Brian Thompson and his co-workers murder hundreds of thousands of people with systemic neglect, spreadsheets, and lawyers. They murder in broad daylight, during business hours. And yet they're comfortable, well paid, successful people who will never see a day in jail. What they're doing isn't even considered a crime.
I hope he doesn't get caught, also. Because the same laws that protect those fucking ghouls will crush him for bringing attention to the grift.
If anyone needs details to back this story up for jounalistic reasons or just fact-checking the barns were in Brooks Alberta in the early 90's and were owned and operated at that time by Lakeside Packers, and I'm happy to bring receipts. I can probably even bring up the old pay stubs via the CRA that show the year (and my corresponding age, by turn). Happy to fucking do it. The above and dozens of other horrors I witnessed working in that and similar environments as a young person haunt me to this day, well into my 40s.
Reach out.
I think the ag-gag piece is the real story here. I grew up (a zillion years ago... the 80s and 90s) in southern AB and my first paid job at 12yrs old was in a factory chicken barn for $12/hr, which was more at the time than mom was making as a union gov't worker in a hospital with many years of tenure.
My job was to walk the barns for the first 3 to 5 hours of every day, culling. My job was to kill chicks and full-grown hens (depending on the barn) that looked ill, deformed, or even just that moved slow or weirdly. My co-workers in this role were also 12. We were not supervised.
You can imagine a group of 12yr olds tasked with such a twisted thing, every business day for several hours per day. We grew bored of it. We normalized it the same way the (so-called) adults who placed us into these roles normalized it long before we ever got there, which is twisted as fuck on its own if you think about it.
We initially were taught to press the necks of the chicks/chickens against the rim of the buckets we carried to dislocate the spinal bones and crush the spine which was a pretty quick and obvious death for the birds, but it didn't always go as planned. Obviously some fought, or others you felt what you thought was the neck snapping but it didn't in fact snap and the bird struggled and lived horrendously inside the bucket for an hour or more while others were piled on top of it.
As pre-teens go, we fucked around and found out. Eventually, working together in a group and being the young assholes that we were, we started gamifying it. In some cases I remember that we would find birds that "needed culling" and pick them up by their heads and swing them around with as much centrifugal force as we could summon until their bodies ripped away from their necks. The head would be in our hand, the body of the bird would go flying, blood everywhere. The lower part doing "the funky chicken". The game matured into us trying to hit each other with the bodies of the birds.
You can see the problem here, I hope. With 12yr olds being employed in such a fucking grim environment. With no adult supervision. In fact with wider community acceptance and even encouragement from a town of adults who didn't see any problem with it. And even further with poor parents who saw their pre-teen kid "gainfully employed" and already making "more money than them" for a summer job. They were fucking proud and even envious of us. My own stepdad tried many times to steal the money I earned at this, my first paying summer job.
TL:DR this shit is still happening in 2024, as evidenced by the current story linked from the post. Like actually fuck H5N1 in a real way. Why are kids working in these environments at all? And who the fuck accepts that agribusiness giants are allowed to influence laws that protect them from whistleblowing????
I had no smartphone or even access to cameras that weren't the size of lunch bags at that time. So the ag-gag laws in question are an obvious response to available tech and cultural norms shifting away from letting them get away with this shit. Anybody reading this thing should really wonder at how and why the younger generations and immigrants are being fucked with and silenced in such obvious ways in this era.
Fuck everything about this story from start to finish. Actually.
Her and her husband were sick af. It's good they got caught (relatively) early into their thing, they almost certainly would've continued on with that shit indefinitely if they could've.
Only two convicted murders but one of them was her own sister, Karla Homolka served 12 years and got out in 2005.
Fuckers can try. I wasn't directly involved in this but I grew to know personally David Arthur Johnston over (?) a decade ago who spent years in Victoria viscerally protesting right-to-sleep laws/anti-laws and finally won. Due to his tireless efforts, hunger strikes in jail, and community support he helped pave the way for homless people to pitch and sleep in tents for the night on any public property.
Don't like seeing poor people on public lands? Okay... be part of the solution.
That was his message. And here we are still working on the questions involved, and solutions. Good. As long as the convo is still active and we haven't given up.
Yeah I tried an @ and then some markdown and then just went hrrumphsend. Who'd have thought it's a bang?
Anyway now I know.
I'm going to pop into Boost's community and suggest they hardcode it in the edit-post modal or something for us lazy people. 🤣
Thanks. I tried to look up how to format it but failed. Will fix now.
Literally
I just read something the other day that a single query like this one burns enough electricity to charge an iPhone 100 times or whatever the hell. It sounds like hyperbole but I think that number is close.
This is how humankind ends. A guy asking a fucking computer to validate his insecurity infinite times. This is how ai ultimately destroys us.
Holy fuck 💀