In which politics is broken.

Periodically, I write to my representatives about something or other.

After some time, usually several weeks, I get an email, usually titled “Responding to your message,” which is always a form letter outlining the rep’s stance on whatever the issue is.

Their previous stance. They never indicate that my opinion as a constituent will affect how they legislate or vote at all.

I recently wrote about student loan relief. One of my reps responded with something soft about student burdens and then some vague shit about trade schools. (Specifically: “Trade schools, which generally cost less than do those offering a four-year degree, should be supported along with other types of post-secondary education. Such schools provide access to well-paying jobs usually with a lower burden of long-term educational debt. I am working to encourage and improve such offerings.”)

I… don’t care about which sort of college people went to? Doesn’t matter if it’s a state, trade, or ivy. I don’t give a fuck. I want student loan forgiveness. You’ve just said your response to student loan forgiveness is UTTERLY UNRELATED NONSENSE ABOUT TRADE SCHOOLS and A LOWER BURDEN OF DEBT, which means you’re not going to vote the way I fucking want you to.

People who want to go to trade schools should absolutely go to trade schools, literally nobody disagrees with this. Jesus fucking Christ, you moron. What we want is for it not to be obscenely expensive!

I understand staffers count the number of contacts that are either pro or con on any particular issue, but the canned responses never indicate that knowing what their constituents want actually impacts how our reps do their jobs at all. Except maybe briefly, in election years.

in which i wish i could trust the society i live in to not be ignorant fuckheads.

went to the store today and a shocking number of people were unmasked, like at least 20%

saw three tweets tonight about breakthrough covid. one has damaged lungs, a damaged heart, and is in kidney failure.

went to the cdc site and i’m eligible for a booster, so i scheduled one for next week.

up to half the people who come into my workplace are either entirely unmasked, or they unmask to eat

i’m not high risk, like, i’m not immuno-compromised or ill, but jesus christ, no vaccine is perfect and any one of these fuckers could be asymptomatic and this disease KILLS perfectly healthy people all the time

in fact, if you’re unmasked i just assume you are a carrier and stand as far away from you as i can because your lack of masking probably indicates that you’re not doing anything at all to stem the spread of this disease

covid will never be over, because a third or more of the country “don’t believe” that covid is destroying people’s organs and over a thousand are DYING every day, we’re literally having a 9/11 every single fucking day but people think it only affects sick and fat people who somehow are disposable? what if i happen to LOVE somebody who is ill or old or fat but otherwise has a perfectly normal life expectancy, do they deserve to die because YOU won’t get your shots or wear a fucking mask?

the new normal is that you or someone you love might come down with covid and in the space of a month need organ transplants or be dead, because society just won’t comply with SIMPLE mandates: vaccinate, distance, mask, and wash your fucking hands

this shit is not a cold or flu, it’s putting people, including children and athletes, in the ground every single day

and it’s unutterably disgusting that for many, a death is ONLY sad if the person didn’t have pre-existing conditions. tons of people have pre-existing conditions (because thanks to science, we live with them now rather than die from them)

a person with a congenital heart defect is not less valuable than you, nor is somebody with diabetes, or someone on blood pressure meds, or with asthma, or ANY CONDITION AT ALL. they deserve to live just as much as you do. i mean, how valuable are you to society? what do you do or give that makes you deserve more to live?

probably not much.

if you’re healthy, it’s not a virtue. it’s not your smoothie habit or exercise regimen, it’s not your idiot herb supplements, it’s your genes and your environmental experiences. it’s a combo of luck and privilege. and if you live long enough, you WILL EVENTUALLY develop a so-called pre-existing condition, dumbass.

and you may be against “big pharma” now, but one day, if you don’t die suddenly or in an accident first, you’ll see the results of your blood draw and they’ll tell you that you need meds to LIVE, and you’ll fucking take them. it could be anything from high blood pressure to cancer, but you’ll take the meds. everybody does BECAUSE the morality of capitalism in medicine, while a big goddamned problem politically, becomes irrelevant when you’ve got something that can be managed with meds but will otherwise kill you.

anyway, get your vaccinations and boosters. wear your mask. avoid crowds. wash your hands. just don’t give me covid, because there’s a small but non-zero chance that it might fucking ravage my organs and/or kill me because sometimes that’s what happens because vaccines are not perfect: that’s why EVERYBODY NEEDS THEM to STOP THE DISEASE

you ignorant, insular, selfish fucking cunts.

in which this was gonna to be a twitter thread but it got too long

remembering how broke i was my whole adult life (basically until entering middle age), and how i accumulated debt just being alive because it cost more to live than i ever earned, and how jobs have steadily degraded since i started working, i cannot even fathom how fucked it must be to be 20-something now

jobs REALLY suck now, and there’s no memory of prosperity or meaningful growth, just the mindless, cancerous greed of mega-corps

there are two reasons and two reasons ONLY that i’m doing okay now, and they’re entirely good luck:

– i spent my 40’s living with a relative for free, so i paid off my debt instead of paying rent and utilities
– i lucked into a partner who has more earning power than i ever did

i can now buy groceries without first checking my balance, i can buy clothes i don’t strictly need, and i can even take modest vacations

i have no wealth and no equity (i’ll die if i get truly sick), but i have more than $400 in savings

i consider myself rich because i can donate

i was born into the upper middle class on one side, and lower middle class on the other, but my parents slipped some, briefly, when them not being poor too would have helped me A LOT (college years, mostly) probably due primarily to divorce, and i slipped even further into, at one point, homelessness

because i never had any savings until about five years ago, and i’m 53 now

they keep talking about nobody wanting to work, but places like mcdonald’s and walmart literally have departments that teach their underpaid, no-benefits-having employees to apply for services like ebt and state health insurance

once you discover the hard way that getting a pittance of a raise kicks you off state insurance, why work at all? if you’re really poor, you can get things you can’t get working full-time in a lot of jobs: food stamps and basic health care

if you’ve worked any modern corporate job (walmart, home depot, mcdonald’s) with low pay, a toxic environment full of constant reminders that you’re replaceable, meaningless weaponized metrics, no bennies, random scheduling so you can’t do anything else (like go to school, raise your kids, or attend a funeral), time off requests routinely denied, you know it’s better to just not fucking work

you’re already poor even while working full-time or more (far too many americans have multiple jobs in an attempt to stay above water), might as well get rid of the stress of a shitty, abusive job, right? at least you can continue your ramen diet while reading, painting, or doing something that makes you mildly happy

i don’t blame anybody, especially in food or customer service, who have worked throughout the pandemic and now know that society considers them BOTH “essential” and disposable, who isn’t fucking working, fuck those jobs, fuck corporate america, fuck billionaires

In which I admit it, I’m feeling despair.

Multiple airlines, who want bail-outs because of the pandemic, have announced they won’t be requiring staff to vaccinate. This makes me glad I chose not to fly out to DC in October to visit my friend Stephen.

No, it makes me angry. Fuck those fucking dipshits. I haven’t had a vacation in two years. I could fucking cry, really, but there you are. We were going to go to his cabin and eat and drink and chill and it was going to be restorative and fun and lovely, but nah. I’m going to take a week off and DO NOTHING, IN MY GODDAMNED HOUSE, IN THE SAME GODDAMNED BUILDING I’VE BEEN IN FOREVER. I need a vacation, I really do, but Jesus.

Spread of Covid in Oregon is heartbreakingly, unnecessarily high. The governor is expected to announce a new mask mandate tomorrow.

Everybody who works at Fox is vaccinated, no matter what incendiary, evil bullshit they say on the air. It’s publicly documented. You can see fucking photos of many of them getting their shots after a second’s online search. But they say the most horrific shit to their viewers, literal lies or weasely “I’m just asking questions” bullshit that a lot of people frankly aren’t intelligent enough to see through.

One in four hospitalized with Covid in Arizona, which has already started school, is under twenty years of age. Yes, KIDS GET IT. Whoever told you kids don’t get Covid fucking LIED TO YOU.

DeSantis is literally killing his constituents, live, in real time, and… nobody’s doing anything about it? But he also wants 600 ventilators and a bunch of ICU nurses, because everything’s fine and Covid isn’t really a thing? HOW IS THIS FUCKING HAPPENING. HOW. HOW THE FUCK IS IT HAPPENING.

Several states have no hospital beds left because they’re all full of unvaccinated Covid patients. People ask why they don’t just “put up tents” like they did last year, but “hospital bed” doesn’t mean the literal, actual bed: it means equipment and, more importantly, qualified staff.

The staff that aren’t already dead due to lack of PPE are quitting in droves, because they’ve been in the trenches for over a year and they’re demoralized and exhausted. It’s too much to be intubating unvaccinated people who insist they DON’T HAVE COVID, BECAUSE THEY DON’T BELIEVE COVID IS DANGEROUS, or, perhaps worse, people who beg for the vaccine now that they are personally sick enough to “believe” in it, even though it’s far too late.

Every local and regional news tweet about Covid or Covid policy has hysterical, ignorant, enraged, racist replies underneath it. “Fake news!” they scream. Or “this is because of illegal immigrants!” Or “Covid isn’t dangerous, this is all lies!” I recently read an anecdote by a nurse describing a nurse educator who honestly believes that leaving milk in the hall outside the doors of the Covid ill will attract and trap the virus.

Fucking IMAGINE an adult, with a job in healthcare, no less (!!!) fucking thinking that’s how anything works! Civilization is FUCKED!

Don’t even get me started on the ‘zombies’ bullshit. Anti-vaxxers are fucking wrong and should, under no circumstances, be entertained or allowed in debates or considered in any way whatsoever, full stop.

There’s a doctor that has been tweeting Covid dead for the past year and a half. Just little blurbs, but each one IS A DEAD HUMAN BEING. Now he’s got threads of dead children, dead pregnant women, and dead Covid deniers who recanted on their literal deathbeds and begged people to get vaccinated. I never watch those videos.

A million fucking people are dead, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and WORST OF ALL: surviving Covid is often worse than dying of it. This disease does permanent damage to organs. This disease causes fucking brain damage.

But a full third of the population refuses to know any of this, because they’ve been fed some incredibly insane bullshit by Fox or whatever they’re poisoning their minds with. I don’t know why right wing media wants its viewers to be poor, get sick and die, but it clearly does. It lies, literally outright lies, and I can’t figure out why it’s not being stopped. These outlets are tearing society apart, fomenting hatred, deliberately and with malice misinforming the population on everything from a deadly motherfucking disease to immigration, and nobody in authority is even acknowledging it.

For the past month, I have been the only person wearing a mask where I work. (For reasons I can’t explain even to myself, I’ve only been wearing it in the shop front, with customers, and not in the kitchen with co-workers, but shit, my co-workers are just as likely to turn me into a carrier as customers. None of them are distancing or masking, and I’m not even sure they’re all vaccinated.

I worry about this not just because I don’t want to accidentally infect somebody’s unmasked child while handing it some cheese or ice cream, but because there’s evidence you can get long Covid even if you’re vaccinated and asymptomatic. I emphatically do not want that.)

Based on the maps, Umatilla county is lousy with Covid. The mask mandate NEVER should have been lifted. These fucking people drive massive trucks they don’t need, carry guns they don’t need, and have a collective IQ of nine. They’re full of hatred, selfishness, distrust, and racism. I mean, most of them are fine, one-on-one, for a short conversation, but they don’t even know how much they don’t know about reality.

The bar across the street from the cheese shop has been fully open for awhile now. I know this because the new bartender comes in all the time for lunch. He doesn’t wear a mask.

The world is on fire. Russia, Lebanon, Greece, the United States. All burning. Here, we’re on our, what, fourth? fifth? heatwave of the year. Drought everywhere, flooding everywhere else. Shit is VERY, VERY BAD, but everybody’s just trying to get back to their normal rate of obscene consumption of resources. Just look at fucking truck ads, for fuck’s sake.

We’re having a crisis of compassion. We’re having a climate crisis. We’re having a crisis of civic duty. We’re having a crisis of venality and greed. We’re having about twenty crises at once. I’m sitting here in my air conditioning, feeling like a bloated tick on the skin of the world because I honestly can’t figure out what to do to help. I try very hard not to be the problem, but how does one become part of the solution? I can see clearly what’s needed, but I’m none of the things that one needs to be to do any of what’s necessary: stop the filibuster. Kill the police and fund non-military responses. Cut the military by 75%. End the industrial prison complex. Mandate national Covid responses. Universal healthcare. Make healthcare non-profit. End all monopolies and monopsonies. Tax corporations. Tax the rich. House the homeless. Decriminalize drugs. Build high speed rail. Stop pipelines. Enforce anti-pollution policies. Fund the IRS. Fund the FDA and get all those snake oil ads off the air and out of print. Prosecute everybody associated with the insurrection. Prosecute Trump’s entire thing. Make it illegal for anybody in any public office to accept anything whatsoever from anybody because OH MY FUCKING GOD THE SHIT THESE ASSHOLES VOTE FOR. Spank Wall Street into a snotty, cowering mess.

Just for a start.

I don’t know how anybody can look at any of this, let alone all of this, and think it has nothing to do with them. OF COURSE IT DOES. If you get sick or injured in the next, say, year, you might not be able to get a hospital bed in time to save your life. Because either the beds will be filled with terminally ill Covid-deniers, or there just won’t be any qualified fucking staff, because society is so fucking broken that they’ll all be PTSD-ridden and homeless, or they’ll have been fucking deported for being “foreign.”

Maybe where you live isn’t much affected by climate change, yet, but somewhere nearby is, and the people who will be shortly driven from there will be in your fucking neighborhood, and you’ll have to deal with it then. And your ONLY CHOICES will be to either fucking help, like a decent human being, or hate them because you’re a goddamned ignorant, selfish coward who lacks the intellectual capacity to understand that it WILL be you next. One way or another.

We’re all in this together, and while it’s been, for a long time, possible to ignore it, let me tell you: the bill is coming due, motherfuckers. You have to love, and you have to care, and you have to do better, because we’re entering several extinction-level scenarios simultaneously. Disease, climate catastrophe, and worst of all, unchecked, unmitigated Mammon-worship.

There has got to be a way to stop so much of society from being totally fucking evil, doesn’t there? Imagine extracting wealth from healthcare and somehow sleeping at night! How the FUCK is that even possible? How is it a thing that there’s an entire insurance apparatus that just dictates life-or-death outcomes in ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS for profit? It’s absurd, and yet there it is. How the FUCK is it that we send brainwashed, indoctrinated, armed soldiers to handle things like mental health crises or stolen cars in our cities and towns? How the FUCK is it that Congress just orders billions and trillions of dollars worth of war machinery that even the armed forces publicly admit they don’t want, just to line the pockets of the military industrial complex, and we all know about it and NOTHING IS DONE TO STOP IT? How the fuck is it that our society supports brutally razing homeless camps instead of, you know, giving them somewhere to fucking LIVE? We’re at the point where many of us actively hate people less fortunate than ourselves, and we don’t even question WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US?!

If you ever find yourself hating, the very first thing you should do is ask yourself why, because the two worst things are hate and greed, and WE ALL KNOW IT.

A thousand times this.

In which fake news must be regulated.

In yesterday’s paper, there’s a Dilbert strip in which Dilbert says he “hates people” so much he doesn’t wash his hands, and hopes he’s an asymptomatic carrier of a deadly disease.

The strip’s artist is a man called Scott Adams who has, I regret even being aware of, publicly fallen down the Fox News/Breitbart/Q rabbit hole. I have no idea who or how he was a decade ago, nor do I care, but today he’s a rabidly pro-Trump, hateful, ignorant white nationalist more famous for saying awful shit online than drawing a comic.

It’s my opinion that all these media companies should be strictly regulated. Fox isn’t a news channel, it’s an opinion channel. It does not adhere to ethical reporting standards and has, as far as can be observed, never intended to.

Watching Fox News as one’s primary source of news turns a citizen into a fearful, angry idiot. It means that they “know” and “believe” a shocking volume of things that simply are not true or didn’t actually happen in reality. This makes these citizens, in my opinion, ineligible to vote.

If you “believe” that viruses aren’t real and that it’s fine that over 560,000 Americans are dead of a preventable disease, you’re not a competent adult.

If you “know” that the horrific number of mass shootings are a reasonable price to pay for… for… for, well, anything, you’re not competent. You’re a fucking sociopath. The second amendment does not mean that idiots can run around with weapons, killing and maiming others at will. Thinking that that’s what it does mean makes you… well, an idiot.

Read this Twitter account, Well Regulated Militia. It’s just an endless scroll of stories of people shooting themselves and others with guns they never should have had in the first place. I mean, we’re a population that can’t be trusted with lawn darts, and yet guns are fine?

These entertainment editorial platforms need to be regulated. They must be required by law to label themselves as entertainment and not news. They are deliberately misleading people and fracturing society. Because of them, people hate the Fourth Estate, because they lack the ability to tell the difference between reportage and editorial. It’s a massive fucking crisis and must be addressed.

I realize the IRS doesn’t go after rich tax evaders because it can’t afford to. I realize that the FDA doesn’t police ads for supplements as it should, for the same reason. (Print, TV, and online ads for unregulated garbage making insane health claims are utterly rampant. It infuriates me, because it’s just making the population dumber.) Trump’s administration gutted a massive amount of oversight in industry. The country’s organs of regulation are all but useless (rich people gonna loot and pillage, after all) but we have got to get them all properly staffed and budgeted ASAP.

We have the money. There are absolute fucktons of money, we’re just siphoning it off into the offshore accounts of the upper eschelons because we lack, apparently, the will to make this rapacious theft stop.

Vote in every local election (these are the ones that really matter). Subscribe to your local paper. DO NOT WATCH FOX, unless it’s just your mostly-harmless local affiliate’s local coverage. Be angry that there are homeless people in your community, not because you’re disgusted by them but because, in a rich country, the only reason anybody’s fucking homeless is because your asshole Puritan ancestors decided that poverty was a moral failing and not ultimately an indictment against society’s empathetic failings. Laugh at the war on drugs. Be offended by warlike language used by the police. Know that cops ARE NOT SOLDIERS and vote down any police funding requests for tanks and other weapons of war.

Shit is pretty awful these days, because a third of the country thinks guns and extra-judicial murders-by-cop are acceptable and that wearing a mask is, bafflingly, a violation of their rights. It’s going to get much worse.

Oh, also: kill Citizens United. Enforce anti-trust laws. Break up ALL the monopolies. And tax professional sports; I can’t fucking believe pro football is tax exempt, that’s a fucking racket. Also tax every penny every church has that isn’t spent directly on domestic charity. Megachurches should be illegal, or at least heavily regulated. And representatives at all levels of government should be heavily fined for refusing to show up in order to deny quorums. End the filibuster. Uh, what else? Drastically change police mandates and fund the ever-loving shit out of replacement entities to handle domestics, drugs issues, homelessness, etc. You don’t send a fucking armed soldier to get some unhoused out from under a goddamned bridge. Oh, and fuck car culture. Every single community in the country should require businesses to remodel existing structures whenever possible before building new, brutalist, sprawling, shitty buildings out on the highway that can only be reached by firing up a car or truck. Outlaw the modern SUV truck; those things are monstrous and ugly and they have such high windows and broad hoods that drivers can’t see anything closer than 23 feet away, which is why they keep killing pedestrians and cyclists.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m going to go ride my bike now.

In which… yeah, idk. It’s a new year. Arbitrary date. Whatever.

I sleep a lot because what else is there to do! Still scrolling Twitter and Instagram and watching massive amounts of streaming TV. Still not reading or knitting or painting. My mending basket looks exactly the same as it has forever.

I cook, work, and do chores. That’s my entire life. Occasionally I attend a virtual satsang or retreat, which is really nice and I’m super grateful for it but still, it’s just me sitting on my living room floor in front of the TV watching a live YouTube stream.

In the past, oh, six months or so, I’ve had a few days of swollen lymph nodes, but like I’ve said before I think it’s related to a dental infection I haven’t yet had addressed. (Specialist is in Walla Walla, transpo’s a bitch. Normally I’d just catch a ride and while away the extra time in a bar or coffee shop, but there’s a pandemic on.)

Last Wednesday I had that tight lung feeling you get right before you wake up sick with influenza, but it went away without getting worse. It’s the second time that’s happened. I don’t know if it’s an immune response or maybe from chain vaping too much. It makes me wonder, though, if I’m asymptomatic — people come into my shop unmasked all the fucking time, plus all my co-workers have other jobs, school, and families. I’m living in rural Oregon and see fewer people in half a year now than I did in a week back in Minneapolis, but I’m still indirectly exposed to hundreds of people I don’t know, and any one of them could be sick.

Last year I went to the dentist for the first time in years and discovered my root canal had failed, which resulted in three more appointments: one to repair the root canal (a fourth root had to be cleared out), another to fill the crown, and then another to replace the crown when it cracked in half. I’ve been stabbed with needles at least two dozen times, since each appointment required full numbing. So many needles, Christ.

At the crown replacement appointment last week, the nurse sneezed. Twice. She was wearing a mask and a couple feet away from me at the time but I was lying there in the chair thinking, “Well, that moment right there could be me dead.” It’s a weird way to live, with the knowledge in the back of your head that anybody you interact with could potentially kill you.

I read a lot of medical Twitter and it’s fucking awful. Hospitals all around the world are over capacity, which means if you get in a car accident or have a heart attack, you might not get treatment. So even if you avoid COVID-19, it might kill you anyway.

Then there’s acute Covid. Click this and read the thread to get scared shitless:

And Long Covid? Holy shit. Organ failures. Amputations. Strokes, embolisms. Breathlessness. Fatigue. It’s looking like for each of our 350k dead, there are another 16 or so who may be permanently disabled? (That’s 5,600,000 possibly PERMANENTLY DISABLED FROM COVID-19 IN THIS COUNTRY ALONE so far.) And motherfuckers are out there refusing to wear a piece of cloth over their faces?

I can imagine being disappointed, after decades of, say, zealous survival prepping, that your moment of sacrifice isn’t the zombie apocalypse, but merely a call to wash your hands. But holy shit these people are DUMB. AS. FUCK. They deny reality and fight about “the economy” like it’s a law of nature and not just a human construct. And the rampant ableism and willingness to sacrifice human life is truly disgusting: people with asthma and diabetes can live entirely normal lives with some drugs, they don’t deserve to die of a PREVENTABLE DISEASE because something-something “the economy” and “pre-existing conditions.”

Reading the Faces of Covid account should be fucking mandatory. It’s not “just” old people and sick people, it’s hundreds of thousands of people dead that shouldn’t be.

And then there’s a the vaccine rollout. So fucked up ALREADY that doses are spoiling before being administered, and so slowly that at this rate we won’t have herd immunity for seven more years.

Oh, and only $1,800 stimulus in NINE MONTHS. That’s it. It’s a fucking farce.

And here’s me, snug and safe. I feel weird about how protected I am during all this. I don’t deserve to be, considering I contribute fuck-all to the overall wellbeing of the world, but I have a small job in a small town, and so does my SO. We have plenty of money. We have a really comfortable home. None of this is hurting me directly, and yet somehow I can still have compassion for everybody else.

Uh, I own three tablecloths now. I really like having our own washer & dryer. I mastered falafel in the past year, as well as bread. I have discovered that I love French raclette. I got a raise. I bought some clothes I’ve always wanted (most specifically this, in cocoa!!! expensive as hell, but hand-made and I loooove it). I get three days off per week, like I’m some sort of goddamned royalty. My fountain pen collection is still cool as hell. Christmas was fine. My SO is walking around wearing his black & red bathrobe like a boss.

I don’t know. I guess happy new year and stay safe out there, babies.

Target pays low wages, withholds benefits, treats their employees and the communities they operate in like shit, and they store their (well, really our) wealth offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Ditto Walmart and Home Depot and all those other massive chains. FUCK THOSE BUSINESSES. THEY ARE NOT GOOD CITIZENS, AND THEY DO NOT DESERVE ANYTHING: Not our respect, not our protection, not our grief, and absolutely not our bailouts.

Fuck them. Fuck every one of those society-looting, conscienceless motherfuckers. They do not operate in good faith.

They’re the enemies of healthy society: they stand in clear opposition to prosperity, dignity, and beauty. Their business model is to suck wealth out of communities, destroying Main Street in the process, and have the government (read: us) subsidize them in two ways: welfare for their under-compensated employees, and tax cuts and bailouts for themselves.
Continue reading Why to ABSOLUTELY DO LOOT A TARGET →

In which it’s an intense time to be alive, no doubt about that.

The images that get traction are of broken-hearted wailing and absolutely JUSTIFIED rage; fire; despair. Cops acting as if the population they’re sworn to serve and protect are enemy combatants, and so hatefully indoctrinated they don’t know why that’s a problem.

The images of comfortable, wholesome protests, of community and support and love, get little to no coverage. If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead.

Far too much coverage of looting. Listen, when you never earn enough, have no healthcare, and live at the edge of homelessness in a grossly rich country that spends BILLIONS ON WAR AND COPS, why not take shit from a Target when shit’s on fire? If you don’t, it’s just gonna burn up anyway, why not get something to use or gift or sell?

I would, I absolutely WOULD loot a fucking Target if I didn’t have the support that I have — all of which is due to my luck, not my intrinsic worth. I don’t offer society anything of real value, and neither do most of you. The only reason I’m not looting a Target is that I don’t have to, and the reasons I don’t have to are luck and skin color.

Let them have their Martha Stewart lamps and bicycles and flat screens. What those businesses have stolen from us is much, much worse than that. Those businesses pay shitty wages, withhold benefits, treat their employees and communities like shit, and store their money offshore to avoid taxes. FUCK THOSE BUSINESSES, THEY ARE NOT GOOD CITIZENS, they’re not citizens at all, really, AND THEY DO NOT DESERVE ANYTHING. Not our respect, not our protection, not our grief, and not our bailouts. Fuck them. Fuck Walmart, fuck Target, fuck every one of those society-looting conscienceless motherfuckers. They’re enemies of society: enemies of prosperity, dignity, and beauty.

Five Black human beings have been found hung from trees in the past week. (Obviously, in light of history, this is not how any Black person suicides, ever.) This is absolutely fucking unacceptable and shows how deep racism is in this country. Fucking lynchings?!? I am heartbroken by how safe, comfortable whites are willing to just ignore the suffering of people JUST LIKE THEM who have more melanin. That’s fucking racism; it’s really not that hard to understand how running highways through affluent Black communities for decades might have had an effect on a population we’ve been so happy to ignore and push away unless they adopt our bullshit White saviour pseudo-Christian culture.

The population is acting recklessly in face of a killing global pandemic. This is entirely the fault of the current administration failing to bother to message properly.

Wear your mask. Stay in as much as possible. Wash your hands. Ignore the re-openings, IT’S NOT SAFE.

Trump is incapable of compassion, old, weak, dumb, venal, and ugly of heart. He is the reflection of the nation’s cumulative personality.

We’re risking millions of lives in the forms of millions of service workers because our society is broken, and I hate it. It breaks my heart that people too poor to not work have to work for CEO bonuses are forced to work. It’s slavery, but we pretend it’s a free market.

Walmart costs you, the taxpayers, billions of dollars annually because their MEDIAN PAY is under twelve bucks an hour. They literally maintain hotlines that assist their underpaid workers with their assistance applications.

The Supreme Court actually surprised me today, however; there is still hope that people, many people, do their duty for its own sake.

is on fire, and it’s a nuanced and complex situation ranging the gamut from genuine societal rage and a systemic cultural reaction to entrenched oppression, to boredom from lock-down, spring weather sprung, opportunistic bullshit by outside actors, and a pinch of actual anti-social behavior. (after all, young men aren’t known for their self-restraint in emotionally-charged mob situations, that’s why all nations use them as soldiers.)

now, [white and other privileged] people are blowing off all that complexity because they’re focused on how… holy shit commercial property is being destroyed!!!

really.

you think it’s fine for the state to REPEATEDLY use lethal force against non-violent black and brown and poor people, but god forbid anybody torch a fucking walmart? THAT’S what’s utterly beyond the pale for you? not the literal state-sanctioned brutal loss of human life without any repercussions, but destruction of… commercial property bothers you?

REALLY?!

people don’t destroy their communities; there’s no community there to destroy. there’s pan-national corporations sucking wealth up from the bottom to the top, shitty jobs, dangerous intersections, racism, stagnant wages, lack of health care, late busses, racism, shitty landlords, food deserts, class divides, racism… you can’t possibly believe that healthy communities fucking BURN THEMSELVES DOWN for absolutely no reason, can you?

no. you think they’re burning shit down because they’re, you know, just intrinsically LIKE that. them. not us, them. basically animals, which is why it’s fine to kill them

review your comfortable beliefs and learn about complexity, bitches: turns out you’re classists and racists.

In which I’m on about the anti-vax movement again because really can’t figure out how it attracts so many otherwise normal human beings. Like, most of the people I loved during my Fairfield/TM days.

No SHIT, right? Right?

Antivaxxers and alternative medicine quacks are attracted to simple solutions. Reinforces their worldview, which is that they’re personally capable of expertise without earning any qualifications beyond google university.

They don’t like complexity (unless it’s the pseudo-scientific nonsense they make up themselves), and they don’t like nuance or method. They like bad guys and easy solutions, they like victimhood and keeping their (almost overwhelmingly white, middle-class) privilege at all costs.

So we’ve got wholly unqualified keyboard warriors promoting a medicine they know fuck-all about for use in a disease they also know nothing about, because… they read some dumb shit in their online echo-chambers.

Which are supplement stores, by the way. That’s where they get it. Mercola, Natural News, whale.to, Oz, Chopra, Oprah, Goop: they’re all stores. It’s like getting your worldview and ideology from Safeway and then deliberately exposing your children to potentially fatal diseases because of something you read on a pop tart box.

Then there’s this: “President Donald Trump on Sunday once again touted the potential life-saving benefits of treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, a powerful anti-malaria drug, despite a dearth of medical professionals or clinical evidence supporting his claims. It just so happens that one of the largest manufacturers of the drug, Novartis, previously paid Trump’s now-incarcerated former personal attorney Michael Cohen more than $1 million for healthcare policy insight following Trump’s election in 2016.”

They’re literally supporting what they claim to hate, the whole “evil big pharma” thing. Mostly because they can’t discern between Citizens United fallout and, you know, the whole of scientific method.

What a time to be alive.