Just a short post today. This video’s from a new channel that I might dip into again in the future. I’m not a huge fan of the clickbait-y content style, but I cannot deny that this video contains some cool facts about lions, and it also has… a certain something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Watch to the end, and let me know what you think.
I am, in general, pretty cynical about the U.S. electoral system. It’s designed to empower conservatism, and has been shaped to make change that benefits the working class nearly impossible. Yes, there are victories, but every single one has come as a result of decades of grueling and dangerous work by the people who most need that change. The Republicans want the U.S. to be a fascist, white supremacist state, in which the power of capitalists – the aristocracy – is unchallengeable, as long as they support the fascist agenda. The Democrats, or at least their leadership, still seem to want the world to be held in stasis in the mid 1990s, but will go along with social change when someone else does the work.
That’s not exactly a difficult choice to make, but neither is it a pleasant one. When it comes to foreign policy and the military-industrial complex, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, though the Dems are, on rare occasions, a bit less hawkish. Biden won’t try to hunt down and murder trans people, but he’ll continue working to undermine any alternatives to capitalism, and to prevent things like universal healthcare.
In a lot of ways, at least to someone who pays attention, workers have become alienated from politics in a manner similar to how they’ve been alienated from their labor. It’s something that affects our lives on a daily basis, but we have very little say in how it goes. In both cases, getting change that helps us, and not just the capitalist class, requires us to work together outside of a system that very much does not want us to do that.
It’s frustrating, and for those working to make things better, it’s often exhausting. I can easily understand why so many people often try to avoid thinking about it. We can have massive demonstrations to change policing, and after paying a bit of lip service, the Democrats go ahead with giving cops more money, while the GOP accuses them of defunding – something they have neither the courage, nor the desire to do – and howls for more violence from police
That’s why I advocate for systemic change, outside of electoral politics. Our system does change, but it does so slowly, and at great cost. The decades it took to ban leaded gasoline, or to end segregation, or to get gay rights, or to get trans rights – people died during those delays, because of those delays. People are dying right now, because of the backlash against advances in trans rights.
And as hard as people fight for their right to their own damned lives in the United States, that barely touches the horrors of the military-industrial complex, and colonial economic policies. Find me any politician in the U.S., and I can find you a reason why they should not be trusted. Bernie defended the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and has voted for any number of objectionable things. Katie Porter just talked about how impressed she was by the far-right ethno-nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu, and her support for Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. I’m certain that a great many politicians are pressured into supporting stuff that they don’t like, but it’s often hard to tell when that’s the case, and when they just support bad things.
It’s discouraging. I said I get why people just tune out, but I also get why people become intensely invested in a version of anti-establishment politics that says, “both sides are the same, so let’s burn it all down”. If only it were so easy.
The road to revolutionary change is slow, difficult, and full of frustration. Personally, I lean towards the opinion that – for all their evils – it’s better to vote for the Democrats in the short term. I say that not because I think they’ll do what I want, but because I don’t think that what I want can even be done, within the U.S. political system. From that perspective, I’m not looking for who will fix things for me, I’m looking for who will do the least harm and/or the most good, within the confines of our unjust and corrupt government. The revolution, of course, will have to come from the bottom.
I think there’s a danger in that perspective as well, however. We need systemic change, so anything short of that is inadequate, right? Well, no. I don’t think so.
I was, for a short time, intrigued by accelerationism – the idea that real change will arise spontaneously when conditions become unbearable. This is basically identical to the justification for the cruel and deadly sanctions placed on places like Iraq or Cuba – sure, it hurts the populace, but that’ll just give them incentive to rise up and free themselves from their oppressive rulers! Maybe that’s how it worked in France that one time, but in general, when people are struggling to survive, that takes up most of their time and energy. I think that the social networking that can come from that struggle can, in theory, become the foundation for a future revolution, but that requires the addition of time and resources beyond bare survival.
That’s why it’s so important that, as we work for a better future, we do what we can to save and improve people’s lives now, even if each improvement is far to small, and far too slow for any real satisfaction.
Fortunately, some changes are pretty big, especially for those people directly affected:
[Minnesota Governor Tim Walz] signed Executive Order 23-03 on Wednesday. It orders state agencies to protect people seeking gender-affirming healthcare in Minnesota, as well as the entities that provide it. State agencies are also specifically forbidden from providing information or assisting investigations to penalize trans people and their allies for seeking transition-related care. Judgments from other states that terminate parental rights because the parent provided their child with transition-related care will not be recognized by the state of Minnesota, and the state will also refuse to comply with subpoenas that seek information about trans people who travel to Minnesota to obtain care.
Additionally, the executive order tasks the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) with preparing a report that summarizes the literature on the safety and effectiveness of gender-affirming care, to be presented to the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Legislature by the end of the year. The order also strengthens protections for insurance coverage of transition-related care and mandates MDH to refuse to approve HMO contracts that discriminate against people on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
Noting that other states have “curtailed access to, or even criminalized” transition-related care, Walz’s executive order recognizes that “these actions pose a grave threat to the health of LGBTQIA+ individuals by preventing them from affirming their gender identities through safe and scientifically proven treatments.”
The executive order will be effective 15 days from the date of publication. It comes alongside a bill, HF 146, that would enshrine these same protections into Minnesota state law. Introduced by Rep. Leigh Finke, the state’s first out trans legislator, the bill will likely pass the House in the coming weeks, but Governor Walz told PBS that the escalating attacks on trans rights in other states made the need for such protections more urgent.
“Families who have fled are already here, and many more are planning to come,” Finke told the Minnesota Reformer. “We’re going to be ready to take care of them, and to provide them with the health care they need.”
This is great news, and it’s why I tend to prefer Democrats. Trans people, and the parents of trans kids, have been fleeing Republican-controlled states for a little while now, because of the growing efforts there to carry out a trans genocide. The problem is, there are so many anti-trans laws, and they’re coming so fast, it can be hard to know where to flee to. Moving is expensive, especially if you’re moving to a different state, so it’s not hard to believe that someone could move to a place that seems safer, see that change, and be stuck because they used up their resources. Journalist and activist Erin Reed has been maintaining a risk assessment map for just this purpose, and while she still needs to update it to include the latest info, she has said that this bill will upgrade Minnesota to being among the best states in the U.S. for trans people to be able to live their lives in relative peace.
I am especially glad to hear that Minnesota will, explicitly, not help those states seeking to persecute trans people. The companion bill, as far as I can parse the language, expands emergency jurisdiction over children present in Minnesota even if that’s not officially their home state. I believe the standing law gives that jurisdiction in cases of abandonment or abuse, while the new law expands that to include the inability to get gender-affirming care. I think there’s a strong argument for that inability being a form of abuse, but given how many people clearly disagree, it’s good to see it spelled out like that.
In the long term, the USian fascist movement is still going strong, and there’s still a very real danger that the GOP will take over the federal government again, and do far more damage than the last time. As I said earlier, the U.S. is set up to empower the aristocracy, and to empower conservatism. It will take much, much more than this to actually safeguard trans rights, or any other civil rights, for that matter. It will take more than this to end US support for fascists and their ilk in other countries. It will take more than this to build the world we want. There’s a lot more work to do, for the long-term.
Humans don’t experience life in the long-term, though, and this isn’t just me saying “people can’t plan ahead”. When we’re hungry, we need food. When we’re cold, we need warmth. When we’re being attacked, we need defense. It does no good to promise that those things will be available to us in 20 years, because if we don’t get them now, we won’t be here to collect then, even if that promise isn’t a lie.
Laws like this save lives, and while that should be enough to support them as-is, laws like this also move us towards our long-term goals. Those lives that are saved or improved by legal protections, are very likely to be a powerful part of continuing movements for liberation. Our dream of a better world depends on our collective power, and that depends on all of us caring for and protecting each other now. That doesn’t mean we try to make the movement risk-free, but rather that we do everything we can to ensure that people can choose what risks they take on. All we have is us, and so it’s extremely important that we take care of, and empower “us”.
I doubt that governor Waltz wants all the same changes I do, and I’m sure he’d be happy to send in the police to oppose a movement for economic democracy, for example. I won’t say that none of that matters, but it matters far less than this does, at this point in time. This executive order is a clear win, and I hope that HF 146 is passed into law very soon. The fascists are coming for trans people right now, and it’s great to see people in government fighting back in a materially effective manner.
Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!
I’m not sure where I first encountered the despicable practice of using autistic people as a political weapon, but it was probably the anti-vax movement. Some time after that, I learned why so many autistic people hate the organization Autism Speaks, and not long after that, I started to become more aware of how our society systematically fails, abuses, and kills people with all sorts of disabilities and neurotypes. In recent years, the reactionary “Gender Critical” movement has been using the bigoted notion that autistic people don’t know themselves or their own experiences, to attack trans people. It’s something that requires dismissing what autistic trans people have to say, often while claiming that those same people “don’t have a voice”, and so need some Rowling-style “feminist” to speak for them.
Mica of the Youtube channel Ponderful does an excellent job dismantling this bullshit, and giving her perspective as an autistic cis woman of the sort that the transphobes claim to speak for. Fair warning, this video does get a bit dark, as it goes into topics such as the frequency with which disabled people are murdered by their parents and other caregivers, and abusive “treatments” for autism. It’s an informative video, and it closes out with comments from autistic trans people, because it turns out that they actually do know their own minds, and they have voices with which to speak for themselves.
This video follows a couple divers and their support team, as they cut through nine meters of ice (just under 30 feet, for my USian readers) to dive in the appropriately-named Lake Untersee, a large, freshwater lake on the edge of East Antarctica. It’s frozen over year-round, but there’s still plenty of liquid water, and as Jeff Goldbloom would say, life finds a way.
The picture shows fossilized stromatolites, cut into squares to show the many layers that made up the structure. The upper surface is covered with conical shapes, and you can see how the layers underneath built up to form them.
Normally when I cover research on or around Antarctica, it has to do with this planet’s climate, but Untersee is such a harsh and isolated location that the main interest, aside from studying what’s down there, is in how it might help us find life in extreme conditions on other planets.
What’s down there, it seems, is stromatolites. These are layered structures formed by microbes gluing sand and other stuff together into their microbial mat. Over many generations, they form the alien shapes you can see on the lake floor in the video below. These structures fossilize well, which is probably why stromatolites represent the oldest evidence of life we have on this planet.
The divers’ first attempt, after a few days of digging a hole in ice, was aborted after the rebreather apparatus malfunctioned and started putting chemical-tainted water into the tube one of the divers was supposed to be breathing from. Just after they got the divers out, there was a storm with 100mph/160kph winds that lasted 24 hours, after which they had to dig all the snow out of their diving hole.
I’ve never had a whole lot of interest in learning to use scuba gear. On the one hand, I think it’d be pretty cool to be able to poke around underwater for a while like that, but on the other hand, there are a lot of ways it can go wrong, not to mention that I definitely don’t have the money for a hobby like that. Even if I do take up diving someday, I can guarantee I’ll never try it in a place like Antarctica. I definitely see the appeal, but as with cave exploration, I’m afraid I may just be too much of a coward. As for diving in caves? Yeah, I’ll pass on that. Honestly, I think I’d lump Antarctic lake diving in with cave diving – it may be that there’s less of a maze, but if you’re in an enclosed bubble of water that you had to drill through 30 feet of ice to get through, that counts as a cave, to me.
That said, I’m very glad that there are people who want to take on challenges like that, because I love being able to see this footage.
.
Back in October, I posted a Münecat video dismantling the bullshit of “body language experts”, and one of the problems she points to is the destructive use of these so-called experts in the legal system. 911 call analysis seems to be a version of that, but instead of body language, we have cops and their ilk “analyzing” 911 calls, and arbitrarily deciding whether they think the person making the call is lying. This fits in well alongside polygraph tests and lying about evidence, as another tool police can use to try to bully or gaslight a person into making a false confession:
As you heard, her [20 year old] son initially said that his mom had killed herself, before realizing that she had been bound with a belt and stabbed many times.
The cops pulled him into an interrogation room and kept him there for 13 hours, convinced that he was the murderer. Why? Well, why on earth would he have assumed his mom committed suicide? (3:23)
They were convinced it was him, but eventually, the cops checked his location data on his phone and found that he was nowhere near his home when his mom was murdered, and DNA at the scene was connected to a man who had been arrested multiple times for burglary in the past and who was eventually convicted of the crime.
In the Rebecca Watson video below, you can hear the 911 call (there’s a content warning before that point, in case you need it), and yeah – the kid sounds all over the place, and initially mis-understood what he was seeing. Based on that, and some cop’s opinion of what he would do under those circumstances, they interrogated him for 13 hours. I think most of us are aware of how miserable it would be to be locked in a featureless room with a cop for 13 hours, constantly being accused of murder, and fed stories about what a shitty person you are. How much worse would that be if your mother had just been murdered? If you had found her body?
And all they had to do to avoid tormenting that poor man was check the location data on his phone, or wait for the DNA evidence. They didn’t do that first, because they care more about getting a conviction – any conviction – than they do about the danger of imprisoning, or executing, an innocent person. The more you dig into the policing system in the U.S., the more examples you find of cops just absolutely wrecking people’s lives because they’re too lazy, too cowardly, too sadistic, or too full of themselves to do their jobs properly.
Now, I don’t have a very large audience, but there’s always a chance someone will come along and read this, who might think I’m being too hard on cops. Maybe this is a technique that’s supported by science, or that was pushed on cops, right? Well, no.
In 2009, a cop named Tracy Harpster, from a small town in Ohio that rarely saw a murder, published a preliminary study in which he combed through 100 911 calls, half of which had been made by the person who was later convicted of the crime being reported. He did this to identify patterns, coming up with a list of features he noticed in the “guilty” calls, like not immediately pleading for help, not demonstrating sufficient urgency, being polite by using words like “sorry” and “thank you,” giving extraneous information, or insisting that the victim is dead when their condition isn’t 100% known to the caller.
Though Harpster had no scientific training, that kind of analysis IS normal and even necessary in science – it’s a first step that says “hey, here’s a pattern I noticed in THIS dataset.” But because the researcher at this point is specifically looking for ANY data points that stand out, literally looking for the anomalies, it’s impossible to say that those anomalies will be found in a larger dataset. For instance, if I have a bag of 100 different colored marbles, I can reach in, pull out a handful, and record what I notice: 7 blue marbles and 3 red. That doesn’t give me a definitive answer but a hypothesis: if you pull one more marble out of that bag, it has a 70% chance of being blue. The next step is to test that hypothesis by reaching in again and grabbing a new handful and seeing if the numbers line up. And then doing it again, and again, and again.
Harpster never bothered with that crucial second step of actually testing the hypothesis. Others did, with one study in 2020 and another from last year both finding no correlation between Harpster’s list and actual cases of deception. But those studies haven’t mattered, because Harpster’s preliminary analysis had already been shared by the FBI to law enforcement agencies across the country, who immediately started putting it to the test and finding great “success” at identifying criminals based on their 911 calls. These successes encouraged Harpster to start charging for 2-day training sessions, paid for by taxpayers, in which he trained investigators on how to use his magical checklist.
Investigators quickly realized that because there was no actual scientific backing for the checklist, they would have to sneak it into court cases without actually calling Harpster (or “trained” detectives) as an expert witness, since there are rules for what qualifies as expert testimony in court. ProPublica has reams of documents that catch prosecutors doing this red-handed, creating a playbook on how to use Harpster’s now-debunked pseudoscience in court without subjecting it to scrutiny:
“First, identify law enforcement witnesses who have taken Harpster’s course. Then tell them how to testify about the guilty indicators by broadly referencing training and experience. As Esteves, the prosecutor in Iowa, put it in an email: “Have them testify why this 911 call is inconsistent with an innocent caller, consistent with someone with a guilty mind.”
“Next, prime jurors during jury selection and opening arguments about how a normal person should and shouldn’t react in an emergency. Give them a transcript of the 911 call and then play the audio. “When they hear it,” a prosecutor in Louisiana once told Harpster, “it will be like a Dr. Phil ‘a-ha’ moment.” Finally, remind jurors about the indicators during closing arguments. “Reinforce all the incriminating sections of the call,” another prosecutor wrote, “omissions, lack of emotion, over emotion, failure to act appropriately.”
“Juries love it, it’s easy for them to understand,” Harpster once explained to a prosecutor, “unlike DNA which puts them to sleep.”
Cops lie. They lie all the time, and they lie to everyone. They lie to juries, they lie to attorneys, they lie to the general public, and they lie to judges. They’re trained to lie, encouraged to lie, and rewarded for lying, and they do not care how many lives they destroy. It seems unlikely to me that that will change so long as we maintain this unaccountable class of violent people, who are given rights and authority over everyone else.
There is, of course, more to the story than these quotes. For the rest of it, check out the transcript linked at the top, or Rebecca Watson’s excellent video below:
A little while back, I shared the good news that the so-called “clathrate gun” was apparently no longer a serious cause for concern. I remain happy about that, but unfortunately there are other big sources of methane – all tied to fossil fuel extraction – that are contributing to climate change in a major way.
More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.
This is why the focus on individual lifestyle choices has always been a massive red herring, and why I focus more on systemic/societal change. I haven’t owned a car since late 2009, and any decrease in humanity’s emissions from that choice was more than wiped out by the methane coming from any one of those facilities. Do what you can on the individual level, but if we don’t chance society, that won’t end up mattering. That’s doubly true, because fossil fuel corporations fully intend to extract every drop they can, no matter the harm done to everyone else:
Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.
I guarantee you that there are more than 55 places around the world where new extraction is planned, and from which a horrifying amount of methane will leak. These 55 are just the really exceptional ones. Regardless, these findings support the long-standing view that we need to act a lot faster than we have been. The upside is that eliminating or dramatically reducing these emissions should, technically, be pretty easy:
Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.
The two new datasets identify the sites most critical to preventing methane-driven disaster, as tackling leaks from fossil fuel sites is the fastest and cheapest way to slash methane emissions. Some leaks are deliberate, venting the unwanted gas released from underground while drilling for oil into the air, and some are accidental, from badly maintained or poorly regulated equipment.
Fast action would dramatically slow global heating as methane is short-lived in the atmosphere. An emissions cut of 45% by 2030, which the UN says is possible, would prevent 0.3C of temperature rise. Methane emissions therefore present both a grave threat to humanity, but also a golden opportunity to decisively act on the climate crisis.
“The current rise in methane looks very scary indeed,” said Prof Euan Nisbet, at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK. “Methane acceleration is perhaps the largest factor challenging our Paris agreement goals. So removing the super-emitters is a no-brainer to slow the rise – you get a lot of bang for your buck.”
“Methane emissions are still far too high, especially as methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency. “There is just no excuse.”
I believe the excuse is that solving these problems might slightly slow the rate at which fossil fuel executives keep getting richer. The world has been blessed with a great abundance of “low-hanging fruit” with regard to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and for the most part, those have been ignored. I full believe that this will also be ignored, unless there is real, scary pressure from the bottom.
It may be that as a movement rises, rooted in collective power, direct action, and the common good, the capitalists will begin making more dramatic changes in an effort to appease the masses, head off real change, and hold on to their power. I’ll celebrate those changes when they come, but given the past behavior of these people, I think it’s safe to say that they will not be enough. Not for dealing with the climate, and not for the goal of freedom, self-governance, and justice.
Methane leakage from the fossil fuel industry is not a new problem, and it’s already a crime against humanity that it hasn’t been dealt with. The longer this is allowed to continue, the more harm it does to all of us, and to future generations. They’ve shown that they will not voluntarily cease their campaign of destruction so they must be made to stop.
Edit: Someone on Mastodon pointed out that when methane reaches the end of its “life” in the atmosphere, it doesn’t just disappear – it largely turns into carbon dioxide, and keeps warming the earth that way.
It’s hard to decide what aspect of climate change is the most frightening, amplifying feedbacks – effects of warming that themselves cause more warming – have to be near the top of the list. A few days ago, I wrote about research indicating that they may be worse than we know, and today’s research is about the progression of one of those feedback mechanisms. Wildfires have been increasing with higher global temperatures, increasing output of CO2. Unfortunately, it turns out that 2021 saw a huge spike in wildfire emissions:
Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO2) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021, 150 percent higher than annual mean CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2020, the scientists reported in a paper in Science.
“According to our measurements, boreal fires in 2021 shattered previous records,” said senior co-author Steven Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science. “These fires are two decades of rapid warming and extreme drought in Northern Canada and Siberia coming to roost, and unfortunately even this new record may not stand for long.”
The researchers said that the worsening fires are part of a climate-fire feedback in which carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, creating conditions that lead to more fires and more emissions.
“The escalation of wildfires in the boreal region is anticipated to accelerate the release of the large carbon storage in the permafrost soil layer, as well as contribute to the northward expansion of shrubs,” said co-author Yang Chen, a UCI research scientist in Earth system science. “These factors could potentially lead to further warming and create a more favorable climate for the occurrence of wildfires.”
Davis added, “Boreal fires released nearly twice as much CO2 as global aviation in 2021. If this scale of emissions from unmanaged lands becomes a new normal, stabilizing Earth’s climate will be even more challenging than we thought.”
This is why I focus not just on ending fossil fuel use, but also on making changes now, to help us deal with the warming that we know we will be unable to avoid. The climate shift that we’re currently experiencing has a great deal of momentum – enough that it could conceivably keep warming for centuries, even if we do get our emissions under control in the next 20 years. It would be much slower, and potentially easier to adapt to, or even reverse, but the ball may already be rolling fast enough that it no longer needs our help. The longer we delay action, the higher the odds that that’s our situation.
That’s also why it’s important that we actually deliberately phase out fossil fuel use, rather than trying to tweak the market and hope that works. That means big increases in renewable energy, and big increases in nuclear power, as we also work to reshape our infrastructure for a more hostile world.
The upside is that CO2 emissions from wildfires are a little bit like sea ice – they “recover” a bit every year. The net effect is still more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but the fact that, according to the researchers, 80% of the CO2 released is re-captured by new growth following the fire, is important to note. I think it also increases the need for various forms of rewilding – turning areas currently being used by us in the conventional sense, into either fully wild ecosystems, or managed ecosystems that would provide some more direct benefits to humanity, like food.
I don’t expect news in the coming years to be particularly uplifting, but it’s important to remember that we do have ways to make things better.
If bats are known for anything, it’s for being the only mammals to evolve flight. Some eat fruit, nectar from flowers, or even fish, but a great many make a living snatching bugs out of the air. It turns out, however, that even with the ability to fly, sometimes it’s easier to just walk. Met the pekapeka – the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It’s the only bat I’m aware of that hunts on the ground, scuttling around on the forest floor looking for insects and other things to eat. The males also apparently sing to attract mates.
They’ve had a rough time of it, but apparently conservation efforts are ongoing, and there may be cause for cautious optimism. This video is a couple years old, but they little critters seem to be holding on:
Growing up, my parents had a great many books from the newspaper comic Doonesbury. For those who’re unfamiliar, the comic started in 1970 following the lives of a group of college kids, mostly centered around the experiences of one Mike Doonesbury. When B.D., the jock who never removed his football helmet, volunteered to go to Vietnam, the readers went along with him, and got a darkly humorous take on that conflict. When George Bush Sr. invaded Iraq in 1990, B.D. was there, too, along with Duke, the Hunter S. Thompson parody, who went to profiteer.
I think it’s fair to say that, along with listening to NPR in the car, Doonesbury was a pretty big part of my childhood political education. During the Gulf War era, the theme of greed was woven through the comics. Mr. Butts, a mascot for the tobacco industry, was handing out free cigarettes to B.D. and his fellow soldiers. Duke ran a sleazy club, which he opened to profit off of soldiers, officers, and the various dignitaries and oilmen drawn to the war and its profits.
The second part of my political education came from my involvement in The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which instilled in me a religious opposition to war, and was a huge part of my social life, growing up. The third part was my high school, High Mowing Waldorf School, which regularly brought in speakers on a variety of topics, including SOA Watch, and an organization called Voices in the Wilderness, which talked about sanctions.
See, the Gulf War was pretty short by modern standards. It only lasted from 1990, to 1991, though it was a brutal affair. If you ever have any questions about whether Bush Sr. was less horrible than W, look into that war, maybe starting with The Highway of Death. The war destroyed a lot of Iraq’s infrastructure, and the sanctions regime that followed made repairing it nearly impossible. I’ve mentioned before that I view sanctions as a form of siege, using modern power and politics to blockade an entire nation, rather than just a city or fortress. The sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis between 1991, and the 2003 invasion by W’s administration, and most of those “excess deaths” were children.
After being “bombed back to the stone age”, people died. A big part of that was because the war’s destruction included sewage and water systems. That meant that clean water was hard to get, and disease was everywhere, while medicine was hard to get. It’s not clear if anyone literally starved to death but there was malnutrition, which makes people more vulnerable toinfection of every kind. On top of that, the U.S. used the U.N. to block necessary supplies, like the resources to repair the infrastructure and purify water. The sanction that angered me the most, in my teens, was on new blood bags for transfusions, on the grounds that they could, in theory, be used to make chemical weapons.
This was a continuation of the gross hypocrisy that always surrounded the U.S. relationship with Saddam Hussein. There’s no question that the man was a horrible person, responsible for incredible amounts of death and suffering, but the U.S. does not care about that. At various points, the U.S. government actively supported those atrocities, just as it supported Saudi Arabia’s ongoing genocide in Yemen, along with countless other crimes against humanity all around the world.
So that was my background when Bush got elected, and most of the people I knew who talked about the issue, fully expected W to try to finish what his daddy started, and get Saddam Hussein. When 9/11 happened, it was immediately assumed that Bush would use it as an excuse to attack Iraq. Not long after, I started attending a weekly peace vigil in a town near where I lived, and I continued demonstrating and protesting through the propaganda campaign that led to the invasion.
I encountered people who sincerely believed that Iraq was involved with 9/11, despite all evidence to the contrary. They screamed in my face about it, in fact. They also screamed about WMDs, even though Iraq had been under inspection for years, and there was no sign that they had anything. I watched my government lie to me, as I had known they would, and I watched the justification for the war shift, and become more vague as each lie was debunked.
I saw how it didn’t matter. The protests didn’t matter, the facts didn’t matter, the opposition from allied nations didn’t matter – none of it mattered. France opposed the invasion, so we had to deal with “Freedom Fries”, and wine stores poured out their French wines. I also saw the rise of Fox News, and its unwavering commitment to making the world worse, and to lying about fucking everything, no matter how pointless.
I’m going through all of this, so that you’d have some idea of my views and memories surrounding the Iraq war and the George W Bush administration. With that as context, imagine my feelings when considering the effort by Prager “University” to rewrite that history. For those unfamiliar, PragerU is a YouTube propaganda mill helmed by an obnoxious and creepy conservative radio host named Dennis Prager. It was originally funded by fracking billionaires, and I believe it has since been bought by The Daily Wire.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that PragerU lies even more than Fox News, and you do not, for any reason, gotta hand it to Fox.
Prager’s primary project seems to be creating an alternative history where everything that ever happened in the world both supports all the opinions of U.S. Christian fascists, and in which the United States always has been, and always will be The Greatest Country In The History Of The World. You know how there’s currently a push to prevent children from learning about LGBTQIA issues, or any accurate telling of U.S. history? Prager U is what they want to have instead.
It’s not shocking that conservatives are trying to rewrite history. That’s all they’ve ever done, really, and it’s part of how they claim moral supremacy for the United States. From cherry trees to WMDs, they just make up a history they like the feel of, and attack anyone who tells the truth as un-patriotic. Fortunately, I’m no patriot, and while I don’t know much about Dan from Three Arrows, if he is a patriot, it’s not for the U.S. (how’s that for a segue?), who just put out this video picking apart Prager’s lies about Iraq and the second Bush administration:
I think it’s helpful to have a perspective from outside the U.S., but more than that, I just appreciate anyone who’s able to dig into videos like this and the people behind them, and put out a solid debunking video on the topic. Conservatives are not going to stop trying to erase and re-write history to suit their agenda, so I think it’s extremely valuable for us to have content like this to push back against their lies.
Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!
Every once in a while, you come across some aspect of USian life that really underscores just how parasitical the ruling class really is. There are a lot of things like that, but they’re rarely as on-the-nose as the blood plasma industry. For those who are blissfully unaware, the United States is one of those rare “industrialized” nations that allows people to sell their plasma to supplement their income. This is the point at which a conservative would probably make like George W. Bush and say that that’s just an example of wonderful American Opportunity, but to me it’s a gross failure of society.
I suppose there are differences of opinion on what societies are for, but I generally hold the view that their purpose is to ensure a better standard of living for all, than any of us could hope to achieve working alone. Obviously, this is not a popular opinion among the USian ruling class. That means that rather than ensuring peoples needs are met, it’s considered “better” to let economic desperation drive people to selling parts of themselves to survive.
As these things go, selling blood plasma is probably the least harmful option, after selling hair for wigs. They take your blood, run it through a machine to filter out stuff like blood cells, and pump that back into you, while taking the fluid – plasma – that’s left over. You lose more than just water, but far less than you would from a whole blood donation.
I know a bit about this off the top of my head because, back in 2009, I sold blood plasma to help make ends meet for a while. I think the price has gone up since then, but at the time, in Madison, Wisconsin, I think the most I got was around $350 for my first month of donations, and less after that. I could be mistaken, but that’s what I remember. Rent was a lot lower back then, so that went a bit further than it would today. Unfortunately, it meant getting holes poked in my veins a lot more than I was used to, and, of course, sometimes they’d accidently poke through a vein, rather than just into it.
I started to worry about the long-term consequences of that repeated damage, and because I wasn’t in any real danger of not being able to eat or make rent, I decided to stop. It turns out that while I was probably better off than most people who sell plasma regularly, I was closer to the norm than I realized:
“What I found instead was a lot of people who, say, 25 years ago would have been middle class, and they just don’t make enough money for that lifestyle any more. I get the sense that one of the biggest demographics is college students. We’re talking about like big public universities where there are a lot of students who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds; I’ve talked to people who use this money to buy books, to pay to go out for a night, for ‘beer money’.
“You will also find people in communities like Flint, Michigan, where I spent a lot of time, who used to be able to expect to have this very normal American middle-class lifestyle and wages and benefits no longer keep pace with that. There are people doing it to buy groceries and to pay for housing. There are also people who are selling plasma to take a vacation.
“It’s these places where people are economically fragile, not necessarily desperately poor. The kind of fragility that we didn’t have 25 or 30 years ago when there were more social-safety protections.”
Yep, that’s me. I went to a decent college, and got a bachelor’s in biology with the expectation, based on everything I’d been told from all sides at that point, that I’d be able to find reliable work, have a career with benefits and a prospect of a decent retirement, and all that jazz. My partner at the time was a chemist, and had enough work to keep us afloat, but it was close to impossible for me to find a job “in my field”. I got some canvassing work around the 2008 election, but those jobs left as soon as the election was over (even though it wasn’t canvassing about the election).
I eventually got contract work from the Wisconsin DNR, as I’ve mentioned before, by volunteering for them for a bit, till they found some money for contractors on the side. Basically, I had to do free labor because I cared about the work, in order to get a job. Then-governor Jim Doyle had imposed a hiring freeze for the state government, which meant I couldn’t be hired with a salary, benefits, or anything like that. I got $15 per hour, and had to pay self-employment tax on it, because the Democratic governor thought that austerity was a good idea. That was back when people in the Democratic party believed – or pretended to believe – that Republicans actually cared about “fiscal responsibility” and the national debt.
I don’t think that effort to appeal to conservative voters did anything but help Scott Walker when he came along a short while later.
The article I quoted above is about a book by one Kathleen Mclaughlin, a journalist who depends on blood plasma to survive – someone at the other end of the supply chain that started in my bone marrow. I think it’s a good perspective to have for writing something like this. Selling plasma did feel a bit like having a “good” job. I got paid, and I made the world better for someone else, and being reminded of that someone else does make me feel better about it in hindsight. My problem was the safety of the work itself, though I think it’s possible I was more worried than I needed to be.
McLaughlin did not find significant evidence that giving blood frequently has negative health effects in the long term. “A lot of people get extremely tired. There is a lot of fatigue. A lot of people I talked to didn’t notice anything at all and they’re totally fine with it. It seems like it’s a very personal, individual thing.”
But she does point out that when people donate blood to the nonprofit Red Cross, they are limited to once every 28 days, which works out at 13 times per year. Those who sell to a for-profit centre can do it 104 times a year. “The disparity between those two limits is shocking.”
Honestly, I think I’m going to look into donating blood. I haven’t done that in a long time, and since it’s never caused me any problems, I really ought to. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need and all that.
One thing I found interesting was Mclaughlin’s discussion of stigma:
And whereas donating blood for free is lauded, donating it for money is stigmatised. “If you think about blood donation, it’s something that we consider quite heroic. If you go to the Red Cross and donate blood, you’re saving a life, you’re not getting paid for it.
“But somehow this practice of donating plasma for pay comes with a pretty heavy stigma. A lot of the people I interviewed who do sell plasma had not told their families that they do it because they were afraid of what their families would think: there would be some kind of judgment or their families would be worried about their health or concerned that they don’t have enough money.
‘The stigma is entirely linked to the fact that we stigmatise poverty in the United States. We look down on it. We don’t respect people who aren’t wealthy in the same way that we respect wealthy people. It’s been interesting for me to see the way that people view selling plasma as being somehow problematic and that’s definitely contributed to the fact that this industry is kind of hidden.”
I think she’s spot on about stigmatization of poverty in the United States, but I honestly don’t remember feeling it about selling plasma. I don’t remember if I told my family what I was doing at the time. If I didn’t, it certainly wasn’t because I was afraid they’d judge me – they’re not like that – but more that I didn’t want to worry them. I don’t think I thought about stigma at all, really, but I also was far less aware of class and power dynamics back then. I’m glad I missed that particular worry, but it’s not like poverty lets you get away with no worries at all. This was also the period where my health insurance didn’t cover any emergency rooms in something like a ten mile radius – an easy and effective way for the insurance company to avoid having to pay for my healthcare.
At the end of the article, Mclaughlin is quoted on the ethics of the blood industry, and again, I think she’s spot on. She focuses not on the industry paying for plasma, but on the economic system that, as I’ve said in the past, is designed to use economic desperation to force people to accept things they otherwise wouldn’t. The industry itself isn’t particularly parasitical, other than the obvious direct parallel; it only becomes so in a society set up to constantly feed an already-bloated aristocracy.
Donating blood and plasma is good. I’m even fine with paying people to do it, since they did the work to produce that blood. It’s a huge part of how modern medicine saves and improves lives, and rewarding people for doing it makes sense to me. The problem isn’t that particular financial incentive, so much as everything about the system surrounding it. It’s not “you get paid if you do this good thing”, it’s “if you don’t do this, you might not get to eat today”. That’s about capitalism, and the policies designed to keep certain segment of the population poor and desperate, while treating poverty as a moral failing. It sounds like an interesting book, and I appreciate having insights the industry.
Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!