Posted on by Jo Gent

No Kings, None, Nada

We finally got to a No Kings rally today, one of the under-the-radar versions, in Glen Burnie, MD. There were I would say about 500 people there which was a great turnout for GB! It was fun. Our female host is more of a regular protest goer so we didn’t even have to make a sign, we took hers, since she had to work today.

We hadn’t been to a protest since Trump I, during which we participated in the Women’s March and the March for Science. In retrospect, those weren’t too fraught. Most of us thought Trump’s election was an anomaly from which the nation would right itself, and the Trump I team included a lot of reality-based (I’m talking World One reality, not reality-show reality, which is actually not related to reality, for those of you who remember reality) persons who were stopping much of the foolishness.

Obviously, we are no longer in that situation. World One is gone, at least from these shores. So say those of us on the ex-pat track.

What I did learn from today is that a group of people protesting together is no more likely to share core beliefs than any other group of theoretically like-minded people, including mothers of infants and coal miners. Some examples:

  • There were lots of thumbs-up horn-honkers, but also a few deploying the American Eagle in our direction with vigor. The group split between, We love everyone, including chanting Love Heals; scorn, pity, or sadness for the Lost Ones; and Those folks are pro-violence or They should be locked up.
  • Chants of USA! occationally broke out, a chant I personally feel is too ambiguous. People mean a lot of things when they chant USA, some of which will be racist or sexist or pro-war, given that this was not a gathering of historians.
  • This was a very white crowd overall. I agree with that in this way: People of color cannot safely protest in public spaces while masked ICE goons are enabled to ship them to foreign prisons sans due process with the blessing of the Supremely Kangarooish Court. So it’s up to us white folks to take our chances with arrest to perhaps avert all of us living in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. But I’m sure not everyone saw it the way I do.
  • I imagine the crowd was all over the place on the religious spectrum, just as Christians these days range from turn-the-other cheek New Testament-based classics to burn-the-heretics, where heretic is your neighbor who thinks her middle schooler should be able to read Harry Potter.
  • Some of the protesters were talking about Our Party and Their Party. That did not resonate with me at all. Democrats got us into this situation very specifically, including last year when their candidate could not stop pandering to billionaires, refused to engage with social media in the MAGAverse, and would not even acknowledge that the US might not want to be funding/arming a foreign theocracy committing genocide. If the choice is Dems or Trump, well, again I am moving.

Now for some fun signs! Notice it was a beautiful day in GB. If you look closely, some of you may find someone you recognize in one of the pictures.

And finally, the Raging Grannies sang some spoof songs specific to our times. This is a Glen Burnie branch of a nationwide organization so you can probably hear them online, though I haven’t tried that yet. Happy No Kings Day to you all!

Posted on by Jo Gent

One-Half Nation, Demoralized

Roughly half of our nation, namely the Maga supporters, are super psyched, for a variety of reasons. The anti-DEIs are happy about getting white heterosexual males back in charge of everyone else. The anti-abortion side plus some incels are excited about moving toward a Handmaid’s Tale-style society. The Dominionists are ready to re-create an Amerika that follows the teachings of the Vengeful Christ, whoever that is. A group recently released from (and a subset already returned to) incarceration are busily exercising their right to carry guns, chant, and intimidate average citizens on the nation’s average streets. A small but prominent minority, the Gazillionaires, are thrilled to find that for a few million dollars and utter abandonment of all moral principles plus everything they were taught as children, they may soon become gazillion-illionaires.

Then there’s President Musk, a man of action, who is continuing to live the values he learned as a child in South Africa, as he always has. He isn’t messing around; he’s taking over every government system of the United States and systematically destroying it from inside. He currently has complete control of federal spending and has gutted USAID, a pretty impressive effort for two weeks. He is being helped by executive orders and non-meritocrat Cabinet nominations by shadow president Trump. Did I get those backward?

Whatever. The other half are astounded by how easy it is for a small number of persons to bring our country to a near total halt just because they want to. It turns out that for the past 249 years the reason systems kept working is only because people didn’t try to break them. That is demoralizing.

I wouldn’t say there’s no resistance, but it’s feeble. A lot of this stuff is illegal, but if the enforcement branch is the one breaking the laws, the “normal” way to stop them is through the judicial system, which works pretty slowly, and is riddled with sycophants and capped by a nine-person bench of which six are cultists/corrupts.

There are some protests, and various interest groups trying to get attention, and lots of people and groups asking for money to help, but no person or group has a plan of action that appears to me will be in the slightest bit effective against the combination of power and norm-flouting currently practiced by the scofflaw co-presidents.

The Democrats and their supporting media organizations spend a lot of time being aghast or shrieking about the latest travesty, seemingly feeling that if they show Trump is “bad” we will all immediately conclude Democrats are what we need. Isn’t that the strategy that just lost them the election?

That’s bad, but even worse are the ones who are trying to find a way to compromise with our new administration. As we saw during the campaign when they couldn’t stop consulting their billionaire doners, denounce genocide in Gaza, stem government corruption, break up predatory conglomerates, or take one concrete step to reduce grocery prices, many Democrats are so enamored by hanging out with the cool kids that they’re going to drink the Kool-Aid.

Leaders of our nations universities are very much in this last category. Their organizations are reeling under new DEI strictures, but every single one is carefully tempering comments on the topic, fearful of retaliation.

In other words, it turns out that those of us who should be leading the resistance are either craven or ineffectual. Bernie Sanders would be the exception; he does not appear afraid of retaliation in the slightest. However, he is still focusing on using our nation’s process, spending his considerable energy and influence on finding truly progressive and perhaps bold leaders to run for office in 2026.

I think it is perhaps optimistic to think we will have an election in 2026. Even we do, we need to do something before then. This last election was at least in part decided by gerrymandered precincts and reduced voter rolls, and those sorts of activities will only increase between now and then.

My husband and I are thinking we should leave. That also seems craven, but as two retired people, we are in no position to turn any aircraft carriers around, especially without a strong organization spearheading a viable plan. As people depending on Social Security as part of our retirement plan, we are very vulnerable to impoverishment. We are angry; we’ve spent nine years building a new life in California, and we will have to start over again at this older age. However, that is something we at least can figure out how to do.

Honestly, it’s not clear that we will be able to get out in time. The US has now officially stopped tracking/reporting bird flu, and if it transitions to human-human transmission, which seems inevitable, we may not even find out until it has spread halfway across the country.

Season 2 of Trump v Pandemic could be more of a killer than Season 1.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Is Murder Always Bad?

Mainstream media and government elites are “shocked” by a massive outpouring of haha emojis after the assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare. Shooting people is not a great way to solve things, and it’s probably not going to work out well for the accused assassin, unless he can pull an OJ Simpson with the jury. But chronic pain, permanent impairment, financial ruin, and, yes, even murder avoidable death, are being dealt every day to ordinary Americans by ordinary American health insurance companies.

I have to admit that when I first heard the headline my immediate response was, Well, no surprise there.

The insurance company Anthem had recently announced a plan to limit anesthesia coverage to the predicted duration of an operation, as opposed to its actual duration. This announcement was met with equanimity by the major press and politicians, among whom there are apparently no persons who can imagine what it would be like to be dropped off anesthesia before you’re stitched up. Anthem reversed that decision immediately after the assassination, a tangible positive result.

I feel like I should stop the blog right here, because everyone knows this already, right? Our singular for-profit healthcare system makes people sicker, and America’s health has plummeted in my lifetime while its healthcare costs have burgeoned.

The observable failure of our healthcare system has fed into the cynicism created by decades of being blanketed with false messages about government waste and trickle-down economics combined with stories of why three is the right number for yachts as well as bears. The only people doing well in America are moguls, and non-mogul 21st-century Americans are ready for a piece of the action, including our doctors. Getting more money is a good thing, however you go about it. If we’re rich we’re trying to get richer. If we’re not we’re trying to get there.

I heard today that Detroit was having an “upturn” after a decline lasting over 50 years. I hope they’ll have an upturn lasting 50 years. If this neglect of Detroit is exemplary of other regions of the country, no wonder citizen-victims of all ages are fed up with waiting for their turn to prosper.

The depth of the cynicism is truly fathomless, especially for us those of us who grew up when it was pretty simple to identify an asshole. Like Pete Hegseth, a jerk, an alcoholic, a misogynist, and a perpetrator of sexual assault. Even so, zero Republican male Senators are going to vote against him while the Republican women Senators are “trying” to find a way to vote Yes.

I guess Republicans just want the Cabinet to behave more like the Supreme Court.

The Democrats are cynical as well, responsible for moving most blue-collar jobs overseas, destroying limits on monopolies and income inequality, failing to devise reasonable immigration policy for decades, and making policies that led to us imprisoning more people than any other nation.

We’re number one!

So I really am sympathetic to those who felt neither voting choice was good. Soon I fear I will need to be empathetic with them as well. When the macroeconomically-challenged Elon and Vivek take the $1.5 trillion of Social Security payments out of circulation, my own personal economy is going to collapse along with the nation’s.

Pretty sure I won’t be around for 50 years of decline though.

Posted on by Jo Gent

RFK might be OK

I’m almost as depressed by the dialogue around this election as I am about the results. I really feel the blue angst-fest is missing the obvious. Case in point was an interview on Politico about RFK becoming secretary of HHS. The guest had a lot of credentials from Georgetown university, including a program he devised that is supported by WHO. In other words, he was another elite of the sort who have been running the country since the 1990s.

While he briefly acknowledged that eating fewer processed foods could be healthy, the guest, as well as the journalist interviewing him, were making the point that having RFK in charge of health would be a really bad idea, ie, piling on with collapse-of-the-country predictions, and by-the-way simply can’t imagine what Trump voters were thinking.

Castigating voters is not getting us anywhere. Millions of people are not stupid or crazy, they’re voting their own interest based on their own narrative. While some of these are clearly concerned with America becoming a “minority majority” nation, a lot of them have noticed that decades of political control by graduates of elite universities has led to declining living conditions here.

The healthcare expert on Politico, for example, did not even mention–and was not asked about–the fact that health in the United States had cratered during this century. We are one of the most unhealthy populations in the world, rife with chronic diseases and mental illnesses, often starting in childhood, for which we are offered expensive, corporation-enriching patented pharmaceuticals that allay some symptoms while introducing others, rather than treatments that might effect a cure.

Someone, as in at least one Democrat of prominence, should *apologize* for selling us all out. Because that is what has happened here. Instead, they are daily asking for more money! The beneficiaries of the inaccurately-named meritocracy have taken their subsidized Ivy League credentials right to the bank. Most are wallowing in the ill-gotten gains of a financial industry optimized to extract value from everywhere and stuff it into the pockets of those seeking a baby yacht for their momma yacht.

Re-focusing on healthcare, others have gotten very wealthy trying to “cure” cancer with bank-account emptying, damaging procedures–because how would we make money if we prevent cancer?–or re-purposing their research to serving big pharma in the race for patentable pharmaceuticals people can pay for for the rest of our lives, instead of saving for retirement .

if RFK says that raw milk is good for us, or that highly processed foods are not good for us, why can’t we test and find out whether this is true?

Don’t answer, I know the answer, I’m just playing with you!

It’s really hard to get major funding to figure out whether a lifestyle solution such as a change in diet would improve health, because that doesn’t lead to any big paydays for the funders. The US healthcare system is the rare for-profit healthcare system, and the sicker we are, the richer the top 10% will be.

If blue journalists and Democratic politicians want to have any credibility going forward, after apologizing, they might try to find out why so many people, smart people, rejected them. Both red and blue are hobnobbing with billionaires, and both sides have prominent members who are willing to use their positions to maximize their own wealth and prestige, one of whom I would posit is the president-elect. But the blue siders keep saying, We care about working families, and then using their power in ways that promote income and job inequality.

Three caveats:

  • Shoutout to Biden, who did pass several major bills with long-range improvements for jobs and infrastructure that will mostly take effect in time for Republicans to take credit, but points off for waiting so long to do anything then not selling it.
  • I’m thinking and reading a lot about this, but ultimately I’m guessing about motivations, because, as most of you know, I still think the blue side has more of a chance of actually improving conditions for We the Folk.
  • I drink a therapeutic 8 ounces of raw milk most days.