Saturday, March 28, 2020

May you live in interesting times

We now know there is no bottom in the despair and stupidity generated by Comb Over Caligula. This failed reality TV host knew the epidemic was coming as far back as December 2019 but he was too busy playing golf at his shitty resort in Florida to care. The head of the Seattle Flu Study knew it was here.

It didn't matter because the current GOP administration in their mad rush to "make federal government small enough to drown in a bathtub" had fired the Pandemic Response Team in 2018. Specifically, John Bolton did this at Trump's behest.

This isn't our Orange Führer's Hurricane Katrina, it's the death of whatever sort of middle class might have still existed in our broken land. There is no Houston Astrodome big enough to save us.

We are all living in Calcutta now. There are only rich Brahmans in limousines and desperate poor people in depressing tenements and cardboard boxes begging for change.

 Never has so much fear, absolute selfishness, and bigotry existed in one morbidly obese rapist. He has told the poor, uneducated whites of America what they wanted to hear so often he's deified in fundamentalist Christian circles.

We are the country that puts 12-year-old children from El Salvador in cages because they dared come here seeking what every single Irish, Italian, Dutch -- pick a European ethnicity -- came here for in the 1800s and early 1900s: asylum.

In a matter of days we will be the country that allows the elderly, people with MS, the disabled, disabled veterans, anyone unlucky, to die. All for our pointless unregulated capitalism and it's eternal state of flux between boom and bust.

The last time I took a gander at the Big Red Map of Death the world had exceeded a half million confirmed cases. We're set to double that by the end of next week and America is the new Italy.

Italy has over 92,000 confirmed cases as of today. And over 10,000 dead thanks to a mortality rate between 4 and 6-percent. A lot of them are not elderly men who smoked. Quite a few were 20-50 year olds in moderate-to-good health.

We.

Are.

The.

New.

Italy.


Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Defining women

Defining a woman becomes complicated when one ceases to define her on the basis of gender assigned at birth. When experience varies so much from woman to woman, blanket statements fail. Though I am not an expert on gender studies -- and I hope to keep my opinions fluid -- I arrive at a definition of womanhood by looking at men: what they do, what they have, and whom they prevent from doing and having. I define womanhood by who suffers for not identifying or presenting as male, and why.  -- Hari Nef, Twitter, Dec 2015