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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Covering the White House
is a tough beat—and that was the case before the Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters
descended upon it. These days you’re constantly trying to decide whether you need to
mainline coffee or Scotch, just to make your deadlines, given the constant stream of
shite coming out of the West Wing.
Actor Tom Hanks gets it,
so yesterday he sent the press corps a spiffy new espresso machine, causing the
best news to ooze out of 1600 since 18 January.
I enjoyed the tweets
that responded to the report. This photo, for example, drew horror at the Styrofoam
cup, along with comments to the effect that the machine is off-limits to McClatchy
reporters, who only deserve instant coffee.
There also was
appreciation for the note that accompanied the gift—Hanks is a well-known
collector of typewriters.
Although controversy
raged over his use of the Oxford comma, a violation of AP style.
If you look closer,
Hanks includes a cartoon from Pulitzer Prize-winning Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who—along
with Ernie Pyle—gave Americans the closest look at the ordinary GI in the
Second World War. The cartoon is one of many that enraged General George S.
Patton, in much the same way (and for many of the same reasons) that the White
House press corps enrages the Cheeto-in-Chief. The reference also pokes fun at how news reports don't always hit the mark.
This will be the third
high-end coffee machine that Hanks has contributed to the upholders of the
First Amendment in the White House over the years. For this reason, I’m willing
to overlook that Oxford comma thing.
This was part of one of those
cutsy quizzes that your friends post on Facebook, so you click through to take
yourself.
Although they supposedly tell
you one thing or another about you, there is one thread that consistently runs
through them: they often use such poor language, logic or both that it’s hard
sometimes to wend your way through the multiple choices. (And that leaves aside
the issue that frequently you wouldn’t have any of those multiple choices on a
platter with hot fudge sauce on it, so your inputs aren’t the highest quality
data.)
Anyhow, I got a little
confused on this:
How can you possibly be doing
two opposite things for a majority of the time?
The move a couple of
weeks ago wasn’t the worst one, but it also wasn’t the best. Considering all
the recommendations I’d got for this moving company, and their advertising on
local PBS stations about how much care they take of your possessions, the
lasting impression that JK Moving gave me was that my business is not really
worth their time.
I mentioned
before how they gave me a quote for cross-country relocation that was way
over the odds of what other companies estimated. (And some of those other
companies were reputable, even.) And that, not content to charge me more than
20% of my interstate costs, their
final price for a 20-mile move was 12% over the estimate.
But over the weekend I discovered
that one of these movers had jammed a yoga mat and its carrying bag into what the Container Store calls a Vertical Gift Wrap Organizer. Along with a used plastic water bottle and
candy bar wrapper, packing tape roll and other trash:
And when I say “jammed”,
I mean with such force that the container broke at the bottom:
Now, here’s one of the
things I hate about movers—and in fairness to JK, every moving company I’ve
used in the past 20 years has done this—they know when they’ve damaged
something, but instead of fessing up to it, they try to hide it. Does this stuff come out of their individual pockets?
(For my relocation from
Virginia to Seattle, the Mayflower unloaders actually put a floor lamp they’d
bent in transit behind a wall of cartons in a backyard storage shed. Like I
wasn’t going to notice that the one source of light for the living room was
missing and go looking for it.)
Sure enough, my trained
professionals put the bin, smashed side to the wall, in a closet. And left me
to dispose of their rubbish when I opened it up to see why it might have
broken.
So, not that they care,
I won’t be recommending them to anyone in the near future.
