One of my favourite filkers played a drinking game with himself while watching the Democratic debate last night, and then live blogged it. He was pretty smashed by the time he stopped, and his wife was carefully hydrating him at last report. It was pretty funny.
Still no plan or commitment to end police violence. Bernie is using all the right words, but they don’t add up to “We will take the following steps to end deaths during custody and confinement”. This is the standard that the black activists I follow on twitter are politely asking for, and it is not adding up to a plan.
When they point it out to white people (or wypipo, as it sometimes appears on twitter much to my amusement) the mostly male Berniestans LOSE THEIR CHEESE. The stuff they say to people like Imani Gandy @AngryBlackLady (lawyer, feminist and CHRIST can she throw shade) and Elon James White (who is straight up one of the funniest, kindest, nerdiest and clearest thinking humans I’ve ever run across, while still being uncompromisingly stern with racist assholes) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (‘ta na hezzy) who is an awesome prose stylist and an atheist, and you try being an atheist in black culture, Abiyomi Kofi, the Gullah-Indigenous intersectionalist, and I dare you to say that when you’ve been drinking, and Wagatwe Wanjuki, activist against gendered violence — is absolutely disgusting. All these people get shit from white people on the internet, in an ever flowing stream of bile, bad spelling, shitty science, gendered slurs, racial slurs, and yet they rise every day and try to hack through the thickets of law, media and custom to get to a place where anything but equality is unthinkable.
The Zika virus is unlikely to be causing the microcephaly cluster. It is much more likely to be a previously unknown teratogenic effect of a Monsanto larvicide which started being added to the water in large swathes of the affected areas in 2014.
So I am looking at this horror show and thinking, wow. Monsanto sells MORE LARVICIDE to get rid of the mosquitoes. The various government health bodies pay out money for larvicide and reap the hellish bounty twice: Once when the larvicides quit working and forever when microcephalic children are born.
The governments involved may say it’s a fair price to pay to keep the working population healthy enough to you know, work. Screw the kids, they’re all poor anyway.
As for Zika virus being found in sufferers, it’s present in 75% of the population in that state anyway. Not a clear signpost.
I DIDN’T LIKE MONSANTO BEFORE THIS.
This ol’ world sucks a mop. But it’s the only one we got, and I need to help make it better.