Hello, friends,
I hope you’re all doing wonderful this week. Last week, we talked about how companies like Disney and WB are cannibalizing their movie-and-other properties to get tax writeoffs. This week, I haven’t found anything in the news that really calls to me as commanding a full-length article, and while I want to rant a bit about some situations, there’s nothing that constitutes a deep dive today.
Instead, today we’re going to talk about a few of our past articles and how things have progressed on them. By the way, if you’re new here, we do a little of this every week at the end of every article, but some weeks are just weeks to review.
If you want to see future articles and deep dives, please mash the subscription button. The Progressive Cafe is free and always will be, but we’d love to reach fifty subscribers before our first birthday on November 11th!
Now, let’s talk about Fani Willis, someone I generally respect, and something she did that disappoints me.
Fulton County DA Fani Willis Declines To Charge Three U.S. Senators.
For those who live under rocks, ex-President Donald Trump and a bunch of his allies have been accused of trying to pressure Georgia Secretary Of State Brad Raffensberger into finding Trump more votes.
So, look, all due respect to Fani Willis for indicting Trump and a bunch of his allies, but I had been wondering why South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham wasn’t indicted for trying to pressure Raffensberger alongside Trump. I figured maybe the Grand Jury didn’t return the right approval of such a thing.
Well, now it turns out that the Grand Jury in question did, in fact, return a recommendation of charges against Graham - AND against both of Georgia’s then-Senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Now, I’m not a lawyer, but there might be strategic reasons Willis didn’t charge them. One of them might be the Speech and Debate Privilege, which basically means, “Hey, if you’re an elected official and you ask a question and/or state an opinion, you’re protected from most legal trouble because that’s your job in service to the people.” It’s meant to be a shield to make sure elected officials who say unpopular, even questionable things are protected. It’d be like trying to charge a political with drug offenses for advocating the legalization of cannabis or something - something this publication advocates for, by the way.
I would really love to hear her reasoning as to not charging them. It seems clear to me she’s not concerned with her prosecutions appearing political, in no small part because Republicans will turn any investigation of them into a political persecution, which is not the same as a prosecution.
But until I do, I’m disappointed that she’d let them off the hook. It’s a two-tiered justice system, alright - it just favors the wealthy and powerful. It further entrenches the power of elected officials to attempt to overthrow our government - something which, I don’t know if you know this, is really bad.
Louisiana Ordered To Remove Youth From Adult Prisons
According to the Louisiana Illuminator, a judge has ordered that the state must cease housing juvenile offenders in - and I had to check this multiple times to make sure this is right - the former death row of the Angola State Penitentiary.
So they took children and put them on a literal death row in order to, I guess, scare them straight? Or, do you think that maybe such harsh treatment will leave psychological scars that are hard to heal and further fuel unacceptable behaviors? Given my background in education, I can tell you that, yeah, this is a bad policy.
I guess this practice being shut down is a baby step towards criminal justice, although it falls vastly short of the goal of prison abolition, which this publication supports.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where children aren’t put on death rows?
The U.S. Is Doing A Molten Salt Reactor Project
Back in February, we talked about how the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor might be part of a solution to our ever-worsening global climate crisis. Yesterday, one of the Thorium Facebook groups I’m part of shared a post by the U.S. Department of Energy that included a job posting for a director of a molten salt reactor (MSR) program.
This kind of came out of the blue. A quick Google search provides little by way of information on MSR projects. I can’t say if this is going to be a Thorium-based fuel cycle or what, but it’s awesome that we’re FINALLY digging into a fuel cycle I’ve been writing into my science-fiction novels probably since Physics Incarnate.
This comes at a time when we’ve just experienced the hottest summer in recorded Human history. Some might think it’s too late to save us - and, yeah, the Clathrate Gun hypothesis might hang over our heads, we aren’t sure - but I cling on to hope (even if it’s just liquid hopium straight into the vein) that we’ll at least get this situation under control, slow the process of warming down, and - if the technology is in the cards - figure out a way to pull the carbon dioxide out of the air to cool us down.
The GOP Continues To Hate Queer People
The subtitle kind of says it all, but in the Republican plan called “Project 2025,” they intend to declare all Trans people “Pornographic.” Now, I want you to think back to our article discussing the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and how we were concerned that the concept of “harmful to children” might be applied to anything LGBTQIA+ and/or related to racial inequities in this country?
This is it. Project 2025 is the plan for a Fascist government, and it’s one reason why we need Democrats to stand strong and refuse to support KOSA and any other thing.
They cannot allow Republicans to frame the discussion because they will do so in a genocidal fashion.
The War Against Pain Patients Continues
We’ve talked before on this publication about the treatment of chronic pain in this country. Refusal to provide adequate pain medication is a system-wide point of failure that extends not just throughout the U.S., but internationally as well.
Recently, a young woman died of a genetic ailment. Stephanie Aston was an advocate for patients’ rights, a path that began for her after her symptoms were systematically dismissed by the medical community. She was accused of faking symptoms, including severe pain, meaning they went un-treated.
Back at home Michigan recently embarked on a month-long celebration of “Drug free pain treatment.” I guess they fail to recognize that some people have more pronounced injuries and symptoms than others.
As someone who needs a mild opioid to function due to a compressed spinal cord, I just have to say that I hope this sort of shit is fought against on every level.
We’re One Step Closer To Growing Human Organs In Animals
I want to leave you with something sweet, but it’s gonna be a bit bitter to start.
For those who don’t know, my father was a transplant recipient. He had Hepatitis C and his liver started failing him in 2012. I was unable to donate mine due to the distribution of my liver (most of it is on one lobe, and the other isn’t enough to support someone). He nearly died a couple times, but in December of 2014 he received a donor liver from someone who we can only profusely thank. Even though my father later passed in December of 2021 (he nearly made it to 7 years!), those extra years were in many ways the most important I could have spent with him.
Well, now we’re dawning on having the ability to grow at least some organs in pigs. While that still means we have to injure or kill a pig to get one, I am already a guilt-ridden carnivore, so this changes little for me.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.