MonsterHearts 2025 – Day One

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  For this first one, I tried to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, there are a lot of disadvantages to doing that, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, or placing your title just so.  Probably won’t keep up the effort.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY ONE:  NAUTICAL

TITLE:  LAY HIM IN WATER LILIES

CHARACTERS:  Brother Crispian: the Exorcist, Childeric: the Faun

PREMISE:  A mysterious young dude is tempting all the men of the village into gay dalliances and then being entirely too forthright about the fact when asked.  There are hints he is a supernatural creature, up to no good.  Whatever the case, gotta put the inquisitional spurs to his pale hide.

THE HOOK:  The only way to cleanse the world of Childeric’s sin is to plant a knife in his body – representing each man he has made filthy, thus taking the sin back from them – and for him to be drowned in the river, beneath the water lilies.  So sayeth Father Auribrande.  But you really wanna put a knife in that, Brother Crispian?  Really?

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Specific Actions for Blue States

This is an open letter to the governors and state legislatures of California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and anywhere that still has responsible human beings at the helm.  This blog itself is a wasteland of poorly considered guff, obscenity, and self-indulgent daydreams, so I’d rather this letter not be shared with links to the source.  Just copy-paste it at your politicians, if you agree with my thinking, and by all means, if you have better ideas, improve and rewrite it.  For my part, I’m sending it to Washington State’s Governor Bob Ferguson.

***

The federal government of the United States is being destroyed.  We will fight to preserve what we need, to get a fair return on what we pay into it through taxes, but the thugs have a death grip on every lever of power, and we must respond to their destructive radicalism with constructive radicalism.  We have to build something to replace everything they destroy.  And the best time to do that is right the hell now, because the destruction will happen very quickly.  Like global warming, it is already too late to truly get ahead of it.

This is not going to be easy at all.  I understand that it seems like I’m asking for the impossible.  Right now so much is under threat in so many ways, and we are all operating at a loss from responding to massive natural disasters, year after year after year.  But we cannot expect the status quo to suffice, even in blue states.  Perhaps especially in blue states.

I’m not talking about replacing capitalism, as much as I’d love to be.  I know there is not a body in power with any interest in seeing that happen, and that’s fine.  Properly regulated capitalism is still recklessly cruel and ultimately burning the world to ash, but it’s a system under which we can enjoy some liberty, can lead reasonable lives.  You ran for office in this country knowing what this country is, and I’m not asking you to fundamentally change that.

This the United States of America.  At our christening, we took this name to show that we are a collection of individual nations – willing to be united, but never willing to give up our self-determination.  My proposal is to assert control of that self-determination – to make it our own – so that when the feds say “public schools don’t exist, we’ll only fund hitler youth programs,” we can say “no thanks, we’ve got our own way.”

These aren’t meant to be done in sequence, hence bullets without numbers.  They have to happen all at once, as much as possible, because the “storm” they promised is coming down now.

• Come Together

The blue states need to be forming political alliances, making deals with each other for mutual aid and protection. As I recall, during the pandemic response, the governors did meet. Now it’s even more important to do this.

• Shore up Taxes

None of this will be possible without tax revenue.  All of our states have powerful lobbyists constantly campaigning to keep the wealthy from having to pay a fair share of the cost of having a civilization.  You may have to make some risky moves, you may have to examine every inch of every way money changes in the state to look for new angles, you may have to fuck up the avenues by which the wealthy put their gold bricks on the scale against you.  But you cannot afford to lose a cent.

This could be a significant part of why Democrats have lost so much nationally.  They profit handsomely from business as usual, from legalized bribery in the form of lobbyist money, from gerrymandering that makes their jobs safe at the expense of fair representation for all.  Obama and Biden could have seen the writing on the wall and used their executive power to limit the power of the executive, but they couldn’t bring themselves to lose a drop of their privilege.  You may have to reach within yourself to find principles that have been very hard for the best of us to find, when national power is on the line.  Please do.  Lives are depending on it.

We’re taught in middle school that budget decisions have to be approved by Congress, but the current president has shown that these norms are so much paper.  Expect every drop of federal funding to be leverage for intimidation and coercion, to abuse you and your constituency.  Get ready to lose it all.

• Replace Federal Funding

This could border on impossible, or it could be way easier than I’m imagining.  After all, most of the revenue of this country comes from our states.  But replacing federal funding of state programs will absolutely be necessary, for our continued safety and prosperity.  It is very unjust that our tax money continues to flow to a federal government that cares so little about us, that only trickles back as it sees fit – especially when that is jeopardized by the whims of a tyrant.  However, short of civil war, what can we do about it?

Work around the problem.  Come up with investment schemes, carefully negotiate with the wolves of business.  Maybe some functions of the state can be handled by the private sector.  That has been generally bad for utilities and extremely bad for telecommunications, but if you have no other recourse, privatization could prop up tax shortfalls.  Only use this one with the strictest of regulation, OK?

Right now US Treasury bonds are underpinning the global economy.  The tyrant could end that tomorrow because he didn’t get a nap and felt cranky.  What if California State bonds were so hot that international investors could just ditch the fed and buy into Cali?  How does your value stack up against the BRIC nations?  What about the combined value of the blue states?

• Plan Radical Restructure

Plan this, but with the knowledge it is aspirational – unlikely to be passed into law in one grand sweep.  This is what the radical right wing administration is attempting at the federal level, and attempting it with a grand sweep.  They want to destroy every institution on which the country has come to depend, and replace them with exploitative mock versions that funnel money into the pockets of wealthy administration cronies.  That’s a radical restructure.  We don’t have that kind of power, but maybe we could benefit from some careful measure of that kind of radicalism.

Our states’ institutions evolved over time from the growth of our respective economies, and from the progress of history.  This process is not elegant, not efficient, and there may be costly redundancies in our laws, policies, and bureaucracies.  The right wing solution being attempted at a national level is to wipe away the complexity of established systems and replace them with something new, simple, and rigged to feed the rich.

To help with the goals of shoring up taxes and replacing federal funding, targeting these inefficiencies may be a useful goal.  We don’t have to leave people in a lurch like they have.  The right way to do this is to study how our civil structures operate – what they do, how, and why – and see if we can engineer more elegant ways to achieve the same ends.  Then implement those fundamental changes in a way that exercises care to prevent lapses in essential services.

If the current president cared one jot about his own constituency, actually believed that his right wing agenda was a principled and good thing, he would have taken that thoughtful and slow approach to making these changes.  It didn’t have to be implemented like a blitzkrieg.  That’s just a way of showing off that they don’t have to care what anybody thinks of them anymore.  It’s a way of showing off that at a national level, democracy is over.

• Plan for State Border Problems

While red states demolish their social services, health care, infrastructure, human rights, and worker protections, our states will become the release valve for anyone trying to escape the badlands.  This is already true in many ways, but can get so much worse.  At least for the moment, interstate travel is free access, but as the reddest states try to lock their women in Gilead, border checkpoints may become a thing.  And if that doesn’t happen?  Then that’s a lot of red state refugees you may need to accommodate.

This can be a good thing, if it’s done right – like international immigration.  Try not to be as exploitive as our country has been in that regard.  Instead of “what can these desperate people do for us?” ask “what can we do for each other?”  Indeed, to the extent the fascists allow any international immigration to happen, the same kind of solutions can be applied to both issues.

Job programs and genuinely affordable housing are my preferred solution.  And if there aren’t enough jobs?  Figure out how to make more jobs.  It’s been done before, during the New Deal.  And if that’s too radical for you, this may be a good place to make deals with private businesses, to have them fulfill some of these roles, for profit.  Any unskilled position in healthcare, construction, agriculture, customer service – these are places where the most desperate people can be employed.  The kind of jobs we have a bottomless need to fill.

It’s important that any immigrants that are allowed to stay in our states should be allowed to do so in a legally sanctioned way.  Our country has allowed illegal immigration to prop up entire sectors of the economy, because that labor force was cheap enough to encourage us to turn a blind eye.  But that’s just human trafficking – moving unprotected bodies and subjecting them to abuses we’d never allow to happen to those we fully regard as human.  We have to be able to figure out a better way to do this.  I know the red state solution is going to be prison labor.  But that’s just slavery.  Let’s do better, for everyone.

And if it can’t be like that – if there’s a need to privilege residents of a state over immigrants from another – then there should be a refugee program to allow a more expedient path to residency, for those under the most threat where they come from.

• Rethink Healthcare

Our nation’s health care structure is a rolling disaster, created explicitly to make the rich richer, off the desperation and sorrow of the poor.  To an extent you cannot escape this.  Medicare is federal, and Medicaid is federally funded.

I think it’s instructive to look at the history of Medicare’s “parts.”  Part A was free for people insured through taxed wages and covered hospitalization.  Part B became necessary as healthcare expanded to lean more on specialists and outpatient care, and there was not enough money (was there?) to make the expansion happen without charging for it.  That’s $185 a month out of old folks’ Social Security checks, and not well-liked.

A and B didn’t cover everything, so gap coverage came along to pick up the rest, plus another letter for prescription drugs.  These are parts C and D, and these were a massive gimme to the rich.  The fed subsidizes these programs, forking over barrels of taxpayer dollars to private businesses.  In return, those businesses provide spotty service, while terrorizing and badgering the vulnerable with deceptive advertising and outright lies, denying care, and getting people killed.

This situation happened in stages.  Some causes were unavoidable – healthcare was bound to  become more sophisticated and expensive over time – and some were a result of avoidable government corruption.  At this point in history, we have enough perspective to come up with new ideas that aren’t hobbled by piecemeal development.

This is another Radical Restructure.  Your state could probably afford to lose its entire Medicaid program easily, if it had a well-designed and efficient replacement that covers many more people.  Maybe that could be handled as an expansion of the bureaucracy of Medicaid, but an expansion that relies on state funding over federal.  Because most importantly, as the federal government abdicates all responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, we are obliged – by the human decency they lack – to make sure everyone is adequately cared for.

• State Social Security

The federal program of Social Security will likely limp on in some debased form, barely helping anybody with anything, while its coffers are pillaged to pay for nuking Samoa, or some other absurd nonsensical atrocity.  I think it’s time to help seniors (and other vulnerable populations) within our states in big ways.  This can either be done with a new retirement program – a “State Social Security” – or by massively reducing the expenses members of these populations face, with expansions of Section 8, EBT, utility programs, etc.

Advantages of State Social Security:  This can be tied to investment schemes that generate revenue, and because people are already paying for and receiving Social Security from the federal government, this doesn’t need huge payouts – just enough to make up the shortfall, to keep old folks from having to eat dog food and ration medication.  Disadvantage:  Corporations will exploit any public benefit to raise their prices, busting you back to square one, with nothing but useless bureaucracy to show for it.

Advantages of Reducing Cost of Living:  Takes away that last disadvantage.  Need-based programs cost money.  More people using them means more people needed to administer them.  And as a strictly humanitarian thing, they cannot generate profit.  These programs are always targeted by aggressive lobbying – by rich vultures that will never be satisfied until the poor are beaten and bleeding in chains, calling it austerity.

The best way is probably some combination of the two, but one thing that is needed regardless of the approach is…

• Genuinely Affordable Housing

OK, you can’t very well have half your state on Section 8, and you can’t limit the asinine price of real estate without damaging the financial sector, right?  But there is absolutely a middle path here.  Poor people – the renting class – generate so god-damn much money.  The rich have come to feel entitled to have an ever-escalating amount of that money, with no thought to how much blood is in these stones.

If you could just get a corporation to be willing to accept a smaller profit margin, in exchange for providing massively more units for rent at reasonable rates, you could house many more people.  People who could afford to participate in your economy as consumers, as workers.  All you need is the political will to make these deals with a strong hand – without capitulating to lobbyists who tell you that “one or two sliding scale micro-studios in a block of two thousand $8000 units should be enough to house all your baristas.”  Those lobbyists are liars that do not deserve your tax breaks.  Don’t sell your people out; don’t let yourself look like a cheap bum.

• Disaster Preparedness

Climate change has caught us completely flatfooted.  What happens when we are still recovering from the last disaster every time that a new one strikes?  We are gradually worn down to nothing.  What happens with no help from FEMA?  Don’t let that be you.  I don’t know how much your state spends on research into new ways to deal with natural disasters – new solutions – but it needs to be a lot.

I know, we are so many grains of sand before the mighty gale.  But we caused this with innovation.  Surely there are ways we can deal with it that haven’t been fully considered or even developed yet.  And again, there’s a venal motivation for you as well.  What if California figured out how to manage wildfires, to prevent them from ever damaging property?  To prevent them from turning the sky into blood and hellfire multiple times a year?

What do you suppose that might do for the value of real estate there?  To the decision-making of businesses considering your state for a new campus?  If the new methods involve a process of labor or technology that can be employed and exported, how would you like to corner that market, in a world that is increasingly on fire?

This isn’t just about fire.  New solutions for flooding, earthquakes, winds, freezing, for temps that melt plastic and soften aluminum.  We’re in for a world of excitement.

• Global Warming is Not Going to Stop

I reiterate.  Look at what all of the world’s reputable scientists have said.  Look at what our federal government and businesses are doing in response to the crisis.  You know those maps of what the world will look like with no polar ice caps?  Familiarize yourself with them.  Count on that becoming a reality before this streak of fascism has even run its course.

None of you are in as bad of shape as Florida, but we are all going to take big hits – in addition to the disasters mentioned above.  NYC is going to have to move ashore, eventually.  Paint all your rooftops white.  Start wearing silver foil when you walk your dog.  SPF ain’t gonna hack it.  Air conditioning must be regarded as a human right, same for water.  Incorporate this kind of awareness into every law and policy you draft, for the next ten thousand years that it may take for the world to recover.

• Beware the Wolves

Unregulated capitalism devours itself.  It destroys competition, consolidates power, devolves into dictatorship and tyranny.  I’ve mentioned that, for lack of revenue, you may involve corporations in the essential functions of your state.  But this must be regulated powerfully, unfailingly.  That’s even without the consideration of a federal government that might consider dropping tactical warheads on San Francisco.  Watch your backs.

***

That’s all I got for the moment.  The nuke thing was hyperbole, I hope.  Don’t look at me like that.

This took way too much brain to compose.  Hopefully I don’t get spammed for donations by the DNC for the rest of my natural life.

Look forward to my usual foolery later today.

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Life List: Osprey

GO ‘HAWKS!  WOOO!  I kid, I kid.  I don’t give a fucking fuck about amurrican roids ‘n’ brain damage -styled football.  But the Seahawks have been around in the periphery of my consciousness many a year.  Seahawk is another word for osprey, so just to squeeze more wordcount out of these birds, I’m gonna talk about hucking the ol’ pigskin.

Colors:  Green and blue are the team colors.  Those colors don’t go great together, in my humble opinion.  Too “Captain Planet.”

Local Billionairism:  One of Bill Gates’ old buddies Paul Allen owned the ‘Hawks while he was alive, and I indirectly worked for his ass during a few of those years.  I don’t much care, but it puts me in mind of the bitter fact I have, in past jobs, been close enough to some famous billionaires that I could have just reached out and… I kid, I kid.  Unless..?  No, no, of course not… … …

The Kingdome:  Sports arena sponsored by local TV station King 5, started losing bits of roof, got replaced expensively.  Subject of much one note local humor.  Speaking of local humor, I have some affection for the old TV show Almost Live!, which, last I checked, was airing in reruns after SNL on NBC.  That last checkin was a long-ass time ago.  As was the moment in history when Bill Nye was on that show.  For whatever that’s worth to whoever.  Enjoy some Pat Cashman.

Good times.  Anyway,

Parking Garages:  You can tell a lot about sportball fandom by how badly they fuck up the parking garages nearest the playing fields.  I never noticed any especial damage for the women’s soccer or the hockey teams, but baseball, men’s soccer, and football would definitely leave their mark.  People get messy.  Baseball fans are just tipsy enough to accidentally drop their wallets or other little bits and bobs.  Soccer fans leave half-eaten boxes of oranges, clothing items, and other oddities.  Football fans invariably knock the garage’s gatearms off their posts.  One time a rich drunk fucko that came to get his eighty thousand dollar SUV -after the garage had closed for the night- crashed it through two concrete bollards and a metal roll-down fence, in order to get home.

That’s my menial job’s eye view of amurrican football.

How about some birds?  One time in a gas station parking lot in Federal Way, I heard some bizarre bird calls from the treetops, and busted out the birdy app.  It was ospreys, having the biggest conversation I’ve ever heard from them.

Accipitriform birds of prey -hawks, eagles, old world vultures, ospreys- usually nest on broad platforms at the tops of tall trees.  On a cellphone tower near the Walmart I used to work in, I once saw some ospreys hanging out.  Trying to nest?  What was interesting to me about this sighting is that one of the birds had a whole-ass cardboard box in its talons, and was flying it up the tower.  Was there anything in the box?  Tasty fish?  A gwyneth paltrow head?  An Alice in Chains?  A British one-hit wonder?  Or was it nesting material?  I just think it looked cool.

Ospreys are sooo easy to see here, around the Puget Sound.  Go close to water.  Look at treetops, or out in the shallows.  Watch them grab fish.  A sunny day is best because the fish are often shiny and silver, which makes the birds easier to spot at a distance.  Once saw one when I was walking across the Ballard Bridge, resting briefly on a street sign there.

Ospreys are one of those birds with worldwide distribution, so you might know about ’em no matter where you are.  They are white and brown, leaning toward the white.  Heads are white with a dark brown mask.  They are famous for reversing one of their toes to get a better grip on a fish.

I had a birthday a few years ago where I went to the beach.  Briefly I waded out to get a better look at a heron, and an osprey flew by at the same time.  Fun.  But the water was piss warm and full of slimy kelp and humans.  Ugh.

The US military has a tilt-rotor aircraft called the Osprey, courtesy of Boeing.  It looks cool, looks like a good design to do vertical or short takeoff & landing.  But it’s been problematic enough to call into question whether any aircraft built on that idea can ever be fully safe, over the years taking dozens of soldiers to their graves.  On the other hand, maybe it’s just motherfucken Boeing.

Bird doesn’t have that problem.  Nature wins again.

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A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

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Life List: Chestnut-Backed Chickadee

Chickadees are American tits, like the stuff I got in my shirt, hey-O!  heyoheyoheyoHey-O!  Haha.  Got ’em.

But seriously, they’re iconic birds of North America, hugely successful and widespread, to the point I have to wonder, like I do with dark-eyed juncos, if they are out of balance with their natural condition, as a result of human restructuring of the world.

That’s mostly black-capped chickadees, but of course, there are other close relatives of those birds.  Of them, the only one I’m ever likely to see is the chestnut-backed chickadee, because they are found in similar environments to the black-capped – namely, in trees and bushes around humans.

They have to be niche partitioning somehow, to have such a close relative in the same range.  What are CBCs doing differently?  Well, for one thing, they are not completing their sentences.  They are mumblecore chickadees with vocal fry, or whatever you call it.  BCCs are well known for their chickadee call, which in practice is more like “Tsickida-BEE BEE BEE.”  I could be wrong about this because it’s hard to get a clear enough view of the bird making the call, but it seems to me CBCs say Tsickida but never BEE.  Kinda like, halfway between the indistinct squeaking of bushtits and the bolder chickadee style.

Also, they are less bold in color.  I didn’t know there were multiple types of chickadees when I first saw them, and the chestnut back stood out less to me than the charcoal color of the dark areas on their head.  It’s like somebody took a black-capped and turned down the contrast, then painted a cedar red strip on their back.  I initially assumed I was seeing a mutant black-capped, with low-key leucism.

Anyway, I think they look cuter than black-capped chickadees, but cuteness is not the main thing I like about chickadees.  It’s the sassy noises, and for that, black-capped chickadees win – enough to get a post of their own someday.

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Life List: Pine Siskin

A few weeks ago, my husband called my attention to a flock of birds flying around wildly, outside our window.  He said they must be the same birds that weirded him out when, upon waking, he thought he was seeing bats outside.  Now these birds were not flying at all similar to bats, but they were shading in that direction much more than bushtits or starlings – the other birds I see larger flocks of at times.

There was just an erratic, manic quality – no cooperation, just dashing around.  Starlings are like fighter jets, Bushtits are bouncy little paper airplanes, and they both like moving in the same direction as the squadron.  Not so much with these guys – pine siskins.  How else can I characterize them?

I don’t have much to say.  They’re streaky LBBs with a wee bit of yellow in the beige.  My husband thinks they look green.  Word is they sometimes flock with goldfinches, but I haven’t seen it.  They’re not unusual in the region but it is unusual for me to see a big flock so close. Kinda fun.

This post was boring so I’ll do another one today.

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Are Black People Smarter?

Little bit of a land mine here, but I’m feeling insouciant today, so bear with me…  I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of Americans from all walks of life, and surely my impressions of that experience are tainted by biases.  Racists annoy the fuck out of me and are foolish as all hell; people who live on the receiving end of systemic racism have my sympathy.  I also relate a lot more to poor people than to the middle class.  So are my perceptions accurate?

There are standardized tests for “IQ” other cognitive faculties, and these have problems galore – not the least of which was their origin as a method for justifying racism.  I’m not even gonna bother with links; this shit is common knowledge among those nominally acquainted with the subject and with no delusions about their genetic superiority motivating the shit out of their reasoning.

But on a practical level, numbers aside, some people are just more thoughtful than others.  I characterize this as being willing to take new information on board, genuinely try to understand new things they encounter, and able to learn.

Ability to learn is a funny thing, because as we grow out of childhood, many of us handicap ourselves on purpose.  You mean I’m never gonna need this information again?  Fuck it, I chuck it, will re-learn as-needed.  I can feel that I did this to myself sometime around age 20.  While circumstance has pushed me into trying harder, I still allow myself the luxury of not learning shit, whenever I can.  There are people who either didn’t limit themselves in the first place, or are just more wise in how they apply that limitation, more able to get back into learning mode.

Willingness to try to understand new things is obviously a useful trait to have, but we don’t need it most of the time.  Our lives can be pretty damn simple in most ways, most of the time.  Whatever else is difficult about them, it isn’t the complexity of the problems in front of us.  It can get rusty, same as what I described in previous paragraph.  But I feel like this is a little different from that issue…  That’s about memorizing a new fact, this is about understanding why that fact is so – understanding a process.

The thing the reflexively ignorant don’t get is that understanding the process makes remembering the facts easier.  Like, remembering dates in history is rote, easy to lose.  Understanding what happened in sequence – what led to what – can make the simpler facts, like dates, easier to remember.

This is practical intelligence, not fancy logic or math or knowing big words.  A small child can be thoughtful, an adult can be thoughtless, and vice versa.  By this metric, I’ve spent a vast, unspeakable amount of time talking with thoughtless people, and less speaking with the thoughtful.  Of course, the average person is somewhere in between, but still shades toward the foolish side.

If I’m talking to an 89 year old who is still very sharp, it’s usually an upper class person with an ocean of privilege behind them, who worked in academia, finance, law, etc, on the pointy end of it.  That’s gonna shade white, tho not exclusively.  But stepping back from those rarities to look at people who are still very competent, who can look at a situation involving new information and deal with it, not shut down and get angry or cry about it?

Feels like the median black person is more intelligent than the median white people, in practical ways – which are the only ways that really matter.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with somebody that has advanced knowledge but can’t be fucked to understand anything outside that domain.  I want somebody that can be exposed to new information and understand it enough to have something to say about it.  That’s just conversation, but it’s indicative of the approach to other kinds of information as well.

It’s like white people feel more entitled to not have to think about things, to put that onto other people, and have anything they need sorted out for them with zero thought involved.  Black people are used to a society that is low key hostile to them getting their needs met in every way, cradle to the grave, so they need to be able to understand the shit that comes their way.

I might be remembering the thoughtless white people at outsized rates because of the biases I mentioned above, but also because they make a much more acrid stink about having their right to not have to think impinged upon.  I might be remembering black people who figured out some tangled bullshit at outsized rates because my unconscious bias is to assume them less intelligent, and it comes as a surprise when it should not.  I know there’s no way I haven’t absorbed that poison on a cellular level.

But I dunno.  Maybe black people are just better than us.

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Note:  If my comments are half as foolish as this post itself was, I’m gonna have to shut ’em down.  It could get offensive in a hurry.  For that matter, what I wrote could be pretty offensive to a reasonable person, and they don’t deserve to get upset because I thought it would be funny to upset unreasonable people, right?  In which case, sorry, and let’s just move along tomorrow.  I’ll leave this post up as a monument to my folly.

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JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Spoilers

Been watching yewchoob horseshit on the TV downstairs when I’m in a living-room-adjacent chore.  By default when I first turn the smort teevee on, it’s in this app that has a variety of channels.  One is “Anime All Day,” which has often been showing JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.  JoJo has a wacky concept that the main character – the titular JoJo – is a different person from one season to the next.  This cursed family always has members whose names start with Jo, Joe, Gio, etc., who are destined to fight evil.  Of course there are superpowers and whatever whatever.

So there was a season a few years ago which is seeing a lot of play, where the JoJo duJour was trying to join the mafia in Italy, to become a “Gang Star.”  There have been a few things that jumped out at me as fun or noteworthy or weird about this show.  This be spoilery, but you aren’t going to watch this junk anyway, are you?

One.  People act surprised when somebody has superpowers, even tho superpowered people always wear wild-as-hell, very queer clothing.  But they’re all hetero?  Or not especially interested in boning down, that I’ve seen.  Ace?  But they dress like it’s always Mardi Gras.  What’s especially funny is they showed the childhood backstory of the supporting character Bruno Bucciarati, and his queer clothes were shown to be growing up with him!  Like, baby Bruno had a simpler version of the design, which added more details as he aged.  He always had hair like Louise Brooks, even tho he waited until he was a mob enforcer to add the little girl barrettes.

Two.  Bruno is the underboss of his lil squad of supergangsters, and is showing JoJo around.  One of the gang tries to prank JoJoJo by pissing in a teacup and handing it to him.  Now, this shit aired on TV in Japan, I imagine in an adult-oid-esque-ish time slot somewhere somehow, so there was no dongling on display.  They just showed a stream coming out from behind his hand, splashing in cup, steaming.  Then, “You have to drink this tea because I have offered it.  Don’t be rude.”

JoJoJoJo impresses the guys by drinking the whole mug.  They’re grossed out and amazed but surmise, correctly, he used a superpower to avoid swallowin’ that juice.  But here’s the thing.  That shit passed your lips, man.  You inhaled the vapors.  I don’t care if you transformed your teeth into jellyfish that could hold it until you spit it out later.  That’s just weird.  At that rate, you might as well swallow it.  I don’t know.  Maybe he had gout.

Three.  Trish Una is cute and cool.  The mob boss’s daughter.  Trish and Bruno are the obvious standout characters of the season, both looking way cuter and cooler than the JoJo.  Megan Thee Stallion did a cosplay of this character once, so you know she’s a winner.

People with superpowers have an inhuman projection of that power called a “stand,” which makes them “stand users.”  The stands are usually (if not always) named after rock or pop songs or bands.  Trish’s stand is called “Spice Girl.”  This gives me a Trish connection: Bébé Mélange is a joke off “Baby Spice“+”The Spice Melange.”  I can give more history on that in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Four.  The stands are named after music.  This shit would not fly in the USA, and good for Japan, frankly.  JoJo’s stand is named after Prince’s album The Gold Experience, Bruno’s is named Sticky Fingers after a Rolling Stones album, a character named Mista has a stand called Sex Pistols, and the big bad guy’s stand is named King Crimson.  One of the bad guys is ノトーリアス・B・I・G.  I’m tripping.

Five.  The best moment of the season (that I watched only in snipped moments) was when Bruno is taking Trish to see her father the mysterious mob boss.   They have this moment of tender melodrama, where she’s afraid of how it will go, and he’s reassuring, and she tries to act tough.  They hold hands as the elevator ascends.

Suddenly, Trish is gone.  Serious expression – what happened?  Then it’s revealed Bruno is still holding her hand – which is severed at the wrist.  It spews blood everywhere while he yells NANI?!! NANIIII?!?! with his eyes bugging out and wiggling.  The comedy, which I’m pretty sure was intentional, came from the contrast of the quiet, brooding, intense moment of dignity, of characters asserting their self-possession and humanity, contrasted with home boy losing his shit anime-style.

“Bizarre Adventure” living up to its name.  I’m down.  But still… Stop me before I weeb again.

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Tvxnp Wants You Stuck in Traffic

There are about three million federal workers and more than half of their collective work hours take place in person – telecommute is common, but most telecommuters spend some amount of time in office; few are exclusively remote.  Sixty-one percent of work hours are in person, so using that an extremely crude proxy for amount of time spent in commute, something something,

Tvxnp🖤Mvksk want to put like 1.8 million extra drivers on the road during your daily commute, with all the attendant pollution we as a nation have proven to not give a fuck about, but also adding to congestion, which we do complain about an awful lot.  That includes people whose entire-ass job is being on the phone and computers, whose work is constantly tracked and monitored, who couldn’t be doing less work at home even if they wanted to.

It’s also making any federal jobs that had offered telecommute before suddenly a lot less appealing than their equivalents in the private sector, driving people away from agencies that are already understaffed.  This only makes sense in light of their overt not-quite-fully-confessed desire to destroy the entire US government, except for whatever apparatus funnels working peoples’ tax money into the bottomless tax credits and loopholes available to the rich, and except for the police and military which are needed to keep the proles in line.

Never change, shitheads.  Keep making everything worse for everyone in every way you can, why not?  It’s who you are.

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Life List: Kinglets

Just wanna mention this before I forget.  And it’s a lumping post.  I didn’t want to do lumping posts but I have so very little to say about the one bird, and still want to say it.  I caught it like pokeymans.  So I’ll talk about it, then its cousin.

Kinglets are tiny-ass borbs.  LBB, but oh so tiny tiny.  Anna’s hummingbirds can be tinier, but they can also be larger – more variable size, at least that’s my perception.  Kinglets are tiny as hell, but do look a bit more conventional for perching birds, otherwise.  Anyway, at that scale, with proportionately huge eyes and puffball-shaped body, they are disgustingly cute.

There are two varieties in Washington state – ruby-crowned and golden-crowned.  I do think both are common enough, but also easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, and they often tuck themselves out of sight in dense bushes or up in canopy.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen ruby-crowned before, but I wasn’t properly recording observations back then, and the memory has slipped.

But I saw one Friday Jan 24, pretty confidently.  It’s so small it’s very hard to be 100% positive, but in the slightly impressionistic view from over ten feet away, everything was right.  It was being quiet and I didn’t have bird app out, so I couldn’t confirm by vocalization.  And my phone’s camera is no better at distance than my eyes are.  But it was olive drab, small as a hummingbird or bushtit, but with very short tail, a contrasty bar in the wing area, etc.  And when I looked up info, it said they often feed on the ground, which is where this one was.

So ruby-crowned kinglet, snapped up in my pokey-ball.

Golden-crowned kinglets are either much more chatty or much more common, easy to detect on birdy apps throughout the region.  After I got priced out of living in Seattle for the first time as an adult, I landed in about the sixth worst apartment complex in Federal Way, so pretty shitty but not frequent gunshots when we were there.

The interior looked like it had been built in the ’50s or ’60s and there were homophobic slurs misspelled in the closet, “faget faget,” written in lipstick.  But just one step out the door and I got my best view ever of golden-crowned kinglets – a pair of them, right at eye level, within a few feet.  Fantastic.

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