I feel like I’m writing for future archeologists. Remember, you who read stones, if you have peace and prosperity and contentment, you will lose it if people think they have something to gain by it.

I’ve known since people elected Reagan, the guy who made selfishness respectable, that we were headed for a time of trouble.

(Yes, now that we’re walking into the future some of us have chosen, it’s obvious I need help with my marketingspeak. “Trouble?” Just “trouble?” I know, I know. But any other word will also be too weak.)

I didn’t know it would happen so fast. I didn’t know it would take only a few years for people to actually, willingly, in reality, elect a demented criminal carnie barker because they hoped he’d give them, and only them, the shards of the world he was selling for parts.

Remember in future, if the parts have healed and grown back and you’re able to try to read stones again, if you let some people take what they want you will lose it all.

Societies live by rules. Whether it’s might makes right, or the divine right of kings, or that money confers power, or whatever they are, the rules are taken for granted as true and justified and the way things are.

A few hundred years ago, people started the greatest experiment so far: they tried rules based on justice instead of justifying whatever they had. They thought long about what justice entailed and they came up with rules based on the ideas that truth exists, that it can be discovered, and that it can be applied.

The truths they held to be self-evident were that we’re all equal in law, that we all have the same rights, and rights are those rules that let us find our own path without interfering with others.

It’s led to bloody revolutions. But it’s also led to the greatest growth of ideas and inventions and prosperity and peace that the human species has ever seen.

So, naturally, we do everything we can to make sure we can use those rules, right?

No. Apparently, no.

It’s more important to make mountains of money (because we really do believe that money confers power). It’s more important to keep any scrap of status you manage to feel (because we’re social animals and status is life itself to (most of?) us). Sadly, the rules forgot to make sure that equality in law reflected equity in fact so they forbade rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, and here we are.

The rules of equality and rights for all never filtered down to everyone. Recently they stopped filtering at all and we’ve been going backward. Which infuriates people. All the money stuck at the top is a bone-deep corrosive, but taking power away from billionaires is not something we know how to do. Our credo is that it belongs to them, so there’s no effective way to solve the problem.

Misogyny provides the small continuous hits of status to compensate. (Racism works too, but not as well from the standpoint of the perps. Racism, for most racists, provides only occasional or theoretical help because there’s not enough interracial contact. Besides, out-and-proud racism generally leads to ostracism.) Putting women down so you can stand on them and feel a bit taller, that’s available all the time.

Misogyny has been used to the max to keep people voting for the billionaires and against themselves. Because, after all, a system that says you’re winning couldn’t possibly be making you lose. Could it?

Millions of people, mostly men but plenty of women too, inhale the misogyny and vote for the end of any solutions.

Remember that, you who survived. Misogyny is a hell of a drug. Stay away from it unless you want to end like us.

Remember the beginning of the abortion fight?

Sorry. Stupid question. Anything older than two weeks is Not Memorable in the Mediacene.

The abortion fight geared up in the 1970s after the widespread use of birth control. Before that, even fully patriarchal white evangelicals didn’t have a big problem with it. Then the shocked realization descended. Women couldn’t be controlled by fear of pregnancy. This could not stand. At that rate who knew how much male control they might flip off next.

The next thing we knew fetuses had become “babies” and here we are. Women can be stopped from leaving Texas in a throwback to the days of escaping slaves. Totally appropriate, of course, for the current three fifths humans who might be trying to evade their primary function as incubators.

The things is, definitions are important. Vital. Critical. Essential. Do I need to put it in bold all caps?

That’s not a new thought. Socrates pointed it out a few years ago. So let’s start by defining who’s human, in the sense that matters to being a legal person, and who isn’t.

Corpses have rights. Organs cannot be removed from a corpse, even to save someone’s life, without prior permission. Compulsory organ donation is not a thing. People are not allowed to use other people’s bodies for their own benefit, even to save lives.

But wait, you say. Forcing women to carry pregnancies is compulsory life support on a grand scale. And it’s done all the time. It’s different.

Yes, it is different. Only women can do pregnancy. Corpses and organ donors might be male. That’s the only difference between whose body can be used by others and whose can’t. There’s no other difference in principle between forcing some people to provide life support but not others.

That train of reasoning shows it doesn’t matter whether you think a fetus is a legal person or not. It’s irrelevant to the question of why women, and only women, are forced to provide organ donation to save lives.

For the sake of completeness, though, let’s see whether fetuses are legally persons. Again, it doesn’t matter if they are. No legal person, except if they’re women, can be sacrificed for another. But, legally, fetal personhood does not extend to, for instance, counting as a second occupant of a car driven by a pregnant woman in an High Occupancy Vehicle commuter lane on a highway. Fetuses don’t inherit if their mothers die intestate, as children would. Birthdays don’t count from conception (except in Korea) but from, well, birth. I could go on.

The longer one goes on, the clearer it becomes that the only situation in which fetuses are persons — and not only persons but ones with more rights than anyone else: the right to take over someone else’s body — is when the body in question is female. That quiet part was even said out loud in an Alabama case.

Alabama’s new blanket ban on abortion “protects the sanctity of unborn life,” with one curious exception: The law deems only fertilized eggs inside a womb worthy of protection, not ones routinely destroyed in the process of fertility treatment.
“The egg in the lab doesn’t apply,” Clyde Chambliss, state senator and sponsor of the abortion bill, said during the Alabama legislative debate. “It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

If it’s all about the “babies,” this makes no sense.

So, in the abortion power grab we’ve seen what happens when we don’t bother to define which rights are involved or who is a legal person. Abortion is not about a right to privacy (although privacy is important). Nor is it about health care (although that’s important, too.) It’s about something more basic than that. It’s about the right to control your own body, the right not to be the property of the state or anyone else.

By not seeing that clearly — by still not seeing that clearly — we’ve fallen back into a situation where women are deprived of their most basic rights. And people barely notice. It’s about “health care,” isn’t it? Lots of people can’t get the health care they need. What’s the big deal?

Now we’re falling down the cliff of the same type of error in the fight over sex, gender, trans rights, and women’s rights.

The main defense, the only(?) defense that’s been consistently applied so far, is in the UK. Beliefs that womanhood is a sex-based category are as worthy of free speech protections as the belief that womanhood is gender-based according to one’s own sense of gender.

And that’s where I start screaming.

Hello? Have you all gone mad? This is not like being a flat-earther. Without any other knowledge, our eyes tell us we do live on a flat earth. This is worse.

Going by the evidence of your own everyday eyes, without any knowledge of math or science, the existence of female and male sexes is an absolute bedrock FACT. It is not a belief. The essence of facts is they go on being facts no matter what you think. You can believe babies are picked up in a cabbage patch. It doesn’t matter. In mammals like humans, they will still arise by a combination of egg and sperm and subsequent pregnancy ending in birth. That’s what a fact looks like.

In contrast, the statement that we have a gendered essence of masculinity or femininity is a belief. It’s a similar concept to the soul. There is no physical, material evidence anyone can point to of, say, a little nugget buried perhaps near the pineal gland which is the locus of a gendered essence.

That’s not to say the belief is wrong. Giordano Bruno believed there were thousands of peopled worlds. He was judged insane (and a heretic). Recently, the probabilities are turning toward his view, although we still have no proof. We have no factual proof of the existence of God, which just means we don’t _know_. A strong feeling that God does or does not exist is not proof. A strong feeling that a gendered essence exists is not proof. It’s meaningful to the believer; not necessarily to anyone else.

Pretending that a fact is somehow equivalent to a belief is nonsense. Facts remain, whether they’re believed or not. Facts will have consequences whether they’re believed or not. Facts must be accommodated so that their consequences aren’t damaging.

Beliefs, on the other hand, just have to be kept to oneself and one’s co-believers. Nobody is under an obligation to participate in someone’s beliefs. Pretending they’re facts to live by just ends in instant absurdity. Imagine a religion (I’m sure there are none like that) which considers nonbelievers subhuman, while the nonbelievers believe the same of the religionists. Since there are no verifiable facts involved, nothing exists to agree on even if they wanted to. The only way out of the absurdity is if one side can annihilate the other. Unless you want eternal war, beliefs can’t be forced on others.

Pretending they’re equivalent also implies facts are optional. We don’t have to live by someone else’s beliefs, so we also don’t have to live by any facts they point out. Except that facts go on having consequences no matter what we believe. Eventually, facts can be stubborn enough to kill people if we’re stupid enough to ignore them.

That’s the once and current disaster with the abortion issue. That’s the train we’re on with the trans issue.

Trans civil rights must be respected the same as everyone else’s. One of those rights is to believe what they like. That’s everyone’s right. The UK is making a start by pointing out that beliefs can’t be imposed on others.

The next step is to acknowledge the existence of facts. One of them is the existence of biological sexes.

The myth of increasing mildness allowed economies to go back to “normal” without spending more money. No need to improve ventilation. No need to provide vaccines against transmission and infection, only against “serious disease.”

But … we had been warned. The early data pointed toward this:

[A friend’s] third bout of Covid was significantly worse than the previous time they caught it.

“I thought every time you catch an illness it’s supposed to be a bit better each time?”

The misleading codswallop around covid drives me straight into podium pounding. A BBC article has several examples.

This year even fewer people are being offered the vaccine [in the UK, but also everywhere else]. … Prof Openshaw says he is not a “doomster”, but thinks the result will be “a lot of people having a pretty nasty illness that is going to knock them out for several days or weeks.”

“I’m also hearing of people having nasty bouts of Covid, who are otherwise young and fit. It’s a surprisingly devious virus, sometimes making people quite ill and occasionally leading to having ‘long Covid’,” he says. …

The official government decision in the UK is to vaccinate those at risk of dying from Covid or needing hospital treatment. This relieves pressure on the National Health Service.

Prof Riley argues: “But that’s not to say people who are under 65 are not going to get Covid, and are not going to feel pretty rough. ..

“A lot of people have very little immunity to the Omicron viruses and their variants.”

If you are feeling rough with Covid – or rougher than you have done before – it could be this combination of waning antibodies and evolving viruses.
…

So where does this leave the thought that Covid is on a trajectory towards becoming a mild, innocuous infection?

There are four other human coronaviruses, related to Covid, that cause common cold symptoms. One of the reasons they are thought to be mild is we catch them in childhood and then throughout our lives.

Prof Openshaw is clear “we are not there yet” with Covid, but “with repeated infection we should build up natural immunity”.

In the meantime will some of us have to suck up a grotty winter?

“I fear so,” says Prof Riley.

Let’s take these in turn.

Regarding government decisions to vaccinate only those likely to end up in hospitals. This means nobody else needs the vaccine, right? Because nobody else gets sick, right? No. Wrong. We would have heard about the end of covid among all younger people. We haven’t. Quite the contrary. So governments have some other reason for limiting vaccinations. Money is one that comes to mind.

• Governments want to save money, but they also want to avoid horrible headlines about refrigerated morgue trucks lining up outside hospitals. They are NOT concerned about your pain or suffering. The lack of funding for universal vaccination does NOT mean the only people in danger are the old and the sick.
• Anyone can get long covid, even after an infection with no symptoms. (Chances go up the worse the symptoms.) About one in twenty five people get life-altering long covid.
• You have the same, or a slightly increased, chance of getting long covid with EACH covid infection. So dodging the bullet once or twice or three times means very little. If you get covid twenty five times, the odds of a permanent disability approach 100%. Have you had twenty five colds in your life? Covid is transmitted the same way. But the long term effects are not the same. Give it a generation or so, and some huge proportion of people will be walking (if they’re lucky) wounded. (See also below about evolution.)
• Further, just a couple of years downstream from covid — which is all the data we have since it’s a new disease — lethal heart attacks, strokes, any cardiovascular diseases, happen statistically significantly more often in survivors of covid. So does dementia. And diabetes. And the list goes on. Fun, huh?
• So governments funding vaccines only for the old and the sick does not mean safety for anyone. It means they Do Not Care. Except for those headlines.

About those evolving viruses:

• First, let’s consider the soothing assurance they’ll get more mild. Yes, that can happen, as with common colds. The reason it happens is because some people died, the ones in whom it was not mild. The reason it happens is because some people stayed too sick to produce children.
• Evolution rewards producing more progeny. Nothing else. (If you’d like more information, this is all basic biology. A first year college biology textbook can get you started.)
• The process of weeding out susceptible people takes centuries. If you’re one of them, the process is not going to feel “mild.” If one of them is your child or your partner, or your parents, the process is not going to feel mild.
• So, sure, with repeated infection we’ll build up natural immunity. There’s a lot of death and disability and grief and poverty along the way, though. And we’re just at the earliest days of the process with covid.
• There is one driver toward “mildness” on the viral side. The virus produces the most progeny if the host stays well enough to keep mingling with others, at least initially. Once it’s spread, it does not care what happens to you. You can be incapacitated or die. It doesn’t change the success of the virus. So, yes, there’s evolutionary pressure for initial mildness. There is none, on the viral side, for making sure you’ll be okay.

While I’m on the subject of evolution, let’s talk about what makes a virus become unimportant. One route is it kills the people who have problems so none of the remaining people notice any suffering. The second route is the virus evolves away from being able to infect people. (That does happen, but rarely.) A third option, only available recently due to science, is to vaccinate everyone so universally that transmission is impossible and the virus dies out in humans. (That was achieved with smallpox, and almost with polio until some antivaxxers felt that getting sick was better.)

The key point is how the virus evolves. In smallpox, for instance, production of new variants is very slow (for a virus). So it can’t quickly jump across species. That means the human variant is found only in humans and there is no animal reservoir that can reinfect people even if it’s stamped out.

In covid the rate of new variant production is very high. That means only very strict anti-transmission measures (lockdowns) would have helped, and (once it was available) vaccination of everybody very fast to stamp it out before variants appeared that could escape. We didn’t do that because it was too much trouble and who wants their tax dollars going to vaccinate some foreigners. Now we have omicron variants that are highly infectious. The kind where walking through a room two hours after an infected person is enough to catch it.

[2023-12-21 Edited to add: the newest ‘variant of concern’ JN.1, offshoot of BA 2.86 on the omicron branch, is the most infectious yet. This is not by accident. Viral variants that are better at spreading will spread more (um, duh), meaning they produce the most progeny, which equals evolutionary success. So the more viruses we allow to be out there, the more we’ll see increasingly infectious variants.]

Variants are random. The virus is throwing things at the wall, so to speak. Sometimes those changes are not good for the virus and it dies out, as I mentioned above. Sometimes the changes do little. And sometimes they make the virus worse for humans. The worst would be a variant that spreads while people don’t even feel sick (covid? check), have high infectivity (covid? check), and then a disabling or lethal progression in most people (covid? not yet).

The more viruses there are “throwing things at the wall,” the more likelihood one of those millions of throws will be a lethal variant.

That’s what we’re enabling by telling everyone to get sick and not worry about it.

Are there solutions? Of course. They cost money or tiny changes in behavior. Governments and too many people would rather pretend they’re immortal than make the effort.

• Inhaled mucosal vaccines, aka nasal vaccines, that prevent transmission, not just death. There are some very promising candidates in animal trials and early stage clinical trials (e.g. more here). If governments cared about more than headlines, and supported mucosal vaccines the way they did the (brilliant!) injected mRNA vaccines, we’d have them already.
• UVC lighting. Ultraviolet-C light is lethal to bacteria and viruses, but too weak to harm people. Those who know say you can even look straight at it without damage to your eyes, although I wouldn’t test that on myself. But there’s no need to stare at it. So long as the lights are directed toward walls or ceilings, or into a disinfecting unit, they can clean room air down to undetectable quantities of virus.
• Ventilation improvements. Room air needs at least five changes per hour with fresh air, not recirculated, and to pass through HEPA or equivalent filters to remove viral particles. Corsi boxes are a do-it-yourself way to do this until building regulations catch up. UVC lighting can be incorporated into the system to disinfect the circulating air. These ventilation changes would drive down the incidence of all respiratory diseases to mere hundredths of what they are now, just like closed sewers drove down all the diseases dependent on the fecal-oral pathway.
• Accurate, free testing (at point of use), universally applied, to avoid asymptomatic spread. Number of repeat tests needed for certainty depends on the frequency of false negatives in a given test.
• Financial support to all who have positive tests so they can stay home and not spread disease.
• Masking on buses and any other enclosed spaces where people gather on a transient basis. (Yes, masking, I know, how unbearably awful. You know what? You get used to it if you don’t drive yourself up a tree about it, and if the disease is at low enough levels that you only have to do it for short periods of time, like on a bus.)

So, the short version is: almost all the covid suffering is preventable. Stupid money-serving myths about mildness only create the suffering we’re desperate to pretend away.

Duh. There aren’t enough pixels in the world for a “Duh” that’s big enough. Meanwhile, with evidence right in the indictment that Trump was swanning around Bedminster, boasting about his loot, that place still hasn’t been searched.

Wake me up when he’s in jail.

Since I’m always fuming about those trans “rights” which are just privileges being pushed by misogynists, I have to comment on the recent garbage.

Apparently, we’re doing this. Texas and Montana and Florida and who-knows-who-else-I-can’t-keep-up have been passing laws making it illegal to be trans, making it “legal” to take children away from parents for letting children switch gender, making it illegal for doctors to provide any cross-sex medical care to minors, and so on and so forth and so on.

(If you have a WashPost subscription, Philip Bump has a good article about the frequency of these laws in the various states. As for, as he says, it being “explicitly political, following an intentional effort to elevate transgender issues by right-wing activists,” yours truly pointed out that they’d be doing this years ago.)

These are human rights violations. Totally beyond the pale. A disgrace, a travesty, and a crime.

(Another parenthetical comment, which wouldn’t be necessary in a rational world. Feminists who advocate for women’s spaces are on the opposite side of trans issues from rightwingers. Feminists’ point is that you don’t need to cut biological bits to fit yourself into a socially determined cage. Feminists want to eliminate the cages. They advocate for women’s spaces to help women in our current misogynist world, not to limit them. Rightwingers, patriarchal caste system boosters, and general misogynists want to make the cages compulsory. The two are opposites. (Yes, I’m shouting.) Repubs are the opposite of feminists when they ballyhoo anti-trans legislation. Yes, both want to safeguard women’s spaces and stop minors from making decisions they could regret. For opposite reasons. The philosophy behind it becomes important when they can push their agenda through. Feminist implementation increases self-determination; misogynists just make stronger cages.)

There’s a right to control your own body, to control your own medical care, which is about as basic as it gets. Because children don’t have enough life experience to always know what they’re getting into, some caveats are essential for them which I’ll get to in a moment.

Nobody has the right to tell another human being what kind of sex to have or who to have it with or how to look while they’re having it, always providing all parties involved are pleased with the situation and are adults capable of understanding their choices.

In the case of children, nobody has the right to shut off their futures without knowing anything about them. The function of parents is to support and guide them into keeping their options open. Not closed.

So in the case of desperately unhappy children who want to be another sex, there has to be counseling. There has to be feminist counseling which can help them see how much of the desire is real and how much is the hope of escaping idiotic gender straitjackets imposed by sexists.

Kids being kids, I’d think it’s quite likely many of them would be happiest with being able to experiment. Wear whatever clothes they want, call themselves what they like, and see how things go. Medical treatments that close off their future sexual and reproductive lives seem like a really bad idea. But counselors see the one in a million exceptions, and there may well be some children for whom medical treatment is appropriate. That is a private decision for the child involved and those professionals helping them.

The point here is that it’s never a decision for politicians to make. They can require counseling for children before sex-changing medical treatment (and provide the funding for counseling). They cannot tell anyone which medical treatment to have or not to have.

And, unless the children have made it clear to social workers that they’re trying to escape, they certainly can’t take children away from their parents.

I thought I might be somebody!
They tell me I was wrong.
For no one was harmed in the race we ran;
I was no one all along.
Mary Leng

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. (William Gibson, whenever he said it.)

In most of the OECD, most disasters haven’t hit most people hard yet. Covid maybe came the closest. In some of the US some women are brought to death’s door because life is sacred. Not their life, obviously. There are wildfires. Floods. People die. But mostly the disasters just loom. They happen to other people. Even so, cartoons are the least of our worries, right? So I’m not sure why this one tipped me over the edge. But it did.

Yes, it’s beyond the pale for the Republicans to censor books, to tell people what kind of sex to have or how to talk about it, to subject women to forced pregnancies, or to tell unhappy children they can’t get help for their conditions (yes, I do mean kids who feel trans and I do mean help).

But while we’re virtuously against racists and Nazis and homophobes and transphobes, there’s a giant elephant in the room. Totally unseen.

Does anyone honestly think that the reason men played women’s parts in drag in Shakespeare’s day is that theatres were being bravely transgressive? That the public was eager to stick it to The Man by gender-bending? That they were less hung up on sexist stereotypes than dumb Republicans?

Men played the women’s parts because women couldn’t. Women were men’s possessions, kept boxed in at home, not out in public. They certainly weren’t to prance around on a stage. They could expect violence and worse if they tried to run around loose.

They still can.

If you’re one of the people making that worse, you know what? It doesn’t matter what your reasons are. It doesn’t matter whether you think women are subhuman, like an incel. Or whether it’s because you’re so progressive you’re only concerned about trans people. Either way, women count for nothing to you. It’s the same old misogyny dressed in makeup and spangles.

And at once, like a platoon of triggered Daleks droning, “Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate” the Democratic side of the argument is puffing in outrage. Oppose. Oppose. Oppose. How very dare they. How wrong can you be. The sky is lime-green!

The thing about reality is it stays the same whether you believe in it or not. It stays the same no matter how you explain it.

If Republicans say the sky is blue because they spray painted it to make it lovely, it doesn’t matter. It stays blue.

If the Democrats insist it’s lime-green because they know the Republicans don’t even own a can of spray paint, it doesn’t matter. It stays blue.

Seriously, people. You can agree on plain, measurable, stubborn facts without tainting yourself as a believer in bullshit.

And yet, when it comes to the trans issue, the Dems can’t bear to acknowledge facts, any facts, because the Repubs have taken to using a few.

How stupid can everybody get? (Don’t answer that.)

Fact recap: Vertebrate mammals come in two sexes. (The arrangements in fungi and clownfish and snakes are irrelevant to that fact.) The female sex produces eggs and, if not a marsupial, grows the young in a womb. In vertebrate mammals, the homogametic sex is female, with two similar sex chromosomes, XX, in every cell in her body. Males are heterogametic, XY. Women have a 99%+ role in producing the next generation. All the downstream consequences are what humans make of the biological facts.

Those facts are directly related to women’s life trajectories. Women’s biological ability to produce babies could make them significant or make them a very valuable commodity, depending on how society organizes itself. Given the human tendency to get while the gettin’s good, we know how that choice was usually resolved.

Then, of course, once you’ve decided to keep women as brood mares, plus servants and comfort animals in their otherwise unoccupied time, you need a whole mythology justifying it and sexism is born. Once you’ve decided to exploit someone, they have to be inferior (else you’ll be the baddie for treating them badly), and misogyny is born right next to the sexism.

The Repubs have decided to take the path of maintaining the system at all costs. Pretend it’s based on reality by pointing out sexes exists and there are two of them. Use that to justify the whole invented superstructure confining everyone to one of two roles.

The Dems could have pointed out that, certainly, sexes exist. Biological facts require protections and accommodations for women. Larding on stories about it has nothing to do with reality.

But that, horrors, would have meant “agreeing” with the Repubs.

Actually, no. Recognizing common reality just marks you as sane. It’s not agreement.

It does mean that people hear you recognize a blatantly obvious fact, that two sexes exist, so it may be worth considering the rest of what you say.

But no. The Dems had to go all in on denying everything, right back to the existence of sex. Transwomen-are-women is part of the credo, including obvious counterfactuals such as male-bodied people can somehow compete “fairly” with women, even though they’re in a completely different weight class. The sky, they shout, is lime-green! And they’re hoping to make it stick by repetition, just like a creationist or a flat earther or a climate crisis denier.

That does not work. The facts stay the same. The earth stays spherical. Evolution keeps working. The climate crisis gets worse. Babies get made by women.

All you accomplish is to label yourself an ideological nutcase willing to sacrifice half the human race to weird beliefs. Which is a label rightfully belonging to Republicans. But you just handed them your strong suit on a plate and let them pretend they’re the ones who are reality-based.

We’re reaching the end of the line. The US Supreme Court looks forward to turning women (back) into livestock.

If you don’t control your own reproduction, you are livestock.

Too many Supremes and a shitload of Republicans want women in that position. They haven’t yet reached the Taliban zone where they want women penned up, but give them time.

Meanwhile, what is the left concerned about? In the perfect words of Helen Lewis,

The right has declared a war on women. The left has responded by declaring a war on saying “women.”

So half of humanity is shoved into body slave status, but the important thing is the feelings of a few thousand people who have the time to worry about their gender identity.

That is the end of the line. When nobody, anywhere, on any side of politics, has a clue which way is up.

I’m tired. I can’t even work up interest in the back and forth going on now among the Supremes.

Sotomayor doing her best by reminding her colleagues they have a personal stake in not looking like pawns. Hollow laughter. Ki-i-i-i-d, I want to say, if any of them cared whether they look like fools, they would have stopped acting like clowns years ago.

And then all the yammering about viability. Of the fetus, of course. ZOMG if anyone else’s rights are at stake, anyone’s at all, ever, anywhere, so long as they might be male, anyone!, then of course the incubator has to do its job. Maybe if women had an actual price on their heads, somebody would notice that the property depreciates from the huge marathon of pregnancy and delivery?

So, forgive me while I shout.

Women are human beings who have the right to control their own bodies.

Well, maybe not all, but look at the state of reporting now. From Jennifer Rubin, one of the best, quoting another one:

Journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen observes that “the incremental coverage, the focus on the inside game, the notion of tactics and strategy, and the joining up of the political class with the information junkies” does little to inform voters about major pieces of legislation. We get nonstop coverage of the “sausage making” but little about the content of bills that cost trillions.

And I just keep flashing back to teaching basic biology to all kinds of pre-med hopefuls way back in the Stone Ages. We’d joke about how the students who did not remotely have what it takes should “go into journalism.” (Not in front of the students, it should go without saying. Just when us teaching assistants were trying to preserve sanity after grading endless bafflegab lab reports.)

I’d be willing to bet they made the same jokes in history departments. And performing arts. And accounting.

Because, really, from the outside, journalism (subsequently “Communications”) looked like the one field where you could get through on bullshit alone.

We were wrong, of course.

It’s obvious now that actual journalism takes analytical ability, perseverance, and a rare willingness to be disliked.

But the BS artists drifted to Communications, too many of them squeaked through, used their flimflam successfully in the job market and the promotion ladder, and here we are. Days of discussion about people’s suits (tan?, pants!, blue). Weeks of discussion whether A insulted B. Were there corn dogs or pizza? Was the pizza eaten correctly? Constant focus on elimination brackets, mostly in fantasy playoffs. Meanwhile, the fate of the humanity hinges on understanding the climate crisis and how juvenile fascism grows up.

It all shares one thing. (Two things, actually. One being easy clicks which is vital to for-profit “news.”) None of it requires any actual knowledge. You have your article/newscast/whatever ready to go after skimming TV or twitter feeds, and no need to sprain your brain. And we, by not having the heart to bounce these yoyos out of college entirely, enabled that mess.

Is it a prion disease? Have aliens orbited Make’EmStupid Satellites to keep us in our place? Why is this happening everywhere at once all over the world?

Fundamentalists in India gobble up Modi’s us-against-them bullshit and start torching mosques. They’re Hindu fundies, not Christian, but it doesn’t seem to help one bit. Duterte, Putin, Trump, LePen (although the French managed to avoid electing her), Taliban, Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, the list goes on and on, everywhere. Reality disappears behind made-up stories people kill for. Or would like to kill for.

The top-of-mind recent example is antivaxxers. They invent metastasizing conspiracies in favor of a devastating disease to avoid the safest medical intervention there is. Covid vaccines are gobsmackingly safe. Safer than aspirin. Safer than burgers. Safer than lettuce, for all I know. I don’t think we collect statistics on lettuce. But if we did, I wouldn’t be surprised if vaccines turned out to be safer. Antivaxxers condemn people to die rather than admit that all — all! — of the evidence is against them.

There’s the anti-choice crowd. They’ve twisted “my body, my choice” into its opposite. Reproductive choice means women don’t die from botched abortions. Nor does it kill their neighbors. Antivaxxers are saying they can do whatever they want, no matter whether it kills you. It is the opposite. But words mean nothing now and nobody cares that “Don’t kill me” morphed into “Shut up while I kill you.”

Then there’s the whole melee about transwomen. (Transmen barely appear, which gives the game away. Misogyny 101.) Instead of escaping society’s invented gender boxes, that movement has decided sex doesn’t exist. Biological sex. The method for making babies, which leaves babies everywhere, which would kind of prove it exists. They’ve decided it doesn’t. It’d be news to Silurian fish that sex is vague. It’d be news to pine trees, if pine trees read the news. Evolution could barely happen without it. It’s a denial of reality on the order of flat earthers. (To be clear, you can believe what you like in your own world, where it doesn’t damage nonbelievers. Nobody else has to buy into your sense that it’s turtles all the way down.) But a bunch of trans rights activists (#NotAllTranswomen) have decided to believe in the transubstantiation of the flesh of men into the essence of women, and ruin and death to the heretics.

The biggest and most lethal group, though, is the deniers of the climate crisis. The chemistry that means carbon dioxide in the air traps heat has been known since the 1800s:

In a series of experiments conducted in 1856, Eunice Newton Foote — a scientist and women’s rights campaigner from Seneca Falls, New York — became the first person to discover that altering the proportion of carbon dioxide (then called “carbonic acid gas”) in the atmosphere would change its temperature. This relationship between carbon dioxide and the earth’s climate has since become one of the key principles of modern meteorology, the greenhouse effect, and climate science. … [N]o one acknowledged Foote was the first to make this discovery for more than a century

Meanwhile, right up until now (yes, I mean Manchin), people whose salary depends on not understanding that fact tell themselves stories about natural variation or a hotter sun or tech solutions or that we’ll just turn up the A/C. Anything to force somebody else to take care of it, even when it kills people.

(Just for the record: No, the variation is off the charts. No, the other planets aren’t warming. No, people make and use technology. If technology was the solution, rather than people being the problem, the tech would have already been applied. No, there’s no way to turn up the A/C for all of nature, except by not idiotically warming the planet to begin with.)

The climate crisis deniers are the worst of the lot because they’ll kill billions of people. Billions with a “b.”

So here we are, trapped in alternative “facts.” If the loonies don’t get us for ignoring them, reality will when it crashes down.

Bernie Sanders was talked about a while ago, blathering his usual blather about how there is nothing but class struggle. Racism? Caused by poverty. (In which case, why aren’t poor blacks racist against whites?) Trumpism? Caused by poverty. (But, but, but, his fans give him boat parades. Have you priced boats lately?) Crime? Caused by poverty. (Has he never heard of Madoff? Or, for that matter, Trump?)

Now, admittedly, poverty is tough. People tend to react badly to it and bother their neighbors trying to get out of it. But that’s a whole different matter from poverty causing bigotry. Plus it does nothing to explain centuries and millenia of elites sneering at the stupidity and laziness of their underlings. If only poverty could cause that, elites should be the intelligent, highminded people they imagine themselves to be.

What does follow a pattern, though, is that people make sure they think poorly of anyone they hurt. After all, if the piefaced whatnot didn’t deserve it, they are the bad guys for inflicting harm.

The more harm, and the more baked-into-the-society and structural the harm, the greater the contempt for the underclass who are made to suffer.

In other words, Bernie has it backwards. It’s not poverty that causes racism. It’s the need to justify exploitation. Damaging others causes racism. And sexism.

That means the solution is not to make poor whites richer, to take an example at random. Or to make men more confident of their masculinity, to take another. It’s not to increase the status of the group causing harm.

It’s to remove it. It’s to maintain real equality.

Equals have enough social status to inflict a cost when someone tries to get something for nothing out of them. Without the ability to get away with hurting each other, there’s also no need to label others contemptible enough to deserve it. With real equality the need for contempt to justify bad treatment gradually fades.

Bernie’s BS would make the problem worse, and it sends people hoping for the solution down the wrong road. That’s why his BS is not simply silly.

A few things to remember while we’re boneless with relief that so many of us survived the kakistocracy.

1) This is just back to normal. Remember normal? It’s great compared to being in the grip of a tarantula that thinks we’re food items. It really is. But normal isn’t genius. It’s just okay.

2) Yes, I’m glad Kamala Harris is in the picture. No, I can’t get over the crushing weight of sexism that gave her the place she’s got.

3) Last and most important for fixing the problems in the immediate future: Remember that there would be little to celebrate without the work of Stacey Abrams. We’d still be at the non-existent mercy of Moscow Mitch.

So the main thing to say on this day is

Thank you, Stacey Abrams!

There’s an easy sense that internet violence is just some fantasy. Just cosplaying. Just nothing.

I’ve long thought that was a mistake when it came to the vicious threats thrown at women. That regularly bleeds over into real life.

But I wrote off the radical right wing yammering about destroying the government as stupid fantasists full of cosplay.

That’s the transformative power of not being the target.

Well, these goonies with their GoPros and gear and internet messages asking for the snacks are obviously cosplayers. The part I missed was that doesn’t stop it from bleeding over into reality.

Just because they’re clowns doesn’t mean they can’t kill real people.

They believed the stuff about this being the beginning of the real war which would put them on top. (evidence: all over Parler)

They had a President telling them to go to it. Jenn Budd:

They had collaborators inside the Capitol Police (and elsewhere no doubt?). The “Pentagon” (i.e. Trump’s very recently installed Acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller) put significant restrictions on D.C. Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests.

The rioters constructed hangmen’s platforms with rope nooses near the Capitol.

Their fantasy included the execution of the “enemies of the people.” (evidence: all over Parler)

Some of them carried zipties to handcuff people.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the people, “enemies,” being led off to those newly constructed gallows.

The President who told them to go to it had a tent with video feeds and drinks and food and cronies where they could all watch the progress of the Glorious Victory.

Their grip on reality was so pathetic they couldn’t see that their Klown Kar Koup was never going anywhere. But that changes nothing.

They were hoping for a coup.

It won’t be enough to laugh and move on. They were hoping for a coup. It has to be treated like one. The whole mentality that led to it has to be rooted out. That has to start with evicting Trump from the Presidency now. Yesterday. Anything less shows stupidity about the scope of the disaster.

Otherwise this is our last warning. Next time the Klowns will have more than cosplayers. They’ll have a planner or two.

Update Jan10: Something heartening: Igor Bobic filmed a quick thinking Capitol Police officer, by himself, as he eggs on a mob to chase him (toward his backup…) instead of charging in to the Senate room with Senators still inside.

So the only thing Trump and McConnell and the gang are doing now is trying to make sure that Social Security and the Post Office and Federal lands and the Arctic and cybersecurity and the economy and all international relations and the pandemic and, well, Absolutely Everything, are as awful as possible so Biden starts out with massive failures everywhere.

Which they’ll then try to blame him for and try to use to worm their way back into power in all of Congress in 2022.

There’s only one thing to say and Jeff Tiedrich said it.

holy fucking shit, the president of the united states is up late at night plotting a military coup to overturn the election and I guess what I want to know is, why do we even have a 25th amendment if we’re not going to use it on this fucking unhinged raving anti-American lunatic

Say a prayer for the salt of the earth.

People working for little or no money to make this a real election.