A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

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Are Black People Smarter?

Little bit of a land mine here, but I’m feeling insouciant today, so bear with me…  I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of Americans from all walks of life, and surely my impressions of that experience are tainted by biases.  Racists annoy the fuck out of me and are foolish as all hell; people who live on the receiving end of systemic racism have my sympathy.  I also relate a lot more to poor people than to the middle class.  So are my perceptions accurate?

There are standardized tests for “IQ” other cognitive faculties, and these have problems galore – not the least of which was their origin as a method for justifying racism.  I’m not even gonna bother with links; this shit is common knowledge among those nominally acquainted with the subject and with no delusions about their genetic superiority motivating the shit out of their reasoning.

But on a practical level, numbers aside, some people are just more thoughtful than others.  I characterize this as being willing to take new information on board, genuinely try to understand new things they encounter, and able to learn.

Ability to learn is a funny thing, because as we grow out of childhood, many of us handicap ourselves on purpose.  You mean I’m never gonna need this information again?  Fuck it, I chuck it, will re-learn as-needed.  I can feel that I did this to myself sometime around age 20.  While circumstance has pushed me into trying harder, I still allow myself the luxury of not learning shit, whenever I can.  There are people who either didn’t limit themselves in the first place, or are just more wise in how they apply that limitation, more able to get back into learning mode.

Willingness to try to understand new things is obviously a useful trait to have, but we don’t need it most of the time.  Our lives can be pretty damn simple in most ways, most of the time.  Whatever else is difficult about them, it isn’t the complexity of the problems in front of us.  It can get rusty, same as what I described in previous paragraph.  But I feel like this is a little different from that issue…  That’s about memorizing a new fact, this is about understanding why that fact is so – understanding a process.

The thing the reflexively ignorant don’t get is that understanding the process makes remembering the facts easier.  Like, remembering dates in history is rote, easy to lose.  Understanding what happened in sequence – what led to what – can make the simpler facts, like dates, easier to remember.

This is practical intelligence, not fancy logic or math or knowing big words.  A small child can be thoughtful, an adult can be thoughtless, and vice versa.  By this metric, I’ve spent a vast, unspeakable amount of time talking with thoughtless people, and less speaking with the thoughtful.  Of course, the average person is somewhere in between, but still shades toward the foolish side.

If I’m talking to an 89 year old who is still very sharp, it’s usually an upper class person with an ocean of privilege behind them, who worked in academia, finance, law, etc, on the pointy end of it.  That’s gonna shade white, tho not exclusively.  But stepping back from those rarities to look at people who are still very competent, who can look at a situation involving new information and deal with it, not shut down and get angry or cry about it?

Feels like the median black person is more intelligent than the median white people, in practical ways – which are the only ways that really matter.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with somebody that has advanced knowledge but can’t be fucked to understand anything outside that domain.  I want somebody that can be exposed to new information and understand it enough to have something to say about it.  That’s just conversation, but it’s indicative of the approach to other kinds of information as well.

It’s like white people feel more entitled to not have to think about things, to put that onto other people, and have anything they need sorted out for them with zero thought involved.  Black people are used to a society that is low key hostile to them getting their needs met in every way, cradle to the grave, so they need to be able to understand the shit that comes their way.

I might be remembering the thoughtless white people at outsized rates because of the biases I mentioned above, but also because they make a much more acrid stink about having their right to not have to think impinged upon.  I might be remembering black people who figured out some tangled bullshit at outsized rates because my unconscious bias is to assume them less intelligent, and it comes as a surprise when it should not.  I know there’s no way I haven’t absorbed that poison on a cellular level.

But I dunno.  Maybe black people are just better than us.

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Note:  If my comments are half as foolish as this post itself was, I’m gonna have to shut ’em down.  It could get offensive in a hurry.  For that matter, what I wrote could be pretty offensive to a reasonable person, and they don’t deserve to get upset because I thought it would be funny to upset unreasonable people, right?  In which case, sorry, and let’s just move along tomorrow.  I’ll leave this post up as a monument to my folly.

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Tvxnp Wants You Stuck in Traffic

There are about three million federal workers and more than half of their collective work hours take place in person – telecommute is common, but most telecommuters spend some amount of time in office; few are exclusively remote.  Sixty-one percent of work hours are in person, so using that an extremely crude proxy for amount of time spent in commute, something something,

Tvxnp🖤Mvksk want to put like 1.8 million extra drivers on the road during your daily commute, with all the attendant pollution we as a nation have proven to not give a fuck about, but also adding to congestion, which we do complain about an awful lot.  That includes people whose entire-ass job is being on the phone and computers, whose work is constantly tracked and monitored, who couldn’t be doing less work at home even if they wanted to.

It’s also making any federal jobs that had offered telecommute before suddenly a lot less appealing than their equivalents in the private sector, driving people away from agencies that are already understaffed.  This only makes sense in light of their overt not-quite-fully-confessed desire to destroy the entire US government, except for whatever apparatus funnels working peoples’ tax money into the bottomless tax credits and loopholes available to the rich, and except for the police and military which are needed to keep the proles in line.

Never change, shitheads.  Keep making everything worse for everyone in every way you can, why not?  It’s who you are.

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What Are You Doing for MLK Day?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  But if you can’t, I recommend watching Birth of a Nation (2016 of course).  This country is back on its bullshit and I think it can be useful, if you’ve got the heart for it, to look with unvarnished eyes on a realistic depiction of slavery.  It’s as horrible in that film as it should be in the hearts of all decent americans.  If you have to look at something horrible that day, at least it shouldn’t be the motherfucking inauguration.

Ah, today is the four year anniversary of the beer hall putsch, USA edition.  I can’t even.

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Write, Jan 17th-20th

In a profound insult to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a racist sexist classist know-nothing soulless shitsack con-man thug and dime store Hitler will assume the throne of the USA on MLK day, January 20th 2025 – soon to be known as The Day the Music Actually Died.  I don’t know about you, but I will not be paying the slightest bit of attention to it, or fucking anything that follows.  We know by the end of the week there will be about fifty executive orders making things worse for just everybody that is alive now or going to be alive for decades to come.  We will have all the time in the world to find out about these things as they fuck us over, so why speed-run our sorrow?

I don’t work Fridays and I have Monday the 20th off for the holiday, so I have a four day weekend.  I will be doing a speed-writing event with whoever is willing from my writing group – which is likely to be nobody but my husband, heh.  I will be attempting to finish a short novel in four days.  To facilitate that, I have done a lot of preparation and intend to do more – coming up with answers to any questions that might bog me down with research, coming up with names, outlining the plot more specifically than I might for a more casual paced event.

So.  Can you write around 12,500 words a day during that window of time?  Or just part of that time?  If not that ambitious, what could you write?  Might you be available?  It would be cool to have some solidarity on busting this thing out.

Another question for you:  Would you mind if I posted the whole first draft here as I wrote it?  I know some of you feel overwhelmed when I ramp up productivity for a minute, and just check out.  I don’t mind if I don’t get comments, or get them days or weeks later when you’ve caught up.  I do think it would be fun to post a big wild pile of unedited mayhem on here, but I don’t want to waste your time or my own if that’ll just hit like a lead balloon.

And with regard to the solidarity thing, you could post your first drafts in my comments.  Long posts will end up going to spam and need to be manually cleared so might not show immediately, but I will approve them.  Or you could post reminder links to somewhere else online where your words are posted.  Sharing your first draft is for egomaniacs only; it is showing your ass in the worst way.  I’d love to see it.  If you do post yours, I might not have time to read them until after the event, but I’ll read yours if you read mine.

Holla at your dogg.

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Edit to Add:  i forgot that critique is an implicit ask when posting something publicly.  if it helps you feel more bold in posting your stuff, we can make this officially “no critique” or “positive feedback only.”  it’s my house; i can make that happen for you.

Time to Form a Third Party?

More than usual, I’m amenable to hearing arguments in favor of abandoning the dems for a third party. If it was done on a large enough scale and fast enough, it could end-run the two-party stranglehold. If you do it on election eve 2028, bad timing. If you got way better than Green numbers well in advance, with a sufficiently bad-ass campaign, it might not be that hard to make a better showing than Harris, next time out. Her numbers were that miserable. These are radical times; radical things may happen.

I don’t have much to say on this right at the moment, and I know the conversation could get acrimonious, but if you can keep it civil, please speak your piece below. As much as I’m “vote dem or die” when there is no viable alternative in sight, it feels more possible than it has in a while that we could all just dust those fools off and do something else.

With dems acting the way they are now, we can be fairly assured of ten to forty years of fascist rule. If they changed their tune tomorrow I’d be open to hearing it, but they’ve been signaling a right-wing turn. What if we had somebody else, another party that wasn’t a fucking piss-take?

I will immediately return to “vote dem or die” if we get closer without a crushing success in building a replacement, so this is idle fancy. But get fancy with me for a minute.

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Mandate of Heaven, Evil Edition

Some prominent dems have signaled willingness to work with the repugnant.  Should they?  Or should they just stonewall and annoy, as much as is possible from minority positions?  I don’t know.  Yes, everything the nazis have said that they desire is literally evil, the kind of stuff that should be opposed by all decent people with everything they have.  On the other hand, this is what the US wanted.  The nazis have a mandate.

Literally speaking, it isn’t what the people actually wanted, right?  All the polls say those positions would fail if given simple majority polls of all people in the US.  But that isn’t how things work.  You have to vote.  This is the thing about red state people saying “my vote doesn’t count”:  Yes, it doesn’t decide the election, but it helps set the tone of the national conversation.  By not caring enough to show up, you said, “nazis, fuck it, take it all.”  Now they have, and they will get to goose step all over our asses, for as long as they can stave off self-destruction.

And it will have to be self-destruction, because without earth-shattering numbers of people voting blue next time, it will be impossible to break through the wall of voter obstruction they are going to erect the second they take office.  We know americans are too bitchy provincial and lazy to make that shit happen, so we are officially at T minus X days til more than a decade of fascist rule.

So what do you do, as a non-genocidal body filling the loser seat on Capitol Hill?  Oppose and obstruct as much as you can, or play some kind of ball?  If one of the ball-players manages to wheedle the fascists into being 2% less deadly to innocent people, that’s worth doing.  It will be degrading, humiliating, frustrating, and tragic to behold, over and over and over again.  So much failure ahead of them.  But still, some lives might be saved?

Any dems with that in mind are going to have to pick their battles.  Obstruct on some days, play ball on others.  It’s just how it is now.  At many times over the last few decades, it’s the way it has been – only now it’s a lot worse, and going to stay that way.  Meanwhile, smarmy anti-voting anarcho-fools will point to AOC signing off on some reprehensible bill as proof they’re all out to get you, even when it was the best thing she could do to eke out a better chance of survival for her constituency.

America didn’t want fascism, but didn’t know enough or care enough to stop it, and they will not have a choice next time around.  So for those of us who are vulnerable, it’s all about picking our battles.  For some, that will mean never coming out of the closet, leaving the country, shining stormtrooper boots on monday and trading illegal art on tuesday.  For some, it will mean joining La Résistance.  For many, it’s going to be some combination of the two.

At some point you’re going to be forced by circumstance to play nice with your mortal enemy.  (Black people have to do this every time they get stopped by a cop.)  Don’t let it defeat you, in your heart.  Keep keeping on, my friends.  Eventually, we’ll get through it.  And if we don’t live long enough to see the other side, we can still live well, in whatever ways we can find.  Power on.

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Sorry, I never explained the title.  It’s kind of obscure to most of us in the USA.  There is a concept from part of Chinese history that overlaps with mythology, that you can win the blessing of rulership from Heaven itself, if you get a cool magic artifact or whatever.  I half-remembered that when I thought about our incipient theocracy.  The dominionists threw a little lasso around the foot of a golden toad, and now they can ride behind him as he leaps across the night sky, raining despair and violence like sweat as he goes.  Blessed be.

Life List: Bald Eagle

When I first moved to a homeless shelter in Seattle as a child, I was given a book about wildlife.  Our Magnificent Wildlife, by Reader’s Digest books.  The cover was dark brown, with the lovely face of a bald eagle in profile.  The articles inside gave me some interesting bits of information, might have informed my worldview in some respects.  I do think they overemphasized the threat to animals posed by poaching – the number one enemy has always been greed, from colonialism to capitalism – thus giving lil me an outsized hatred of poachers.  In my mind they were white dudes in khaki pith helmets with elephant rifles.  Shit do be more complicated than that.  Still, that book was the first place I ever saw an illustration of a slow loris.  Love those guys.

Getting away from the topic.  Other than that book cover and images in media, I never saw a bald eagle until a certain zoo visit around age ten – and then only through the narrow slats of a fence.  My first wild sightings were much later, which makes sense – the population still had a lot of recovery to do, after depletion from the pesticide DDT thinning their shells.  Something I also read about in that book.

Now I know.  That eagle cry you always hear in Hollywood output is actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk*.  Bald eagles sound like the seagulls who get bullied by other seagulls for being too effeminate and silly.  Bad seagulls, leave those apex predators alone.  Incidentally, bullying is the easiest way to spot a bald eagle in the open.  Unless you’re in an area with a weak presence of corvids, you will hear the cawing of crows and see them fly aggressively, before you notice they’re doing so to harass a bald eagle.  The only times I’ve seen a baldy that wasn’t being tormented by crows was when the eagles had a flock of their own, or they were at some lonely altitude, far above the earth.

Bald eagles are known to join claws and plummet out of the sky, as a daredevil courtship maneuver, I think?  My dad said he saw some doing this over I-5, and they almost got hit by a car when they neared the asphalt.  It was visiting my dad, in a brief window of time when he lived on an Indian reservation in Snohomish County, that I got my best view ever of a bald eagle, perched briefly in a tree that had been stripped of all its low branches.  I also saw one even closer, more briefly, as it flew above his back porch there.  Majesty, yo.

In Alaska they are numerous around landfills and fisheries, seen as pests.  It’s easy to find video of this on youtube.  Big flocks, kinda cool.

Bald eagles are the symbol of Amurrica.  Love it or leave it, pal!  Hey, where are you going with my DDT, I need that…  Gotdam renevuers.  What was I saying?  Bald eagles are not very rare anymore, and that’s nice.  Look upon them and feel some type of way about where you are.  And wonder how long it will be before the tumorous-organ-in-chief mandates all factory farms switch to eggshell-destroying pesticides again.

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*I never recall hearing red-tailed hawks make that sound, as many times as I’ve seen them, until this year, when we went to a mountain on the Olympic Peninsula for part of our honeymoon.  At high altitude, they love to belt it out.  Only other soaring birds up there were ravens, that I saw.  Ravens surely harass raptors like crows do, but I didn’t happen to see it.  Probably because they don’t have as large of flocks.

Unimaginable Nationalism

Any kind of nationalism is kinda fucked up and weird to me.  Born and raised on stolen land, soaked in blood and slavery, the whole nine yards.  I don’t belong here but I don’t belong anywhere else either.  Citizen of the world?  Except you can’t be.  Every inch of every place that hasn’t had the natives fully eliminated is staked out, by people who would die for the dirt, kill for the dirt.  Give me this dirtpile or give me death.  But better to give you death, other people who I have decided should not be here.  Nationalism, like colonialism, is the seed of genocide.  Some flavors of it are so mild and banal that you could miss it, but it’s always there, waiting to blossom.

It’s especially wild to me that some people want to kill or die for land in the Middle East.  There are much nicer or more interesting deserts and plains and beaches, and most of them don’t have nearly as many genocidal terrorists or fascists, don’t have as many centuries of decapitations and flayings and immolation and destruction.  If any place in the world is hell, it’s the holy land.  If I was Jewish, I’d be glad to be nowhere near it.

Might feel some type of way about it, since the history of the shituation is very different from that of my ancestral island.  What would it be like, to have lost your homeland for over a thousand years, to never be allowed to feel at home anywhere in that entire time?  To at last be given a promise of a return there, of a homeland – a promise literally predicated on nationalism and colonialism both – and to see that come to exactly what anybody with an ounce of wisdom could have seen a hundred years away?  Poison gift.  I’d keep Brooklyn, thanks.

Seriously.  People who feel magical about that piece of dirt.  What even?  I can’t imagine a worse place in the world.  Here I can walk down main street and feel the ghosts of natives choked in disease, driven from their homes, murdered in the wilds.  Not great.  There, I’d be walking the same streets where so many people were slaughtered in so many ways it’s fucking near unimaginable.  I’m willing to bet there is not a person in the entire region who is without genocide in their hearts.  How could you live through that history and not want to see everyone on the other side of the conflict disappeared?  With cruel violence?  At least on some level.  I know there are peace activists in Israel and bless their hearts.  But how often are they tempted to just give up, and join in finishing the job on their opposites?

The overwhelming hate of it all.  For dirt.  If I was born there, I’d have left and never looked back.  The USA is bad enough, but at least I’m not living on a land mine, living in torture alley between people who want nothing more than to see each other reduced to shreds, to blood and then dust.  Ain’t no god and ain’t no land and ain’t no ideal worth living in hatred.

This is the only thing we have, when fascists rule the day.  The freedom to have moments of peace in our hearts.  Because above all they love hate, and we have the ability to love life.  They can’t be happy unless horrible shit is happening to someone, somewhere.  We are capable of living for good things, and they aren’t.  We win even when we lose, given that.  What if we didn’t have the option tho?  What if we were born into an endless war, gestated in amniotic fluid poisoned with cruelty, with lust for annihilation?

I advocate a no-state solution.  Everybody lives as refugees in other countries for another thousand years, and moves back when they’ve learned to play niceys.  I used to be more flip about the idea all the holy cities should get nuked (rome, jerusalem, mecca – ideally with everybody moving out first), and I’m not that grody nowadays.  But should anybody be living there?  No.  What’s the half-life on genocide?  How long before that land is no longer glowing with hatred?

My guess is that for the remainder of humanity’s time on this world, there will be nothing in Israel or Palestine worth preserving, except for people – who would be much better preserved by leaving that hellhole behind.  The touristy beaches, the shopping malls, the ultramodern gleaming skyscrapers, the perfectly irrigated fields – yeah, even the nice parts.  They are not nice, because of what they cost.  Leave them.

With my nazi-ass country in your corner, Israel, things are about to get even worse.  So much worse than you’ve ever imagined.  To those of you who love genocide, you may find that getting what you wished for is the worst possible outcome for your people, for humanity.  And your day in the sun won’t last.  Your whole country will be destroyed.  And then rebuilt again, I’m sure, with or without you, and whoever lives there?  Probably gonna be genocidal zealots as well, of some flavor.  It’s in the dirt.

Fuck dirt.

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The Anticipation Kills

What horrors will happen in 4 years, and with their power cemented by all the things they can get away with between now and then, what horrors will happen after that, and for how long?  Don’t answer that question.  We all have some pretty good ideas, I don’t need ’em spelled out.  But my mind can’t help but ask, like the way we think “why?” when we feel pain.  Doesn’t have to make sense.

I just hate it.  It’ll be more bearable to me if they at least lose their vile messiah.  Leave us in nazi hands, apparently we asked for it, but just lose the hideous smug face and insufferable voice at the top.  Fuckin ben shapiro’s uncle tom ass lollipop guild voice would be more bearable.  Entropy i pray, please do your inexorable magic, disintegrate the life, steal it away, reduce this horrific waste of flesh to atoms, and then to nothing.

If you’re one of the few tender souls who doesn’t think we should wish death upon the worst of us, take heart that this is as useful as thoughts and prayers, and can do no harm.  Shit, you know he’d be proud and pleased to be despised by people like me, so if anything I’m doing him a favor.  Even knowing my ardent desire for his extinction might cause his desiccated member to twitch, I can’t help it.  I need it so much.

I have wondered in life sometimes who I hate the most.  Con men tended to be number one, followed shortly by nazis, transphobes and misogynists somewhere down the way as well.  These were always categories, not individuals, but how apt that all are rolled into this creature, the number one category embodied there with primacy.  Just cease to be, bitch.  It could happen any day, or not for twenty years.  The luck we’ve had, you know which is looking more likely.  But fuuuuuck.  Let it be.

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Silver linings,ugh, lemme see…  Just the usual.  I think for most of us our lives may be negatively impacted but they will not end, we will survive and love our people and go into the night the same as we would have in a better world.  Stick around, my friends.

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Another one:  I don’t feel homicidally cranky about these fuckers all the time because I don’t think about them all the time.  If I’m thinking about them, I want them dead.  But mercifully my mind allows me to think about other things during the day.  I can lean into that.

In fact, I’ve been queuing posts, and by the time this one comes up, I’ll probably be a lot more chill.