I wonder… the impression I have is that the crisis pregnancy centers aren’t regulated much. What’s to stop pro-choice people from opening them and giving accurate advice about where and how to obtain abortions and just making it sound like they are doing the opposite? Getting funding from the anti-abortion folks would be a sweet bonus. You could design a script that would sound like you are warning against abortion, all the while you are providing information. Just a thought. 😈
Time to train women to be warriors as they were in previous centuries. We know they existed from grave sites that were wrongly identified as male. Better knowledge of human anatomy has corrected an error. Time to correct the error in thinking women don't have what it takes to be great fighters.
If they mean a baby that won’t have a horrific genetic mutation and/or won’t be at risk of losing a future pregnancy due to a horrific genetic mutation, then yes. I am trying to have a designer baby with IVF. Also, do they have any idea HOW FUCKING EXPENSIVE IVF is? No one’s doing it for shits and giggles ok a whim.
These people are deeply disturbed, and they keep pushing further and further, broadening the group of people they slander each time. When will a straw break the camel's back and they become so toxic that either voters desert Republicans en masse or Republicans disown them?
I haven’t wanted to say the fall of Roe could be good for abortion rights and bodily autonomy in the long run because it sounds insensitive to the suffering now. But I don’t think many Republicans really thought this through to the end. They’ve unleashed the crazy, and they won’t be able to pacify or control them. Plus, people always galvanize when they are suffering. If we can avoid becoming a fascist theocracy in 2024, we have a real shot to ensure bodily autonomy and abortion rights nationwide. The right keeps going more and more extreme. They are turning off some of their own voters. But I despair that we are living through this.
It seems like the MAGA bunch actually *likes* the crazy. We’ve become so polarized that the more moderate branch of Republicans, horrified by Trump & Co., still can’t seem to break away from the party. I hear a lot of them suggesting that even if Trump is the nominee, they’d write in someone else rather than vote for Biden - which I absolutely can’t understand. They know that doing so will make it easier for Trump to win, but either they don’t care, or they want to remain ‘loyal’ to their party, and are counting on everyone else to vote for Biden. This is a recipe for disaster.
I grew up in New England, however, so my understanding of “moderate Republican” is a bit different. Mitt Romney was about as far right a Republican as could get elected in Massachusetts, and even he knew better than to buck the state legislature. I wouldn’t have voted for him, but he didn’t terrify me. Obamacare is basically Romneycare - Massachusetts developed the program while he was Governor. Charlie Baker, the last Republican governor of MA, was, from all reports, a good guy, and not at all extremist - he got good marks from my Dem friends in the state for the way he handled the pandemic. The state has a habit of electing a very solidly Democratic legislature, and a Republican governor. The electorate considers that checks and balances, and it works pretty well.
When Trump was elected and let the crazy off its leash, I was really surprised by how little pushback he got from his own party. I honestly thought that the kind of Republicans I’d grown up seeing in Massachusetts would revolt - only to find that either they no longer exist, or they’re mostly just as revolting as the rest of them.
If someone asked me to bet I'd say that this drags on. We avoid the fascist theocracy next year but we don't get the trifecta for a long time either :( I'd like to be wrong though.
True. But abortion taboos are one thing; now (as predicted) they're openly going after IVF and birth control. Roe was Republicans' best political friend because it kept a lid on these people, something that Republicans clearly can't do themselves.
This is supposed to be the one issue that's toxic for them. They don't think they can win without these crazies, so they keep indulging them, but since they're crazy they have no interest in things like electability (or democracy for that matter) and so every time they open their mouths the strategists cringe. At some point it's got to hurt them on the other end of their spectrum. I suppose they see the writing on the wall which is why they're trying to plot a post-democratic United States.
As I always say, "Every abortion begins with sperm". Perhaps if people can't produce sperm, they will realize how ridiculous it is to minimize someone down to their reproductive capacity, as well as the value of infertility treatment.
I am absolutely not joking when I tell you that this past legislative session Kansas passed a law defining men and women as people who produce sperm or people who produce eggs. Our governor vetoed sb180, but our insane legislature overrode her veto . The idea is to attack trans persons, but it puts the entire definition of my being on my former capacity to make eggs. I'm past menopause now. Does that mean I'm no longer a woman? Hardly.
We really need to pull out what I call the petri dish pictures, the pictures of pregnancy at various early stages, over and over and over again. Every time they say 'baby' or 'person' we pull it out and say 'this is what they're calling a baby'. We have to challenge that language, every single time, and maybe by the thousandth time the message will start to get through to the public that these are crazy people who make stuff up.
I also have great images of various animals including dogs, chickens and humans at similar gestational ages in the early first trimester and they all look remarkably similar. I did a talk once for a group that was considering whether to vote for that heinous State constitutional amendment, and I flashed those images on the screen and I said "okay we're going to play a game: which one is the human?" No one could tell
The quote describing the vice-president as attack dog has all the right (i.e. wrong) policies listed, but we still have to watch the messaging and the messengers. Harris' numbers are slightly worse than Biden's; she doesn't appeal outside the base. So by all means use her to rally the base, but remember that there are a shit ton of voters in the middle of the electorate many of whom have voted Republican in the past but are (or would be) alarmed by the abortion bans, the book bans, the guns, etc. It's important to speak to these voters in ways they are open to and can understand. So for example we wouldn't want to use a word like 'patriarchy', not because it's not a real problem (it most definitely is), but because any time we sound like left-wing academics they tune us out and think we're "just as" extreme as the fascists (another word not to use) that we're trying to stop. Two track messaging is important; one message for the base, and another message for the voters who aren't ready for that yet.
Bingo, Zach. We need to find a messenger that appeals to them. Kamala Harris is, as traditional for a VP, a great messenger to the base.
But we have the opportunity to expand this way beyond the base. I wish we had a prochoice Republican woman who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth, and be blunt about it.
In my experience with voters in this group, they pretty much hate women politicians and won’t listen to them. And I still say Biden needs to lead the charge.
I just don’t think Biden will lead it. Partly because he’s still an institutionalist, and sees the attack dog role as belonging to the VP, and partly because while I believe he is absolutely pro choice from a legal perspective, he is still not comfortable with it on a personal level.
I have a friend like this. She’d never vote for a forced birther. She absolutely understands the need for abortion, not only in cases of medical complication, but because she believes women should have the autonomy to make their own decisions. If her daughters got an abortion, she’d be there with chicken soup and love. Hell, she offered to go with me when I had the abortion 20 years ago. But she isn’t comfortable with the language around abortion, and she’d just make a lousy spokeswoman for it - I know she cannot imagine herself ever choosing abortion voluntarily. She lost a child at 7-8 months - I don’t know whether they induced labor, or performed surgery to remove the fetus. Like a lot of women, she doesn’t see that as a situation in which she had a choice, and she wouldn’t label it an abortion.
Biden can probably speak to voters like her effectively, but in doing so, he’d turn off a lot of voters like you and me - and unfortunately, there’s a slice of voters on the left who already lean away from him because he isn’t far enough left for them. Many of those folks voted third party last time.
Younger voters, especially, don’t understand the pragmatic art of compromise. I’ve lost track of how many of them who have said they’re tired of voting for the lesser of two evils and just refuse to do so anymore. (I bite my tongue to keep from saying “yeah talk to me about tired in 40 years.”)
My politics are to the left of the Democrats, but I recognize that the country runs better when it is governed from the narrow slice of center left/center/center right. Unfortunately, the Overton window has slipped so far to the right since 1980 that what I think of as center left is now considered communism. I blame the Democrats for allowing that. Reagan and the rise of the religious right scared the hell out of them, and they ran to the right as fast as they could. “Ending welfare as we know it.” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “Defense of Marriage Act.” “Safe, Legal and Rare.” They lost the plot in the late 80s/early 90s, and by the time they realized how badly they had screwed up, it was too late.
Senators Murkowski and Collins both voted against the last bill that would have codified Roe. They said they didn’t like the provision that would have forced Catholic hospitals to provide vide care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. Murkowski said she would support No Labels if Manchin ran for president. All three of these folks are Catholic, and Manchin is anti-choice.
Yes. I tend to keep Murkowski in mind because I think she's more sincere than Collins, and under the new election system in Alaska she gets more support from Democrats than from Republicans. But yeah the question was finding a strong pro-choice Republican woman, and there aren't good answers, yet anyway; maybe someone will emerge as the situation keeps getting worse. The women who filibustered in South Carolina are notable.
I saw that Kansas bill which establishes life at conception and makes destruction of frozen embryos a federal crime. It is the trigger law which would have gone into effect had the "Value Them Both" (insert vomit emoji here) amendment been added to the state constitution. It didn't get out of committee and would have been vetoed by our Governor if it had been passed through both the house and the senate. Here's my take, though... how many of those legislators and their families have benefitted from infertility treatments? How many children and grandchildren of those posers would never have existed except for their Reproductive Endocrinologist's intervention? It's not a small number, I guarantee it. This is sickening posturing and will drive infertility specialists out of my state. Mark my words. (Betsy Wickstrom, High Risk OB practicing Maternal Fetal Medicine in the greater Kansas City area for over 30 years)
For many issues, the right does what is convenient and best for themselves while forbidding others from doing it. Not just health care but financial things too.
There are already for profit prisons for immigrant kids. The companies that run them put the kids in tents and strip malls. Their reimbursement rate is the rack rate of a nice hotel room. It is easy to see a business in warehousing unwanted kids.
Remember Pres Bush the younger snowflake adoption campaign? His administration allocated some millions to Christian adoption agencies to promote people adopting frozen embryos. Don’t know their outcomes. They commodified embryos but didn’t give the couples who created them any price subsidies. Given the alacrity that these groups are lobbying to make women give birth no matter what, I’m thinking they will charge some handling fee and commodify infants just like the pre ROE days. Just a theory but the elements are being set in place. Less desirable kids will just go to foster care or orphanages like in Romania. Under these laws women are already chattel. The effect is that
If you believe this source https://heavy.com/news/john-roberts-family/, they have two adopted children who were adopted as newborns. There is a puff piece in USA Today from 2006 (https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-25-roberts_x.htm) that confirms the same story. Both Roberts and his wife were raised Catholic. The whole snowflake thing makes me want to gag. I am an adult adoptee and really hate it when people appeal to adoption as an argument for taking away women's rights.
"These groups say the quiet part behind anti-abortion measures out loud: during the panel discussion the moderator (Baptist pastor Derin Stidd) asked, “Why do you all hate women?” The men laughed in response."
The true face of anti-abortion. FYI a quarter of women have had abortions. Another 20% have had miscarriages which are indistinguishable from abortions. These men would undoubtedly kill nearly half the female population if they could. They are literal psychopaths.
I posted that article, complete with that exact quote, on the facebook page of our Kansas nonprofit (education, awareness, activism) The 802 United. Terrifying.
Remember "The Handmaid's Tale"? (It was in the book, but I don't know if it was in the television series.) Old/sterile women either were forced to become collaborators (the Aunts) or were shipped off to do things like clean up radioactive waste pits. Add in poor living conditions, no protective clothing, poor food, etc, and their life expectancy would have been in weeks or months. So, no reason for them to stop at killing off half the female population.
I also highly recommend the novel "Widowland" (and its sequel, called "Queen High" in the UK & "Queen Wallis" in North America) by C.J. Carey, which imagines a world in which Britain capitulated to the Nazis in 1940... kind of a cross between "Handmaid's Tale" and "Fatherland" by Robert Harris. Women are classified according to their physical attributes and fertility. Beautiful, fertile, young women are at the top of the scale, as are mothers of four or more children. They get more rations, better housing, better jobs, etc. Childless women & widows are considered the lowest of the low, forced to do manual labour, live in crumbling ghettos and subsist on meager rations. Much of the story is based on real plans the Nazis had for Britain. It's chilling (but also inspiring).
I wonder… the impression I have is that the crisis pregnancy centers aren’t regulated much. What’s to stop pro-choice people from opening them and giving accurate advice about where and how to obtain abortions and just making it sound like they are doing the opposite? Getting funding from the anti-abortion folks would be a sweet bonus. You could design a script that would sound like you are warning against abortion, all the while you are providing information. Just a thought. 😈
Justice Barrett seems to think that babies are a commodity and can just be passed on.
We had excess embryos but didn’t want some random people taking them.
Thanks.
"prohibits the centers from making false and misleading claims."
Shouldn't that be illegal giving false medical info?
You'd think...
Time to train women to be warriors as they were in previous centuries. We know they existed from grave sites that were wrongly identified as male. Better knowledge of human anatomy has corrected an error. Time to correct the error in thinking women don't have what it takes to be great fighters.
The guy arguing with the Obgyn on Facebook....... this made me feel legit *tired*. How do you even begin to snuff out this kind of misinformation?
Not just a guy, but a politician talking to his own constituent.
If they mean a baby that won’t have a horrific genetic mutation and/or won’t be at risk of losing a future pregnancy due to a horrific genetic mutation, then yes. I am trying to have a designer baby with IVF. Also, do they have any idea HOW FUCKING EXPENSIVE IVF is? No one’s doing it for shits and giggles ok a whim.
These people are deeply disturbed, and they keep pushing further and further, broadening the group of people they slander each time. When will a straw break the camel's back and they become so toxic that either voters desert Republicans en masse or Republicans disown them?
Hope very soon but there already have been signs in the Kansas vote and the Wisconsin one.
I was hoping Trump was that straw, but no low is too low it seems.
I haven’t wanted to say the fall of Roe could be good for abortion rights and bodily autonomy in the long run because it sounds insensitive to the suffering now. But I don’t think many Republicans really thought this through to the end. They’ve unleashed the crazy, and they won’t be able to pacify or control them. Plus, people always galvanize when they are suffering. If we can avoid becoming a fascist theocracy in 2024, we have a real shot to ensure bodily autonomy and abortion rights nationwide. The right keeps going more and more extreme. They are turning off some of their own voters. But I despair that we are living through this.
Andra, I despair as well.
It seems like the MAGA bunch actually *likes* the crazy. We’ve become so polarized that the more moderate branch of Republicans, horrified by Trump & Co., still can’t seem to break away from the party. I hear a lot of them suggesting that even if Trump is the nominee, they’d write in someone else rather than vote for Biden - which I absolutely can’t understand. They know that doing so will make it easier for Trump to win, but either they don’t care, or they want to remain ‘loyal’ to their party, and are counting on everyone else to vote for Biden. This is a recipe for disaster.
I grew up in New England, however, so my understanding of “moderate Republican” is a bit different. Mitt Romney was about as far right a Republican as could get elected in Massachusetts, and even he knew better than to buck the state legislature. I wouldn’t have voted for him, but he didn’t terrify me. Obamacare is basically Romneycare - Massachusetts developed the program while he was Governor. Charlie Baker, the last Republican governor of MA, was, from all reports, a good guy, and not at all extremist - he got good marks from my Dem friends in the state for the way he handled the pandemic. The state has a habit of electing a very solidly Democratic legislature, and a Republican governor. The electorate considers that checks and balances, and it works pretty well.
When Trump was elected and let the crazy off its leash, I was really surprised by how little pushback he got from his own party. I honestly thought that the kind of Republicans I’d grown up seeing in Massachusetts would revolt - only to find that either they no longer exist, or they’re mostly just as revolting as the rest of them.
If someone asked me to bet I'd say that this drags on. We avoid the fascist theocracy next year but we don't get the trifecta for a long time either :( I'd like to be wrong though.
True. But abortion taboos are one thing; now (as predicted) they're openly going after IVF and birth control. Roe was Republicans' best political friend because it kept a lid on these people, something that Republicans clearly can't do themselves.
Umm, never? The second is more probable. The Rethug Party has already disowned some of their own. (Example: Log Cabin club types.)
This is supposed to be the one issue that's toxic for them. They don't think they can win without these crazies, so they keep indulging them, but since they're crazy they have no interest in things like electability (or democracy for that matter) and so every time they open their mouths the strategists cringe. At some point it's got to hurt them on the other end of their spectrum. I suppose they see the writing on the wall which is why they're trying to plot a post-democratic United States.
As I always say, "Every abortion begins with sperm". Perhaps if people can't produce sperm, they will realize how ridiculous it is to minimize someone down to their reproductive capacity, as well as the value of infertility treatment.
I am absolutely not joking when I tell you that this past legislative session Kansas passed a law defining men and women as people who produce sperm or people who produce eggs. Our governor vetoed sb180, but our insane legislature overrode her veto . The idea is to attack trans persons, but it puts the entire definition of my being on my former capacity to make eggs. I'm past menopause now. Does that mean I'm no longer a woman? Hardly.
Thanks, Grace! Good job today, as always.
💛💛🫶
We really need to pull out what I call the petri dish pictures, the pictures of pregnancy at various early stages, over and over and over again. Every time they say 'baby' or 'person' we pull it out and say 'this is what they're calling a baby'. We have to challenge that language, every single time, and maybe by the thousandth time the message will start to get through to the public that these are crazy people who make stuff up.
I also have great images of various animals including dogs, chickens and humans at similar gestational ages in the early first trimester and they all look remarkably similar. I did a talk once for a group that was considering whether to vote for that heinous State constitutional amendment, and I flashed those images on the screen and I said "okay we're going to play a game: which one is the human?" No one could tell
Brilliant indeed 👏
That is brilliant!
The quote describing the vice-president as attack dog has all the right (i.e. wrong) policies listed, but we still have to watch the messaging and the messengers. Harris' numbers are slightly worse than Biden's; she doesn't appeal outside the base. So by all means use her to rally the base, but remember that there are a shit ton of voters in the middle of the electorate many of whom have voted Republican in the past but are (or would be) alarmed by the abortion bans, the book bans, the guns, etc. It's important to speak to these voters in ways they are open to and can understand. So for example we wouldn't want to use a word like 'patriarchy', not because it's not a real problem (it most definitely is), but because any time we sound like left-wing academics they tune us out and think we're "just as" extreme as the fascists (another word not to use) that we're trying to stop. Two track messaging is important; one message for the base, and another message for the voters who aren't ready for that yet.
Bingo, Zach. We need to find a messenger that appeals to them. Kamala Harris is, as traditional for a VP, a great messenger to the base.
But we have the opportunity to expand this way beyond the base. I wish we had a prochoice Republican woman who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth, and be blunt about it.
In my experience with voters in this group, they pretty much hate women politicians and won’t listen to them. And I still say Biden needs to lead the charge.
I just don’t think Biden will lead it. Partly because he’s still an institutionalist, and sees the attack dog role as belonging to the VP, and partly because while I believe he is absolutely pro choice from a legal perspective, he is still not comfortable with it on a personal level.
I have a friend like this. She’d never vote for a forced birther. She absolutely understands the need for abortion, not only in cases of medical complication, but because she believes women should have the autonomy to make their own decisions. If her daughters got an abortion, she’d be there with chicken soup and love. Hell, she offered to go with me when I had the abortion 20 years ago. But she isn’t comfortable with the language around abortion, and she’d just make a lousy spokeswoman for it - I know she cannot imagine herself ever choosing abortion voluntarily. She lost a child at 7-8 months - I don’t know whether they induced labor, or performed surgery to remove the fetus. Like a lot of women, she doesn’t see that as a situation in which she had a choice, and she wouldn’t label it an abortion.
Biden can probably speak to voters like her effectively, but in doing so, he’d turn off a lot of voters like you and me - and unfortunately, there’s a slice of voters on the left who already lean away from him because he isn’t far enough left for them. Many of those folks voted third party last time.
Younger voters, especially, don’t understand the pragmatic art of compromise. I’ve lost track of how many of them who have said they’re tired of voting for the lesser of two evils and just refuse to do so anymore. (I bite my tongue to keep from saying “yeah talk to me about tired in 40 years.”)
My politics are to the left of the Democrats, but I recognize that the country runs better when it is governed from the narrow slice of center left/center/center right. Unfortunately, the Overton window has slipped so far to the right since 1980 that what I think of as center left is now considered communism. I blame the Democrats for allowing that. Reagan and the rise of the religious right scared the hell out of them, and they ran to the right as fast as they could. “Ending welfare as we know it.” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “Defense of Marriage Act.” “Safe, Legal and Rare.” They lost the plot in the late 80s/early 90s, and by the time they realized how badly they had screwed up, it was too late.
I’m rambling, I’ll shut up now.
Needing Biden worries me. He's pretty good at governing but I just don't know if he can handle the salesman to the public part of the job.
Yeah, closest I can think of is Lisa Murkowski. If I were Senate Democrats I would be talking to her every day.
Senators Murkowski and Collins both voted against the last bill that would have codified Roe. They said they didn’t like the provision that would have forced Catholic hospitals to provide vide care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. Murkowski said she would support No Labels if Manchin ran for president. All three of these folks are Catholic, and Manchin is anti-choice.
Yes. I tend to keep Murkowski in mind because I think she's more sincere than Collins, and under the new election system in Alaska she gets more support from Democrats than from Republicans. But yeah the question was finding a strong pro-choice Republican woman, and there aren't good answers, yet anyway; maybe someone will emerge as the situation keeps getting worse. The women who filibustered in South Carolina are notable.
Unfortunately, even moderate Republicans don’t like her.
Idk, depends. She's still a Republican so there may be voters out there who think like her.
I saw that Kansas bill which establishes life at conception and makes destruction of frozen embryos a federal crime. It is the trigger law which would have gone into effect had the "Value Them Both" (insert vomit emoji here) amendment been added to the state constitution. It didn't get out of committee and would have been vetoed by our Governor if it had been passed through both the house and the senate. Here's my take, though... how many of those legislators and their families have benefitted from infertility treatments? How many children and grandchildren of those posers would never have existed except for their Reproductive Endocrinologist's intervention? It's not a small number, I guarantee it. This is sickening posturing and will drive infertility specialists out of my state. Mark my words. (Betsy Wickstrom, High Risk OB practicing Maternal Fetal Medicine in the greater Kansas City area for over 30 years)
For many issues, the right does what is convenient and best for themselves while forbidding others from doing it. Not just health care but financial things too.
There are already for profit prisons for immigrant kids. The companies that run them put the kids in tents and strip malls. Their reimbursement rate is the rack rate of a nice hotel room. It is easy to see a business in warehousing unwanted kids.
If you are female you are already receiving substandard medical care.
Well-said!
Remember Pres Bush the younger snowflake adoption campaign? His administration allocated some millions to Christian adoption agencies to promote people adopting frozen embryos. Don’t know their outcomes. They commodified embryos but didn’t give the couples who created them any price subsidies. Given the alacrity that these groups are lobbying to make women give birth no matter what, I’m thinking they will charge some handling fee and commodify infants just like the pre ROE days. Just a theory but the elements are being set in place. Less desirable kids will just go to foster care or orphanages like in Romania. Under these laws women are already chattel. The effect is that
Isn't one of Justice Roberts' children a snowflake baby?
If you believe this source https://heavy.com/news/john-roberts-family/, they have two adopted children who were adopted as newborns. There is a puff piece in USA Today from 2006 (https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-25-roberts_x.htm) that confirms the same story. Both Roberts and his wife were raised Catholic. The whole snowflake thing makes me want to gag. I am an adult adoptee and really hate it when people appeal to adoption as an argument for taking away women's rights.
This makes me ill. I know you’re right.
"These groups say the quiet part behind anti-abortion measures out loud: during the panel discussion the moderator (Baptist pastor Derin Stidd) asked, “Why do you all hate women?” The men laughed in response."
The true face of anti-abortion. FYI a quarter of women have had abortions. Another 20% have had miscarriages which are indistinguishable from abortions. These men would undoubtedly kill nearly half the female population if they could. They are literal psychopaths.
I posted that article, complete with that exact quote, on the facebook page of our Kansas nonprofit (education, awareness, activism) The 802 United. Terrifying.
Why would they stop at half?
Remember "The Handmaid's Tale"? (It was in the book, but I don't know if it was in the television series.) Old/sterile women either were forced to become collaborators (the Aunts) or were shipped off to do things like clean up radioactive waste pits. Add in poor living conditions, no protective clothing, poor food, etc, and their life expectancy would have been in weeks or months. So, no reason for them to stop at killing off half the female population.
I also highly recommend the novel "Widowland" (and its sequel, called "Queen High" in the UK & "Queen Wallis" in North America) by C.J. Carey, which imagines a world in which Britain capitulated to the Nazis in 1940... kind of a cross between "Handmaid's Tale" and "Fatherland" by Robert Harris. Women are classified according to their physical attributes and fertility. Beautiful, fertile, young women are at the top of the scale, as are mothers of four or more children. They get more rations, better housing, better jobs, etc. Childless women & widows are considered the lowest of the low, forced to do manual labour, live in crumbling ghettos and subsist on meager rations. Much of the story is based on real plans the Nazis had for Britain. It's chilling (but also inspiring).