December 31, 2021

Finally found a quote that sums up how I feel today.

This time last year, we were all celebrating Joe Biden’s win and looking forward to the vaccines. "2020 was a real shit show," we said. "Thank God it's over!"

This year, I feel punch drunk after all the crap 2021 has thrown at us. But hey, Biden is still president, right? As hard as Trump has tried, all of his efforts to get his disgusting ass back in the White House have gotten him absolutely nowhere. So that's at least one thing we can celebrate, right? Right?

Anyway, here's hoping better times lie ahead, or at least that 2022 will be less of a dumpster fire than 2021!

December 21, 2021

To all my fellow DUers

Today, the days begin to lengthen again. Celebrate the return of the sun!

December 19, 2021

A judge ruled that a charter school's ban on girls wearing pants was unconstitutional.

The school is pushing back.

More at the link: https://www.thelily.com/a-judge-ruled-that-a-charter-schools-ban-on-girls-wearing-pants-was-unconstitutional-the-school-is-pushing-back/

The way this school is pushing back on this makes my head hurt. I thought the whole "girls MUST wear dresses" mindset was a thing of the past, except in certain fundamentalist religious circles. But now here I am in the twenty freaking first century, reading on the internet about a school that actually has that rule, right here and now. WTAF. And their excuse is, of all things, chivalry. As my grandmother used to say, lord have mercy!

Don't get me wrong; there's absolutely nothing wrong with wearing dresses, if that's what one chooses to do. What's wrong is not allowing girls to have a choice and running a school in such a way that gender roles are strictly circumscribed in a discrimatory, not to mention highly anachronisticway. What this school is doing is just gross, afaic.

December 19, 2021

It's really not that simple.

I've seen so many posts like this, and while I fully understand why people feel this way, I find these posts disturbing.

Health care professionals have a code of ethics that underlies decisions about the allocation of care, for covid or anything else. I don't think it's appropriate for those of us outside that field to make pronouncements that they should start doing things that violate that code (such as having different standards of care based solely on vaccination status), even in jest.

Health care workers need all the support we can give them right now, and imo, saying that they should flush their professional ethics down the toilet when dealing with covid patients is neither supportive nor helpful.

I realize this may not be a popular stance right now, but all this talk of denying care to a specific group is highly problematic, imo, no matter who that group consists of.

December 16, 2021

FYI: Covid hospitalization hot spots across the U.S., in five charts

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/article/covid-hospitalization-hot-spots-across-u-s-five-charts-n1285965

December 15, 2021

That's not exactly what I meant.

When I said "defeatist," I meant the kind of post that says, in effect, "It's all over," when it isn't. I'm sick of people saying we've already lost our democracy. It's endangered, yes, but we haven't lost it yet, and there are are people working very hard to keep that from happening. It's flat out inaccurate to say we have lost already.

When it comes to the DOJ, what I get tired of is people saying they're doing nothing, like it's established fact, and bashing Merrick Garland for not doing what they think he should be doing, the way they think he should. The fact is, WE DON'T KNOW what the DOJ is doing ir what Garland is thinking. It would be great to know all the details, but for thatever reasons (that we also don't know), WE DONT KNOW. And I just get tired of people assuming they do know when none of us do.

I understand being impatient for certain things to happen. I just don't think we have any grounds to assume we know all the answers when we barely even know any of them.

As far Arizona, I don't know why the DOJ decided to leave it alone, but when a state legislature decides to to conduct an audit of the vote in their own state, that is something they have the right to do, even if they're doing it for really stupid reasons, and they have the right to decide how they want to do it, even if they decide to do it stupidly. So I think the DOJ may have decided to just let it play out. And what happened? Nothing. The whole thing ended, not with a bang, but a whimper, and the AZ state legislature ended up looking pretty silly to everyone except diehard MAGAts. Yes, they spent a lot of their state's money very foolishly, but that, too, is something they have the right to do. I hope some of them have to pay for their stupidity at the ballot box heat year, but I don't live in AZ, so it's not really any of my business. And it's not really the DOJ's business, either.

But back to my main point: as much as we wish we knew for sure what Garland is thinking and what the DOJ is doing, the fact is, WE DON'T KNOW. And as impatient as we may feel, assuming that we know things we don't know doesn't do any of us any good.

December 12, 2021

I need to vent!

I just had a crappy week, and the week before that wasn't great, either. This weekend is turning out to be even crappier.

It's nothing earth-shattering, just incredibly inconvenient. Week before last, I had my car towed to a garage, because it wasn't running right. It started up just fine, but then refused to go more than 10 miles per hour. Flooring the accelerator had no effect.

Turned out very major repairs were needed. First we thought we were going to have to replace the engine to the tune of about 3 grand. It's a very old car, and we were considering whether replacing it would make more sense, but then the garage came up with another solution that was "only" 2 grand, so we decided to go with that route. (Please don't ask me to explain any of the technical details; that stuff is, as they say, over my pay grade,)

They had to keep the car for an entire week, but I was finally able to pick it up on Friday, and everything seemed fine. I dropped off my husband's car when I picked it up, as it needed some brake work. Drove wherever I needed to go on Friday evening; car ran great. Until the next day, when I got in the car to go do some grocery shopping, and guess what? Started fine, but wouldn't go over 10 miles an hour AGAIN.

So here we are with one car in the shop and the other one undriveable, and nothing to be done about it until Monday morning. We couldn't even get a rental car today, because *surprise surprise* local car rental agencies are closed on Sunday!

So I will have to get up bright and early tomorrow morning, arrange for a rental car, and have my car towed back to the garage again, on top of worrying about how much all of this is going to end up costing. We'll manage somehow, but things are going to be tight for a while. It's just a bummer, because we finally got all our credit cards paid off last year and being debt free for a while has been WONDERFUL.

Best case scenario would be my car getting fixed quickly without a lot of additional expense, my husband's car repair bill being minimal, and not needing the rental car for more than a couple of days. Worst case scenario, I don't even want to think about.

Along with everything else, my husband had some pretty extensive oral surgery on Tuesday and is still not fully recovered, so I've been having to deal with all the car stuff without a lot of direct help from him. He could barely talk for the first few days, and still can't do so very comfortably, so I, a person who HATES making phone calls, will probably have to make all the calls to the garage, car rental agency, etc. tomorrow. Oh joy.

The effort required to type all this out in a somewhat coherent fashion has calmed me down somewhat. There's still a part of me that feels like screaming and throwing things, but it's under control for now. Thanks for reading.

P.S. The garage that fixed my car is one we've used for years, they've done good work for us in the past, and they have a track record of being trustworthy. Just so you know.

December 11, 2021

The reporter who wrote that story later tried to claim that's not what Minton meant.

More here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1082691634184310784.html

Personally, I think it was a Freudian slip. TFG is and has always been ALL ABOUT hurting those he sees as enemies. His entire 2016 campaign was ALL ABOUT hurting people, and whether his supporters are or were consciously aware of it or not, that is what a large percentage of them were and are attracted to.

These are people who see themselves as victims, and they were thrilled when this big bully told them he was going to come in and (metaphorically) beat up all the other bullies on the playground that were picking on them. They felt betrayed when he did something that hurt them (i.e., the 2019 government shutdown), but they quickly forgot about it when he went back to hurting the people they thought "deserved" it (like immigrants and asylum seekers), and they voted for him again in 2020. Why? Because they like the feeling/delusion that they've got this big bully supposedly looking out for them. They know full well that he's a big, mean, nasty bully, but he's THEIR big, mean, nasty bully.

December 8, 2021

"Q: It's my choice to not get vaccinated. Why should I be penalised for this?"

A: Because your "choice" not to get vaccinated penalizes everyone around you and society as a whole, knucklehead.

I really like the analogy of drinking and driving as an individual choice that can cause a tremendous amount of harm to others. I think most people can understand that on some level. (Even drunks who decide to drive under the influence can understand it in theory; they just think it doesn't apply to them because they are delusional about how impaired they actually are.)



Unfortunately, I think covid has made it painfully clear that the idea of doing something "for the public good" is a completely alien concept for way too many people. Futhermore, if someone has made it to adulthood without acquiring an understanding of that, educating them out of it is probably a lost cause in most cases.

The people who resist vaccination, like those who worship TFG are very literal minded and only see what's right in front of their faces. They don't understand statistics or probabiity, so the idea that they are "more likely" to get seriously ill, need hospital care, or even die means nothing to them. They can only understand direct cause and effect, and immediate repercussions, not theoretical ones. Since not every unvaxxed person gets covid and not every person who gets covid becomes catastrophically ill and/or dies, they simply assume that THEY won't be one of the ones who do. The possibility of infecting others and contributing to the spread of the disease is even more meaningless to them.

How the hell do you get through to people like that? Damned if I know.

December 2, 2021

I'm pretty sure I've told my story here at DU at some point.

I had an abortion, too. I live in the midwest, and it was 1972, so I had to travel to New York, where it was legal, to have it done safely and legally. Fortunately, I was able to do that, and everything went fine.

I was in college at the time, and continuing the pregnancy would have meant dropping out of school, at least temporarily. Realistically speaking, my education would have been over, or at least postponed indefinitely, unless I gave the baby up for adoption. My family would have supported me to the best of their ability, but the best of their ability would have been grossly inadequate for reasons I will not go into here.

People talk about abortion being a difficult decision, and I know it is for some. It's not hard for everyone, though, and it wasn't for me. I had plenty of time to think about it before I could confirm the pregnancy. There were no home pregnancy tests kits then; you HAD to go to a doctor, and even the doctors couldn't confirm it nearly as early as they can now. I had to wait over a month between missing a period and getting "official" confirmation. The whole time, I knew what I was going to do about it.

Fortunately, the women's studies center on my campus had a problem pregnancy counseling service, where you could get help to find out about all the options that were available and make a decision. I had already made my decision, so they hooked me up with a reputable abortion clinic in New York City, and I was on my way.

I never wavered in my decision. To be honest, it was the only choice I could even imagine. There was no way I was going to be able to raise a child, and I couldn't imagine having a baby and relinquishing it to be raised by strangers, as was customary in those days. (Open adoption, as we now know it, did not exist then. You signed away your rights, and an agency took it from there. Where your baby ended up after that was none of your beeswax.)

For me, abortion always seemed like a better alternative, or rather, all the other possibilities seemed too overwhelmingly life-altering to have any appeal. So that was the choice I made. I didn't feel any ambiguity about it then, and I've never regretted it. To tell the truth, I get uncomfortable when people talk about it like it's always an agonizing, gut wrenching decision. It is for some people; I get that. But it is simply not that way for everyone, and that's OKAY. That doesn't make me better or worse than someone who found it to be a deeply difficult decision, and it doesn't make me better or worse than someone who chose a different path. It just makes us all different from each other. And that's okay, too!