This evening, I smuggled Sprite into Rip-off-fest - continuing a proud tradition.
I didn't see any good temper tantrums at Rip-off-fest this year. Nothing like the time people got in a big argument over blankets. There was also nothing like the time a drunken woman rightly criticized George W. Bush for his fascism.
But I succeeded at my goal of soft drink smuggling.
The September edition of The Last Word is now pub!
It's our back-to-school issue! This ish talks about a flatulence-filled Tennessee trip, Kentucky's war against homeschooling, our struggle with Verizon, psychiatric fascism in Illinois, an altercation in a school library, Steve Kroft blowing a bubble, the decline of NKU, assorted corporate scams, and more!
So point your pooper here...
https://www.scribd.com/document/908696489/The-Last-Word-9-2025
If that doesn't work, blow a bubble like Steve Kroft and fly on over here...
Back in June, I partook in another Roads Scholaring in Cincinnati. The 20 photos it yielded were mostly on the north side of town and beam wildly at the world.
So peep them until your face flies off in public (as a wise man would say)...
Tyranny is on the march in Mason County.
Just northwest of Maysville, the county is trying to seize land from farmers and residents so a big electric utility can build a data center that would gobble up 5,000 acres - almost 8 square miles.
The data center would be run by East Kentucky Power Cooperative. EKPC is ostensibly a nonprofit utility, but the data center push sounds more like something from the most notorious proprietary companies.
The entire event has been wrapped in secrecy, as several county officials signed confidentiality agreements about the project. People who were approached about selling their land didn't even know what it was for until later.
This comes after state lawmakers and the Beshear administration passed a measure to give massive tax breaks for data centers. In addition, the Trump regime granted exemptions for utilities to release pollutants like mercury, which would otherwise violate federal regulations. What's the point in having regulations if utility companies can receive exemptions just for the asking?
These data centers primarily serve AI platforms of huge corporations like Google and Facebook. This is while flawed AI models are being used to police online content and determine eligibility for government benefits such as Social Security Disability Insurance. The data centers use huge amounts of power, strain power grids, and drive up energy costs for everyone else. If the Mason County project is built, its power usage is expected to grow 20 times in its first 5 years.
The county now says it won't use eminent domain to take the land, but don't laugh too hard at the idea of the government confiscating land for a private company. Virginia already abused eminent domain to give land to the politically connected Dominion Energy to build transmission lines for a data center.
Meanwhile, electric utilities keep giving deep discounts to data centers while hiking rates for everyone else. More handouts for big corporations. Imagine that!
We were absolutely flabbergasted to discover this, as it ranks right up there with Delaware towns giving voting "rights" to corporations (which the Nazis also did).
The Knoxville News Sentinel ran a story recently noting that the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, now enforces a property requirement to vote in city elections.
This unconstitutional rule allows those who own property in the city to vote even if they don't live there. This means almost 300 people may have been able to vote in Knoxville who do not live in the city, thus receiving special rights in violation of the "one person, one vote" principle. There are reportedly 2 other cities in Tennessee that practice similar discrimination. According to a Facebook post, one of the others is the small town of Lexington.
We're usually not big fans of "This time we mean it" laws, but we think it's time to amend the U.S. Constitution to reinforce the "one person, one vote" idea and bar people from voting in jurisdictions where they do not live. If that doesn't happen, the National Guard should be pressed into service to enforce fair voting rights. Barring that, the people should enforce the law and make citizen's arrests of election officials who participate in violating "one person, one vote."
Broward County, Florida, may be emerging as America's book banning capital. Public schools in that county are yanking 55 books off library shelves ahead of the new school year.
The books include a Judy Blume novel, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and a novel about a victim of human trafficking.
This follows a similar ban in Hillsborough County, where the school superintendent was quoted as saying, "When our '25-26 school year starts, I want to be assured that there is absolutely zero, none, zero inappropriate material in our libraries."
Why are we bringing this up? It's because these are big, urban counties that everyone acts like are so sophisticated. They're not small Rust Belt burgs or Montana farming counties. Broward has more people than Hillsborough, and in most of recent history has probably been the more authoritarian of the two on most major issues. Naturally, Kamala Harris won Broward by 17%, which suggests that the Democrats have become as much of a right-wing authoritarian party as the Republicans.
Urban sophisticates claim to be so liberal, yet they're out there burning books.
Gentrification. Bringing book bans to a city near you.
The year has been mostly a rainout, but on one of the few dry days of the year, I embarked on a Roads Scholaring in Latonia!
This event yielded 23 photos, and you can peep and weep here...
Corporate America has had a love affair with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear ever since he hamstrung the state with COVID totalitarianism that kept worsening even almost a year after a vaccine was introduced. This affair continued when Beshear approved further gutting of the state tax code - thus hitting poor and working-class Kentuckians harder. Then Beshear spoke before the far-right World Economic Forum, proving he was a cutout of that secret society.
Even the Kentucky Lantern seems to have had their fill of this poo-poo. A Kentucky Lantern piece reveals that big corporations have been heavily bankrolling Beshear's superPAC, which seems to be an exploratory effort for a possible presidential bid. Among the top donors to this superPAC is a big real estate developer.
Another is utility giant Louisville Gas & Electric. LG&E has been the target of complaints from customers who found that the company overcharges for electricity by overestimating their electric usage. One customer reported receiving a bill for over $600. Another said LG&E's parent company cut off their service in retaliation for complaining to the Better Business Bureau about bad service.
The superPAC has spent a lot of money propping up professional political operatives and consulting firms. It doesn't even do much to advance policies or candidates. The massive flow of money is what inspired Beshear's own right-wing policies. He's less right-wing on issues where there's less money to encourage him to be more right-wing.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that corporations can now give unlimited amounts of money to superPAC's. This bottomless spigot needs to be shut off lickety-split.
Last night, I had another funny dream. I dreamed I was back in 5th grade, and the teacher was out of the room all day. So someone wrote on the chalkboard, "I bet Oscar the Grouch's shit stinks from eating all that trash."
Posts
All Comments
