also what happens when someone who is still alive is removed from your life. You can remember how they looked but after a while you start to forget what their laugh sounded like or what it looked like when they walked across a room and so piece by piece it’s stripped from you and then someday it’s all gone and it’s dirt now.

We think there’s another part that’s coming later still though don’t we. We don’t believe it but we think it. Maybe it’s heaven or just later on down the road years from now and we get to pet the crocodiles together.

Here’s another song I just listened to called “Headache” by Grouper and it starts like this: My mother once told me she walked into the ocean. Didn’t want to die, just couldn’t tell where the horizon was. Wanted to have a closer look. Why is this costume weighing me down?

Here’s the part I actually wanted to get to this whole time and it’s about a woman named Laura Gilpin. Gilpin wanted to be a poet and she went to Sarah Lawrence College and got an MFA from Columbia University and then she was a poet not because of the degrees but because she wrote poems which is what a poet does. I wanted to be a poet once and I went to school to be a poet and I wrote some poems but I’m not a poet anymore because I do something else now.

Gilpin’s first book The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe was a marvel and people knew it at the time which is such an unlikely thing to happen. Imagine writing some poems and then people liked them and gave you money for them? What a world.

She won the Walt Whitman Award for it in 1976 which is a prestigious award for first time poets and I just looked on Amazon and you can buy a used hardcover copy of the book today for $1,099 which seems a bit steep even considering how good it is.

Here’s one of the most memorable pieces from it which I was reminded of on Twitterthis week.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, he sees
twice as many stars as usual.

After that book was published Gilpin decided maybe she didn’t want to be a poet anymore or at least didn’t want to have that on her business cards because of course you never stop being a poet or do you but the thing she went and did was become a nurse and an advocate for better standards in patient care.

“Laura became a registered nurse and one of the first staff members of Planetree, an organization dedicated to developing and implementing a patient-centered model of care in hospitals,” her obituary reads. “This became Laura’s life work, and for over 20 years she wrote and spoke tirelessly and traveled the world to promote this vision.”

Here’s an excerpt of another poem of hers which I grabbed an image of from heresince I’m not sure how to do the formatting on this thing.

I thought you would like that one.

Then Gilpin died at the age of fifty seven from brain cancer but not before she published one more book of poems and that bracketing makes a perfectly sad sort of sense to me because I’ve always said poetry is best written by and best appreciated by the young and the old because it’s meant to be a manual of sorts that teaches how to live and how to die with grace.

We started watching the Sopranos this week. Michelle has never seen it and I haven’t watched it since it was first on and naturally Tony’s ducks have resonated with me since I’m always crying about the goddamn bunny in my backyard on here. But also this part from episode three stuck with me.

TONY: Somebody called me a Frankenstein today.

MELFI: Really?

TONY: This Hasid I’m doin’ business with. These Hasids, they’re out there, but they got their beliefs, you know. They’re not afraid of death. At least this one guy wasn’t.

MELFI: Maybe they have the belief because they are afraid.

TONY: I’m not afraid of death. Not if it’s for something. You know, a war, something like that. A reason. But Jackie, to see this, this strong, beautiful man just wither away to nothing. And you can’t do nothing about it. And you, you can’t fight it.

MELFI: Do you envy the Hasids and their beliefs?

TONY: All this shit’s for nothing. And if all this shit’s for nothing, why do I gotta think about it?

MELFI: That’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mystery of god, or whatever you want to call it, of why we’re given the questionable gift of knowing we’re gonna die. Do you feel like Frankenstein? A thing lacking humanity, lacking human feelings?

I sometimes think it’s a rip off to be the type of person who is obsessed with mortality and riddled with existential dread because it doesn’t make a difference in the end. The blissfully unbothered and the curdled nighttime cowards all end up in the same place it’s just the latter have to spend the trip there in a panic.

About a year ago Michelle was teaching a unit on crayfish to her third graders and so she went to the fish store or whatever the fuck it is and bought some and got the thing to put them in and set it up in the classroom and they were supposed to take care of them for the rest of the year. One of them came without any hands though so the rest of the crayfish turned on him I think it’s a him and they bullied him to the point that she had to take it out and put it into its own space. At the end of the year the rest of the piece of shit crayfish either died or were sent home with students I forget that part but now the one crayfish nerd lives at our house and it sits in a little aquarium where it has a fancy stone pineapple it hides in. After a while it grew its little pincher hands back. We dumped food into the water and it turned that food into new hands.

I just went to dump a few pellets of food into the water and he’s hiding in there and when he sees you coming he’ll scuttle backwards so fast it almost looks like he teleports from one spot to the next. Sometimes he sheds his entire skin and then we both go and look like wow what the shit and then we come back and it’s gone because he ate his whole ass other body. We call him Survivor and he’s very lonely although we talk to him sometimes and I have existential panic attacks some nights when we can hear him scraping against the walls of his prison and I hope very much that its tiny fucking brain is too small to understand the concept of hell because if not he might think he’s in it.

This is an excerpt of the latest issue of Welcome to Hell World please subscribe here.

Everyone knows there’s a Dril tweet for everything that’s just how our brains are wired now but for me there’s one tweet that has become so reliable an illustration of how the centrist Democrat mind works that it’s long since become hacky to even use it which those of you with Twitter Mind Damage will know as maplecocaine.jpg.

luke o'neil on Twitter

Altogether way too many occasions to do this

The most recent instance of this was a week or two ago when someone went to the Washington Post and pitched an idea to the editor and the editor said sure that sounds good to me let’s see it and then they wrote a piece about how, yes, Mike Pence’s wife Karen better known as Mother was in fact working at an elementary school that explicitly bars LGBTQ employees and students but isn’t it nice that as a woman she’s able to go back to work?

I bring that up because I was wrestling with the concept behind the joke when the news dropped that the Supreme Court would allow Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military to go forward. This is obviously offensive to any person of decent conscience of course and I am fully supportive of inclusion and acceptance, but wait, I thought, why should I care about this particular issue, isn’t it something like saying:

Make 👏 the servants👏 of bloody 👏 American empire 👏 more inclusive. 👏

After some reading around I came across a piece by writer Laurie Charles that addressed this head on.

“There is no better PR for the modern imperialist adventure than a bit of ‘pinkwashing’ — the act of a company or government institution presenting itself as LGBTQ-friendly in order to downplay or distract from oppression it causes,” she wrote. “Wealthy nations with a big financial stake in the military industrial complex depend on pinkwashing to justify violence they inflict abroad as well as on their own citizens.”

Sort of like when the NFL pretends to care about breast cancer and domestic violence for a month by putting on pink socks or whatever.

“Anti-imperialists are right to deride such violent propaganda, and ultimately allowing trans people to simply to be tokenized by the military industrial complex will never be a pathway to liberation. However, it would be a terrible mistake to think that transgender representation in the military has no impact on our rights in wider society,” she went on.

Raquel Willis on Twitter

I have major critiques of the military industrial complex, but no one can deny how this - once again - signals to others that it's OK to discriminate against trans folks. Trump's attacks on marginalized communities continue. https://t.co/aQJMTzmb5D

Essentially the idea is that by letting the government experiment with such exclusionary practices in an area that is clearly given so much prominence the end result is expanding those harmful ideas outward into other parts of society. Much as we might wish it were not the military is still a pretty big deal vis a vis American norms.

It’s something others who are attuned to these issues and from whom I’ve learned a lot like Parker Malloy have been busy and exasperatingly repeating all week on Twitter.

Parker Molloy on Twitter

Basically: even if you don't care about the military/don't like the military, you should still oppose this policy because it's very clearly just going to open the door to even *more* discrimination (if they'll trash "the troops," the'll have no qualms trashing the rest of us)

Indeed as we speak lawmakers in Utah are trying to legislate the official existence of trans people out of existence by making it illegal to change a person’s given biological sex on a birth certificate.

Masha Gessen wrote thoughtfully on her experienced being misgendered throughout life in the New Yorker this week as well.

In Trump’s America, she wrote, “Even those who are not affected by the Supreme Court decision have been reminded once again that our rights can be taken away at any time, on a whim — that the widespread impulse toward gender-policing has the force of the highest branches of government behind it.”

Transgender service members have been speaking out against the illogic and curelty of the ban this week and hoping to talk to one I came across the story of Riley Dosh, who is, she says, the first openly transgender graduate of West Point to be discharged from the military.

Dosh was honorably discharged after she graduated in 2017 and denied a commission she had very much wanted since she was young, caught between enrolling during the Obama era and graduating after Trump had taken office and set his sights on rolling back his predecessor’s policies. I spoke with Riley about her experience coming out while at the prestigious military academy and how Trump’s tweet-fart-born policy has effected her life and the lives of her fellow transgender military hopefuls.

What was your reaction to news from the Supreme Court today?

Well I didn’t think I’d have to be rehashing arguments for why tans people should be in the military but here I am. I knew the Supreme Court was going to say something about it. I thought they would either take it up or return it to lower courts and at least put an injunction on the policy instead of allowing it to go forward.

Read the rest at Hell World and subscribe.

I wrote this in December of 2017 for the Nieman Lab future of media predictions and with the recent news about even more layoffs at digital media companies I thought I’d repost it here since it seems like it’s going pretty much as I guessed so far! Sub — and I cannot stress this enough — scribe to Hell World.

Here is how it will go. Men with no fewer than four boats and at least as many divorces, whose monetary interests are best served by going entirely unreported on, will continue to purchase existing media properties, either gutting them, running them into the ground, or rendering them effectively toothless, as we’ve seen with numerous alt-weeklies and newspapers throughout the country in the past few years.

Sometimes we won’t even know whose hand it is pulling the lever on the guillotine. The publications who would’ve reported on who bought the publications won’t exist anymore.

Dailies who aren’t already well ahead of the game in terms of reverting back to subscription models, or of significant enough national prominence, or don’t find their own relatively benevolent billionaire owner, will continue to either be neutered or flattened out by conglomerates into content distributors. The ones that don’t will buy some time, but will ultimately become vanity projects read only by people wealthy enough to remain interested in the superficial comings and goings of other wealthy people.

The internet will continue to become increasingly polarized to the point where we no longer merely dismiss the reporting from the other side that we find inconvenient, but we don’t even realize it exists anymore because they won’t penetrate our microscopically focused self-selected social media cocoons.

The last remaining source of local news will be the neighborhood-based Facebook groups people go to right now to complain about leaf-blowing imbroglios. Instead of asking what night of the week street parking is allowed, we’ll ask if anyone knows whether or not the rumors about the mayor’s horse-fucking dungeon are real, then we’ll be suspended for posting profanity.

With fewer checks on the remorseless, shameless, broke dicks on the local level, the worst people alive will graduate from their local grifting operations to the national stage unmolested by conscience or scandal, populating the halls of power with an even worse species of villain than we’ve previously imagined. Nothing anyone of us can now do will stop it. It’s too late. We’re pivoting and pivoting in a widening gyre.

There’s a trope in dystopian fiction and apocalyptic films where it’s almost worse to have survived for just a little longer than everyone else wiped out in the original disaster. Better to be consumed in the nuclear blast than to live rummaging among the ruins. Those of us still left in the business are the poor survivors. We’ve peered into the cannibals’ cellar.

What’s worse is that we are still pretending it didn’t happen. We’re fighting over pools of shit-water that have settled into the craters and bartering with dog meat under the mistaken impression we’re carrying the fire. On the plus side, there will be a lot more Stranger Things posts.

Hell. World.

The latest subscriber-only Welcome to Hell World is here please feel free to purchase a subscription to read it.

luke o'neil on Twitter

Today's subscriber-only Hell World is about the No More Deaths volunteers' conviction, the Boston Globe declaring racism over, MLK's thoughts on the bootless man, and sprawling wealth inequality. https://t.co/9YoXOg55r9

People like that think fairness is a synonym for justice but it’s not fairness is an impediment to justice a lot of the time. Fairness might be applying the law as it’s written about where and when people can drive onto a wildlife refuge to leave water behind but it’s not justice. Fairness might be treating people of different races equally in our personal interactions while ignoring systemic racism but it’s not justice. Fairness might be letting people who’ve amassed large fortunes keep their money because they worked for it after all but it’s not justice. Justice isn’t fair it’s just.

You’ll pay for this someday

The plan when I started Hell World was to eventually turn it into a paid subscription newsletter and I guess I should probably do that now. Not now now, but later this week. The idea is to charge around $5 a month or $50 a year if you pay upfront, although I kind of like the idea of charging $6.66 a month to stay on brand. If you have a strong opinion on that either way please feel free to email me and let me know. You can also email about anything else if you like but don’t be weird about it.

I will continue to post the occasional free email so those of you who can’t pay or don’t want to will still get a smidgen of my particular brand of horse shit on occasion. If you honestly can’t afford to pay and getting these emails is important to you for some reason or other you can let me know and we’ll figure it out.

A nice reporter from the Study Hall newsletter interviewed me yesterday to find out why a lot of people like myself are turning to newsletters lately and I told her a couple of things one of which is that I have never had a desire to start a podcast but this feels like that in a way. One thing we’ve seen from the boom in podcasting is that people are willing to support the people who make them that they like and trust and presumably some number of you will be willing to do the same for me. I can’t promise much besides one or two newsletters a week and also that I will never lie to you and I will never ever present both sides of an issue. I will present the real one because both sides is a fairy tale for cowards and businessmen. I also told her that the normal work I do reporting and writing for traditional publications is fine and good but a lot of times it feels like trying to make plans to go out to dinner and a movie with five other friends and no one really wants the same thing so you always end up compromising and being disappointed. When you are on your own you can do whatever you want. One time a guy wrote that hell is other people but I don’t think he was talking about freelancing. In any case I am sick of asking for permission at this point in my life. Sometimes they know what they’re talking about but they don’t tend to know what I’m talking about.

I’ve decided to throw my large hat into the email newsletter thing for some reason. Well, for a couple of reasons:

1) Facebook has become an increasingly confounding and unreliable platform for writers to share their work, and as much as I’m still surprised to see it, there appear to be a non-zero number of people out there who are interested in regularly reading my bullshit. So one aspect of this email newsletter will be compiling my work published elsewhere in any given week in a handy to delete email that you never look at. Here’s a piece on my colleague Judd Legum’s decision to start a newsletter of his own like this from Wired.

2) Many of you are not on Twitter, which is where I tend to share most of my quicker reactions to the news and jokes that will get me fired from jobs I don’t actually have, so in theory this will also serve as a means of bringing those of you without internet brain damage into the soggy trenches of my poison mind cavern with Twitter-like thoughts of the news of the day.

Luke O'Neil on Twitter

It is very hard being a straight white man seeing various rude posts about me occasionally and in no other facet of my life being inconvenienced

3) Depending on how things go, this should also develop into a platform for me to publish original essays and interviews. It won’t all be dispatches of misery and woe from Hell World either. Sometimes things are nice and I will gladly say so. Here’s a nice band. Here’s a nice TV show. Here’s a picture of a nice piece of fruit. Probably not that last one but who knows.

4) I could use a little extra money! It’s no secret, or it shouldn’t be, that trying to make a living in the rapidly imploding world of journalism and online media is becoming harder every year, as publications fold, or greedy, wealth-hoarding pay pigs buy off otherwise solvent publications and grind them into dust, extracting all of the marrow from their bones and discarding the remains into the giant invisible toilet known as the Economy. If all goes well I’ll be humbly asking you to toss a few bucks into the pot to access this newsletter. Some of you will do this, some of you will not, but it would be nice if you did! Maybe $2–5 a month? I slave over a hot internet all day for you nice folks that seems reasonable to ask. And if it doesn’t work we’ll all just pretend this never happened. Not my problem in any case.

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