Category: Dumbassedness (Government)

The Correction does her thing

So, this morning, Coronavirus. 80k infected and 2.5k dead, approx, as of this date.

Holy shit, the lies and propaganda about COVID-19 on line – I’m doing a skip-dive this am – are horrifying. Once again, there is zero evidence that the Chinese government made the virus. They’d be releasing it in the Uighur camps if that was true, come on dear people think.

Also, apparently abandoned babies are appearing in orphanages because their parents haven’t been paid since January and they’re being evicted – there was a heartwrenching picture with a letter indicating that the parents would be back to collect the kid when they had a home again. ABSOLUTELY no idea if it’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

there are reports of entire families (all over 50 yoa) perishing within a fortnight, also reports that there’s no systematized autopsies of the dead so we’re not getting a clear idea of what aspect of the virus procession through the body is actually killing people which given that it can kill you more than one way, which would affect treatment protocols, is just one more thing that CDCs in the rest of the world are going to have to figure out, because China’s a little busy right now. The ACE2 receptor is the main target in the human body but that means it can attack lungs, organ linings (endothelium), kidneys, blood vessels and the heart. Death by this organism can masquerade as a heart attack or a fatal asthma attack and you won’t know without an autopsy, so current cause of death info is bullshit and we need to poke the Chinese to do better

and to top it all off you’ll be way more susceptible to any lung bug at all for months afterward if you do get it so just imagine the first groups of people who survive COVID-19 only to die from regular flu and how angry their families will be GET YOUR FLU SHOT

A THREAD.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is nonsense

And professionals agree…

There was a trans woman at the writers group on Tuesday. She was funny and friendly – just like everyone else there. I’m still snickering to myself.

I’m writing lots, just nothing reportable.

Check this out, it’s crunchingly hilarious. Chock full of outrage and swearing!

Just as an aside

I met the granddaughter of a survivor of the Armenian genocide yesterday.  Her grandmother was present as well but I didn’t want to bull my way into a family gathering.  Ya peeps the Armenian genocide really did happen and Erdogan denouncing the governments who call it that won’t clean the stain from Turkish history.

Every government and every peoples has something like this tucked away.  Smaller scale governments and ethnic groups do too.  It is the way of the human.

 

Justice for Cindy Gladue

I am very sore today because merely standing triggers my pelvis pain to the point where I drag both my feet.  Also, Paul very efficiently tricked me into mowing the back lawn, so I was really, really sore by the time I was done. 2.0 hours on the cpap – keep forgetting to put the mask back on.

I wrote this in my notebook over a rather lavishly irrigated lunch yesterday.  I went to the rally, which was triggered by this.  As is my custom, I did a square search count of the crowd. It was never fewer than a hundred people and swelled to 150 around 11 am.  Knowing that we were gathered in 20 cities across Canada (including Saint John’s NFLD, where it was ass freezing cold and blowing snow) made me very proud.  And sore, as I mentioned.  I am going to pick up another one of those mini-chairs from Lee Valley, I simply cannot stand for an hour and a half without problems.

So I was angry when I wrote this.  I am still angry, but it’s the quiet, smoldering kind.

Edited for errors in usage and kindness Feb. 20 2021, the day I learned Bradley Barton is going to jail.

April 2, 2015 unceded Coastal Salish land. MST LAND

Canada is the kind of country where a sex trade worker deserves to die for being a sex trade worker.  If she’s Indigenous, and ‘somehow’ ends up with an 11 inch stab wound which is paraded through the courtroom in a specimen jar in a grotesque parody of a ceremonial object, she had it coming.  Somehow the fact that a misogynistic piece of sh*t named Bradley Barton murdered her in a drunken stupor gets dropped from the equation, and he left the trial a free man.

I’ve been angry at the Canada ‘justice’ system before. Lots.  But I don’t normally get off my ass to protest.

Cindy Gladue did not deserve to die.

She didn’t get justice.

Her children and her family and loved ones did not get justice.

I am enraged that Cindy Gladue and her 1200 and counting indigenous sisters are being treated by the justice ‘shitstem’ as entirely disposable human refuse.  The UN has asked Canada to investigate.  Harper says it isn’t even on his radar.

F*CK THIS RACIST SEXIST ENTIRELY HORSESH*T SYSTEM.

It’s gotta come down.

Let it come down.

With unity of purpose and steel in our veins, let us BRING IT DOWN.

There were 150 of us in front of the Courthouse yesterday. Indigenous and white and mixed and ‘other’.  We were men and women and non-binary and children. We wept and drummed and sang and screamed our disappointment and anger that Indigenous lives are forced to be so far from justice, or even its prospect or possibility.

Justice for Cindy Gladue.

Lunacy (in a size 44 long)

The gun lunacy in the US just boggles n croggles me.  From CNN.com:

 

According to the FBI, in the entire country in 2011 there were just 201 justifiable homicides committed with guns by private citizens. There are over 300 million guns in America, which means that about 1 out of every 1.5 million guns was actually used for lethal self-defense. According to the National Weather Service, your chance of being hit by lightning this year is a mere 1 in 1 million.

The paucity of training in statistics and how to understand them is obviously part of the NRA strategy.  If you scare someone, they are at a disadvantage for staying rational.  It’s a fact of the human brain.  In fact, the ability to force one’s brain into staying rational while scared out of your tiny mind is one of the things that distinguishes humans from critters.  Not everyone is so gifted, though.

I came up with another lovely line for my notebook last night.  “Darwin backed into a meatgrinder and assembled something from the chunks” (with respect to an ugly critter from a video game, but could be more widely applied… Jeff is playing Borderlands II and there’s some UUUUGly critters.)

SO TEMPTED to go with Tammy to New Orleans in March.

Marijwhatnow?

The Seattle PD responds to marijuana legalization. pOp you MUST read this, it is the single funniest statement to the public evar by any PD.  The tone, the tone.

A friend who’s otherwise entirely left wing doesn’t support legal marijuana on facebook.  I disagreed with him, but not by taking issue with one substance.

My response:

 

Legalize everything.

The problem with marijuana legalization is that the state removes a tariff (essentially) and the profit from a wildly lucrative trade.  It is lucrative for those who build prisons and put disproportionate numbers of POC in them, lucrative for bad people with automatic weapons, and lucrative for state sponsored terrorists from foreign climes.

When you pull insane amounts of profit from the hands of bad (mostly) men, their response is not to roll over and play dead, it’s to find something else to profit from.  In this case it would be refined opiates and meth that they would now be trying to extract value from. Or they’ll push human trafficking instead, since the demand by men for teenaged girls seems to be entirely limitless.   I will be fascinated to see if the rates of meth use and reported human trafficking bump up, along with intergang carnage, in the places marijuana has been legalized.  It may be the revenge of unintended consequences all over again.

The Portuguese model of across the board treatment of drugs as a HEALTH issue has been running for 10 years and their HIV rates have plummeted, their societal costs for drug use are minimal, they’ve unclogged the courts and drug use across the board has been reduced especially in young people, and what sane human being doesn’t want to see drug use rates in teenagers fall.  I would be willing to hazard a guess that human trafficking is worse though, although I have no proof of that.

(That’s what I put on facebook – I could have said MUCH MORE).

what?

Dear Mr. Kenney, and by copy to Mr. Julian,

Look, it’s really very simple.  If you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one.  If you don’t have the equipment to ever need to make that decision, stay out of it.

Do not attempt to legislate the recriminalization of abortion in Canada.  Although there is a substantial minority of Canadians who would applaud the recriminalization of sodomy, gay marriage and abortion, we live in a modern pluralistic liberal democracy and the majority of Canadians don’t support those stances.

Recriminalizing abortion is regressive, mean-spirited and an assault on women’s rights.  It’s bad medicine, bad politics, and bad social policy.

I say this as a woman, a tax-payer, a church-goer and a voting Canadian.

Kill M-312 as soon as possible.

 

Yours truly,

 

Allegra Sloman

phone and address redacted

May ludicrous things happen to Jason Kenney

O, FFS.  Jason Kenney is trying to recriminalize abortion.  The war on women has officially moved north of the border, kids.  You’ve got a day to move on this.

If you have had an abortion WRITE YOUR MP AND COPY JASON KENNEY.  If you think women have the right to legal safe abortions, as well as the contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place WRITE YOUR MP AND COPY JASON KENNEY.  If you don’t want to live in a country where your daughter or friend or sister or coworker is forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term after she’s been raped WRITE YOUR MP AND COPY JASON KENNEY. TELL THEM TO VOTE NO ON BILL M-312.  http://www.canada.gc.ca/directories-repertoires/direct-eng.html#mem is how you get hold of them. FOLLOW UP WITH A MAILED LETTER – you may send it at no charge to http://www.parl.gc.ca/Parlinfo/Compilations/Addresses/ParliamentaryHOC.aspx

The war on vegans continues

Holy flaming balls of purulence.  I inherited John Caspell’s entire library of anarchist works – if I lived in the US I’d be subject to a Grand Jury indictment just because I lived close to some government building that was vandalized.  Here’s the link.  Or should I not be worried because I am not young?

I am settled into my room at the Double Tree Worthington

Cindy will arrive shortly and go straight to sleep in my room. I will find something to do with myself while she kips and waits for her room to be ready – I am thinking I might like to go look at the enslaved animals, if only in remembrance of the other Ohio animals who didn’t make it.  Besides, they have bonobos, and I ain’t never seen any.  Or I could wander down to the “German Village” room (!?) and see if anybody is filking yet.  Or maybe I’ll say fuck it and go to Macy’s.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Starbucks coffee is nauseatingly bad.  They may be proud to serve it but I’m a fool to drink it.

Gadhafi’s STILL dead, sic semper tyrannis.

So far, except for the coffee, I am loving this hotel.  The staff are really, really professional, friendly and courteous.  Room was supposed to be non-smoking, when I bleated they fixed it without a hiccup.

Weather’s like Vancouver, but windy.

I got selected for ‘special screening’ yesterday.  O goody.  I also got yelled at by every single one of the ‘security theatre’ staff, to the point that I would say “Please don’t yell at me,” not that it helped.  Note to self – travel in slip-ons next time.

“Miles Vorkosigan’s” filk of Lady Miss Banjola’s “Wreck of the Crash” MUST GET LYRICS and sing for my pOp.

It’s about the legal repercussions of losing your hotel room key, and it, like the song it’s based on is bloody hilarious.  YES there was filking last night and it was still going on when I went to bed at midnight local time.