Now not only am I working from home every single day, but my husband is also home because he has been furloughed. Like literally millions of other people. It is slightly amusing to see him go from his usual cheapskate mode to a new Super Cheapskate! Have to find the humor where we can, I guess.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about deplorable people, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
(click to embiggen)It’s nearly the end of my fourth week of working from home full-time because of the pandemic. The state’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order hasn’t been in effect that long. I chose to work from home four Mondays ago on a day when I would normally go in because I had developed a cough1 over the weekend, just to be safe. I didn’t want to be the person who infected other people if I happened to have this thing, right? Later that week, my boss encouraged everyone to work from home… and then we had the first request (not an order) from the state to all the tech companies to let employees who could work from home do so, and so the executives sent out the message to that effect.
I regularly worked from home at least two days a week for quite some time before then, so I didn’t expect it would be much of an adjustment3. And I’m an introvert, who while I like spending time with my friends, need to spend quite a bit of time alone in order to not be mega-cranky.
My husband, in the meantime, was still having to go into work five days a week4, which of course had me fretting. I’ve been fretting about all my friends and loved ones throughout this mess. Earlier this week, he and most of his co-workers were furloughed, so he’s going to be home with me all the time for the foreseeable future. Which means slightly less fretting, right? Of course it also means we need to figure out some new routines.
On the one hand, it helps that he’s also an introvert, and we already have a habit of spending most of our time at home ignoring each other. He usually sits at his computer and I sit at mine. If I’m watching TV he’s usually playing games on his computer, or designing 3D figures to print on his 3D printer, or sitting at the table painting said figures. So we’ve got that part sorted, for now.
But worrying about everyone else does wear on you. And even though I have been a news junkie5 since I was a kid, I’ve noticed that I’m starting to avoid some of my usual news sources during my daily reading. But even though I’m trying to avoid some of those external sources of anxiety, stuff still comes across my stream that just demands a comment.
For instance, White nationalist planned to bomb a Missouri hospital as revolt against coronavirus lockdowns. Seriously? Geeze. If you don’t want to click through, the guy was under surveillance by the FBI for some time because he was active on some of the same neo-Nazi message boards as several other people arrested over the last few months for similar plans. He had been in communication with someone he thought was building a bomb that could be installed in his car, and he showed up to pick up the bomb, not realizing it was an FBI sting. He resisted arrest, and got shot and killed in the process.
Speaking of angry white men who may finally be held accountable for some bad stuff they’ve done: Alex Jones Loses Sandy Hook Court Appeal, Must Now Pay Nearly $150,000 In Legal Fees. I hope he keeps losing lawsuits from the families of those murdered children until he’s homeless8.
Another feature of angry white men we don’t spend enough time talking about is just how stupid they are. And it’s the kind of stupid that causes real harm to others. So I’m going to close with this video, where Rachel Maddow talks about one such stupid angry white guy. Take it away, Rachel!
Rachel Maddow blasts Mississippi governor for banning cities from coronavirus business closures:
1. A couple days before that tree pollen count went into the deep red, and what few other symptoms I had were consistent with a severe hay fever attack, so I was fairly certain I didn’t have the coronavirus2. But, better safe than sorry, right?
2. I have been following the advice from the World Health Organization of checking my temperature several times a day ever since. I have had no fever in that time. The cough went away for a while, then came back, and then went away. No other symptoms have shown up, so knock wood!
3. And when some people on some of the podcasts I regularly listen to were talking about how difficult it was coming up with things to do to amuse themselves while avoiding going out, I admit I chuckled. I have so many books in my to-read pile, for instance! And there are all those shows I have been trying to get to on the various streaming services! The problem isn’t finding things to do, the problem is still not having enough time for the things I want to watch, read, or listen to!
4. Riding the bus back and forth twice a day. At least he doesn’t work directly with the public like he used to. He even pointed out that because his workbench in in a cage (because he works on hard disk and other highly valuable things that are easy to pocket), most of the time all of his co-workers are far enough from him to prevent casual infection.
5. I sometimes blame Weekly Reader6, which was this sort of mini newspaper that we used to get in some of the elementary schools I attended. The idea of Weekly Reader was to provide age-appropriate versions of the big news stories kids might be hearing their parents talking about or whatever. It was an interesting publication.
6. Though my paternal grandfather was a big fan of reading the newspaper, as well as the nightly news. And most of the radio stations in most of the places we lived during my childhood had an hourly news break provided by one of the major networks. And there always seemed to be a station that carried the Paul Harvey show at noon7.
7. Which I now realize had a quite skewed viewpoint and was as likely to report urban legends as it was real news, but there was something entertaining about it.
“I never encountered anyone who is willing to die for someone else’s 401k. This is a whole new level of craziness.” — former FBI special agent Ali H. SoufanHIV is not a casually infectious illness, requiring intimate contact and an exchange of bodily fluids to transmit, however, there are a few similarities between the height of the AIDS crisis and our current situation in the COVID-19 pandemic. One of those similarities is the fact that people can be infectious without any obvious symptoms. You can’t tell looking at a person that they are sick. Another similarity—one I’m frankly a bit surprised at—is how quickly a number of people have started talking about the people who seem to be most at-risk to die from the illness as being expendable.
It may not be quite as bad as that time (when I was a very closeted guy in my early-twenties) while my head was bowed in church when the pastor leading the prayer thanked god for the scourge of AIDS which was “killing all the gays” but it came close. Nor is it quite as bad as the time a college classmate said to me, “I know Jesus said to take care of the sick, but they didn’t know what caused all illnesses back then. We know what causes AIDS…”
So, in both cases we are talking about a virus. As I have pointed out, outside of the U.S., the vast majority of people who have been sickened and died of AIDS are straight women and children, not gay men. HIV is a virus, a natural phenomenon which is passed from person-to-person through behaviors that are a natural part of being a human being.
We know that factors which increase the likelihood of developing severe symptoms include a lot of chronic health problems that are widespread in the population. About 60% of adults have at least one of those known chronic health disorders. We also know that people how smoke or who are ex-smokers are at higher risk for getting severely ill. We have less data about whether vaping is also a risk factor, but it isn’t unreasonable to think so.
But there’s another risk factor that people aren’t taking into consideration: lack of health care options. Sure, it appears that the death rate is about 3.4% in general… yet we have places such as Italy and Spain that are seeing something closer to 8%, and at least one reason why is that so many people got sick at the same time that there weren’t enough hospital beds for the severely sick, and there weren’t enough respirators for those severely sick people who needed them.
Which is why the shelter-in-place/stay-at-home orders are important. Slowing the spread makes it possible that we might not have too many people severely sick at the same time than we have facilities for.
Though it’s quite likely that several spots in the U.S. are going to overwhelm their medical facilities, soon.
I am worried about my own health, it’s true. I am far more worried about the health of people that I know and love. I am worried about the economic hardships many are already facing, and that a lot more of us may be facing, soon. But most of those economic hardships (and many worse) will happen if infection rates surge to the point that millions die. The notion that ordinary people aren’t going to face disruptions and financial problems if all the orders are lifted and everyone goes back to work is simply wrong.
Humans are social animals. One of our survival traits as a species is that we take care of each other. My community didn’t survive the plague of AIDS by taking an “everyone for themself” attitude. The world won’t survive if you fail to learn the lessons of our ordeal:
Edited to Add: I’d already started the draft of this post before this tweet went across my timeline and I chose to re-tweet it. Decided I should add it here:
We’ve reached the third Friday in March and also the official beginning of spring (in the northern hemisphere).
More of the world is working from home this week. My husband’s place of work has cut down on hours, so he’s not having to leave the house as many days each week. That has a marginal decrease on my anxiety, and for now we’re trying really hard not to worry about economics.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five (pandemic-free) stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about responding to the pandemic, five stories about the pandemic, one story in a category of its own, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Tulsi Gabbard ends White House bid, endorses Biden. It’s not that I want everyone to rally ’round Biden already, it’s just that I really wanted her out: “She had also become the subject of widespread skepticism among national Democrats, often rebuked for her past anti-LGBT rhetoric, isolationist brand of diplomacy and 2017 meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom she declined to label a war criminal despite the dictator’s use of chemical weapons to attack his own people.” There were only three candidates still in the running in last week’s mini-Tuesday… and still she came in sixth place. For good reason!
I’ve been trying not to get all ranty and also not to turn this blog into all-pandemic all-the-time, but… Here’s the thing. I know that all of us are anxious, and it feels as if washing our hands and avoiding crowded places, and wiping down the handle of our shopping cart, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera isn’t really doing anything. But the panicked buying and the profiteering isn’t actually helping, either.
Besides being an old fart, and therefore automatically in a higher risk group for getting severely sick, I am also diabetic (and before certain people chime in, it’s been identified as one of the genetic types, so no, there is absolutely no amount of exercise nor weight loss that could prevent it—I have long joked the diabetes doesn’t run in my dad’s family, it stampedes and now I have medical proof that it isn’t a joke). Besides putting me in yet another high risk category, what that also means is that a couple times a day I have to swab some part of my skin with alcohol, poke it with a lancing device, and place a drop of blood on a test strip to check my blood sugar (while pressing the alcohol swab to the pinprick to help stop the bleeding in a sterile way), and at least once a day I also have to inject myself with the medication that controls my condition and guess what—that also requires swabbing some spot of my skin with alcohol before stabbing myself with the needle (and afterward wiping again, as per medical recommendations).
Now, I come for a long, long, long line of penny-pinchers, so I worked out the routine a long time ago of doing the swab-lance-test-press-swab-stab-inject-swab-again routine in a short enough time frame that it only takes one alcohol wipe to get the test and inject job done. But, that’s the morning injection. I’m also supposed to check my blood sugar twice more during the day, and under certain circumstances, inject myself with a second medication at bedtime.
So when all the panic-buying started, I double-checked my wipe supply and confirmed that I had an unopened box in the cabinet in addition to the box I was using. And I had two. (Because it’s cheaper to order the three-pack). Then I reached the end of the current box, and I told myself, “That’s fine, I have a couple more boxes.” But then I saw enough comments about people having things back-ordered and I thought, “Okay, though this should last me a couple of months, maybe it’s okay to order a single box, knowing that it isn’t going to ship for many weeks.”
That was merely eight days ago. This morning I got the third update in that time advising me that the arrival date is being pushed back some more.
The problem is that some people will read this and think, “Oh, no! I need to buy more of blank just in case…” which is just going to make things worse.
Since we’re on the subject, let’s dive in:
Please Stop Treating Me Like I’m Disposable When You Talk About The Coronavirus . This one really hits several spots. I keep seeing people insisted that “only a few percent of people are at risk” and variants. First, a lot of people are at risk. High risk groups include older people, and if you are not old you may think that means it doesn’t matter to you—but what about your parents and other older relatives? Do you really not care about them?
But it’s more than just “old people” who are at risk, it is also people with pre-existing chronic health conditions (including high blood pressure [33% of adults in America], diabetes [9.4% of Americans], heart disease [6% of adults in America], and a wide variety of chronic illnesses and disabilities that compromise the immune system). The best guess is about 60% of the population has at least one such underlying health issue, and 40% have more than one.
So think of it this way: imagine yourself and your two best friends get infected. Out of just those three people, statistically, two of you are probably at higher risk to develop a severe case and require hospitalization and a ventilator/respirator to have any hope of surviving.
And no, I’m not making that up: What Will You Do If You Start Coughing? “Stay home” is not a sufficient plan. When health officials say most people will have mild symptoms, that word doesn’t mean what you think it means: “a “mild” case of COVID-19 is not equivalent to a mild cold. Expect it to be much worse: fever and coughing, sometimes pneumonia—anything short of requiring oxygen.”
But wait, there’s more: “Flattening the Curve” is a deadly delusion. “Once a person is on the ventilator, it often takes about 4 weeks for them to get out of intensive care again.”
And don’t get me started on all the lies and worse in the White House press briefings…
That’s enough of depressing news. Don’t forget to wash your hands (soap and water are fine). Also, moisturize! While the washing literally kills the virus (and other nanoparticals), it also damages the skin, which makes your hands more vulnerable. Your skin is your first defense, so use some lotion regularly, too!
Finally, Randy Rainbow has humorously summarized many related issues, while making a parody for a song from one of my favorite under-appreciated musicals (Guys and Dolls)—
The CORONAVIRUS Lament – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody:
Edited to add: Some comments indicated people don’t understand what kind of alcohol wipes I’m talking about in the opening two paragraphs. They are TINY little wipes intended for a single medical purpose. They aren’t big enough to effectively wipes door handles, cart handles, doorknobs, and other large objects in the real world that need to be disinfected.
(Click to embiggen)We’ve reached the second Friday in March, and everyone is starting to learn about social distancing.
This is the second week that I (and my entire department) have been working from home at the direction of upper management. I am exceedingly lucky that my work can be done over the internet and that my employer is set up for that. It makes me feel extremely guilty that a lot of other people can’t. Including my husband. And I only have anxiety attacks about him (and many other friends and relatives) a dozen or so times a day.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable things and the people fighting them, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Stories of the Week:
Why Are Women Less Likely Than Men To Support Sanders? Data that backs up what I’ve been saying for over three years: “It’s hard to pin down a single reason why men seem to be more attracted to Sanders’s candidacy than women… But there is evidence, according to an analysis by Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, that while support for Biden increases among voters with more sexist views, those with the most sexist views were disproportionately likely to favor Sanders. And sexism was higher, in general, among men.”
It is time once again for another of my Saturday posts where I talk about news stories that either broke after I finished this week’s Friday Five, or a story having been linked and/or commented upon in any of my previous posts has had new developments. Let’s go!
So, yesterday I included a link to a story where a guy who is frequently on CNBC as a financial expert said that it would be better for the economy if everyone just got sick the people who are going to die from COVID-19 just did so and got it over with so the rest of the world could get on with business. He didn’t literally quote the line from A Christmas Carol where Scrooge tells the two well-meaning gentleman taking donations for the poor that people who would rather die than go into the debtor’s prison that, if they would rather die, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” but he came close. Well, since then he has tried to backpedal a bit: Rick Santelli Sorry He Said You Should Get Sick And Die, For The Economy. Of course, since this is hardly the first time he has said that we shouldn’t care about people who have had bad things happen to them, I rather doubt his sincerity.
Let’s move on.
Earlier in the week I logged into the blog to work on a post, and I saw that my clicks were way, way up. So I looked at the list, and two old blog posts about disgraced former Congressman Aaron Schock (and self-loathing closet case) were getting a whole lot of hits. I had already seen the news stories where he finally came out of the closet (again, I’ll get into that), so I shouldn’t have been surprised—yet I was. Anyway, because one particular old Weekend Update post on the subject always gets lots of hits whenever Schock is in the news, I have taken to adding updates to the bottom of said post rather than keep making new posts just for him. I did so again. I’m gonna just quote it here for starts:
Update 7: Now, here it is March 2020, and Schock has decided to really come out. He means it, this time, because there is a really long post about it on his Instagram. As Joe Jervis notes on Joe.My.God: “The post goes on for several self-pitying pages.” He still doesn’t apologize for all his anti-gay votes and campaigning. The closest he comes is saying if he were in Congress today he would vote differently on LGBT issues. But he also reaffirms several times that he still supports the rest of the Republican agenda. In the self-pitying parts he blames his anti-gay votes on feeling the need to fit in with his Republican colleagues, which I’m going to give myself a silver star for, as I have predicted on this blog that Schock would eventually come out and blame the pressures of being closeted for all his hateful speeches and votes.
Since making that update, I keep seeing news outlets carrying the story of Schock coming out, and a lot of them are reporting it as if it’s just a sort-of-famous person coming out and isn’t he brave? Except, of course, he isn’t.
Those self-pitying pages of his really long Instagram post are filled with, “woe is me, my bigoted parents/friends/former colleagues have all rejected me” since he was caught on camera making out and groping guys in public, and his really bad attempt at coming out last August by actually asking a couple of other gay republicans to pretend to leak some of his pictures and conversations trying to hookup with men for sex online (and then renouncing it).
Millions of queer people have been rejected by family members. Some of us even had close family members threaten to beat us or worse (even if we came out after moving out on our own and becoming productive members of society). But most of us didn’t run for political office on extremely anti-gay platforms, vote against LGBT rights, give hateful speeches in Congress and on the campaign trail calling for rollback of what rights we had clawed out in some jurisdictions at the time. And most of us weren’t so comfortably well off that we could afford more than one multi-million dollar homes. I’m sure he’s not quite as wealthy as he used to be, but he has the funds to go to across the continent to attend the music festival where he was groping those guys, and later to Mexico where he was videoed putting money into the g-string of a male stripper. So I’m having trouble feeling sorry for him right now.
During each of the six years he was in Congress (from 2009-2015), several hundred kids were bullied because people suspected they were queer to the point that they committed suicide. Even more kids each of those years were thrown out on the streets by religious parents. Speeches Schock made in those years and votes he took contributed to the hostile homophobic environment that causes that bullying and rejection. So he has to do some atonement before he’s entitled to any sympathy.
I will admit, at first I wanted to rant, “Girl, bye. Take your Republican, anti-LGBTQ ass outta here and go rub suntan oil on some WeHo dummy who doesn’t know he’s sleeping with the enemy.” But I thought better of that. I thought, “No, I should take the high road. What Aaron needs is help, because attractive, rich, gay, white celebrities never get help.”’
…So Aaron, I want to help you. I want to offer you the help you don’t deserve and that you never gave anyone else you oppressed. Privilege, right? It’s great.
It’s funny, and he has some good suggestions.
And now, for a different kind of self-loathing gay man: Ex-Judge Guilty Of Buying AR-15 For Nazi Boyfriend. I tried to follow the link that is inside that story to read the longer piece at the Pittsburgh Gazette, but the website asked me to whitelist the site to proceed. So I did, and in order to whitelist you have to then refresh and guess what, they then tell me that I have exceeded my free stories for the month. That is a really badly programmed paywall. Anyway, to avoid a paywall you can get some more details here: Retired Judge Admits To Buying AR-15 For Felon With Nazi Obsession.
It’s not crazy enough that a retired federal judge, of all people, illegally bought at least one semiautomatic rifle for the convicted felon who also happens to be a neo-Nazi. It’s that the judge, who is a man, and the neo-Nazi, who is also a man, are in a romantic relationship. Why do so many self-loathing gay white guys embrace Hitler? The original Nazis hated the gays (please go google “night of long knives” and “history of the pink triangle” if you’re not familiar). And neo-Nazis hate the gays, too. WTF?
The feds found a rather large cache of weapons, ammunition, and Nazi memorabilia. Some people just have way more money than sense, I guess.
Anyway, I wanna close this by quoting a hilarious tweet from more more than a year ago which explains why the image I linked above recommends composting rather than eating the rich. Take it away @Foone:
friendly reminder since this is going around again: DO NOT EAT THE RICH!
it’s called bio-magnification, people! the rich are at the top of the food chain, so they accumulate toxins from their food at a greatly increased rate.
Instead, /compost/ the rich.
Image from: Steve GreenbergWe’ve reached the first Friday in March, and I wish I was feeling a bit more upbeat about it.
Not to focus too much on one news event, but it just so happens that I live in the same county where nearly all of the coronavirus deaths that have happened in the U.S. thus far have occurred. I worked from home the first couple of days of the week because I was having a few bad hay fever days, which means I was sniffling and sneezing and occasionally coughing. Since I have remained fever free all week, I do not believe that I am sick, however, right now nobody wants to be around anyone who is coughing or otherwise seems to be sick. Then, the county health department recommended that anyone who could work at home should, and my boss and her boss asked all of us to work from home for the rest of the week. Since then the state health department has made the same request, and the executives at my employer have asked us all to keep working from home for the foreseeable future. So I have not witnessed for myself much less crowded the buses and lots of public places downtown reportedly are. I do happen to be in an age bracket that is considered at higher risk for having severe symptoms if I do get sick, and I have one of the longterm health issues that is also on that list. And I come from a long line of Professional Worriers™, so while my usual optimism is still intact, there are moments.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the possible pandemic, five stories about the deplorable thug occupying the White House, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Credit: PixabayA few months before my 18th birthday, both my maternal and paternal grandfathers, independently, started asking me if I had registered to vote, since I was going to be eligible to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. They were both big believers that voting wasn’t merely a right, it is also a responsibility. My paternal grandfather, for instance, was the one who told me when I was much younger that I shouldn’t argue politics with my father specifically because Dad had never voted in his life and therefore didn’t have a right to express an opinion on such matter.
The main thing I remember about that first election was that the person I voted to represent me in Congress won, while the down ballot races were more mixed. My preferred party lost the majority in the state legislatures lower house, that year.
Two years later was the first time I voted in a presidential election, and I have much more vivid recollections of just what a painful election it was. The guy I least wanted to become president (Reagan) won. My choices for Senator, Governor, and state Attorney General lost. The both house of the state legislator swung heavily into Republican control. I was devastated. It was another 12 years before the person who I chose on the general election ballot would win the Presidency—and that person had not been the candidate I supported during the caucuses. Then another 16 years before the candidate I favored in the caucuses got the nomination (and went on to become President).
My point is, out of 10 presidential election cycles, only four times did the person I vote for win, and even less often did the candidate I favored in the run-up even make it to the ballot. And the way things look right now, the person I wish would get the nomination and become the next president has become quite a longshot. But at no point has it ever made sense to me that I shouldn’t vote.
I was reminded this morning—while I was looking at the demographic information about who actually turned out to vote in yesterday’s primaries (and the heated discussion from some quarters about the results)—of the Zen story about A Drop of Water:
A Zen master asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath.
The student brought the water, and after cooling the bath, threw the remaining water over the ground.
“Think,” said the master to the student. “You could have watered the temple plants with those few drops you have thrown away.”
The young student understood Zen in that exact moment. He changed his name to Tekisui, which means drop of water, and lived to become a wise Zen master himself.
The usual lesson people take from the story is that it’s easy while struggling with big problems (the buckets of water), to become careless about more routine chores.
One of the most fundamental of chores is to show up. It doesn’t matter how pure or noble your intentions are. It doesn’t matter how many people you have harassed tried to educate on line. It doesn’t even matter if you have volunteered or donated to your great and noble candidate. If you don’t show up and vote, you leave the decision to other people. And yelling about conspiracies after the vote didn’t go your way, rather than admitting that the people who showed up (and thanks to voter suppression tricks going on in some states, stood in line for up to 7 hours before getting to cast their votes) just picked a different person.
If you did show up and vote, but the polling data indicates that a lot of people who claim to agree with you didn’t, those people are the ones you should be yelling at. They are the ones who have let you down. The other voters who maybe have your candidate as their second or third choice are not the problem.
Font Folly 