2025- It is a marathon, not a sprint

However you have arrived to the conclusion, you must admit that we are in danger.

Not only singular we as a personal group of one or two, but we as a nation.

This is mainly by design. Their design.

The chaos, the mass firings, agency by agency.

All those lives ruined.

All those career civil servants who keep the lights on, and the airplanes where they need to be, who kept the national parks open and safe for visitors – gone.

No matter where you sit on the political aisle, no matter who you voted for, or why you voted the way you did, does this feel good to you? Is this what you wanted?

The number one thing that was cited over and over and over and over and over about why the votes were the way they were was the price of eggs. I know that this was a red herring, after all, the price of eggs is higher than it has ever been.

How is that working for you? You realize now that this is a ridiculous argument, right? Right?

We can get mad and scream and shout accusations.

Or we can get to work.

After all, resistance is not a sprint, but a marathon.

I am ready to weigh in with my purchase power. Are you?

Time to let the companies know that the American people mean business. As in, no business to them on those days.

This Friday is the first organized pocketbook protest. It is a no-buy day.

Nothing.

Nada.

Not even a stick of gum.

One of my friends lives near a shopping center and has told me they are going to keep watch on the cars going toward the shopping center on Friday. They hope that the amount of cars will be less. Time will tell.

The Montgomery bus strike lasted over a year. 381 days to be exact. I am prepared to go the long haul.

I have emptied my Amazon cart and most of my lists. The only things that are left are things for school and books for school. I haven’t bought anything from them since Christmas.

We can do this; we’ve just gotten lazy with the ease and convenience of it all.

It is time to make a new plan. I have curated a list of places I will be buying from, of small businesses that get our money. I have made planting plans for the spring, summer, and fall, and plan for the utilization of our fridge and freezer.

And protest with our buying power. A world in which I can make purchases easily but have a boot on my neck politically is not a world I want to live in. This is how we protest, small ripples that become a wave.

My protest begins with a single action. No-buy on Friday. This is the first action step in what will be a marathon of protesting.

It is time to be prepared.

Sometimes the beginning of the protest comes at a shout, like at some of the town halls that happened this last week.

Sometimes, the beginning of the protest comes with a snap, like the closing of the wallet.

What 5 things did I do last week for my employer? I’m not going to tell you.

Tuesday Top of Mind 2/18/25- ripping the wings off of butterflies and laughing about it

There is something laddish about going into government computers and programs and ripping out the guts. And leaving a big mess.

Of course, this time the mess equates to the suffering of many, many people.

It brings to mind the episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called The Naked Now. An affected by the virus that makes everyone act as if they are drunk leads Wesley Crusher to disable the engines just as the Enterprise is in dire straits.

Sound familiar?

It takes Data, the android, who is also affected, to rise to a goad to put the pieces that Wesley has destroyed back in working order.

If that isn’t a metaphor for today’s US I don’t know what is.

A kid gets drunk. Are you with me? Not unlike the teenage and young 20s young men who are playing havoc in our systems. Reminder, the frontal lobe doesn’t finish developing until age 25 or so. Of course, they are charged with this task by an older man who just wants to break things.

Not a perfect metaphor.

A kid disables the engine, leading to peril. If it hasn’t happened yet, see the plane crashes since inauguration day, it will soon.

An android, one who is a valuable member of the crew but one at first who was looked upon with derision and scorn and fear, is the one to right the ship. Oh, and did I mention that he struggles with identity through so much of the series? There is definitely a trans allegory there.

But, I fear, that we will no one who has been othered around to help. Because they have been deported or are living in fear.

They are pulling the wings off the butterfly that is the U.S. And laughing maniacally while doing so.

I wouldn’t be able to plot this and no one would read it because it is so implausible.

But here we are.

Our international reputation is shredding, not unlike the wings of the butterfly.

There is no one coming to save us.

People are suffering. Including people who voted for this madness.

I am trying to find sympathy for them.

I have no sympathy for the government.

But I have a real fear of our standing in the world and the utter trainwreck that Democrats have to right after this. Because it is always up to the Democrats to fix what the Republicans broke while giving billions and billions of dollars to those who do not need it.

Tuesday Top of Mind 2/11/25- the SAVE Act

Well, this is a piece of neo-mansophere trash.

If this vote passes the Senate and is signed into law as written, voting by women will be changed.

On the surface, this bill is about voting. Okay, fine. Not a demonstrable problem, no matter what some republicans think.

However, if you read the summary, voting will be permitted only if you are able to prove that you are a United States citizen. How to prove that? The easiest way is to provide your birth certificate. Your certified birth certificate.

Good on the surface, right?

Why did this not pass last year when it was first introduced?

Because it is a huge waste of time and resources. You already cannot register to vote unless you prove you are a US citizen. Usually by driver’s license or passport.

There is already a REAL ID that will be used by airlines starting in May. The SAVE Act is a belt to that suspenders. I got my REAL ID by showing my passport to the DMV. The same passport that I had to use my driver’s license and birth certificate to obtain.

I will note that I have a certified copy of my birth certificate. Obtained from the state where I was born. But what about the people out there whose birth certificates cannot be certified. What if they were born at home? What if they were born in a time before all of this nonsense?

To obtain a passport, you already have to show proof of residency. To get mine I had to have my driver’s license and my marriage license proving that the name change was legit. Same for the social security card.

Because this act shows their hand. 80% of woman who are married in this country take their husband’s name. I did. Does this bill mean that I would no longer be eligible to vote because my birth certificate and my driver’s license do not match?

I am afraid that this is the intention. In all the reading I have done these last 3 months I have come across a phrase in a couple of places that I thought was straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. “Family voting”, wherein the man, whose name does match his birth certificate, votes for the entire house.

The real question is what exactly is this bill saving? Nothing. It would cost A LOT of money to implement. Imagine the lawsuits. Imagine the outrage the first time a woman goes to vote and is denied because she took her husband’s name.

For something we didn’t even need. Unless that was the entire point. To more than halve the number of women who are eligible to vote.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Are you frightened yet?

More importantly, are you paying attention yet?

Tuesday Top of Mind 1/7/25-of course babies are being thrown away in TX

SIX babies have been found abandoned in dumpsters in this last year in Houston, TX, alone. According to reporting by Fox News 26 in Houston, this is a 500 increase since 2022. In that year ONE baby was abandoned.

What else happened in 2022? The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, dooming more than half of their constituents to fear and the possibility of death if pregnancy doesn’t go 100% right.

This sounds like the natural consequences to their actions. To be clear, the government and the legislature are not the ones facing the consequences or death.

The worst part of this story is that 2 of the babies were found dead.

The other worst part of this story is that it is not just Houston.

The other other worst part of this story is that sometimes it is a ditch.

Reminder, Texas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the US.

And they are surprised? No, of course not, this is just expected fallout of their control issues. Acceptable casualties such as these have probably already been calculated and their concern level has not been breached.

There is another way. There are safe haven laws on the books in Texas. It just comes with an eensy, teensy catch. The mothers (it is always the only the mothers, have you noticed?) might not even know about them as the powers that be in TX certainly don’t advertise the laws. To do so would burst their happy little bubble that this is fine, everything’s on fire, but it is fine.

Dead women if you do (abysmal women’s maternal mortality rate, worst in the nation according to the state rankings), dead infants if you don’t (allow abortion rights, fund women’s healthcare, give a damn about your constituents, allow ).

And the women who have the money and the support to go out of state to seek their very much needed healthcare? Texas and Indiana and possibly Idaho would very much like to know where women go when they flee the state for needed healthcare.

A law called HIPAA prevents them. But that doesn’t stop them from trying. From battering down the walls that are protecting women from creeps like them.

Are you paying attention yet?

Or are you pleased this is happening and the dead children and dead women are acceptable losses?

Tuesday Top of Mind 12/31/24- criminalizing miscarriages

I am sure I have written about this before. When it happened in South Carolina, when it happened in Ohio. In fact, there have been at least 7 states that have prosecuted women for failing to seek medical care. Well, what they considered prompt medical care.

But what is happening in South Carolina is another swing at the apple of declaring that life begins at conception. Whatever your creed or not creed when life begins has very different answers. According to Genesis 2, life begins at first breath.

Reminder, the bible is not necessarily truth. It is a truth that was written by men. And I use the term truth loosely. It has been translated many, many, many times and we all know what happens when you play telephone.

By declaring that life begins at conception this opens the door to naming miscarriages and abortion as murder. Since South Carolina is a death penalty state, this potentially means the death penalty for women who suffer a miscarriage. That’s 25% of all pregnancies, straight off the top. This leads me to wonder “Can they math?”

And here, I thought they were concerned with the declining birthrate and, by extension, the declining population numbers that do not match what is required to take care of the elders.

The thing is, South Carolina tried this before in March of 2023. In a bill that went nowhere. In fact, the reason it went nowhere is that several republicans pulled their support of the bill. Perhaps when it started getting a lot of publicity.

I am sure that some of this stems from a genuine concern for the unborn by a small amount of people. But not most of it. The rest are concerned with the federal money. Missouri told us that.

At heart, and I have definitely written this before, it is about controlling women.

Full stop.

But I don’t think it sends the message they want to send.

If a woman fears the death penalty for getting pregnant, she can take birth control. And not get pregnant.

Do you see where this is a foolish idea?

Good job scaring a lot of women, South Carolina. I hope you DON’T get what you are after.

Don’t worry, criminalizing birth control is next on their pretend outrage docket.

After they finish dumping crappy bills into December when no one is paying attention.

Tuesday Top of Mind 11/5/24- your vote is private

Over the last two weeks, I have heard many, many, many, many, many attacks on women. Men are interested in how learning a woman, any woman, THEIR woman voted.

Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t owe anyone an answer to this.

It is none of their business HOW you voted.

It is none of their business IF you voted. Although, I wish you would.

Some men even equated not voting in lockstep with their vote to cheating. Cough, cough, jesse watters.

Um.

Take several steps back, sir.

In fact, check yourself. I realize that you think having an outie sex organ entitles you to all the things. But it doesn’t.

A woman in her EIGHTIES voted for the first time because her husband, who had decreed that it is not important that she vote, died last year.

There are so many stories about men and others but mostly men, putting pressure on women to vote the way that the man does. Or even stopping women from voting. Where do you think you live, sir? Iran or Afghanistan. The woman’s right to vote is enshrined in the 19th Amendment and we will not be denied.

Of course, there is a lot of chatter “joking” that the 19th Amendment has to be repealed. Yeah, I’ve seen your jokes. There is always a kernel or even a whole ear of corn of truth.

You and what army?

There are stories of breakups over a woman not telling a man who they voted for. Of men looming over their partners in the voting area in an intimidating manner. BTW, this is not allowed. Men who gave their wives the silent treatment because the wives dared to 1) vote and 2) not to tell them how they voted.

If I was confronted and someone demanded I tell them how I voted, I would tell the truth. I voted straight blue ticket. Yes, all of them, even the ballots that don’t have party affiliations on them. I can research and read up on the people I am voting for before I go to the early voting site.

But not all women are like me. And that’s okay.

This is your permission slip to lie. This isn’t something I would do, but you have to live your life.

No one has the right to know who you voted for.

Tuesday Top of Mind 10/22/24-the pregnant woman “owes” the state her progeny because they will be taxpayers someday-WTAF

The truth comes with a complaint in TX before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Court (of course). This is yet another attack on mifepristone by mail. Reminder, of the varying bans that politicians and states have placed on women’s bodies and their access to healthcare. Okay, it is really the abortion bans that have been ramrodded through state legislatures. And 63% of all abortions in the US are self-administered through medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol. Even before the Dobbs decision, the rule from the FDA allowed these medications to be distributed by mail.

Some people don’t appreciate that and they are throwing anything and everything at the rule and the FDA to stop it.

We have been living this for 2 years. They utilized much of the same constant approaches against Roe v Wade and we all know that sometimes shit sticks.

This last filing is a doozy and apparently pregnant teenagers are the “property of the state”. This is from the state of Texas. And the state of Missouri, as a second complainant, thinks it is the duty of a pregnant woman in Missouri to have the baby. You know, to make more taxpayers.

As I’ve been writing about it is about money and control.

But from the complaint itself being able to obtain abortion drugs “has caused abortions for women in the Plaintiff Stats and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the state itself… a loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States’ subsequent “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds” such as potentially “losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are” reduced or their increase diminished.”

What the actual fuck!

They’ve tipped their hand.

This is it; the entire reason for this bullshit. For the stripping of bodily rights from the women.

Men see women as nothing more than possessions. This includes the output of our uteruses. To their mind, they OWN us and any output our uteri might supply. And how dare we have a sense of our own and thoughts and aspirations of our own! To think that we are people.

After all, the ENTIRE reason for being a woman is to make a man’s job/life easier.

Or, so they think.

I saw this mentioned in an Esquire article and confirmed it with a CNN article and I am appalled. And disgusted. And unsurprised

Everyone needs to know about this.

Women need to know about this.

As a reminder, Missouri has a state constitutional amendment about the Right to Reproductive Freedom on the ballot in 15 days.

Just saying.

School Me Saturday- Poll me once?

In today’s special edition of school me Saturday I want to talk about polls.

Not poll numbers.

But poll questions.

Last semester one of my classes was about measurement. How to take it, and, more importantly, how to make sure the tools and questions were of quality.

Because there are such things as validity and reliability.

For this school me Saturday we are going to take validity: does the question really ask what you think it is asking.

The loose definition of validity is how well the question reflects a true finding among those asked. They use this to correlate with those outside of the poll.

The loose definition of reliability is how well the poll question reflects what can be replicated with another person taking the poll.

What prompted this topic was the ONE time I participated in a poll about this 2024 general election and how poorly written the questions were.

They asked me general questions about who I anticipated voting for and my general feeling about the election.

And then, after they found out I was not playing about voting straight party Democrat ticket, they threw some BS information out about the Democratic candidate and asked if I was still going to vote for them. When I said that I would rather vote for the Democrat, they pushed me, hard. I stated that bodily autonomy was so important to me that I didn’t care what crap they bought up about the candidate.

And they hung up on me.

Frankly, the entire encounter left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I’ve declined all calls since.

It has been a LONG time since I was in journalism class but even I can spot when they are leading the interviewee the answer in the way that they wanted me to answer.

Obviously, they don’t know me.

The takeaway is that if you do answer the phone and talk to a pollster be honest. But also pay attention to their questions and how they are given.

And make sure that you get the name of the company taking the poll. A lot can be figured out by a quick Google.

If you do the quick Google, consider if you even want to talk to the pollster.

If you do talk to them pay very close attention to the questions and how they make you feel.

Before you ask, I do believe in polling.

Just not in answering my phone.

Tuesday Top of Mind 10/8/24- explicative deleted the supreme court

Me again.

Back on abortion news that is so hot it would burn if I had any fingertips left.

Yesterday, the supreme court declined to hear a case from the BIDEN administration about the draconian abortion law in Texas. The state was using that law to say, nah bro, even if a patient is on the verge of dying, emergency rooms don’t have to do an abortion. And they send the woman HOME.

In other words, in starker words, let the woman die instead of performing an abortion, which is the evidence-based standard of care for miscarriage. The problem is that the fetus isn’t dead YET, or at least their cardiac poles are working, and the woman isn’t sick enough YET.

Let the woman die.

Because the output of her uterus has a stronger case in front of the current supreme court than her right to life.

You know, the right to life is in the constitution’s preamble.

But, sure, why not deny a woman her rights?

After all, she is a lesser being than the clump of cells in her uterus.

They had punted a similar EMTALA case in June of this year. Do you remember?

EMTALA is a federal law that means everyone who presents to the emergency room gets the treatment they need. No matter what it is.

Ringing a bell now?

The thing is the Biden administration was asking to send the fifth circuit appeals court ruling on EMTALA and Texas back to a lower court to be retried.

The supreme court said nah.

I am not sure who is paying attention if anyone. There are a lot of other things commanding our attention: the 2024 general election, the devastating loss of life and property over 6 states after Hurricane Helene, the category 5 Hurricane Milton that is bearing down on almost the exact spot where Hurrican Helene hit Florida, the Russian bots that are trolling the news sites and giving out lies. I won’t even talk about their most current lie about FEMA money but it is certainly a lie.

Misdirection is the standard for all magic tricks.

I wonder what else they are doing when we aren’t paying attention.

To be clear, the they isn’t just the supreme court, but news media, and the aforementioned troll bots that are desperate to make you believe lies.

I am tired of being told that my life doesn’t matter, that what I want doesn’t matter by these clowns.

I am definitely tired of being reminded over and over and over and over and over again that because I am a woman my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness matter less than the potential output of my uterus.

Don’t get me started on the fact that my husband and I do not have children. Which also makes us lesser.

Tuesday Top of Mind 7/30/24- childless cat lady here, reporting from the front line

There is a furor of JD Vance denouncing the country as being run by childless cat ladies. There is a lot to unpack here and is my Tuesday top of mind.

It goes beyond the regret that he says that the U.S. is being run “by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Point number 1- I feel this is a call back to the spinster horror from the Victorian era and before where a woman needed a man. Otherwise, they would be “on the shelf” and unmarriageable by 23. She was forced to care for her parents until their deaths and after they died forced to live in misery, unwanted. (frowny face here) This is definitely the underpinning of this idea. It is a well-known trope that it was best to be widowed because the widowed woman was thought to be independent and beholden to no man.

Point number 2- I feel this is a projection of the miserableness of those who have children. They see those of us who do not have children as selfish and having all the fun they can’t have themselves. You know, because of the kids. I think this is especially poignant because some people with children want to make the world as miserable as them, mainly when it comes to book bans and drag queen bans. I get it, when you have children they are vulnerable and everything looks like a threat. But is it, though? Or is the threat coming, as it often does, from inside the house?

Point number 3- Who says those of us who don’t have children are miserable? Kind of goes back to point number 2. Projection much?

Point number 4- This lumps all women and men who don’t have kids into the bucket of not having kids because we don’t want them. This might or might not be far from the truth. What about those of us who couldn’t have kids? We are apparently the same as those who don’t want them. One of these things is not like the other.

Point number 5- I think this is about transphobia as well. Trans women do not have the plumbing to create or carry a child. This is through no fault of their own. But why not twist the knife? It says nothing about their willingness to carry a child, if it was physically possible.

Point number 6- Men like this and others who embrace what he is saying are afraid. Afraid of the woman who is not under a man’s thumb. Afraid of a woman who doesn’t need a man. Afraid of a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it.

Much like the abortion bans and the book bans, it is all about control.

They can’t control us.

And they fear what they can’t control.

Therefore, we childless cat ladies, married or not, women who are unable to bear children or not, are to be squeezed into a teeny tiny box of their making. Because they fear what they can’t control.

Fuck that.

My cats and my uterus and my husband would like a word.

I have also seen the childless dog women coming to our defense and that of Kamala Harris, who the slur was originally against. And it is glorious.

You bet I bought that tee shirt.