Thor's Day Thing 4/21

Feel free to move about the cabin until we win on appeal

Pictured here: My garden’s combat readiness is better than your garden’s combat readiness, and also daffodils.

• I’m aware that I haven’t posted as frequently as I intend, or that I feel you deserve (especially paid subscribers). This is a temporary setback. The simple truth is that life has been kicking my ass lately and I’ve been depressed- serious, no joke depressed, not like a Twitter comment- and have needed to focus the productive energy I can muster on doing my paying jobs and dealing with the various infrastructure fails on the farm that have been making life harder. Husbandmouth has also been struggling with the more advanced parts of his CDL licensing and has been retaking tests- he will absolutely succeed and be finished eventually but it causes continuing anxiety about not having two incomes every time he’s unable to begin looking for work immediately. (Husbandmouth, sorry for the overshare. I am still extremely proud of you and know we will get there.)

• Brothermouth has been stepping up like a gangster (one that, apparently, energetically performs productive manual work instead of committing felonies and writing rap songs) in dealing with the ongoing failure of our new, larger pasture, reinforcing the fencing and helping Husbandmouth add in bob wire (THAT’S HOW YOU FUCKING SAY IT SHUT UP) perimeter. The males (presently only one bull and one steer) have been getting very… active as the weather has warmed up and there have been some tense moments when I’ve walked through the middle of the field with a bucket of feed, so he relocated feeders to the roadside so I can bring feed without being helpless in the middle of 2 tons of beef armed with edged weapons.

• Fathermouth has his big surgery, which has turned out to not be so big, NEXT WEEK and is extremely excited to recover quickly and go home. He’s entered an emotional phase of living here where he has started feeling- purely of his own volition- very guilty and in the way and like a big imposition. He’s eager to get out of our hair, but I think more eager to be back to planning his future and being independent again. He’s intending to sell his home in NC- a kind of bittersweet thing as a lot of my childhood happened around there- and move to Florida. I hope the finances work out for him.

  As I mentioned a few months ago, Dad has been getting very red-pilled following his hospital experience, vaccine injury, and being around a household that consumes a lot of news where he previously consumed almost none. He has lately been expressing an unusual dichotomy that I think a lot of people his age are probably struggling with right now- 1) now that I’ve survived my brush with death I want to live a LONG time, past 100, and get every minutes’ worth; but 2) I’m glad I’m not going to be around when (China invades, the US becomes totalitarian, nuclear war, a global economic collapse, etc.) happens.

  It’s a perspective on death and mortality that I think is very unique to people who find themselves, whether because of age or health, caught between the idea of one’s life ending as a relief or as a theft against the yearning to live more happy years. As a healthy person in my early 40s, given the average age of the women in my family and broad projections of longevity, I’ve probably got another 50 or so years, but a significant number of them will probably not see me physically strong enough to move a lot in flight of tyranny or be very combat effective (though a lot can be done by an old woman in significant tree cover with a good scope). If the near future of my civilization is going to be marked by existential conflict, it frustrates me that I may find myself in the position of being a passive victim and hoping there are enough 20 and 30-somethings who haven’t lost their fucking minds to fight for my interests, and that horrifies me.

• I have plans for at least one focused, topical article, so I’m going to address the recent TSA mask thing here in brief instead of getting its own post. As you’ve probably noticed, I tend to avoid dedicating posts to specific current events and instead focus on broader thematic or fundamental issues that those events reflect- I do this because I think there’s already an enormous amount of reading out there, some of it excellent, a lot of it white noise, about news, and would like to instead contribute to the body of work that helps people analyze and come to their own critical thoughts about the issues around the news rather than opining on the news itself.

  So, here’s my take on the TSA mask thing. I’m relieved and thrilled- like far, far more of us than the defenders of the narrative would have you believe- but remain skeptical. Tactically, there’s no guarantee that it will hold- a repeal of mask mandates in NYC by a judge’s ruling a while ago lasted less than 24 hours, and Governor/Bene Gesserit Hochul basically said her office would ignore it and did so with no political consequences. The DOJ already has an appeal underway. You’d really think that political expedience would encourage anyone in the cult with half a brain left to back down, but here we are. So I’m not assuming that the business trip I’ll take next month will be on a plane (I refuse to fly under mask mandates).

  Strategically, even if the pushback against the ruling is either theater or unsuccessful, this is, at best, a half-victory (albeit an important one), unworthy of a “we won, Joe” phone call. The one good thing is the nature of the judge’s ruling- not whether masks are “teh Science” but that the CDC exceeded its authority. This creates precedent (which is exactly the reasoning given by the DOJ’s appeal- that it would be “dangerous” to strip the CDC of this undemocratic, unofficial, unconstitutional power) which can be cited against similar population-level mandates against healthy citizens guilty of no crime, like stay-at-home orders and social distancing, and if you had a great lawyer, maybe even the vaccine mandates themselves.

  What it doesn’t do is explicitly redefine (or more clearly and firmly define in the first place) the nature of the relationship that we, the politically powerless many, have to “advisory” bodies like the CDC. There is nothing specifically stopping the CDC from “recommending” any damn thing they want, knowing full well the political pressure and optics it creates, in the future. There’s nothing stopping the CDC from issuing cautions against eating, doing, SAYING, THINKING, OR VOTING a certain way “for your health” (and if you don’t think government agencies haven’t been trying to tie dissent and ‘far right ideology’ to mental illness and public health you’re dumber than an opossum at a Mathletes competition).

  Doing this is what victory would really look like: just as Pennsylvania voted- through a democratic referendum, no less- to redefine a governor’s emergency powers (mainly by curtailing his ability to maintain a state of emergency unilaterally), the CDC needs the same treatment: explicit statements that “recommendations” do not hold force of law and do not occupy some quasi-religious status of unassailability that it is EVER okay to begin censoring and punishing anyone who disagrees or debates them. (I’d go a lot further and say that the CDC should focus on research and not have a public-facing loudspeaker at ALL.)

  As final food for thought, here’s a breathtaking article from the olden days of 2014 I got when I did a search for “CDC powers.” Here’s a line:

  “Our public health system is built on voluntary compliance,” Donohue tells TIME. “If the CDC starts to become the enemy holding a gun to [someone’s] head and keeping them in their house, they lose insight.”

  Utter heresy.

  See you soon.