In which fake news must be regulated.

In yesterday’s paper, there’s a Dilbert strip in which Dilbert says he “hates people” so much he doesn’t wash his hands, and hopes he’s an asymptomatic carrier of a deadly disease.

The strip’s artist is a man called Scott Adams who has, I regret even being aware of, publicly fallen down the Fox News/Breitbart/Q rabbit hole. I have no idea who or how he was a decade ago, nor do I care, but today he’s a rabidly pro-Trump, hateful, ignorant white nationalist more famous for saying awful shit online than drawing a comic.

It’s my opinion that all these media companies should be strictly regulated. Fox isn’t a news channel, it’s an opinion channel. It does not adhere to ethical reporting standards and has, as far as can be observed, never intended to.

Watching Fox News as one’s primary source of news turns a citizen into a fearful, angry idiot. It means that they “know” and “believe” a shocking volume of things that simply are not true or didn’t actually happen in reality. This makes these citizens, in my opinion, ineligible to vote.

If you “believe” that viruses aren’t real and that it’s fine that over 560,000 Americans are dead of a preventable disease, you’re not a competent adult.

If you “know” that the horrific number of mass shootings are a reasonable price to pay for… for… for, well, anything, you’re not competent. You’re a fucking sociopath. The second amendment does not mean that idiots can run around with weapons, killing and maiming others at will. Thinking that that’s what it does mean makes you… well, an idiot.

Read this Twitter account, Well Regulated Militia. It’s just an endless scroll of stories of people shooting themselves and others with guns they never should have had in the first place. I mean, we’re a population that can’t be trusted with lawn darts, and yet guns are fine?

These entertainment editorial platforms need to be regulated. They must be required by law to label themselves as entertainment and not news. They are deliberately misleading people and fracturing society. Because of them, people hate the Fourth Estate, because they lack the ability to tell the difference between reportage and editorial. It’s a massive fucking crisis and must be addressed.

I realize the IRS doesn’t go after rich tax evaders because it can’t afford to. I realize that the FDA doesn’t police ads for supplements as it should, for the same reason. (Print, TV, and online ads for unregulated garbage making insane health claims are utterly rampant. It infuriates me, because it’s just making the population dumber.) Trump’s administration gutted a massive amount of oversight in industry. The country’s organs of regulation are all but useless (rich people gonna loot and pillage, after all) but we have got to get them all properly staffed and budgeted ASAP.

We have the money. There are absolute fucktons of money, we’re just siphoning it off into the offshore accounts of the upper eschelons because we lack, apparently, the will to make this rapacious theft stop.

Vote in every local election (these are the ones that really matter). Subscribe to your local paper. DO NOT WATCH FOX, unless it’s just your mostly-harmless local affiliate’s local coverage. Be angry that there are homeless people in your community, not because you’re disgusted by them but because, in a rich country, the only reason anybody’s fucking homeless is because your asshole Puritan ancestors decided that poverty was a moral failing and not ultimately an indictment against society’s empathetic failings. Laugh at the war on drugs. Be offended by warlike language used by the police. Know that cops ARE NOT SOLDIERS and vote down any police funding requests for tanks and other weapons of war.

Shit is pretty awful these days, because a third of the country thinks guns and extra-judicial murders-by-cop are acceptable and that wearing a mask is, bafflingly, a violation of their rights. It’s going to get much worse.

Oh, also: kill Citizens United. Enforce anti-trust laws. Break up ALL the monopolies. And tax professional sports; I can’t fucking believe pro football is tax exempt, that’s a fucking racket. Also tax every penny every church has that isn’t spent directly on domestic charity. Megachurches should be illegal, or at least heavily regulated. And representatives at all levels of government should be heavily fined for refusing to show up in order to deny quorums. End the filibuster. Uh, what else? Drastically change police mandates and fund the ever-loving shit out of replacement entities to handle domestics, drugs issues, homelessness, etc. You don’t send a fucking armed soldier to get some unhoused out from under a goddamned bridge. Oh, and fuck car culture. Every single community in the country should require businesses to remodel existing structures whenever possible before building new, brutalist, sprawling, shitty buildings out on the highway that can only be reached by firing up a car or truck. Outlaw the modern SUV truck; those things are monstrous and ugly and they have such high windows and broad hoods that drivers can’t see anything closer than 23 feet away, which is why they keep killing pedestrians and cyclists.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m going to go ride my bike now.

In which… yeah, idk. It’s a new year. Arbitrary date. Whatever.

I sleep a lot because what else is there to do! Still scrolling Twitter and Instagram and watching massive amounts of streaming TV. Still not reading or knitting or painting. My mending basket looks exactly the same as it has forever.

I cook, work, and do chores. That’s my entire life. Occasionally I attend a virtual satsang or retreat, which is really nice and I’m super grateful for it but still, it’s just me sitting on my living room floor in front of the TV watching a live YouTube stream.

In the past, oh, six months or so, I’ve had a few days of swollen lymph nodes, but like I’ve said before I think it’s related to a dental infection I haven’t yet had addressed. (Specialist is in Walla Walla, transpo’s a bitch. Normally I’d just catch a ride and while away the extra time in a bar or coffee shop, but there’s a pandemic on.)

Last Wednesday I had that tight lung feeling you get right before you wake up sick with influenza, but it went away without getting worse. It’s the second time that’s happened. I don’t know if it’s an immune response or maybe from chain vaping too much. It makes me wonder, though, if I’m asymptomatic — people come into my shop unmasked all the fucking time, plus all my co-workers have other jobs, school, and families. I’m living in rural Oregon and see fewer people in half a year now than I did in a week back in Minneapolis, but I’m still indirectly exposed to hundreds of people I don’t know, and any one of them could be sick.

Last year I went to the dentist for the first time in years and discovered my root canal had failed, which resulted in three more appointments: one to repair the root canal (a fourth root had to be cleared out), another to fill the crown, and then another to replace the crown when it cracked in half. I’ve been stabbed with needles at least two dozen times, since each appointment required full numbing. So many needles, Christ.

At the crown replacement appointment last week, the nurse sneezed. Twice. She was wearing a mask and a couple feet away from me at the time but I was lying there in the chair thinking, “Well, that moment right there could be me dead.” It’s a weird way to live, with the knowledge in the back of your head that anybody you interact with could potentially kill you.

I read a lot of medical Twitter and it’s fucking awful. Hospitals all around the world are over capacity, which means if you get in a car accident or have a heart attack, you might not get treatment. So even if you avoid COVID-19, it might kill you anyway.

Then there’s acute Covid. Click this and read the thread to get scared shitless:

And Long Covid? Holy shit. Organ failures. Amputations. Strokes, embolisms. Breathlessness. Fatigue. It’s looking like for each of our 350k dead, there are another 16 or so who may be permanently disabled? (That’s 5,600,000 possibly PERMANENTLY DISABLED FROM COVID-19 IN THIS COUNTRY ALONE so far.) And motherfuckers are out there refusing to wear a piece of cloth over their faces?

I can imagine being disappointed, after decades of, say, zealous survival prepping, that your moment of sacrifice isn’t the zombie apocalypse, but merely a call to wash your hands. But holy shit these people are DUMB. AS. FUCK. They deny reality and fight about “the economy” like it’s a law of nature and not just a human construct. And the rampant ableism and willingness to sacrifice human life is truly disgusting: people with asthma and diabetes can live entirely normal lives with some drugs, they don’t deserve to die of a PREVENTABLE DISEASE because something-something “the economy” and “pre-existing conditions.”

Reading the Faces of Covid account should be fucking mandatory. It’s not “just” old people and sick people, it’s hundreds of thousands of people dead that shouldn’t be.

And then there’s a the vaccine rollout. So fucked up ALREADY that doses are spoiling before being administered, and so slowly that at this rate we won’t have herd immunity for seven more years.

Oh, and only $1,800 stimulus in NINE MONTHS. That’s it. It’s a fucking farce.

And here’s me, snug and safe. I feel weird about how protected I am during all this. I don’t deserve to be, considering I contribute fuck-all to the overall wellbeing of the world, but I have a small job in a small town, and so does my SO. We have plenty of money. We have a really comfortable home. None of this is hurting me directly, and yet somehow I can still have compassion for everybody else.

Uh, I own three tablecloths now. I really like having our own washer & dryer. I mastered falafel in the past year, as well as bread. I have discovered that I love French raclette. I got a raise. I bought some clothes I’ve always wanted (most specifically this, in cocoa!!! expensive as hell, but hand-made and I loooove it). I get three days off per week, like I’m some sort of goddamned royalty. My fountain pen collection is still cool as hell. Christmas was fine. My SO is walking around wearing his black & red bathrobe like a boss.

I don’t know. I guess happy new year and stay safe out there, babies.