That’s a quote from a criminal as spoken to the person they were robbing, isn’t it?
Well, fuck.
The primary emotions I experience these days are disgust and despondency-- back and forth. Hope is absent and joy has not been seen in recent memory.
This morning disgust came to the fore.
I live in a near-downtown neighborhood of older homes (built from 1920 to 1940). My block is middle-to-lower-middle class. Neatly trimmed yards, plenty of young families with little kids, as well as retirees, students, mixed racial/ethnic makeup, lots of Biden signs, neighborhood association signs saying “if you need help, call us,” MANY MANY dog walkers (who actually pick up poop!), lost/found dog posters stapled to phone poles, friendly people who wave. IOW the BEST block in the BEST neighborhood in the city world.
Cross a main thoroughfare to the east and the houses are same age, but bigger, professionally landscaped yards, a few trump signs 
, no one outside except to get in their cars. And this morning, one guy (40-ish, polo shit, shorts) pounding a sign into his yard: “OPEN OUR SCHOOLS OR RETURN OUR TAXES.” I’m 100% positive this fucker does not send his children (if he has any) to a school in the inner-city district where he lives. So why should he contribute tax money to educate kids who will just wind up working at McDonald’s or fixing his car? And that goes double if the schools are closed!
How fucking ignorant/short-sighted can you get?? Everything about this demand and the frame of mine that birthed it is wrongwrongwrong. I won’t go into it, as anyone who sees it will not need an explanation, and anyone who doesn’t see it won’t get it anyway.
I heartily endorse the title of this thread topic. 
By Grabthar’s hammer . . . what a savings.
It’s the best because you’re in it, silly! I wanna live there too, although my neighborhood and city are just like that-if a storm knocks branches out of a tree onto my roof or into my yard, two neighbors with chain saws are knocking on my door before I know about it.
So the world may not be ‘fucked’ in the end but it is gonna be an ugly, painful ordeal climbing out of this clusterfuck.
You’ve been a good son.
Climate change, covidiots, anti-vaxxers are all symptoms of the same alarming problem: a shunning of science. Today I had a discussion with a former student on hydroxychloroquine. She insists she has doctor friends who “saved many lives” before the bad ol’ FDA made them stop prescribing it for COVID patients. I cited study after study showing it didn’t work. She said, “I believe things I see around me, not some study.”
And she’s not alone. I can’t help thinking we’re entering a sort of Dark Ages Redux. How do we turn this around? How do we change the minds of people who’ve decided science is a crock when it belies their beliefs?
I think that’s more of a viral attack on her brain. Of the Trump’s Moronus variety.
Makes one wonder, what are the chances she is religious?
That’s the great thing about science. It’s true whether you believe it or not.
People are more keen to accept some tidbit their favorite news pundit says than what some egghead scientist in Washington said. Why bother accepting what trained health people and doctors say - that’s hard. Reading-up on the issue and forming your own opinion is beyond the pale, man!
Not necessarily.
I know that song. That’s just an ugly theological rumor.
My late husband was in a German men’s chorus, and the choirmaster had a cupholder for his personalized stein attached to the side of his music stand.
IMHO the one thing that separates us from the beasts, as it were, is the scientific method. I truly do not understand how some people can be anti-science. I’m starting to think that someone should try to convert their country into a “scientocracy” (is their such a word?). Sadly the US is almost a Christian/evangelistic theocracy.
On another note regarding the fuckedness of the world - I don’t think that covid, globally, will disappear until enough Americans either die or get really seriously ill (eg ventilator time, near death etc) until all other Americans personally know someone who covid has either killed or broken.
So covid will be with us for a long, long time, sadly.
As well as embarrassed and ashamed to be an American, I am also scared. It’s no wonder I find myself gripping things so tightly. Constant anxiety.
What really kills pieces of my soul is knowing that some family members are Ever-Trumpers , slurping up Fox news and buying into every conspiracy theory out there.
Not sure about the entire world, but the USA is well on it’s way to being fucking fucked.
Favourite quote: “Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab.”
There have always been anti-science Americans and anti-science people everywhere, in surprisingly large numbers. The difference is that now they have an outsized ability to spread and consume their misinformation. They create communities of misinformation that are much, much larger than they ever could have been before a decade or so ago.
The downward trend actually predates social media, beginning with the splintering of traditional mass media and gatekeeping establishments into many different news outlets, some of which were dedicated to creating their own information (misinformation) bubbles. But Facebook and the like have amplified this problem in unimaginable ways.
Americans embrace freedoms, but we don’t embrace responsibilities that come with them. That has a price.
Since you mentioned climate change, I’ll just point out that the current pandemic failures are nothing. Climate change will exact a brutal toll, and the changes will be sudden and overwhelming. If we think that the pandemic is as bad as it gets, we’re ridiculously dead wrong. Pandemics can destabilize a society; climate change can completely wipe a civilization out of existence - in very short time.
I think TechCorp and Globochem summed it up in this commercial:
That Rolling Stone article was rough, and sobering.
Great article - says so many of things that have been on my mind for a while now.