"They are being forced to have quotas again. They are being pushed for numbers and quotas," the official said. "There is a demand for 2,000 a day. Leaders are being fired for bad numbers."

The insider described a workforce stretched past its limits. "They are canceling leave. Stretching the field thin. Pushing them to the extremes. It's a very bad, toxic environment. Morale is horrible."

It's the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

2. If you came here to improve your English, it's not helping yet.

3. He told me the story of the high school history teacher, Mr. M, who took a small group of 17-year-olds to Boston for three days ... and disappeared until it was time to return to Brooklyn.

The youths had fun.

I was disappointed with the fruits of my limited research here.

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, did not actually dress as a woman. When captured by Union cavalry in Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865, he wore his regular clothes with his wife's black shawl over his shoulders and a waterproof overcoat for warmth.

Despite the truth, the Northern press and cartoonists exaggerated this detail, circulating stories and popular lithographs that depicted him in hoop skirts, petticoats, and bonnets. This widely publicized caricature, immortalized in songs like "Jeff in Petticoats," was meant to humiliate Davis and permanently damage his reputation.

121.

Get out a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle. List all the ways the Republicans and Democrats are cultish.

When you're finished, fold the paper in half three times.

Bend over and insert.

Again, how can anything alarm his staff or anyone else at this point?

Which is why only death will bury Trump. Not anything in the Epstein Files. He's getting out of this life scot-free in his mind, as long as he's a free man when he dies, no matter how crazy he is.

Time for everyone to suck it up. Remember Rumsfeld: We're dealing with what we got, not what we wished we had.

My dear departed brother, in a high school international relations forum, drew Yemen to represent in 1973.

He promptly locked the Israeli delegate in a closet. True story.

I'd agree with him. Let investigative journalists track it down. The FBI's not doing much now.

Maybe they are human-shaped chalk outlines.

What I've wondered of late is: Who came here and established sock puppets almost immediately? And why?

90.

Oooh, Me, Mr. Kotter!!

Destroyed their brand, but people are still buying it.

81. I said here a few days ago that the South ended up winning the Civil War.

Dealing with the MAGAts and (religio)fascists hit home for us a few weeks ago when we returned to a big SE city to find our friends MAGAts and rabid Zionists.

Still love them, though. What can I say?

Back in 2021, guy showed up to our house to do some work after Biden won, wearing a Trump hat. I asked him to take it off. He said he wouldn't ask me to take off a Biden hat. I said my wife has dementia and we don't want her triggered.

Folded up the hat, put it away.

Easier to be human when one doesn't enter interactions with a poker up the ass.

In the desert? It's a desert. Plenty of dumb trumpers there who whine about california and cant afford to leave the desert, yet still don't want to move to the swampy southeast to be among more of their kind.

#70 | Posted by SpeakSoftly

Issue in this country isn't red/blue. It's urban/rural.

Speaks sounds more like Boaz, who presumes that drum-beating librulz in WNC got what was coming to them.

Yeah, Silicon Valley is nice work if you can get it. And Pacific Palisades, if you can get there.

What about the teachers who have to live in the desert just to get by?

By the way, my brother was an undergrad at Wash U in STL in the mid-70s. I felt right at home -- all the urban weirdness and decay of NYC, with back alleys.

And Cahokia Downs.

"If you don't care about outdoor recreation, the south is just fine."

The Great Smoky Mountains (TN) and the Outer Banks (NC) beckon. If you've never been to either, I'd highly recommend. You'll forget a lot of what you knew about southern climate.

42.

We have friends who were able to retire in the late 1990s. Could go anywhere. She's from New Hampshire and hasn't lost a touch of her accent in 80+ years: he's from Georgia. They met when she was an Air Force nurse and he was intercepting Russian radio transmissions over SE Asia.

Drove all over the East and settled in the Shenandoah Valley.

He's happily retired. His wife started working again, and has been at it 22 years, although not as a nurse.

Yes, the South can be very pleasant. Small cities too, not just the big ones.

I took a family of France once on a drive up 441 through Georgia from the Florida to the NC state line. For a group that thinks all of the US is Orlando, New York, and Hollywood, yes it was revelatory.

If you hate pine trees, stay away from Georgia. At last count, 4000 for every man, woman, and child in the state. What horrors.

Speaks, care to speak of conditions in inland California, aside from your idyll?

Calling all the South essentially unworthy of habitation is as dumb as saying [choose your US city] is a nest of left-wing anarchy and too dangerous even to enter.

I've heard that from seemingly intelligent people these days.

You can live in lots of the South and have plenty of land there and never encounter people you don't want to see, if that's your desire. If you have enough money to live on the Pacific Coast, you can set yourself up pretty well in the South, with all the modcons.

I lived in a place that was 70 percent Bush/Trump/Morgan Griffith and right next to East TN, which except for Dolly Parton and ETSU and some of Knoxville is pretty ignorant. I told Mark Warner back in 2020 that I wouldn't move a mile across the state line because of the crazy senators Tennessee has, and I'd take him and Kaine anytime.

As things got weirder, personally and nationally, I learned that to enjoy my own life and let others enjoy theirs, I had to get along with people. It's become a lot easier. I don't doubt it was messed up, but whatever made people Trumpers, they are still human. Except for maybe Trump.

In a grocery store parking lot couple weeks ago (Wegman's, so a pricey store for this area), I saw a young country white guy proudly displaying his truck and his flag and his Trump stickers, and my more peaceful 2008 Prius with a Buddhist bumper sticker was sitting next to his. I went up to unload my groceries, and he had his hackles up, expecting some guff. I smiled at him, waved, asked how he's doing, and he honestly returned the exchange.

Beats hate. Or dragging it around with you. Even for hours behind a keyboard.

PS, Eb: I'm not sure what you're getting at that it's a fact that I (mostly) agree with Speaks' policy positions, as much as I can determine them.

Everyone has their own way of presenting themselves. If I agree with someone, it doesn't mean I'd say it the same way.

But whatever your takeaway, that's fine. There are crazed rightwingers here I read with some delight, and one of my two plonks is someone whom I'd probably enjoy in person.

You can choose a place that is always humid and bug infested and gets occasional hurricanes and tornados, and I'll choose a place that has the best climate in the country and gets occasional wildfires.
At least CA has people in charge who want to address climate change, whereas NC is full of morons who call climate change a hoax and literally cosplay as confederate soldiers on the weekend.

#27 | Posted by SpeakSoftly

You're ignoring economics and structural poverty and a thousand other things you're usually here railing about, correctly.

People in Western NC, poor white generally (or in more well-to-do enclaves or compounds), don't have the option to "choose a place" like Pacific Palisades, or California in general, where housing prices continue to drive teachers out of cities.

Educate yourself, California:

>> Ironically, it was the NC mountains that were recently wiped away in a hurricane, not the CA coast.

I'd take what happened to people I know in Spruce Pine, NC, any day over what happened to people I know in the Pacific Palisades, and which events are forecast to continue there, along with wildfires, earthquakes, etc.

I grew up in New York City, went South in 1977, never returned, and New York would have been the logical course for my line of work. To each their own. No regrets.

==

And yes, Eberly, by reliable, I mean that I usually agree with Speaks' content and enjoy their perspective.

12 trumped your 11, loser.

Marx Brothers play bridge:

18. A usually reliable poster being irrational.

Have you ever lived in the South?

Do you think friends and contacts anywhere make it easier to live somewhere, especially when they are among the wealthiest people on earth who can afford every luxury?

And have it all wiped away in a mudslide overnight? No thanks.

And sure, I'd love to move to Uruguay. Or Amsterdam. Or maybe even back near the NC mountains.

But choice in life sometimes is limited by circumstances way beyond one's control.

That's how they got to be leaders, I'd guess.

Are the Democrats looking for some populist to rise up from the ranks?

Americans don't want democratic socialist populists. And white won't cover it.

There's probably enough marks for a class-action suit.

"private equity in youth sports"

Paging BellRinger for non-sequitur comment about locker rooms.