Replacement parts

Well, after about six years of pissing, moaning, ranting and raving about the ACA, the Repugnants of the House have hawked up their hairball of a replacement scheme. I’m not even going to try to deconstruct it in all its steaming awfulness.

No, Imma let Twitter do that for me, one thousand-words-meme at a time.

I’ll leave you with one last take, which I think is absolutely brilliant.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Let them eat...

Throughout the day yesterday, I checked Twitter for tweets about International Women’s Day. There was quite a range, including one that led me to this great story about the temporary addition of the bronze statue of a little girl defiantly facing down the Wall Street charging bull—funded by an asset management firm committed to adding more women to corporate boards.

At the other end—kinda—there was a tweet by NPR on a story about how Italians celebrate Festa Della Donna, with flowers, wine and a special cake that sounds pretty scrummy. I mean—feminism is as feminism does.

But what gave me the giggles about it was this reply:

Just another way that the US has fallen behind the rest of the world.

#BeBoldForChange

Today is International Women’s Day, the one day out of the year when the world clears its throat and sends metaphorical flowers to the little ladies in its life.

Then it goes back to condoning sexual assault and harassment, pay inequity, reproductive repression and all the other policies it considers only right and proper, as gleaned by direct communication with whatever godhead shines upon the various localities.

I will confess that a year ago on International Women’s Day, I’d not have imagined how far we could have regressed in a mere 365 days. Boy, was I ever a dope. The Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters have unleashed the forces of hate, fury and terror both here and abroad in a way we’ve not seen for decades. And as they raise high the standard of Them vs. Us, the ultimate Them, for these thugs in silk ties, are women.

You can tick all the approved boxes—white; Christian; Protestant; native-born; Republican, even—but if you’re female you’re still only good for a couple of things, neither of which involves control over your own body, let alone over a legislative one. If you’re non-white, non-Christian, non-Protestant, non-native or—horrors—non-Republican, it’s ever so much worse.

Don’t believe me? I’ll give you a couple of examples.

Last month in Utah, the vice-chairman of the Wasatch County Republican party wrote a letter to two local newspapers to oppose a bill before the state legislature that would address pay inequality. Using your basic “because God said so, that’s why” logic, James Green argued that, since men are “breadwinners”, they naturally deserve to be paid more than women.

(And no, as God is my witness, I am not making this crap up.)

“If businesses are forced to pay women the same as male earnings, that means they will have to reduce the pay for the men they employ, simple economics. If that happens, then men will have an even more difficult time earning enough to support their families, which will mean more Mothers [sic] will be forced to leave the home (where they may prefer to be) to join the workforce to make up the difference.”

Sticking his head that far up his ass was not enough for Green, because he went on further, “And as even more women thus enter the workforce that creates more competition for jobs (even men’s jobs) (emphasis added) and puts further downward pressure on the pay for all jobs…meaning more and more Mothers [sic] will be forced into the workforce. And that is bad for families and thus for all of society.”

Green was evidently surprised at the ridicule and outrage this vignette from 1617 sparked—even in Utah, not known as a bastion of liberalism. (Although the tech industry that’s growing there may have something of a modernizing effect.) He later issued the customary apology that his stating the facts of a God-given case could cause so many misguided persons offence, which then had (and this is the crux of his remorse) negative consequences for his immediate career.

However, something else occurred just this past week, which attacks another of those hard-won human rights. In Texas—which has already rolled back access to reproductive clinics (and unsurprisingly therefore has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world)—the Senate has advanced SB 25, which permits physicians to withhold information from pregnant women (in effect, lying to them) about the condition of their fetus. When they give birth to babies with congenital deformities or diseases, the mothers (and even the fathers!) will not be able to sue the doctors for wrongful birth.

Yeah—the Texas lege supersedes the Hippocratic Oath, which starts out, “first, do no harm.” Because: abortion. 

(Given the last round of Nazis’ love of eugenics, I’m wondering how long it’ll take for this crop of them to come up with their own Aktion T4? They're heading there with their lame-ass "replacement" for the ACA, and with one of their leading lackeys, Jason Chaffetz (R, I-guess-I-can-look-my-teenage-daughter-in-the-eye-after-all), advising Americans that we'll just have to make choices, like not "getting that new iPhone that they just love" and taking the money saved to "invest in their own healthcare." And as God is my witness, I am not making that shit up. Why the citizens of Utah do not rise up and physically remove this arrogant, oblivious replicant from office I do not know.)

Well, that’s the state of the country on this International Women’s Day, 2017. We marched in our millions back in January, and it enraged the Kleptocrat and his followers. That was great, but we cannot afford to rest. We are engaged in a war for humankind, and wars are not won by a battle, or even a campaign. They are won over the long haul, by those willing to step up in ever-growing numbers and say, “hell no—we are not going back.”

Because women’s rights are human rights, we must persist.

Community communications

There’s a thing that happens when you follow one of those blow-hard self-promoting “thought leader” dopes on Twitter: you get an auto-generated “thanks for following me” Direct Message, which includes links to their website, their LinkedIn profile, their PayPal account and whatever else they think they can get you to click on to feed their web analytics.

Back in my salad days of tweeting, I actually thought this was an attempt at reaching out, since reciprocity is the currency of social media. Boy, was I wrong. These entities (not sure they are all actually humanoids) are not the least bit interested in anything you have to say. They’re only interest is in pushing their (often system-generated) promos and platitudes into your timeline in hopes that you’ll retweet.

These days, when I get one of those DMs I immediately mute the moron—they see me as a “follower” and don’t know that I can no longer see their nonsense.

Here’s an example. I follow a lot of accounts engaged in the global support of science, research, innovation and the like. And people engaged in research or innovation often follow me on account of things I tweet. So when @GaryBridgeman followed me, and he didn’t seem to be a spammer, I followed him back. Almost immediately I received a notification from Twitter that he’d sent me a DM!

(Twitter always ends its notifications with an exclamation point.)

The truth, however, was less than exciting:

So I muted him and went on.

  

Then @EUSciComm followed me and I again clicked the follow button. And immediately another DM.

(Yes, okay—the guy did not stand out from the ocean of Twitter egos on the first pass, so my cursory skimming of his profile of the second iteration didn’t flag that he was the same guy I’d already muted and screen-capped his DM for posting here. I can be shallow too, you know.)

This time, old Gary set his bot to pick up my name and included it in the salutation. However, he once again stated that he pays no attention to anything I might have to say. In both instances he invites me to connect with him on LinkedIn to communicate. Yeah—that would be a negative, Gary.

Evidently he does not see the irony in talking about “creating a great community” when he can’t be bothered to either write a personal message or respond to DMs. This does not persuade me that a LinkedIn relationship would be worth the electrons holding it together.

Gratitude Monday: clean dishes

I suppose this is really petty, but today I’m grateful for having a full-sized dishwasher, which I only have to run about once a week.

You might think that’s a sine qua non of modern life, but in my last place, the owners—who evidently do not do much in the way of cooking—had a half-sized dishwasher. I cannot think why, as they remodeled their kitchen, and by moving the sink over about a foot (and thus eliminating one of the dopiest pull-out cabinets in existence), they could have installed a full-sized one.

It ate my lunch every time I had to run it with half of a full-sized dishwasher load, because that’s all it would hold. Because it did not use any less electricity, water or soap than the large model.

Anyhow—I’m enjoying knowing that I only have to “do” dishes once a week (unless I go into some cookery frenzy). And I’m grateful for that.