Roots.

If you’ll allow me one more post about our Fort Wayne visit? Let me tell you what our walk-off gift was, courtesy of the Allen County Public Library’s world-class (and I do mean world-class) genealogy department:

The Homecoming organizers told us this was in the works, and said that if we wanted our personal family tree, to provide birth, death and cities for our parents and grandparents. I am one of those people mostly left cold by this stuff; at some point it started to strike me the way past-lives ninnies did, the ones who are always the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Henry VIII, never a guttersnipe in Victorian London or one of Cleopatra’s litter-carriers. But what the hell, why not, I thought, and coughed up the names and dates. And this is what I received in return:

Lordy. All that? Yes:

From the summation inside the front cover, this goes back five generations, to the great-greats. The last of the bunch was born in the 1830s, several in Germany or Switzerland. Some Civil War vets in there. One of my great-great grandfathers had charge of Abraham Lincoln’s bier as he lay in state in Indianapolis for 24 hours on his funerary trip back to Illinois. Another was, get this, a newspaperman.

I’m still working my way through this. Much of it is U.S. Census records, death certificates and the like, but for the first time, I’m starting to see the appeal of doing this research. I don’t carry but a few teaspoons of these old gents’ blood, but it’s fun to see what they did with the hands they were dealt, and how they were carried off. A few of cancer, stroke, some vague “illness” and the big cataclysm on my mother’s side, her father’s exit: “suicide by firearm.” I have a small medal that was his, awarded for bowling prowess:

He was a bank teller. I’m thinking I’ll have it made into a necklace.

If you want to dig up your roots, you won’t find a better place. The story was always that the only equal of Allen County’s collection was the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, and the Library of Congress. I believe it.

So. Here’s a Sopranos joke, adapted for the times: An American walks into the Oval Office with a duck under his arm, and says, “This is the pig we elected.” The president says, “That’s not a pig, that’s a duck.” The American says, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Doubt me? Don’t:

Over the summer, we learned (weirdly, via a social-media post by Jeanine Pirro) that Trump was planning to hang a row of paintings in the walkway adjacent to the Rose Garden, which connects the Executive Residence and the West Wing. …The portraits still haven’t been hung, but on September 21, White House photographers captured a new addition to the colonnade: a mock-up of a sign that reads “The Presidential Walk of Fame” in a large golden font.

Yep, that’s the pig we elected. Of the events of recent days, I have nothing to say that could be captured here. We elected a pig, and that’s that.

Happy Wednesday, eh.

Posted at 12:05 am in Current events, Same ol' same ol' | 44 Comments
 

Hysteria.

I think we’ve tipped into Princess Diana territory now. That is, the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is now at the level of hysteria, egged on by, among others, the widow Kirk, who first delivered a statement with a whiff of Rwanda c. 1994, and then posted one of the cringiest videos I’ve seen in some time, featuring herself mourning over the body of her husband in his casket, whispering I love you while the camera got in close enough to see every detail and capture every sound.

It was awful, the sort of spectacle that makes you think, girl, do you not have one friend or close associate who could tell you what a terrible idea this is? And then you realize, no she doesn’t, and in fact, they were probably all egging her on. Because content. And branding. And reach. And engagement. Rick Perlstein, a historian for whom I have a great deal of respect, wrote on Facebook that it’s of a piece with Jackie Kennedy refusing to take off her bloodstained pink suit after her own husband was shot. I wouldn’t go that far, but if there’s even a shred of truth to it, I don’t feel the least bit terrible about my cold cinder of a heart. Empathy is the most human emotion there is, but there are still ways to kill it.

In the confusion of recent days and of the confusion still to come, here’s something smart I read Saturday. It’s by Cary Gabriel Costello, a sociology professor at UW-Milwaukee. It’s long, and I feel bad about pasting it in its entirety, but it was posted on Costello’s Facebook page, and I don’t know of any other way to share the whole thing, since many of you have left that platform, and good for you. Here’s a link to it, anyway. One thing I try to remember as a mantra when big news breaks is: More will be revealed. Also, and this is increasingly true, not everything you see, even in a legit news source, is true, or even factual. As I look at the case of Tyler Robinson from the perspective of Sunday afternoon, I see a motivation that could be comprised of political philosophy, dead-endism and a large smattering of legit mental illness, as Robinson is smack in the middle of that fraught age range when those afflictions present themselves.

But I think it has more to do with what Costello writes, and I’ll stop blathering and let you guys read it. Happy week ahead and let’s reach the end of it with our sanity intact:

Hi. I took a month off social media, but I’m back upon request to talk about the person who shot Charlie Kirk this week.

Here’s what we know: shooter Tyler Robinson comes from a family of Republicans and loved hunting with them. He was obviously very proficient with guns. He was a gamer and very online. He etched his bullet casings with trolling phrases that reflect this online cultural milieu. And while his politics may have once been mainstream conservative ones, he had become disillusioned with the Republican party—because, as he told a friend, he had come to see them as little different from the Democrats, too content with the system that he wanted to see smashed.

You will see him referred to as a “groyper.” That’s a term for the followers of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who hated Charlie Kirk for not being racist enough.

Groypers harassed Kirk at his public events for years—the so-called “Groyper Wars.” Now consider the collage of images I’ve attached to this post. In the first image, you see the classic meme pose of the groyper: wearing a tracksuit and doing the “Slavic squat.” In the middle we see alt-right meme icon Pepe the frog in the groyper costume and pose. At the right, we see shooter Tyler Robinson in the same pose and costume.

Does a photo of Tyler Robinson in his 2018 Halloween costume dressed up as a groyper meme mean that Robinson considered himself a groyper in 2025? Not necessarily. What it does show was that he was familiar with the group and portrayed himself as one of them at that time. But there is a possible clue in what he etched on one of his unspent bullet casings: the chorus to the song Bella Ciao. This song was an Italian antifacist folk song that was treated as an ironic anthem by the groypers.

I want to point out that all across the major mainstream news outlets as I write, the fact that Bella Ciao was etched by Robinson on his ammo is being presented as evidence that he was an antifascist. I’m sure that was part of the fun for Robinson. As the other messages he etched show, he loved to troll. That’s central to the whole business of the channish online inchoate masculinist clan: mock your enemies, and show proficiency with in-jokes to impress your chortling tribe while leaving the other team befuddled and confused.

The set of narratives expected about motivations by news sources and politicians are very much disconnected with the messages sent by lots of young shooters seeking fame today. Etched on one of Robinson’s bullet casings is “hey fascist—CATCH!” Almost all of the news sources I have just checked are presenting this as proof that Robinson was antifa. They are not headlining the markings on other bullet casings—most local news stories are not even mentioning the others. And that’s because they don’t fit this narrative. The one that housed the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk read, “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this?” That’s a phrase used to taunt opponents in game chats and social media, mockingly pretending that the speaker is a furry expressing sexual interest in the person being mocked. It’s very much like the phrase etched on another casing: “if you read this you are gay lmao.” The point of these etched messages was to taunt Kirk. To own him. To show dominance and prowess. This was like a video game in real life, where everyone would see how good a shot Robinson is, and those in the know would admire his memery.

But the media (Fox no less than the NY Times), and politicians, and influencers, and vast swathes of Americans unfamiliar with this online, game-flavored masculinist form of communication can’t parse any of that. They want to answer a simple question: was the shooter leftwing or rightwing? Or, since most presumed he MUST be an infuriated leftie, which flavor of “woke” were they? The immediate speculation was that Robinson must be trans. Social media are clogged with thousands of posts asserting this. The Wall Street Journal initially reported that there was evidence that was the case. And they got that “information” from federal investigators, who claimed two pieces of “evidence”. The first was that the base of the bullet casings all contained a series of stamped letters including “TRN””, which was interpreted to stand for Trans. Those were just the manufacturer’s mark; the company was Turan Ammo.

The second piece of “evidence” was an etching read “↑ → ↓ ↓ ↓”. Why that was interpreted as “pro-transgender,” I have no idea. Either FBI investigators drafting internal communications were beyond incompetent in somehow interpreting this as trans messaging, or the statement that pro-trans messages were found on the bullets was always disinformation that someone leaked to the press in order to put fuel on the fire of the hate-narrative that trans people are violently unhinged. In any case, it’s nonsensical.

In fact, that series of arrows are just representations of the controller moves used when playing the game Helldivers 2 in order to drop a giant bomb. Robinson was showing a little love to fellow gamers while signaling he was the overpowered dispenser of destruction.

Robinson’s “manifesto” here is essentially that it is Game Over for the famous Charlie Kirk, conquered by Robinson. To the extent that he has politics legible to the familiar Democrats-vs-Republicans mainstream narrative we are all way too familiar with, it is most likely that he was at least sympathetic to the far right. His Ciao Bella was a likely nod to the groypers. But it was also an attempt, along with his “hey fascist—CATCH,” to stir hatred on the more mainstream right against the left. Robinson is above all else an accelerationist. He and his ilk want a war. They want America as it stands to burn. What they believe will rise from the ashes varies, and some are black-pilled enough to hope nothing does. But they all want to blow things up.

Robinson wanted people to pore over his etched messages, so he’d be inside our heads, taking up space, getting attention. He also wanted his messages to be confusing and seem contradictory so that people would fight about what they meant. Hopefully we’d tear one another to pieces over conflicting interpretations.

The correct thing to do under the circumstances is not to feed the troll and give him what he wants: attention, social conflict, rising violence. Unfortunately, our president is not the sort of person to bring Americans together. He has declared that the left is to blame for the shooting, and anyone who critiques Kirk now that he is a martyr is fomenting terrorism. He’s not about to walk that back. And MAGA will follow his lead. If you looked around various social media in the 24 hours after the shooting, you saw thousands of people calling for actions from the banning of all leftist organizations to the extermination of Democrats to locking up all trans people in institutions.

Of course, there were also calmer heads on the right, and Republican politicians who at least acknowledged that Democratic politicians have recently been assassinated or had their houses burnt down. But the problem is that MAGA politics are not about compromise and standing up for the rights of those with differing political positions and identities. Everything happening in our national politics right now makes that clear.

Yet national reporting also shows that if there is one thing that Americans agree on right now, it is that they don’t feel safe and that something is seriously wrong with the nation. And while that’s certainly a very negative feeling, I think a lot about how we might capitalize on that and turn things around—before accelerationist, triggerhappy gloryhounds like Tyler Robinson take us all down.

I hope you are thinking about how to turn things around as well.

Posted at 2:42 pm in Current events | 56 Comments
 

One more time.

In case anyone is wondering, here’s what Charlie Kirk had to say when the state lawmakers were shot in Minneapolis earlier this summer:

“Total shocker that smearing a duly-elected president who won an overwhelming electoral mandate as a fascist or a king leads to violent political radicalization.”

After another shooting in Minneapolis, the one at Annunciation Catholic School, he offered this: “Was the shooter on hormone therapy?” and “Was he on SSRIs? We deserve to know.”

So while it’s obvious violence is terrible when it’s directed anywhere, I think I’m going to try to be better than Charlie Kirk at this moment — it’s about 4 p.m. Wednesday as I write this, and I don’t know Kirk’s condition — I’ll just keep my yap shut for now. I feel nothing anyway, so why embroider on that?

Croaky said something stupid about guns this week, too. “We had lots of guns when we were kids. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so.” He went on to blame psychiatric drugs for the fact they’re now firing them. I don’t know about you, but psychiatric drugs, while no panacea, have brought relief and normalcy to millions of people who suffer from mental illness. The conservative right is now very hot on “mental health,” which they seem to believe was something we all enjoyed until evil liberals took it away.

I’ve always understood the wholesale emptying and closing of public mental hospitals to be a dovetailing of the worse impulses of both the left and the right, the rare case where both sides bear at least some, and perhaps equal blame. I know many of us are older here, and as I recall we’ve talked about it here, too, but I was there and I remember. Liberals said it was cruel and illegal to warehouse people, that new psychiatric drugs offered hope to people who previously could only be treated with Thorazine and other heavy tranquilizers, the ol’ dozin’-and-droolin’ state on American mental wards. The right said, “Close expensive public institutions? Sounds great!” Unfortunately, community-based mental-health buildings never came to pass — they, too, were expensive — and we didn’t reckon that some people with some mental illnesses didn’t want to be treated with the new drugs. They were imperfect, they had unpleasant side effects, and they cost a lot. Lots of mental patients didn’t have any sort of home support network. And so they ended up on the street, almost literally overnight. You saw it too, I bet. It coincided with the closing of SRO hotels in many cities, as yuppies moved downtown and wanted those icky bums out of sight.

So every time a conservative bleats about mental health, ask them: What’s your plan? How much will it cost? Where will people be treated? Because as anyone with even a surface understanding of the issue knows, there aren’t enough beds available now, much less after we start taking the issue as seriously as they think we should. A man off his meds stabbed 11 people in a Walmart in northern Michigan a few weeks ago. It was a familiar story: Paranoid schizophrenic, in and out of treatment and shelters for years, only intermittently in touch with his family, etc. He desperately needed inpatient treatment and a lot of support, but in northern Michigan? Are you crazy?

You could say the same thing about the man who stabbed and killed the Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte. American prisons are already mental hospitals. You want to build a few hundred more? With what money?

Get ready for a new barrage of this, depending on who is arrested for the assault on Kirk.

It’s now 4:45 p.m. Just checked the Salt Lake Tribune, NYT and other sources; they haven’t pulled the sheet up over his face yet. Time will tell.

Edit at three minutes later: He’s dead.

Posted at 4:47 pm in Current events | 55 Comments
 

The golden light.

Having bitched my heart out about the punishing heat this summer, I owe a debt to the weather gods to salute the lovely days that have been with us since the last week in August. We can use some rain, but the nights are cool and the days are on the lower side of warm, and that’s a good thing. Most days, my hair looks the same at 3 p.m. as it did right after I blew it dry after my shower, which means my head isn’t schvitzing like a dockworker all the livelong day. So that’s good.

Right now, I’ve leaning against some pillows against the footboard of our bed, spread out an old down blanket, and Wendy is curled up at my feet, snoring a little, sometimes wagging her tail in a dream. The laundry’s done, the larder is full, I got in a little workout, I restocked at Costco. I’ll owe some money to the IRS in another week, but the wolf is far from the door. My local CVS has the new Covid vaccines, and I’ll get one soon. It’s a good day.

Wendy’s getting on in years — 13, as far as we know — and is showing it in ways large, small and sad. So I’m taking time to appreciate my little dog. We go on more, but shorter, walks. I changed her food from kibble to kibble-and-canned to be easier on her achy teeth. She’s still got that spark, but it’s more mellow, like the autumn sunshine. One reason we haven’t taken a big trip this year is Wendy. I don’t want to leave her with Kate (no fenced yard, cats) for three or four weeks anymore, and she’s so sensitive, that much time in a boarding kennel would kill her. But I don’t mind. She came with us to the U.P., and for our next trip — three nights in Fort Wayne next week — she’ll be fine with a babysitter.

Did I mention we are going to the Fort next week? We were invited — GOD KNOWS WHY — to one of those Chamber of Commerce “homecoming” events. Does your city do those? Detroit’s regional chamber did for a while. They invite notable expats back to town to see the shine they’ve put on it in the meantime. We’re staying at the Bradley, the boutique hotel built by the Vera Bradley people, and some friends will be in the group as well. The idea seems to be to invite potential investors (not our cohort) or opinion leaders (ditto) and spread the good word. Honestly, I have no idea why we’re included, but I’ll try to sparkle and not be too mean to the Republicans.

Speaking of which! What a last few days it’s been for the GOP, and once again, I’ve lost track of the current outrage. Is it Croaky going on the attack about vaccines? Or the Department of WAR-RAWR-WARRRRRR rebrand? There are days when I have to avert my gaze and just appreciate the weather for a moment. Although there are moments of grim, black humor, as here:

While the criticism of Kennedy slowly grows from different sides, I fear it’s too little, too late. Considerable damage has already been done to Americans’ trust in vaccines under false pretenses. A veterinarian recently told NBC News about people expressing their concerns to her about giving their pets vaccines out of fear that they will harm their pets, causing autism or other cognitive issues. When people are afraid of dog autism, it’s going to take a lot more than some harsh words at a little-watched Senate hearing to get us back on track.

Dog autism. Dogtism.

On Thursday, the day this little-watched hearing took place, I took some time to take myself out to lunch, and watched the live updates with analysis on the NYT site as I worked through my pizza and Diet Coke. Claim after claim by Croaky was batted down, and now I can’t find it on their website, although there are plenty of stories wrapping it up. What a psycho that guy turned out to be. Alan thinks he’ll be fired, but I’m putting my chips on the No Way square. Trump never admits a mistake, and he likes anyone who stands up to Elizabeth Warren. We’re stuck with him. As the Onion noted: Kennedy Curse Sure Taking its Sweet Time With RFK Jr.

And now I think I’ll take myself out in this lovely late-summer sun and maybe slowly amble my old dog around the block. The Lions play in half an hour. It’s a nice Sunday.

Posted at 3:55 pm in Current events, Same ol' same ol' | 31 Comments
 

Those files.

A friend called me today to ask what I thought of the Epstein mess. I told him, first thing, that if we have to throw Bill Clinton over the gunwale, well, we’d just have to do it. That horndog got the biggest free pass in the world when he evaded significant punishment about Monica. He doesn’t get another.

But as we talked, I started to sort out my own thinking about it, and I think it’s this:

There are some who will think that any revelation of the Epstein affair that doesn’t include a photo of the president getting a BJ from a 13-year-old means he’s innocent, free, in the clear. I figure, if he was so innocent, he’d have had them printed on placemats at Chick-fil-A by now. But honestly, I think what’s going to be revealed, if anything, is something closer to this:

Epstein was rich, Trump is rich, they hang out with other rich people, and rich people don’t think rules apply to them. Any rules, at least behind closed doors. So what will likely emerge is a picture of Epstein as a guy who knew everyone, invited everyone to his parties, had his young masseuses passing canapés and occasionally slipping off to massage or bang this or that guest, and everybody knew what was happening, and further, no one said a word about it. Because they’re rich. Even if they didn’t participate, even if they disapproved, they wouldn’t say boo. Did they see anything directly? No. And it would just make a big mess for everyone, and after all, everybody’s rich. It would break the code.

Trump was ankle-deep, knee-deep, neck-deep in all this, I’d be willing to bet. Every day was “a wonderful secret,” the secret being that they could fuck young teens with impunity.

After all, Trump married a sex worker, maybe two of them. This is going to bother him? Not a chance.The rules are different for people like him, as we’ve all seen.

OK, so life is starting to return to normal. After my week of vacation, I had a week of pedal-to-metal work, then a long weekend of more work, then this week, and I’m hoping that things will settle next. I have enrolled in a creative-writing class at Wayne State, as a “non-matriculating student,” i.e. an auditor, and I have to read, write and prep for twice-weekly classes. My lifeguarding starts up again, in the early mornings instead of evenings, at least this semester. So I have, as they say, a lot on my plate.

But I will continue to show up here. So forward, into the fall, eh?

Posted at 8:14 pm in Current events | 20 Comments
 

Link salad.

When I said the week would be a whirl, I wasn’t kidding. The work I do for a local nonprofit is coming to a crescendo, and I don’t have a lot of time to do anything. However, I gots me some links for you. I’ll be back on Tuesday.

So.

Did you think it was impossible for the state of Florida’s slurpy MAGA community to get even worse? It is not. Behold the case of the Pulse nightclub crosswalk. You may recall Pulse as the site of a particularly grisly mass shooting in 2016 — 49 killed, 53 injured. As a memorial, or part of one, a crosswalk near the club was painted in rainbow colors.

Can’t have that in Ron DeSantis’ Florida, not when you-know-who is president. So earlier this month, workers painted over the rainbow in black and white. The club’s partisans painted the rainbow back, and state of Florida workers re-painted it black, sometime after 11 p.m. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy decided the rainbow was a safety hazard, I guess. But wait, there’s more!

A Florida state trooper is now parked at the scene, making sure those colors don’t come back. Someone went into police work, and is paid a state police officer’s wages, to watch over a crosswalk.

Moving on. As per our discussion of Jon Carroll a while back, a poignant piece about his wife, Tracy Johnston, who has Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. He’s calling it a pre-obit, and it’s lovely:

We were backpacking in the Sierra, sometime in the late 1970s. The day had been spectacular, and the twilight was glorious, and fading fast. Here’s a great campsite, I said, about a lovely piece of flat earth right beside a lake. Tracy looked at it. Nope, she said. We trudged on. Two more times I found lovely campsites, with trees and views and birds twittering, and Tracy said, nope. And we finally, near total darkness, found a campsite near a stream and a lake. It was in fact the best campsite.

Tracy’s handling of cancer has been like that. There is always more life to be lived, more books to read, more people to hug. Here’s the good news: She ain’t dead yet.

Finally, one of those daffy McSweeney’s pieces that people pass around: I’m the abandoned new Cracker Barrel logo, and you can all go fuck yourselves:

Oh, I guess you’re also mad that they revamped the inside of the restaurants. Heaven forbid they rearrange their collection of Americana garbage to make it look less like the hoarder house you lost your virginity in. Jesus hates a coherent aesthetic, I suppose. A touch of care when placing items on a wall is a DEI dog-whistle, according to the bozos losing their minds on X. Not sure what it is about white space on a wall that makes you think a business hates white people, but okay. I hope they didn’t put all that stuff in the actual garbage, because with what they spent on this rebrand, they’re never gonna be able to buy it all again. On the other hand, if they just scrounged it back out of the trash, who’d know the difference?

Always good to end on a high note, eh?

Like I said, back after the weekend. Enjoy yours.

Posted at 2:09 pm in Current events | 33 Comments
 

Watch your mouth.

I update this blog three times a week, most weeks, not every goddamn day, so Neil Steinberg beat me to the punch, but the punch deserves to be delivered twice, a one-two, if you will.

Croaky and his boss, President Shit-for-brains, have blood on their hands. Specifically, that of David Rose, the responding officer for the attempted mass shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday. He was killed by Patrick Joseph White, the shooter who toted five rifles to a CVS across the street from the building and opened fire. White was said to be increasingly obsessed with the idea the Covid vaccination had made him sick. Wherever could he have gotten that idea?

Our HHS secretary has called the Covid jab “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” citing reports to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Intended to be a democratic way for anyone to report sore arms, fevers, etc., it was most certainly set up for a simpler time, when people would be honest brokers of this information. A friend of mine, then a reporter for a prestigious magazine, was asked to poke around in it, see if there was a story, maybe.

He poked, and came away after a couple days with his conclusion: No. Why? Recall that the Covid vaccine was first given to those most vulnerable to the disease — the elderly and immune-suppressed. And so VAERS is full of accounts that run like this: My father had stage IV lung cancer, and received the vaccine. Three weeks later, he died. Or: My mother, 97 and bedridden in her nursing home, received the shot, and died after 10 days. Neither of these people had Covid when they died, so: Very suspicious!!!

And because VAERS is open to anyone — seriously, anyone can make a report — it is of course subject to manipulation by bad actors. And I’m sure it is. Anyway, it’s not a reliable source of information. Which Croaky should know.

One caveat that I should note: Something that’s always interested me is how mental illness cleaves to the culture of its time. People used to believe incubi and succubi came into their rooms at night and had sex with them. Today, it’s aliens who abduct victims to their ships to stick probes into their anuses. (Always the anus. Huh.) The man who killed four people in New York City a couple weeks ago was convinced he had CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, from being hit in the head as a football player. (He was in the building housing the NFL.) He was 27 years old (well below the age when CTE typically presents), played only high school (potentially dangerous, but hardly NFL-level dangerous) and had not been diagnosed with anything.

So both these men, White and the NYC shooter, had fixated on current events to explain whatever was jangling around in their heads, and it’s possible that White would have fired on the CDC in the absence of a led-from-the-top damning of the work they do. But I’d say those chances are slim.

How did Croaky react? With the usual thoughts-and-prayers statement, made on Instagram. Fuck him.

Finally, I leave you with this, which is so ironic I can’t stand it:

As a record number of people in the U.S. are sickened with measles, researchers are resurrecting the search for something long-deemed redundant: treatments for the viral disease.

After the measles vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, cases of the disease plummeted. By 2000, federal officials had declared measles eliminated from the U.S. This success led to little interest in the development of treatments. But now, as vaccination rates fall and infections rise, scientists are racing to develop drugs they say could prevent or treat the disease in vulnerable and unvaccinated people.

“In America, we don’t like being told what to do, but we like to have options for our medicine chest,” said Marc Elia, chairman of the board of Invivyd, a Massachusetts-based drugmaker that started working on a monoclonal antibody for measles this spring.

Yes, that’s correct: A drugmaker is looking for a treatment for measles (because “we like to have options for our medicine chest”) because increasing number of dumbass Americans are refusing a safe, long-established vaccine for measles. I can’t stand it.

OK, then! On that cheery note, go start your weeks! I’m off on a bike ride before it gets to…checking…89 degrees. Ugh.

Posted at 9:52 am in Current events | 47 Comments
 

More whacking? Really?

I really don’t want to be like this, but it’s hot again and I’m back to hate-reading the publications that cross my path, some of which I even pay for.

For instance, a lame-ass op-ed published by the Detroit News, written by none other than Ted Nugent. It’s about better management of wildlife, a table Ted and I could sit down at and maybe find at least a little common ground. Deer are popping up in my suburb all the time now; on one of the local Facebook pages, a woman said she came across a doe with three fawns on a nighttime walk this week. I always heard that deer will have twin fawns when the livin’ is easy, but I never heard of triplets before.

The Canada geese are so plentiful now that when a beach closes for e.coli, it’s as likely to be because of goose poop than human.

There are other issues, but the bottom line is: I don’t object to hunting and never have. It’s an important part of managing the ecosystem in the absence of natural predators, and I don’t think anyone wants to release a wolf pack in suburbia. For now, it’s Bambi vs. cars.

Unfortunately, from this promising beginning…

Wise use — it’s common sense to us attentive common citizens, and our hearts and instincts compel us to perform our clear and obvious responsibilities to participate in God’s miraculous creation as conscientious hands-on stewards in harmony with nature.

…things go downhill:

Wild game and wildlife are thriving across North America as a direct result of this proven conservation model, and out of touch, even corrupt bureaucrats, and the equally disconnected fantasy-driven uneducated nature haters that they mistakenly listen to are a very dangerous scourge that good, caring people must be ever vigilant of and willing to push back and stop at all costs.

Those real-world healing powers of nature is what I have dedicated my life to, and the embarrassment of mismanagement in my beloved birth-state of Michigan must no longer be tolerated.

This, I think, is going to be the hardest stain to scrub out of the country, if it can even be done, once Ted and company have gone to their reward: “Bureaucrats” must never be overmatched, or even incompetent. They must be corrupt, which suggests maybe they were bought off by Big Bambi, I dunno. Ted goes on for a bit about patriotism (he’s performing his “we, the people” responsibilities, he says); more corruption, this time “blatant”; and finally gets to the point: He wants to shoot not only deer, but bear, mourning doves and sandhill cranes, which birdwatchers know as lovely creatures and he calls the “ribeye in the sky.” They damage crops.

Mourning dove hunting comes up from time to time; they’re not a nuisance, but they do flush in a manner that trap and skeet shooters enjoy, once they get bored with clays. And bears can be a pain in the ass around unsecured garbage, for sure, but the answer seems to be: Secure the garbage. Also, limit or eliminate all food sources, including deer corn and bird feeders.

Ted disagrees, needless to say. The answer is: Whack ’em and stack ’em.

Mostly I wouldn’t object, but he ignores the obvious problem here. What do you do about those wildlife that have moved to suburbia? Make the deer season all year, hell I don’t care, but I would care about bullets, crossbow bolts or even arrows whizzing through the neighborhood, and this is where most of the so-called problem deer are. Canada geese, ditto — they can shit in the middle of the lake all they want, but they like placid places like parks and golf courses, another place it’s difficult to bump them off without risking hitting a kid, or a duffer. Extending the season on up-north deer isn’t going to do anything for down-here deer.

And anyone who could kill a sandhill crane because they gobbled up some farmer’s soybeans ought to move to Texas, or some other bloodstained shithole. That’s where Ted lives, anyway.

Let’s move on. Let’s treat Edward Coristine, aka “Big Balls,” the way his camp treated — treats — anyone in the other camp who suffers a misfortune. If you haven’t heard, BB, a protege of Elon Musk and a DOGE “worker,” was injured in what police are calling an attempted carjacking in Washington. From the WP:

Coristine was assaulted around 3 a.m. Sunday in the city’s Logan Circle neighborhood by a group of teenagers attempting to carjack him and a woman whom police identified as his significant other, according to authorities.

Three a.m. on a school night? Whatever could BB and his girlfriend be doing out in the District at that hour? Could they have been buying drugs? Googling can you buy ketamine on the street in Logan Circle n’hood right now.

OK, I must scoot. After nearly 10 days in the shop, my car is being liberated later today. Time to flex the Amex card and go for a drive. Have a great weekend.

Posted at 11:23 am in Current events | 19 Comments
 

The indifferent sea II.

Writers are infamously messy, and I suppose I am too. My Google Drive, desktop and other repositories hold various half-baked drafts of this and that. From time to time I try to clear them out, but I hang on to some of them. One in my blog drafts folder has a headline — The indifferent sea. — and is an unkind look at something one of my husband’s former colleagues, who was college friends with none other than Stockton Rush, wrote about his dead classmate. Alan asked me to maybe consider not publishing it, if for no other reason than it would make future collegial gatherings maybe a bit awkward. I agreed.

Rush is, of course, the man responsible for his own death, and four others’, when his jerry-built submarine imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast Guard has published its own report on the disaster, and it is…not kind:

At the time of the Titan’s final dive, Mr. Rush possessed a credential issued by the U.S. Coast Guard that permitted him to operate vessels of a certain volume on inland waters.

That credential was based on falsified information, the report said: In 2020, OceanGate exaggerated the volume of the Titan in a letter to the National Maritime Center so that it would appear as though Mr. Rush had the requisite time at sea needed to earn the credential.

…In an interview with the board, the OceanGate director of operations described a dive in which an earlier OceanGate submersible, the Cyclops 1, became stuck beneath the bow of the Andrea Doria shipwreck near Nantucket, Mass., with Mr. Rush at the controls. In response, Mr. Rush had a “meltdown,” the director of operations said, adding that when he asked Mr. Rush to relinquish the controls Mr. Rush threw the controller at him.

All of which made me dig up the original column, and hoo-boy, talk about aging like milk:

From test pilot Chuck Yeager to Mount Everest explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, risk-takers are a special breed. OceanGate CEO Tock was one of them. Unlike the astronauts and explorers who lived to reach the summit of mountains and outer space, however, Tock was fascinated by going to the bottom of the ocean.

…Ask anyone in my Princeton University Class of 1984 which one of us would be brave enough to dare such a mission, and Tock would be at the top of the list.

…When we were 19 years old, he became the world’s youngest commercial airline pilot, commanding Saudi Airlines planes during our college summers.

The part about Saudi Airlines was my first whoa moment. You’re telling me a commercial airline allows college students to fly its planes? Not quite. A little Googling reveals he worked as a first officer, i.e. co-pilot, on DC-8s operated by Overseas National Airways, which was under subcontract to Saudi Airlines to do charters, so kinda true, but not really.

But for the deepest and most unselfconscious look at ol’ Tock, you really have to go to the Princeton alumni publication:

Seemingly round-the-clock news coverage of the missing submersible has led to some unfavorable characterizations of Rush as a risk-taker whose adventures trended toward recklessness. Deep-sea explorers, oceanographers, and other industry leaders were reported to have expressed concerns about OceanGate’s safety precautions in recent years. For example, the Titan was built of both titanium and carbon fiber, which is used in the aerospace industry but considered experimental for deep-sea pressure.

“I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything,” Rush told CBS Sunday Morning last year. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Rush’s friends said that quote has been used to misrepresent his “joie de vivre” outlook on life, and that the message of his quote was likely more along the lines of encouraging people to live their lives and not be afraid.

“History shows us that exploration and innovation are inherently risky and dangerous,” a group of alumni wrote in a statement to PAW, signing it “Proud and Grieving Friends of Tock.” “We’re disappointed, if not entirely surprised, at the outpouring of armchair quarterbacking about the science behind his work.”

Was Tock a rich kid? Of course he was:

He kept a private plane at the Princeton airport, and friends recounted adventures they took with Rush at the wheel.

…(A) friend who flew with Rush on his private plane during college remembered the feelings of trust and safety she felt on board. “He cared for people deeply and he wouldn’t want to put me in a position where I was unsafe.”

Bad things never happen to rich kids, as we all know. Ah, well. Now we know, but we always knew. Meanwhile, speaking of rich kids, Croaky has effectively pulled the plug on publicly funded mRNA vaccine research. If bird flu goes big, let me say it now, while I’m healthy: It was nice knowin’ ya:

Mr. Kennedy has been sharply critical of the technology. In a video posted on social media on Tuesday, he claimed incorrectly that mRNA vaccines do not protect against respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, that they drive viruses to evolve and that a single mutation in a virus renders the vaccine ineffective.

“As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” he says in the video.

“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

What else is new?

So that’s Wednesday’s stop on the Farewell to American Greatness tour. How’s your week going?

Posted at 11:00 am in Current events | 28 Comments
 

Wrung out.

Been running hard the last few days, and it caught up with me Sunday. Didn’t get much done, other than a fair amount of reading. Finished Louis Bayard’s “The Pale Blue Eye” and started “Hotel Ukraine,” the final Renko novel by the recently departed Martin Cruz Smith. Soon I’ll go downstairs and make…something for dinner. Can’t decide between chicken-sesame noodles or a New York strip. What would you guys choose? My decision center appears to have gone on strike.

But I’m using the instruction I used to give Kate when she was potty-training: Listen to your body. And mine, right now, is saying Chill.

It also told me to stop reading the news after I made my appalled way through this almost unbelievable NYT piece (gift link), the top of which I’ll paste because FOR FUCK SAKE:

Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country.

“This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”

Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now she was blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”

The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.

This. This is why I can barely look the few known MAGAts in my life in the eye anymore, for fear I might start frothing at the mouth about BALLROOMS and HEGSETH and ROSE GARDEN WTF and JEANINE PIRRO and now booting a woman who has literally given her impressive life to the service of the United States, on the word of a lunatic who was, as one Bluesky user pointed out, banned for life from Uber and Lyft for harassing the Muslim drivers. If I am triggered, well then I am triggered. I’m tipping into despair. Mission accomplished.

At least we’re given some comic relief, in that the president so overweight and out of shape that he drives his fucking golf carts onto the greens of his many courses is the one who is resurrecting the President’s Physical Fitness Test. A million brains lit up the grid with the same thought: You first.

Look at the photo at that last link (it’s a free one). There’s President Tubby, doing the same mommy-lookit-my-pitcher-I-drew thing of holding up the signed executive order (because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done), while his younger staff of toadies and ass-kissers chuckle in the background. No doubt every one is also thinking: You First. Also note that the one is “WWE Chief Creative Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque,” no doubt fresh from paying condolences to Hulk Hogan’s family, after the Hulkster, allegedly a picture of strength and power, croaked at the relatively young age of 71. Heart attack, surely not at ALL related to the various drugs he gobbled like candy throughout his adult life.

Such fine role models. Loomer, who isn’t 35 yet, has had enough plastic surgery to resemble the Joker, and young men are gobbling dozens of dodgy supplements to achieve the Chad-like look they think will get women of a higher class than Loomer to fuck them. If that isn’t the Trump administration in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and let’s not forget Bobby Jr., another one almost certainly juicing. Well, may his shrunken testicles be a testament to his dedication.

Finally, really New York Times?! Here’s another paragraph in the Loomer/Easterly story:

And it raises big questions about the ways power and influence are currently wielded in Washington; what it means to be a patriot; and whether loyalty to Mr. Trump or any sitting president should be a prerequisite for government service.

RAISES QUESTIONS? JFC, no wonder I just want to read light crime fiction these days.

Here’s one lighter item, something new for the Nall/Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere Back 40. Did you know petunias can come up volunteer? I did not, but several little patches have popped up in the cutest places, like at the foot of our river birch:

It’s kind of like a Bambi forest. I like it.

Anyway, the new week is about to begin. Let’s hope lighting strikes someone who richly deserves it. Oh, and P.S. I’m making the steak. Turned out I didn’t have any peanut butter in the house.

Posted at 5:24 pm in Current events, Same ol' same ol' | 38 Comments