Somehow, though, I doubt that Sydney Sweeney has any socialist sympathies

I have no idea who Sydney Sweeney is. She is apparently a hot new Hollywood star who has been working hard, appearing in a bunch of movies I haven’t seen, and good for her — but I think all celebrities get more attention and money than they actually deserve.

In an informative twist, though, I learned from this article that there are tiers of celebrity, and that Sweeney is near the bottom because she isn’t a nepo baby. Despite having a $3 million house and being pursued by paparazzi, she’s on a treadmill where she must work non-stop (at being fabulous and fashionable, which is of course much nicer than having to grind non-stop at factory) or her whole world will come crashing down.

The whole of American society, at this moment, is a layer of various anxieties and resentments without any sincerely shared values pinning it all in place. Some of those resentments are more deserved than others; the millennial generation stands to inherit a whopping $68 trillion from the Boomer generation. What is being coined The Great Wealth Transfer is already beginning. Sweeney’s peers, who are mostly the children of very rich people, are going to become even richer by doing nothing. Millions of millennials are going to become very rich by doing nothing. Among the many benefits of this will be that they can post only when they want to. They will be able to take jobs they care about instead of ones they need.

But Sweeney isn’t one of those people. She comes from a family that could not afford to financially support her at all when she finished school. She will not have the luxury of relaxing as her inheritance pours in. Everyone deserves to be able to take six months off to have a baby. Everyone. The fact that Sydney Sweeney cannot is a reminder that the reason American workers do not have paid family leave is also the reason each generation has more nepotism babies than the last. We do not tax rich people enough and they do not pay their fair share; the fact of that, over decades, has intruded upon and warped every aspect of American life. Sweeney has to work, like everyone else, and has to do so for whatever she can get, and she has to do it knowing that what reaches her was the absolute minimum figure that people who are paid much more than her had determined that she would be willing to take. She’s not alone.

I wouldn’t feel sorry for Sweeney, but she does demonstrate that wealth inequality permeates every level of American society, and that always the ones on top are the people loaded with inherited wealth that they never had to work for. Tax the rich! Tax them a lot!

Was it actually a super Tuesday?

The chaos that is American politics began to gel a little bit yesterday. It’s still not pretty and it’s never going to be — it’s more like those terrifying Jell-O recipes from the 50s, but at least we’re seeing some progress towards the final boss battle.

You know that Joe Manchin had previously announced that he wouldn’t run in 2024. Well, now Kyrsten Sinema has also bowed out. I’m going to have to recommend this obituary by Albert Burneko.

Blessed by St. Collins. Now you know she’s evil.

What a horrible nightmare of a person Kyrsten Sinema is. That she might end up having been the signal political figure of our time—a period in which the day-to-day work of elected officials has become so hopelessly divorced from the material conditions their work nominally governs that “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns” can function as the full ideological expression and sum total contribution of an actual senator—does nothing to redeem her, personally. At a certain point you could extend her a kind of sour grudging credit, I guess, for having pioneered a new depth of undisguised cynicism in politics, a dark idiocratic abyssal layer where nothing has any value except to the extent that it demonstrably foils one’s own political party and sells out one’s own voters in service to one’s patrons. This is the kind of credit you give when you walk into an apocalyptically ruined public bathroom, freeze, and say, “Whoa, somebody took one crazy friggin’ dump in here.”

This society’s total prostration could hardly find a better—which is to say worse—avatar than Kyrsten Sinema, the mandate that nothing may ever be allowed to disrupt its consumption (or even to facilitate the hope that it could be slowed) congealed into a sneering blonde Karen theatrically performing her own imaginary cuteness while she kills even mild and popular compromise initiatives toward a better future. It’s rare for a single person to hold that kind of power, and unspeakably awful and sad that it fell into the hands of an absolute F-minus of a human being.

In any case, if holding her spiteful, obstructive, nihilistic line turns out not to have benefited any electoral ambitions—there’s no real broad base for a program best described as “the most hateful possible centrism,” to the surprise of no one else—it’s also not clear that Sinema ever authentically had any, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Which fits, since she also lacks any authentic political beliefs, convictions, or sympathy to or solidarity with humanity, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Her constituents as electoral politics defined them hated her guts; on the other hand she all but explicitly did not consider them her real constituents. Her real constituency (assuming Literally Dracula doesn’t count here) is the class of rich freaks for whose benefit she will now even more openly serve. Few could promise to protect them with as little shame, or as much sheer sadistic glee. I wish her all the very worst, forever and ever.

In other news about hypocritical women flopping at politics, Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race. Didn’t she announce last week that she was in it all the way? Unfortunately, even in defeat she didn’t manage the dignity of opposing the corrupt criminal who had stomped on her.

Trumpworld’s frequent insults of Haley—who the former president slammed as “birdbrain”—would indicate that the South Carolina governor is unlikely to be a surrogate or booster of the Trump campaign this election season.

Still, despite it all, Haley has already made the case that Trump is a better choice than Biden—even if she claimed both are dangerous. In an interview with NPR from Feb. 22, Haley said, “I have a lot of concerns about Trump regaining the presidency. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden being president.”

Mediocre.

In local news, Minnesota managed to cock a snook at stooge of the Israelis and Xian fundamentalists, Joe Biden, while still giving him enough votes to carry the state.

President Biden, who faces less prominent challengers, continued to win by larger margins than Trump. But as in Michigan last week, he ceded significant votes to such options as “uncommitted.”

That option was getting nearly 20 percent of the vote in Minnesota with about 85 percent of the vote counted, after pro-Palestinian activists sought to turn it into a protest vote again. The uncommitted share there should wind up being larger than it was in Michigan (13 percent) despite a less-robust effort — and despite Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) taking another 8 percent.

Biden’s current 70 percent overall share of the vote in Minnesota means it could be his lowest share in any state, apart from the 64 percent he took as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire.

Come on, Joe. Grow a spine and stand up against the terrorist state of Israel.

I’m not complaining about some history being erased

Minnesota recently got a snazzy new flag. It’s much nicer than the cluttered (and mildly racist) mess that was the old flag.

The Republicans don’t like the change, so they organized a rally at the capitol to complain.

“I’m wearing a T-shirt today that says, ‘Erasing history never goes well.’ And that’s what we believe is happening here,” Minnesota Republican Party Deputy Chair Donna Bergstrom said. “As a Native American and tribal member, it’s exhausting to see Native Americans once again bearing the brunt of the short-sighted eradication of our shared history.”

That’s the same complaint Republicans made about tearing down Confederate statues. I think that went pretty well, actually.

The bring-back-our-hideous-old-flag rally happened today. Look upon the horde and be awed!

Every time the police are scrutinized, they look worse

I highly recommend this 3-part, thorough article about the police by Radley Balko. It’s central focus is on the Minneapolis Police Department (which is a horror) and on George Floyd, but it’s wide-ranging and indicts the corruption, racism, and brutality of police forces everywhere.

It’s a long series, and I can’t possibly do it justice, so I’ll just highlight one thing that leapt out at me. The police all around the country have resorted to a phony medical excuse for deaths in police custody. You’ll hardly believe it — it’s called excited delirium.

Excited delirium, on the other hand, posits that some people just spontaneously die during intense, high-stress interactions with police, through no fault of law enforcement. It’s also highly dubious and not supported by any major medical organization.

Over the last several decades, there’s been a concerted effort to pressure medical examiners to diagnose excited delirium when the real cause of death was positional asphyxia. This not only exonerates cops who kill, it encourages police practices that will lead to more deaths.

George Floyd’s death prompted renewed scrutiny of excited delirium and its origins. This was overdue.

The first reason to be skeptical of the condition is that it’s rarely if ever diagnosed outside a law enforcement context. If there really is a condition that causes people to die spontaneously during a mental health crisis, while under the influence of some drugs, or while panicked with no accompanying signs of medical distress, we ought to see it under other high-stress, volatile scenarios like street or bar brawls, or when people are forcibly admitted to psychiatric facilities. This just doesn’t happen.

The origin of excited delirium is shonky and steeped in bigotry. But it doesn’t involve police or police restraint. The condition was first described in the mid-1980s by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli after a wave of black sex workers were found dead under mysterious circumstances. Because some of the women had cocaine in their system, Wetli theorized that there must be something about the physiology of black women that causes them to spontaneously die after mixing cocaine with sex.

The phrase “physiology of black women” ought to have set off alarms all over the place. Yeah, this swarm of dead black women whose bodies are littering the streets…nobody killed them. They just drop dead when mixing cocaine with sex. Yeah, that’s the ticket. File those corpses away under “natural causes”. No way they were murdered.

Except…

Despite the absurdity of Wetli’s theory, it precluded homicide as a manner of death, which made it much more difficult for police to investigate the possible murders. It wasn’t until a victim was found in a similar state as the other bodies, but had no cocaine in her system, that the city’s chief medical examiner reviewed the doctor’s work in the other cases. He found evidence of asphyxiation that Wetli had overlooked. Police eventually arrested a serial killer named Charles Henry Williams for the murders. Williams is now believed to have killed at least 32 black women through asphyxiation.

Wetli was promoted and became a medical examiner in New York, where he continued to promote ludicrous, racist theories.

You might be saying right now that George Floyd was not a woman and wasn’t having sex, so how does this relate? Well, fact-free explanations can expand without restraint.

In the absence of any accountability, Wetli continued to develop his theory in ways that proved convenient for law enforcement. He expanded excited delirium to also include black men, particularly those who die in police custody. “Seventy percent of people dying of coke-induced delirium are black males, even though most users are white,” he once said. Instead of concluding that perhaps this was because police were more likely to use excessive force against black men, Wetli added, “It may be genetic.” The diagnosis has since expanded to include “exhaustive mania,” a form of excited delirium that, conveniently, occurs in people who haven’t ingested drugs or alcohol.

If I had a nickel for every instance of a racist saying “it’s genetic”, I’d be able to buy back Twitter from Elon Musk.

Excited delirium is even more useful for the cops. In addition to making their victims conveniently drop dead while leaving the police blameless, it has several other symptoms that play into the cop’s battery of excuses.

There is no diagnostic test for excited delirium. Instead, it’s become a catch-all diagnosis based on a broad range of symptoms and behavior that could be attributed to any number of conditions — symptoms like erratic behavior, psychosis, public nudity, and, weirdly, a tendency to propel oneself through glass.

But the most absurd supposed symptoms are an imperviousness to pain and “superhuman strength.”

There are obviously some drugs that can dull a user’s sensitivity to pain. And a rush of adrenaline can prompt a person to run faster or lift more weight than they otherwise might. But the idea that excited delirium can give people near-superpowers has been incredibly harmful. The claim doesn’t merely excuse brutality, it practically demands it. It also reinforces racist tropes about the brutishness of black men.

This isn’t merely old racist nonsense from the 1980s, it was part of the MPD’s training materials at least as recently as 2021.

You know, maybe it’s not true that all cops are bad. I think you could make a good case that many of them are racist, gullible, and not very bright. They’re not intentionally evil, they’re just so damned stupid that they stumble into badness.

Super Tuesday is coming up

Minnesota has it’s big primary election this coming Tuesday, and of course I’m going to vote. I always vote. It’s a civic responsibility.

We (Democrats. Who cares about the Republicans?) have 11 options on the ballot.

Joe Biden
Eban Cambridge
Gabriel Cornejo
Frankie Lozado
Jason Palmer
Armando Perez-Serrato
Dean Phillips
Cenk Uygur
Marianne Williamson
Uncommitted
Write-in

Most of these are garbage. No, I’m not voting for Dean Phillips, deluded native son, or Marianne Williamson, weird flake.

I’m voting for “Uncommitted.” I feel a little bit of power here — I get to send a message to Biden to let him know I’m disgusted with his craven approach to Israel’s criminal behavior. This is not a decision based on uncertainty or because I might consider voting for Trump in the general election. It’s entirely my way of expressing dissatisfaction with the incumbent’s pandering to an authoritarian state and permitting a genocide to continue.

I thought it would be a happy story about bats

I was in the mood for reading more about bats, so when this news story popped up in my news feed, of course I had to read it: Scenes From the Bat Cave. What else would you expect but a nice bit of natural history? It wasn’t. It’s about crappy greedy capitalistic humans in Florida.

The Rockledge Regional Medical Center reeks of raw sewage and bat guano. No one knew that bat shit was called “guano,” or that the pungent smell emanating from the fifth-floor intensive care unit had bat guano as a source, until last spring, when a delirious patient complained he was being attacked by a “giant grasshopper,” which turned out to be a bat, which turned out to be one of what four nurses told the Prospect was estimated to be at least five thousand more.

The exterminators alleged in court that Steward Health, Rockledge’s corporate owner, never paid them the $936,320 they were owed for “evicting” the bats from the hospital, which sits roughly eight miles southwest of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. And so when, a week or two before Christmas, the sinks on the second floor began backing up with thick, black gunk that smelled like feces of the human sort, the hospital’s in-house maintenance staff tried to handle the job themselves.

That’s the last we hear of the bats, and instead it’s all about the corrupt management of Steward Health, which apparently bought up a bunch of hospitals only to neglect them. They were in the business of scraping every penny of profit out of these places, and actually maintaining them would have meant less money for their corrupt corporate overlords, who had yachts to maintain instead.

In Massachusetts, where Steward was founded and owns nine hospitals, the company’s representatives have essentially ghosted the political class it wooed so effectively a decade ago, when de la Torre graced the cover of the Boston Globe Magazine and touted himself as the quintessential Obamacare success story. Over the past few weeks, Massachusetts politicians have railed against Steward, de la Torre, and his yachts, and Gov. Maura Healey last week instructed the company to leave the state “as soon as possible.”

They are leaving Massachusetts and moving to Florida, which has a more charitable climate for parasites and exploiters. Their hospitals there are a horror story — health care is ridiculously expensive, but do you think anyone is getting their money’s worth out of these toxic facilities?

Nurses provided the Prospect with dozens of photos and videos documenting maintenance problems at the hospital: water leaking out into the parking lot from one of the maintenance rooms, a giant oxygen tank sitting in the loading dock one nurse worries is “one drunk driver away from blowing the back wing of the hospital away,” the fourth floor “graveyard of broken beds” with unfulfilled work orders dating back to September, and sink after sink filled with black gunk, sealed off with “DO NOT USE” signs and months-old work orders. On the paper covering one of the sinks alleged on the work order to have a “terrible smell,” an employee had scrawled, “Fix me NOW!” and two others had playfully responded, “I’ve only been broke 2+ months! What’s the hurry?” and “NOT BEYOND STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS YET!”

Five of the building’s nine elevators have been nonoperational for the better part of the year, and only one or two of the working ones can properly accommodate a critical care patient. Paradoxically, this was an even bigger safety issue back before the bats were discovered, when patients who experienced complications during heart surgery needed to be shuttled up three stories to the ICU; now they can be raced down the hall to the relocated ICU, where half the sinks still have “Do Not Use” signs hanging over them.

Imagine how awful these places would be if they were in Canada rather than Florida. Somebody would be complaining about having to wait for service. Sewage filled sinks and bats fluttering about the ICU is a small price to pay for allowing rampant capitalism to flourish.

I’d rather read about bats than about selfish, greedy humans, I’m afraid.

The genocidal state of Israel

Just before we got shut down, I posted a video by Shaun that condemned all the atrocities committed by both sides in Israel and Gaza (it didn’t dissuade the Islamist fanatic who got us censored). Now I’m going to do it again. Cody thoroughly documents the genocide and lies perpetrated by the Israeli government.

It’s depressing. Don’t watch it you don’t want to be outraged by injustice.

It just affirms my concern that Israel has become an evil rogue nation. And we still send them arms?

Least surprising devolution ever

The Nazis are taking over the Republican party. Are you shocked?

Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.

Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Also, they’re theocrats who hate democracy.

In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

“Satire.” Heh. Right. A good question to ask when anyone makes the “satire” defense is “What were they satirizing?”

Shall we criminalize libraries?

We have a new villain (same as the old villain): librarians. West Virginia wants to make them liable to prosecution.

The West Virginia House of Delegates debated the merits of removing protections for public librarians and school librarians from criminal prosecution in the off chance a minor encounters books and content some consider to be obscene.
The House passed House Bill 4654 – removing bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums from the list of exemptions from criminal liability relating to distribution and display to a minor of obscene matter – in a 85-12 vote Friday, sending the bill to the state Senate.
HB 4654 would lift criminal liability exemptions from schools in the presentation of local or state-approved curriculum, and public libraries and museums displaying obscene matter to a minor when the child is not accompanied by a parent/guardian.

Are you surprised? Those nefarious librarians are probably plotting to commit evil acts like stocking children’s books that present sexuality in an informative and non-threatening way, and maybe they’ll even bring in people wearing women’s clothing to entertain kids and encourage reading. It’s all part of their wicked plan.

This prescient cartoon from more than 20 years saw the whole conspiracy developing.