Are You the Baddies?

Lil’ question for the scientists and science communicators and defenders of liberty who thought woke moral scolds were impinging so badly on their freedom to be assholes.  Who is censoring the hell out science right now?  Whose side is doing that?  I know, bring up the way your fave race “scientists” could only sometimes get published in mainstream sources, cool cool.  But on this scale?  How about the way they’re gutting universities?  Destroying the Department of Education?  Libraries?  This sound like the work of people who care about academia, enlightenment, the advancement of the human species?  Sophisticated discourse, holding up the hem of your toga as you walk through the agora?  Is this how you saw yourselves?

Are you starting to understand what censorship actually is?  Are you starting to understand how misogyny, transphobia, and racism will always lead into fascism?  How there’s no good and actually cool version of any of those things?  Growing a tiny spark of self-awareness yet?  The clock is ticking.  You’re running out of time to breathe the air of freedom you’ve so stridently clamored for.  Anything you might think say or do that isn’t in support of the party line, better get your freak on while you still can.

Remember those guys painted out of Stalin’s photograph when they became not stalinist enough?  By supporting this situation, you’ve put yourself in a more dangerous position than most.  Does this feel like freedom to you?  Does this look like what you imagined it would, throwing off the shackles of woke?

I’m thinking of Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson here.  I’m not gonna host an answer by one of those humanoid tools of fascism, but I wonder vaguely what that would look like.  I wonder if OB feels like this is the dawning of a new feminist paradise, feels completely blameless in the use of transphobia as a wedge issue to establish Gilead.  I wonder if JC feels good about the state of science now, feels completely justified in working to achieve that egregious new normal.

I don’t wonder enough to read their sniveling bootlicking shit, but maybe one of you could summarize it for me in the comments, heh.

–

Life List: Greater Sandhill Crane

There’s an idea that famous cryptid The Jersey Devil can be explained by the sighting of a lone crane in the forest.  Sometimes it is depicted as a bird-like thing with the head of a horse.  I believe it’s a coincidence that the young of cranes are called “colts,” but it’s a fun coincidence.  Unlike the other leggy-and-necky birds known as herons and egrets, baby cranes are cute as hell.  I love them.  I also love hideous freak heron babies, but for different reasons.

Another cool mythical association:  Cranes are the mortal enemies of pygmies.  I do believe this myth has fuck-all to do with the various African tribes of short stature.  The pygmies of Greek legend are mythological beings.  In modern times we’re used to creatures like unicorns or centaurs existing as solitary units, discrete icons.  These ones came with a built-in drama in the form an aeternal war with another type of mythological creature.  Because waging war on pygmies is not something real birds do.  That shit’s just weird.  But funny.

I’ve only ever seen cranes when going out of my way to find them.  They are not a part of my life at all.  I went on a big birding road trip with my dad once and saw cranes in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.  I didn’t remember with certainty which crane species they were and had to look them up.  Based on range maps, this had to be the one: greater sandhill crane.  I didn’t get a very good view.  It was using binoculars to see them at a great distance; not too exciting.  Greige beasts with a lil red bit.

But still.  Big-ass birds are the closest thing we get to pterosaurs nowadays, and they are very cool.  Cranes.  Worth going out of your way for.

–

RP by Comment 00003

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

Already some cool kids were planning to indulge in the city’s night life.  The folly of youth.  Meanwhile, the tour continued into a building full of laboratories, where there was little of interest that they were allowed to see.

Josh came back to Ilmardan and Kaldonia.  “Turns out Humuk is too shy to go to clubs.  Still figuring himself out, I think.”  Kaldonia laughed quietly.

It was hard not to want an escape of some kind, a daydream to distract from the dreary reality around them.  The place looked even less interesting than the average high school – more like an office space of buzzing lights and clicking keys.

They came into another courtyard, this one adjacent to a cafeteria and featuring a heavy mechanized gate which would be used for access by utility vehicles in off hours.  It had a smattering of graffiti and a mostly occluded view of people walking by out on the street.

Ms. Selber sorted the large pack of freshmen into two concentric rings for some awkward ice breaking games.  Everyone had to say their name and answer a specified question to the closest person in the other circle, rotate, introduce themselves and answer a different question for the next.

Kaldonia was with Ilmardan for the question of “What’s your major?”

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

–

President Cal Worthington

There used to be a legend among used car salesman, and many of you may have remembered him the instant you saw the title of this post, even if you haven’t thought of him in thirty years.  Cal Worthington was the classic disreputable piece of shit motherfucker in that field, which I can reasonably infer from the fact he got ran out of entire states on rails, for burning too many people.

Or maybe some other crime; I don’t know the whole history of the situation.  I just know that’s not the kind of business that normally involves moving every few years and living out of hotels.

He had memorable commercials.  You can probably remember the jingle if you’re old like me and from one of the states where he ran the operation.  Cowboy hat, exotic animals that would all be referred to as “his dog Spot.”  When he was in Washington his dealership was in the last city I lived in, which he called “Federal Way, the only way.”

Anyway, if we’re gonna have a blatant criminal for prez, whose shenanigans were well-known decades ago, why can’t we dig up that guy?  He’d probably get his face ripped off by a chimpanzee before he wore out his welcome too.

Cal Worthington for president.

–

Life List: Luzon Bleeding Heart Dove

Is it kosher to put a zoo animal on your life list?  I’m going to have to if I keep doing a post every other day like this.

I believe this was at the Wichita Zoo in Kansas.  They had an indoor aviary when I visited a like four or five years ago?  Lots of fancy characters in there, and the Luzon bleeding heart dove is not the fanciest.  But he was special, because he had gumption and temerity.  He had gotten into the “airlock” between the aviary proper and (maybe not so) sweet freedom.  One joker leaving the door open a moment too long, and he would have gotten out.

Fortunately this was a fairly spacious antechamber, so the bird man of wichita wasn’t a split second from the door at any given moment.  We all got in without incident.  It was just amusing because this is a pigeon-acting pigeon, strutting around on the ground like any you’d see anywhere in the world, but y’know.  Exotic.

Is Luzon the largest island of the Philippines?  I think so.  Fresh from that very catholic and conservative country to our own crappy bible belt, it’s a humble dove with a splash of red on the chest, like he received some biblical punishment or sacrament.  Mary wept a blood tear on his chest.

Speaking of bleeding hearts, at my condo there is a bleeding heart flower on the back porch that grows ridiculously well.  The soil there looked like a pile of cigarette ashes turning to clay when we got here.  Vile.  Everything hated it.  But this plant, every year dead back to a pile of broken yellow tubes, blows up to be much larger than a man, elegant pink flowers all over it, and looks pretty decent for a long time.  We tried to tame it this year with tomato cages, but who knows if we’ll succeed?  Life… finds a way.

–

Primary they Asses

My union talked me into writing to my representatives thru a web form, and the responses have trickled in.  Clearly just had a machine or intern look at the subject matter vaguely and send robo-reply.  On the web form all three required an honorific but the senatorial old ladies only had mr. and mrs.,  while the congressdude had other options.

For the senators I chose mrs. but also used masc legal name.  First senator with a robo reply “corrected” it to mister.  Kinda like, fuck all y’all.

I’ve said before I’m ok with dems taking some bad deals when they’re in the weak position, negotiating however they can to reduce the damage of nazi policies, but if they act at all like they consider a demographic an acceptable loss, or worse, show enthusiasm for nazi ideas like fuckface newsom, we must brutally primary their asses back to whoville.

And if the dem establishment rams a shit candidate through?  I think they’re a few decades overdue for a riot at their convention.

–

Life List: White-Crowned Sparrow

I believe I’ve mentioned these guys a few times.  I started paying real attention to birds for the first time around 2006-2008 while living in Seattle.  I started paying real attention to bird calls after that, when being priced out of Seattle landed me in Federal Way, in the company of northern flicker screeches and one distinctive spring song that I came to recognize as the white-crowned sparrow.

Dweeet-dweet-wipwipwipwipwip.  That’s the impression it makes, but there are subtleties and variations, and the call frequently doesn’t make it to the last -wip because they will shut up if they feel nervous or distracted.  Incidentally, lots of animals will do this.  You don’t think of frogs as having an opinion about people, but if they see you looking for them, they will go silent.  A tittering bush full of bushtits, likewise, will shut the hell up if you come close.  It’s uncanny when you can’t even see the animal.  You got closer specifically to find them after hearing their sound, and then the sound stops.

Not as much of a problem with white-crowned sparrows because they’re fairly bold, living in open fields but also the kind of small trees you find in and around parking lots and sidewalks everywhere.  And in mating colors, they’re fairly distinctive – at least by PNW standards.  Strong black and white head stripes, bright yellow beak.  Larger than chickadees, smaller than robins, and they are easy to spot feeding on the ground.  Hello there.

I read once they’re considered crop pests in California.  Don’t care.  Let the birdies feast!  I kid, I kid.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?

–

Prison Labor Will Set You Free

You ever see the movie Sorry to Bother You by communist commie Boots Riley?  It’s such a great film for this general stretch of US history.  If anything, it feels mild compared to the new fascist deathclown era, but still, worth a look.  One element of that movie that hit me like a ton of bricks was the sunshine-branded debtor’s prisons, called “Worry-free Jobs.”  It felt so real, so possible, so close.

Particularly, I have often felt so beleaguered by the cost of fucking everything that the idea of prison began to have some appeal.  The idea of doing a crime, well, if I got away with the loot it would help; if it didn’t at least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.  But we know how horrible prisons are because it’s a bad joke.  Worse is the specifics, about how for-profit prisons have given people moldy bread, watched their bodies ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, got them pre-loaded with debt for the next time they hit the streets.

Every time I hear some liberal asking, “where do red states think they’re going to get people to do shit work if they deport all the immigrants?,” I know the answer.  “How can landlords keep jacking up rents?  What will they do about the expanding homeless population?”  Loud and clear, no question, no hesitation.  The corporate prison industrial complex is going to be massively expanded, and these gulags are about to supply a ton of slave labor for the new economy.

How will they feed bodies to the system?  Eventually debtor’s prisons will be more formally accessible, with a few laws rewritten or reinterpreted by fascists in black robes.  But until then, the big push for marijuana legalization?  That never did succeed in the vast majority of the union.  Expect brutal marijuana decisions to get handed down.  Expect states that have decriminalized it to see some reversals of fortune.

Anyway, prison reform (or abolition) was always a more important issue than we as a society were ready to handle.  But it’s about to become much more crucial than it has been for a lot more of us.  Don’t let yourself get arrested, my people.  The corporate prisons (with eager police and prosecutor collaboration) will do everything they can to keep you for the rest of your miserable life.

And solidarity for all laborers, no matter if they’re slaves or just wage slaves.  Power to the people!  Recognize we’re all the same to them.  Workers of the world unite.

–

Edit:  Oh yeah, maybe explain the title.  Prison labor will set you (nazis) free (from the economic consequences of murderous xenophobia).

–

RP by Comment – Still Open

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

The orientation guide continued with some basics about the neighborhood – the nearest public park with sporting facilities, directions to the largest public library in town, the hospitals, etc – before getting everybody in motion, following her with trudging little steps around the campus.  The names of the different buildings – after this and that donor or trustee – were a wash of meaninglessness to the non-humans among the freshmen.

As they walked down a long hall, where Ms. Selber mentioned some of the classes being taught, many of the freshmen talked among themselves.  Kaldonia kept on.

“What kind of music do you like, Ilmardan?  I could tell you what clubs play it.”  Why were lizard madonnas so interested in the elvenoid species, he might wonder.  The fashions didn’t hang on their bodies right.  The languages were a little off in that mouth full of uniform, sharp, curved teeth.

Some nearby humans looked judgmental about it, a hip aloofness probably inspired by the social terror of being new.  A male nymph drifted along nearby them, feet barely touching the ground, loose sky-colored curls floating around his shoulders.  He wore a stickball shirt, hipster jeans and shoes, and a little backpack over one shoulder.  There was some room to wonder, did nymphs owe their existence to the wild realms like elves, or the higher realms like giants and dwarves?

An orc jock tried not to step on any people and almost failed when a halfling got underfoot.  That little guy was some kind of raging nerdlinger.

Yup, any kind of weirdo might be in this company.

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

How about you?  It’s urban fantasy.  You’re in community college instead of the big leagues, for some reason, but it’s a place where you can start learning how to chuck fireballs or wield a zweihander, so … excitements?

–

Life List: Turkey Vulture

I’ve seen a turkey vulture once with clarity, tho my memory of it feels so weak and incoherent.  It was eating roadkill and we zoomed past it and out of sight in a split second, on a road trip I don’t recall with people I don’t recall.  Was it with my bro and my tech support guy?  Was it with my husband and his mom?  Was it with jeremy and brandy?  My dad?  Pretty sure it was in Washington state somewhere between Tacoma and Vancouver WA.

Other than that, I’ve seen a lot of them in Kansas when visiting my brother.  Down there they circle just like in the cartoons, but I don’t know that they’re specifically circling dying creatures.  They seemed to be circling hills at the sides of the highway… the highway with lots of roadkill coyotes and deer.

At that distance however – from the highway on a sunny day – they are so many black Vs floating in the sky.  Were they actually turkey vultures or black vultures?  Turkey vultures are more common in the places I’ve been down there, so I’ll assume they were.

Turkey vultures are in that New World vulture genus Cathartes.  They’re very different from Old World vultures, but still part of the eagle and hawk clade, Accipitriformes, if I got that spelling right.  Once upon a time some clever characters names Sibley and Ahlquist came up with a gene testing method that didn’t need sequencing, which wasn’t as advanced then as it is now.  They put chromosomes from different species together and observed how closely they married up – again, if I got that right.  Using this method, they arrived at the idea Cathartes grouped with storks.  The idea had a little staying power, tho it turned out to be wrong.

I think turkey vultures look kinda ill compared to Old World vultures.  Their head seems too small, too weak.  And with the red-pink flesh, they kinda look like they’re partially skinned.  Cenobite-ass freaks.  Black vultures are extremely similar but the mercy of having black skin on their bald heads makes them look much less nasty.

Not that I wouldn’t pet one, given the opportunity.  I like creachers.

Apologies to people who would prefer I fact-checked or researched these things.  I think it’s more fun to freeball it and have a smarty correct me in the comments.  Or just give me your vulture stories below!

–