What if we acknowledged genetic diversity with friendlier (and delicious!) labels? Oh no! Not another 'Race is a social construct' debate! Yet there I was once again, this time on Substack, debating with my fellow writer SteveQJ whether 'race' is a social construct or not. Scientists, for sure, don't talk about 'race' anymore, they speak of 'ancestry', like 'Sub-Saharan African' or 'Northern European'. But still. It's a thing. "So," sez I, since no one can ever answer this question, "What's undeniable is that our skin colors are different. We've customarily called it 'race', but if not that, then what?" Since most of us don't parse genetic hairs like scientists. Steve, a really reasonable, rational, middle-of-the-road black writer on race issues, was the most recent in a long line of others who couldn't offer any better labels. Do we even need any? Of course we do. In a neutral sense, we discriminate between differences. It's not 'speciesist', for example, to point out penguins are different from ostriches and canaries, yet they're all birds. Chances are, if I say the word 'bird', the first image that pops into your mind is a generic small flying critter, since that's what's customarily flying around our 'hoods. That's quite stereotypical, you speciesist! Penguins, ostriches, kiwis, and flamingoes are canceling you on Twitter right now! There may truly be no such thing as 'race', but there are clear superficial evolutionary human differences. You know this by the questions of small children, who often ask, as I did as a little kid in a park, why 'those children over there have slanty eyes', leading my mother to talk to me on the ride home about 'Oriental' people as we called them back then and how you must never say 'slanty' eyes and why. World War II, Japan, 'slant-eyes', etc. A kinder, tastier vocabulary Leave it to a sugar hound like me to suggest 'flavors' as a replacement for 'race' or 'color'. I submit dessert flavors as a friendlier, gentler way to refer to clearly different humans. 'Flavor' is such a friendly word, rarely used in a pejorative sense. Maybe in Harry Potter, where Bettie Botts All-Flavour Beans occasionally come in Vomit, Dirt, Ear Wax, Booger and Rotten Egg. When we speak of flavors we're thinking positively: "7-Eleven Slurpees: Now featuring Tutti-Frutti, Tangerine and Pina Colada!" When I think of human varieties I think of ice cream: Chocolate, vanilla, caramel and butterscotch! What's the diff between caramel and butterscotch? Thank you for asking. Butterscotch is Asians, Caramel is those between Butterscotch and Chocolate. And Rocky Road for those who are brown and white and a little nutty! Or Neapolitan for the more-than-two-flavors multiracial. We can't forget Jews, who feature heavily in fevered white supremacist nightmares but whose skin color defies categorization. So I've assigned them Honey, since honey cakes are a big Rosh Hashanah staple. Stupidifying racism Racist language sounds a lot sillier when the labels sound friendlier. "If we do not stand now and perform our god given duty to keep OUR country clean of all the ̶B̶l̶a̶c̶k̶s̶, Chocolates, ̶J̶e̶w̶s̶ Honeys, and ̶Y̶e̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ Butterscotch scum from Asia, WE are just as bad as the enemy, if not worse. We are trading our race for that of an inferior form of trash." - Protocols of the Elders of Zing Vanilla supremacy? Trust, me no one wants vanilla to rule the world. It's just too boring. And butterscotch 'scum'? I don't know if there's any such thing, but I'll bet it's delicious, just like the chocolate scum at the bottom of a Bosco's bottle. "Slowly fear and the Marxist weapon of ̶J̶e̶w̶r̶y̶ Honeyists descend like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent vanillas." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampfeecake Mmmm, waffles with honey and ice cream! Now let's hear from racism's Ground Zero, Twitter: "Obama only won because he's ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ chocolate. Romney would have made a much better president as he actually has morals unlike ̶n̶-̶-̶-̶-̶r̶ nutter Obama." - Madonna "It's a Friday, it's raining, almost a perfect combination. I'm staying away from ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ butterscotch drivers." - Plastic Jesus on Twitter "Who's the more annoying #Raptors fan? Drake, or the fat ̶I̶n̶d̶i̶a̶n̶ caramel guy with the underwear on his head?" - KB58 on Twitter "I'm a bit sleepy but when I wake up I'm going DefCon 3 on ̶J̶E̶W̶I̶S̶H̶ ̶P̶E̶O̶P̶L̶E̶ HONEY PEOPLE. The funny thing is I can't actually be anti- ̶S̶e̶m̶i̶t̶i̶c̶ schmendrick because ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ chocolate people are actually ̶J̶e̶w̶ Honey also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to chocolateball anyone who opposes your agenda." - Kanye West And now, from butterscotch San Francisco police officer Jason Lai, busted in 2016 for being a flavorist asshole: “I hate that ̶b̶e̶a̶n̶e̶r̶ caramel, but I think the ̶n̶i̶g̶ choc is worse.... [Indian] ̶p̶p̶l̶ caramels are disgusting....F--k that ̶n̶i̶g̶ choc." Lai didn't like gay officers either, describing them as 'flames' or 'flaming'. So, while we're assigning flavors, let's go off-color for a moment and suggest Rainbow, since LGBTs get about as much hate as non-vanillas. Humans: We're magically delicious! I'll admit my association with flavors to humanity may be rooted in an early childhood experience. I was maybe three or four years old and my parents and I were at the beach. I saw a black lady on a lounge chair, slathered in oil and stretched out to catch the rays. She reminded me of a chocolate Easter bunny. My mother had talked to me about race and racism, or 'prejudice' as we called it back then, and I understood color differences and why black people should be treated the same as others. (In Orlando at the time, there were almost no caramel or butterscotch people). I thought of her for the rest of the day as the 'chocolate lady'. As an adult, I used to be friendly with a guy who, I admit, made me hungry for devil's food cake. And others who made my mouth water for Bit O' Honey, Kraft caramels and butterscotch toffee ice cream. Look, sorry, I'm from a French family, and everything reminds us of food. Most of you eat to live, we live to eat! I'll admit I've never met a white person who made me long for vanilla ice cream, but does anyone ever long for that? Maybe Howard Johnson's vanilla, which was actually worth eating on its own in my childhood, without toppings to jazz it up. Don't know if it's still around, or still as good. Anyway, there are very, very few genuinely white people. Maybe South Africans. Or Michael Jackson, shortly before he died. But they never made me think, "Mmmmm, Howard Johnson's!" I do have a fondness for French Vanilla, which is less ethnocentric than it sounds. French vanilla is close to my HoJo memories of yore, pretty damn good on its own. I occasionally call myself French Vanilla. That's definitely ethnocentric. Our conversations about ̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ flavor are schizophrenic. We used to strive to be 'flavor-blind', but Critical Flavor Theorists decided that's impossible because of 'implicit biases' and 'vanilla privilege', which is like original sin or something. Claiming you're 'flavor-blind' is usually found on every far-left chocolate 'antiflavorist's list of annoying things vanilla people say. 'Identity politics', once the purview of vanilla supremacists, has now been adopted and reconstituted on the left and is fine as long as you discriminate against vanillas only. I'm reminded of that famous chocolate leader who wanted his kids to be judged not by the flavor of their skin but by their ooey-gooey goodness inside. True colors It's disingenuous to expect people to not talk about color because it's not 'politically correct' anymore. There's too much baggage in everyone's past, and not just slavery legacies (although that's one almost certainly everyone's family shares, so pervasive is one of the earliest human rights abuses). People suck, and always have. We've found countless ways to abuse and hate on each other as a convenient excuse to destroy others. The earliest known murder victim is some poor Neanderthal schmuck who suffered 'deliberately inflicted blunt force trauma' to the head in a Spanish cave 430,000 years ago. I wonder if he called someone a bad name, or suggested his mama was from the 'wrong side' of the Atapuerca Mountains. While it's paramount to acknowledge the mistakes of the past we need to focus on the present and the future which we still have the power to change. Instead of pretending The Social Construct Formerly Known As Race (or Color) doesn't exist, because the differences are there regardless of what you call it, let's create a friendlier language that unites rather than divides us. Pretty much everyone can agree that things that taste good are, well, good things. Even if you don't like sweets, perhaps you've got your own set of fave tastes--potato chips or smoothies or deep-dish pizzas. Our color differences exist, and if we use friendlier terms, the natural good feelings we harbor for tasty flavors create positive associations in our brains for our fellow humans. No one much cares if you prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla or rainbow sherbet over everything else. With friendlier labels, we may find ourselves reacting less negatively to implicit biases. Instead of reacting on some subconscious level with fear at a 'black' guy [night, darkness, predators, fear], we can speak of color differences without setting Twitter aflame (that's now Elon Musk's new job until Trump returns). No one will ever believe again that 'vanilla' should be supreme. I just Googled it: Howard Johnson's vanilla ice cream, which really was superlative on its own, is gone, along with the other 27 flavors of my birthday celebrations. Case closed on vanilla supremacy. It's harder to believe that 15 million Honeys actually rule the world clandestinely or that Caramels are all rapists. And ye shall know the homophobes among you by those who refuse do oral with multicolored sherbet. Flavor differences are as plain as the cone, cup or bowl under which they rest, regardless of whether you call it 'race', 'color,' or 'flavor'. The wokenati think they can erase discrimination by pretending clear biological differences don't exist and it's flavorist to say otherwise; yet people are undeniably different and instead of denying reality like a MAGA on January 6th, it's time to drag the 'woke' kicking and screaming back to Reality World to confront the evidence of their own denying eyes. Buddhists say the only way to rid yourself of your harmful mental constructs is to confront them, see them, label them and challenge them. Then throw them away because they're useless now. Or better yet, embrace flavorism as the most awesome social construct ever! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Joking about differences knit us into tight, supportive teams. We need to bring that back before the left’s Fragile Flowers destroy us. Oh, you can’t do this today. Before the tyranny of oh-so-politically-correct social media run amok, I worked at two highly politically incorrect companies. Now you can lose your job over something you said and did before anyone even heard of the Internet, but back then the world wasn’t yet ruled by unemployed, mentally unstable fragile flowers. In a past article I weighed in on the Dave Chappelle The Closer controversy and analyzed a dying type of humor Chappelle employed. I don’t know if there’s a commonly-used label for it, but I call it ‘humorous bigotry appropriation’, for lack of a better term. We employed it at both companies. Before the humophobic ‘woke’ replaced Christian fundamentalists as the world’s leading judgmental sourpusses, humorists like Dave Chappelle — or people working in an office that wasn’t on TV every week — helped us bond by making fun of differences. It’s dicey to do it with strangers, but once you get to know, like, and accept your colleagues, you can make jokes outsiders might find offensive but which unite rather than divide. Not a good idea today given everyone’s growing hostility to everybody — declining civility, COVID Brain, police brutality, growing inequality, precarious living, and the moral degeneracy of Trumpism and the Republican Party. That last blossoming like a corpse flower on the left now, too. Chappelle sarcastically employed it when he joked about pushing his transwoman friend away from a hug ‘because I’m transphobic’, and feminists needed him to be their leader and all they needed to do in return is ‘suck my dick,’ and blithely dismissed his dogmatic trans-extremist critics by announcing proudly, ‘I’m Team TERF,’ for stating inconvenient biological trans truths. Humor making fun of bigotry, delivered with a winking sardonicism, by humorously appropriating those bigotries is what I call ‘humorous bigotry appropriation’. It’s only for those with strong, healthy egos, and it unites rather than divides. Its mortal enemy is the Fragile Flower. Years ago I worked at a Canadian IT company with a diverse team. It was startup-small and tight. Everyone had a great sense of humor and confidence and we joked about everything. Including race and culture and all the other now-taboo topics. (Oh hell, they were taboo even then!) Making fun of ideas, people, or things that scare us is a time-honored way of dealing with them. Humor can defuse a tense situation. It can be employed self-deprecatingly to show others you’re not scary and can take a joke. I call myself the ‘middle-aged dumb blonde’ when I make a mistake. In our office, the Jamaican guy was the ja-mon weedhead, even though he didn’t smoke weed and had lived so long in Canada he had no accent. The Pakistani guy was ‘the terrorist’. He also claimed Jewish and black heritage and occasionally called himself ‘the colored guy’. His Jewish and black heritage were debatable. I pressed him on his alleged blackness once and concluded, “Essentially, your African ancestors and mine are so far back in time they hunted together in Olduvai Gorge!” The Jamaican guy didn’t even look black. He was so mixed-race even he wasn’t sure how much he was of anything. I was the violent sarcastic American gun crazy, despite never owning a gun in my life. One guy was a genuine privileged white guy, but self-aware about it, another was the horny European. Later, a visible black guy joined us, and I taunted the Pakistani — “Ha ha, you’re not the staff black guy anymore! We have a REAL black guy now!” The new guy fit in perfectly, jests and jokes flying all day long. No one got offended. No one complained to their manager. (We were too small for HR). One day something went missing and the black guy joked, “Yeah, I bet everyone thinks it was me!” I responded, “We don’t think you’re a thief because you’re black. We think you’re a thief because you steal stuff!” “Okay,” he said, “that’s fine, as long as you’re not being racist!” Double whammy — dissing the stereotype by pretending to meet it and poking fun at the progressive view that there’s no worse crime than being a racist. The Pakistani guy was the most outrageous. I’ll never forget the day he freaked out the Xerox lady, before the black guy joined us. She visited to demonstrate the office’s new multifunctional printer. We gathered around while she conducted the demo and noted as part of her spiel that you can’t use it to counterfeit money. It was simply impossible with this printer. “Oh yeah, everyone thinks the colored guy is going to do it!” the Pakistani guy exclaimed and everyone burst out laughing. Except for the Xerox lady. She froze in absolute horror, rigid, eyes wide. “Daniel, stop freaking out the Xerox lady!” I said and we laughed again. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “He promised to be good if we let him out of his cage!” I turned to Daniel. “You can’t behave yourself for even one minute!” and everyone laughed again. We explained we were a tight team who made jokes like this all the time and she relaxed and allowed herself a cautious smile. The other IT office was homogenously white and American. It was pre-9/11's less divided era. We didn’t talk about social -phobias and divisions the way we do today. We were a small tight office with a great supportive culture encouraging office-wide teamwork. None of us were hyper-sensitive. I was a Pagan, so my Catholic co-worker called me the Satanist and the baby-eater and I called him the Demon Papist, in the style of historical Protestant critics, a remnant of my days in a medieval re-creation organization, the Society for Creative Anachronism. One guy got hammered for being a pervert, even though there was nothing perverted about him. We didn’t stop teasing him about being a perv even after he became our boss. His wife, one of our technicians, was half-French Canadian and got teased about being a ‘Frog’, although, as someone half European French, I claimed she wasn’t a real Frog, she was that fake Canadian crap, who couldn’t even speak real French, but that silly-ass Quebecois gibberish. I was the real Frog around here, and don’t anyone forget it! We hammered each other all day long and the very few times anyone crossed the line we handled it with each other rather than telling a manager (we had no HR department here either). We made lasting friendships, so tight we attended en masse the funeral of one co-worker’s grandmother which greatly surprised and touched his family. We attended after-office functions together at local bars and our Christmas parties were lawsuit-free. Our headquarters in another state wished their office was as much fun as ours. They loved visiting us for special projects. The Canadian office’s camaraderie was the same. It was more hard-drinking than any American one but both were the most fun ever because of the tightness of our team. The bonding we experienced with humor making fun of bigotry was racism vs racist humor, sexism vs sexist humor, religious bigotry vs bigotry against religion. The first kind unites and makes fun of bigotry, the second divides and reinforces it. That’s why ‘the woke’ don’t understand Dave Chappelle. There’s a thick cloud of censorship hanging over any attempts at humor today. Maybe we’re less in the mood for jokes with a never-ending pandemic and its conveyor belt of viral variant hits (“Are you ready for the new Delta? Coming soon to a mouth near you — bigger, badder, more transmissible, possibly featuring the long-anticipated Zombie Mutation!”), not to mention on ongoing War on Democracy launched by a treasonous former President with an attempted coup d’état by a violent terrorist mob. Then again, the far left had been growing increasingly humorless long before either. Dave Chappelle commented in The Closer that he didn’t like the modern gays — they’re too ‘sensitive and brittle’ — which I thought applied to far more than only LGBTQ. The far left, or the ‘woke’ (which means what? We woke up and realized someone somewhere was having a good time and we vowed to crush it?), have declared a War On Humor. Humor targets something. It could be a person, a group, a place, a thing, an idea, a concept — or, in the edgiest humor, hypocrisy. The left’s initially well-intentioned drive to become more tolerant, more sensitive to the feelings of others, more civil and more inclusive in an ever more divided society has inverted itself and become the enemy. A growing portion of the left has lost its self-awareness for knowing when it’s going too far. Gen Y is the ‘Self-Esteem Generation’ raised to believe everything revolves around them and only their feelings matter. Their anti-apotheosis is Joe Rogan and “Fuck your feelings!”. Love or hate Rogan, even progressives still in possession of rational thought occasionally wonder whether there’s too much emphasis on feelings and not enough on facts. It’s why we urge the Fragile Flowers to lighten up a bit. Learn to laugh at yourself as well as the foibles of others. We’re human beings; we’re hilarious! Collective personal fragility is a genuine obstacle in an increasingly critical battle against growing aggression, ‘acceptable’ xenophobia, and a willingness to tolerate lunatic theories and delusional thinking on the right. Fragility is moral and spiritual weakness, and you can’t fight an enemy armed to the teeth with real weaponry when you fall apart at a simple joke. I’m serious about this. Left-wing fragility is in no condition to fight the far right. It’s too busy destroying its own side. The enemy thanks them. Humor about race, culture, religion, sex, gender, politics and anything else related to the human condition can, for sure, be mean-spirited and hurtful. But it depends on the context and the company you’re with. It also depends on the time period. What’s offensive today wasn’t twenty or thirty years ago. Keep that in mind the next time you open your mouth to say something that will offend an as-yet-unborn generation. Today, people take offense under the pretense of looking out for others (taking, ironically, a fairly patronizing view of them) when in fact they object to the poke at that group’s hypocrisies. Hypocrisy is always fair game for humor. When everyone is in on the joke, when everyone genuinely accepts others and all their imperfections, we can all laugh together. It’s why my favorite comedian is the Canadian Russell Peters, who grew up in Toronto in an Indian immigrant family. They moved to middle-class Brampton, a nearby suburb commonly known as ‘Bramladesh’ for its large Indian and Middle Eastern population. The Greater Toronto Area is one of the most multicultural and diverse cities in the world, with over 140 different languages. He’s had plenty of time to mix and mingle with a lot of different people, and he knows everyone hands-down. My favorite Peters routines are the ones making fun of white people. Why? Because he freaking nails us! As he does everyone else. I don’t get mad because he’s part of my tribe — a humorist. Someone who can laugh at everything. A friend tells me how her husband laughed uproariously when Peters joked about the Chinese, including the way they spoke English (he’s great with accents) and their mannerisms. “That’s exactly what we’re like!” her husband guffawed. Peters’s audiences are diverse too. He singles people out and jokes with them, employing humorous bigotry appropriation with stereotypes. We laugh not because he’s reinforcing racism, or ethnicism, or sexism, but because he’s making fun of all of it. The ‘brittle’ don’t get this. I don’t feel more hatred for people who aren’t like me when I listen to Peters, I feel a kinship with them. We’re all funny. We’ve all got quirks, mannerisms, values, judgments and actions that don’t always make sense to others, but we can laugh about them. Together. When you can laugh at stereotypes, they cease to hold power over you. There’s vicious, ugly bigotry disguised as humor, but there’s a great case to be made for the Fragile Flowers of all generations to lighten the fuck up. Removing the ability to laugh together and bond, with a constant threat of ‘cancellation’ hanging over everyone’s heads, divides the world as effectively as a MAGA rally. It’s silencing when you become afraid to speak your mind or debate ideas the same way you can’t in Communist or Islamic-dominated countries or the Fascist regimes of World War II. Proponents can call it a defense against offense all they want, but we can also call it something else: Censorship. And it stinks as much from the left as it does from the right. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Charge $8/month to be anonymous, and bring credibility back to the blue check mark Elon Musk is a supersized Molotov cocktail who threw himself into the already-raging discourse dumpster fire that was Twitter. The richest, not to mention arguably the whitest man in the world, widely described as a 'genius' for bringing us electric cars and throwing his space helmet into the ring of billionaires taking humanity where no government can get the public financial support to go, took over the most up-to-the-nano-second breaking news platform and the world's most vicious public square, resulting in mass chaos. You know things are bad when Trent Reznor heads for the exit. Anyone who's seen this movie before - you may well remember the colossal prequel about the narcissistic malignant psychopathic manchild who persuaded enough people to give him the reins of government for four years (Spoiler alert: Hilarity ensued, but only if you were a late-night comedian) - predated the corporate swashbuckler The Musk of Zero and critics claimed it would end the same way Fail-Safe did, with everything going up in flames. Musk, after all, hasn't exactly inspired confidence as being the most stable genius ever, if any true genius can be. Musk's more irrational pre-Twitter antics include: Suggesting humans might be part of an existential video game; accusing a hero, with no justification, of being a pedophile; and of stating that 'population collapse' is a bigger problem than people realize (it's quite the opposite!) leading one to wonder whether he's just trying to make sure he has enough customers willing to live on his forthcoming Mars colony. So no one was surprised when Elon exhibited a Musk of contradictions in what he intended to do with the platform: Eliminate fake news, and on his first day tweeted a debunked conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton; Claimed he wouldn't allow Twitter to turn into a 'hellscape' of hate speech, yet exactly that skyrocketed, unchallenged, in his first week. People tested it to see how far they could go and discovered you could say the 'n-word' again; in the meantime, over the weekend, Twitter's Head Brainiac allowed Donald Trump free reign on Twitter again after another squeaker of a vote, this time on Twitter (Trump is incapable of just winning with clearly enough votes) leading some to start office pools as to when the last advertiser leaves and Musk himself declares bankruptcy; Claimed he didn't want 'impersonation' on Twitter, began handing out the blue verification check mark to any asshole with $8/month, and impersonations made the hyperspace jump. Some were funny, like blue-checked celebrities changing their account name to Elon Musk and tweeting and sharing Democratic vote-blue content days before the American midterms, while others used the opportunity to fake being LeBron James and Eli Lilley for fraudulent purposes. Says he wanted to uphold, albeit change, Twitter's content moderation policies, which he demonstrated by firing everyone in charge of moderating fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and violent/hate speech. Who replaced them? Presumably the 50 former Tesla employees he hired who know about as much about how to run a mammoth media platform as the brainiac who paid $44B for it. Blamed 'activists' for a Biblical-proportions mass exodus of advertisers rather than noting they'd been worried for months about whether it would be good for their brands to stay on a platform if it was in fact taken over by the notoriously erratic, ADHD Tesla leader. They were joined by numerous senior executives who departed faster than Trump administration hires. Good times at Twitter, Inc. Advertisers fled because no one wanted Twitter's rogue algorithms to decide their brand seemed to be particularly popular with white supremacists or gynophobic trans-activists or people who were still going on about a 'stolen election'. Musk now warns Twitter may face bankruptcy which wasn't a problem before October 28th. His hastily-conceived new blue check policy (now suspended until he can figure out What Went Wrong) was meant to stanch the profits the platform giant hemorrhaged after advertisers' worst fears came true. Now the blue check might be back, and with responsibility for identity on November 29th, but that's over a week away and God knows what the impetuous boy will decide in the interim. Musk is mystified because he misses what is actually Twitter's primary attraction: It's the best place to be an asshole with impunity. How to make it affordable for everyone to be an asshole Former SDNY Attorney General Preet Bharara tweeted that Musk should make people pay to be anonymous. That struck me as an awesome idea to combat the half-of-Twitter's-problem the old regime left standing after they banned Trump, the Proud Boys, and other extremist groups who'd plotted a coup d'etat in plain sight on Twitter and other platforms. They banned the worst of the right, but left the worst of the left, probably because they didn't have much justification, seeing as the left had little, if anything to do with the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Unlike Musk, I've never been a 'free speech absolutist' but I was close to it until the last several years when the ugly hatred that poisons America made it clear that perhaps there should be limits on free speech our founders hadn't thought of. It's an established fact they were way far too busy birthing the first kinda-democracy in two thousand years to manage a Facebook account or tweet anonymous flames about the British monarchy #KingGeorgePeesBlue #KingGeorgeTheCruel #StampOutTheStampAct #NotMyQueen #BribesandGiftsGate #HolyShit15Kids. Twitter did become less toxic post-ban but the far left Reign of Terror continued unabated with 'cancel culture' and vicious attacks on anyone who disagreed with the 'wokenati'. Women in particular could get banned for standing up to trans-activists and 'misgendering' women in identity only. The easiest way to do this was via the indisputably worst curse of social media: The anonymous account. Defenders claim some can't 'tell their truths', especially about traumatic events, without serious backlash if they do it under their true identities, a valid point. Unfortunately, anonymity adopted even with the best intentions can seduce you to the Dark Side. It's just too easy to be an asshole, especially when you're triggered. I know; I had an anonymous Twitter profile several years ago, to challenge the Second Amendment set, and it turned me into an asshole. I got rid of the account, telling myself, "Be a woman and speak your mind under your real name; if you can't do that, then it's not worth saying." Instead of paying for a blue check, make people pay to be anonymous assholes! The system could work on a month-to-month for those who can't afford the monthly fee. If you need to be anonymous to tell your story, pay for one month with the option to renew. At the end of thirty days your anonymous account is suspended until you pay again. It would be interesting to see how much this cuts down on toxic debate and outright flame wars. How committed are assholes to their free speech? How badly do they want to cancel someone for something they said back in 1996, if that person can dig into their own tweets and get their ass fired? If they can't afford the moolah their only option is to tweet like a wo/man/adult other, under their own identifiable blue-checked profile. Blue checks should be free and mandatory for everyone, not just the rich and famous. Anonymity has been a major driving force behind the worldwide social breakdown. When you can say what you like with impunity, when there's no rein on your fingers, you can cut loose on someone in a way you'd never do to their face. You can call them a n----r, a c--t, or worse. Anonymity has been the bane of human existence for all eternity, from the anonymous allegations made centuries ago that led to others' arrest, imprisonment, torture and death to the early days of the Internet in the dark text-only universe of a UNIX shell account. Anonymity and fake accounts made it easy to exchange kiddie porn on Usenet and discuss the forbidden. Before social media, anonymous users left unfiltered comments on news websites, secure their Jewish boss would never stumble upon their horrifically anti-Semitic comments. The Internet started The Plague but social media boosted its virality. What would social media look like if everyone was held accountable? If the public square truly was public, everyone who spouted off on their soapbox would be seen by all, including many who knew their name. Would they be as inclined to take out their personal hostilities on strangers if they in turn could be Googled? What if strangers could swat, dox, or stalk the cybertroll in return, and the feminist he wants to threaten with gang rape can report him to his local police? Neither the left nor the right holds the upper hand in the erosion of courtesy, decency, compassion, or honest debate. Everyone has an inner asshole, and it's time to rein all of us in. Elon Musk, make people pay to be assholes! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Nearly 60 years ago, Bill Cosby put America's Black men in danger. Let's talk about that. Finally. Bill Cosby is back in the news, getting sued by five accusers who claim he raped them many years ago. No new allegants, just five from the sixty-ish who've accused him so far. New York has passed an Adult Survivors Act giving victims of sexual abuse whose silence has exceeded the statute of limitations a year to file lawsuit. It remains to be seen whether any of his other accusers will follow (law)suit. Snowblinded Bill Cosby was 'America's Dad' and a clean, funny role model to millions until he was unmasked as a serial rapist. Google 'Cosby rape case' and 'racism' eight years after a comedian called attention to the predator in plain sight, and you will still find mostly articles and opinion pieces about the inherent racism of going after one of America's most successful Black men. Cosby himself made 'systemic racism' the perpetrator in his sexual assault trial, and himself the victim. Not the 58 accusers who claimed he slipped them Quaaludes and sexually assaulted them. Not the receipts for the drugs or even his acknowledgment that he regularly gave 'ludes to women, and still claimed what happened later was 'consensual'. Bill Cosby validated the ugliest racist stereotype about Black men, one that's gotten countless innocent ones tortured, castrated, and strung up in trees: He went after White women. The compilation photo includes a few better-tanned victims, but it's unquestionable he preferred his extramarital affairs, consensual or not, light-skinned. Cosby's rapes demonstrate a level of ballsiness otherwise inconceivable in early civil rights America, a man whose wealth and celebrity privilege superseded his victims' White privilege, demonstrating a power over them that also endangered others. What Black America doesn't talk about How do you know when a White woman is telling the truth about a Black man raping her? When she doesn't accuse him until years or decades later. White America has a long established history of White women lying about sexual advances by a Black man or several. If there's a single case of a lynched Black man actually raping a White woman before the civil rights movement, I can't find it. American history is filled with shameful accounts of trumped-up excuses for inflicting countless horrendous evils on Black people, many of which involve alleged sexual interest or contact with White women by alleged hyper-sexual Black men. What I fail to find several years later on Google, blogs, articles, or even poorly-written YouTube comments is how much potential danger Bill Cosby put America's Black men in sixty years ago. The man with a penchant for the fair-skinned couldn't have married a White woman at the time he married Camille Olivia Hanks. America's anti-miscegenation laws blocked that route. Instead, Coz satisfied his desire for forbidden fruit with Quaaludes and his growing celebrity. The difference between Cosby and generations of 'Strange Fruit' is no likely guilty parties with the latter. A Black man would have to have been bugspit insane to show any sort of interest in a White woman in the '60s. Everyone knew what happened to Black men who 'forgot their place'. Perhaps the civil rights environment encouraged Cosby to think he could get away with it, and he was right. It amazes me how he found, and I mean this in the most pejorative sense, the courage to do what he did. We have to remember courage is the resolution and fortitude to do something extremely difficult, at great personal risk to one's self, or certain personal risk as exemplified by the 9/11 hijackers who were all ready to die as horribly as their victims. Bill Maher lost his TV show when he stated in the aftermath, "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly." We forget courage works both ways, like The Force. It takes as much courage to commit great acts of evil as it does acts of heroism. And I continue to marvel, eight years later, at the size of Cosby's brass balls. In the 1960s. Bill Cosby put his own life, and Black male Americans', in serious danger when he began drugging and raping White women in 1965 (that we know of). Not only could a Black person not marry a White person back then, but civil rights leaders were getting murdered in the South, Black churches were burning, and four Black girls got murdered by a KKK bombing at a Birmingham church in 1964. Black men were still getting lynched, but it had gone more undercover with the civil rights movement. Nineteen-sixty-five was also the year Cosby's first TV series debuted. Had it been exposed back then the up-and-coming Black celebrity had raped a White woman or two, I'm not sure Cosby could have crossed the Mason-Dixon line for years. Southern White boys would have looooooved to 'avenge' their women on a real embodiment of their most fevered fantasies. What if Cosby's earliest accusers had spoken out? Curiously, none did for the same reasons women today don't accuse their rapists, celebrity or not. America may have a long, ugly, established position of automatically believing White women's claims of Black rape, but when it actually happened, it seems all the White women were afraid they wouldn't be believed. They were told they wouldn't be believed. 'Patriarchy' reigned supreme, even with a Black skin. America also has a long, ugly, established history of not believing rape victims. It seems in civil rights America, White women knew they could get away with false rape accusations against Black men, but didn't trust America to believe them when it actually happened. Especially not a celebrity like young comedian Bill Cosby. In 1960s America, a Black man was more likely to get lynched for not raping a White woman than raping one. And a White woman was more likely to be believed only if she lied about the rape. Why wouldn't White America believe these women? Why would their accusations be any different from the others? Black lynchings were witch hunts; all you needed was an accusation, no evidence required. A dead Bill Cosby would have become a martyr for the civil rights movement, his name perhaps spoken a few years later in Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech. Maybe King would have invoked the image of the promising, funny comedian's body being pulled out of a muddy river, his wrists tied behind his back, his skull crushed, his body a testament to the torture he endured before he died. And perhaps White (liberal) America would have accepted the martyr, assuming he must be innocent because he got lynched, and you know, White women lie. But his earliest victims didn't tell. Somehow, Cosby knew they wouldn't. In fact, he was bold enough to make a statement of power to them. "Their [the other victims'] stories are all the same. Suddenly, I was passed out, and the next thing I know, there he is. It’s almost like he wants you awake. He waits," said Kristina Ruehli, Cosby's alleged earliest victim, from her 1965 encounter with him. She told her boyfriend at the time, but never considered going to the police. "It was not like I was traumatized," she told People Magazine. "There were no rape kits. He had not violated or penetrated me. No one would have believed me.” [Italics mine] No, she had just woken up to find him trying to stick his penis into her mouth. Ruehli didn't tell because she was "...embarassed. How did that happen? I was embarrassed that I had put myself in that position, because the woman always blames herself, right?" His next known victim was a Playboy bunny named Karla in 1967, now the wife of Lou Ferrigno, a/k/a The Incredible Hulk, before she met her husband. She didn't tell, either. Later victims claimed they didn't go to the police or tell anyone because guess what, they didn't think they'd be believed, and were told by others they wouldn't be. By then, with an established actor and comedian, they might have been right. Accusing the rich and powerful comes with great personal risk, regardless of skin color. No color matters more in America than the color of one's money. If you have enough green, you can get away with pretty much anything. (Ask O.J. And arguably, Trump.) How much could America have believed Fat Albert could rape women? The Jell-O pudding fan? Dr. Huxtable? Ghost Dad? America's Dad? No one, it seems, until some male comedian made a joke and finally, America woke up, rather a lot like Cosby's victims. "Wha---? Whaaahappen?" Then people began to believe accusations. Once a man bestowed his prima facie accusation at a far more beloved comedian than himself, suddenly, now, finally, the women were believed. In the early 21st century, Black men don't get lynched anymore for 'messing with White women'. But women still don't tell, or report, because they don't think they'll be believed. La plus ça change... This is a pared-down version of the original, longer article which you can see on Substack. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

We're all on the narcissism spectrum. Aspire to be in the right place, and practice healthy self-love. No one wants to be labeled A Narcissist. For fifteen years we’ve been inundated by cascades of pop-psychology scare content about narcissism, the malignancy of narcissists, and how to tell if your least favorite person is a narcissist (Your ex! Your ex!). We’ve also seen countless articles on Imposter Syndrome, low self-esteem, self-hatred and social media-induced mental illness in teenagers, especially girls. Do we love ourselves too much, or not enough? We meditate, we pray, we engage in self-improvement, we journal our gratitude, and we seek happiness, but not, hopefully, at the expense of others. (Unless, of course, we’re that sort of narcissist.) We seek love, but the experts tell us finding love starts at the mirror. ‘Self-love’. There’s something a little scary-sounding about it. If there are some who love too much as a bestselling self-help book in the 1980s labeled it, clearly there are people who love themselves too much. Are you a narcissist? No, you say, shaking your head. I’m not like that! I’m not perfect, and I can be selfish and egotistical, but I’m not a narcissist! When I blogged on Medium a few years ago, the platform overflowed with young women convinced their ex was a narcissist. The stories of evil, awful, selfish, egotistical, abusive narcissist partners cascaded through my daily newsletter and the Medium landing page. Genuine Narcissistic Personality Disorder afflicts about 4% of the population, and Medium’s female writers had dated all of them. These guys got more tail than Herschel Walker. Many of the stories described guys who were typical young, self-involved, inconsiderate jerks, but hardly narcissistic. You know, like a lot of women can be, too. I began to wonder if perhaps some of the ladies themselves were narcissists, angry at their exes for not recognizing their glorious greatness. Eventually someone wrote a useful article on narcissism. It was based on the book Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists by Dr. Craig Malkin. I borrowed the book from the library. Malkin noted that more recent psychological research and understanding had drawn psychology professionals to understanding narcissism as a spectrum that all human beings are on. Narcissism, they note, isn’t all bad, and you want to be in the right place - with neither too much nor too little. Which Kind Of Narcissist Are You? The book details how the narcissists preoccupying self-appointed experts fall on the higher end (8-10) of the scale. We think immediately of famous narcissists like Donald Trump, the ‘gold standard’ of the most malignant narcissism, the way Hitler is held as the ‘gold standard’ of evil. At the opposite end of the scale, 0-2, are what sounds like the prisoners detailed in psychologist James Gilligan’s books about violence inside and outside the prison system. He describes people whose spirit has been psychologically ‘murdered’, often by a lifetime marked at birth by abuse, viciousness, cruelty, and utter lack of love. I’m quite sure it has always sucked to be Donald Trump, even well before he began being held to account. But if I had to make a choice between being a one or a ten on the narcissism scale, I’d choose ten. I might make everyone around me insanely miserable, but I probably wouldn’t have murdered anyone, and I’d likely be compensated for my mental and spiritual anguish by being a rich asshole who can get away with a lot because I’m such a manipulative fuck. LinkedIn, home of the humblebrag There’s no better place to observe narcissism in the wild than the professional social media platform. Self-esteem and professional pride die scrolling the LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn is famous for the ‘humblebrag’, self-aggrandizing posts sharing how wonderful and awesome you are while maintaining a veneer of humility so you don’t sound like an asshole. “I am humbled and grateful to accept the role of Chief Emperor at Some Company, having been given the trust that I can fill the massive shoes of Joe Blow, who is retiring. I hope I can prove worthy of this role, bringing 47 years of experience to widget production, along with my thirteen certificates in AI, my eighteen Ph.Ds, my three globally viral TED talks and having made the Forbes Thirty Under Thirty list for fifteen years straight until I reached my 30th birthday.” A few years ago I got flamed and lambasted on LinkedIn for calling out a humblebrag by a Millennial military veteran who posted that she wasn’t sure why everyone was always thanking her for her service to her country when she did it for the flag, God, her family, democracy, and more mealy-mouthed blah blah blah. She clearly sought praise the way only famously self-involved Millennials can do and others took the bait, showering her with compliments, and I called out her validation neediness and virtue signalling. When one older gentlemen defended her - he thought she was just The Awesome - I suggestede he was currying favor because she was very pretty (she included a particularly lovely photo of her lovely loveliness). I caught holy hell all day long and hoped my employer didn’t notice (no one said anything anyway). It WAS a humblebrag. But never call out the Holy Sacred Military Veteran. At least not a beautiful young woman. If ever there’s an unhealthy vision of Narcissism Gone Wild it’s LinkedIn. If you’re not inclined to brag about yourself, scrolling through the LinkedIn feed will convince you you’re a loser. Everyone else must be doing better than you because they’re accepting new roles, getting degrees, or touting their super-smart daughter or son who just graduated from college and they got perfect grades all throughout and I’m oh-so-proud of them. A few years back, Millennials had taken to treating LinkedIn like Facebook and posted endless photos of themselves looking hot to get people to tell them how pretty they were (yeah, guess which gender did it a lot more!). Way to go sexualizing the workplace, children. I’m not accusing people on LinkedIn of being raging narcissists, not even the humblebraggers. Remember, we’re all on the scale somewhere. But social media particularly encourages our inner narcissist to step forward, spread our wings and let our Inner Trump out of the cage for at least a few moments. Far fewer will ever admit to their inner Imposter Syndrome. Self-love vs narcissism Self-love is on the narcissism spectrum, but the latter’s got so much negative baggage attached to it. Self-love levels aren’t immutable. We may or may not be born with propensity toward a particular place on the scale but we can move up and down it our entire lives. There are times when we might score higher and others when we score lower. We can be arrogant and egotistical when things are going great and the world is our oyster, and feel low and useless, like when emerging from a bad relationship or losing a job. People falling at the lower end of the scale, past the healthy region, aren’t easy to live with either. They too need constant validation but they seek it in subtler ways and will still suck your energy if you let them. I said to a friend of mine last week, “I made one New Year’s resolution this year. I want to learn how to love myself.” “Wow, that’s a tough one,” he said. “I’d like to know how to do that too.” The easiest person to dislike is yourself, and to distrust anyone who tells you otherwise, since we each know what an eff-up we are. We’re crystal-clear on every mistake we’ve ever made, every time we hurt someone, what our faults are - and we can exaggerate all of them into monstrous proportions. We torture ourselves with the woulda-shoulda-couldas. To paraphrase Stanley Kowalski, “I coulda been the Chief Emperah! I coulda been someone!” All it takes is for some random asshole to put us down and we believe it, or let it ruin our day, or take up residence in our head. But if someone says something complimentary to us? We might smile and say, “Thank you,” but inside we’re blowing it off because the other person doesn’t know us like we do. A few years ago I was talking with a friend. I forget what it was about but I think I was saying something like, “I’m such an idiot! I can’t believe I did that! How could I have been so stupid?” And he said to me, “Stop talking about my friend Nicole like that! I know her really well and I don’t appreciate you putting her down! She’s an awesome person!” It stopped me in my tracks. Sometimes when I catch myself beating myself up for something, I remember what Sam said: “Stop picking on Nicole! Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” Maybe too much self-knowledge is a bad thing. While I beat myself up over things I’ve done wrong, said wrong, screwed up, or cost myself, I totally forget the good things I did, the people I’ve helped, the times I’ve put myself out for someone else. What if we made more of an effort to remember the good things we’ve done, the compliments we’ve received, and wrote them down in case we forget them? I have a file on my computer desktop called Nice Things People Have Said About Me. When I get a really heart-warming compliment, I put it in the document. Then when I’m feeling low (“I’m the most incompetent salesperson in the world!”) I open it up and review it, especially the kind comments from sales clients who loved my work, and supportive comments from my boss. When I think my weekly articles are going to waste, the document reminds me of a few commenters on Medium who said my articles had really changed the way they think. Last week I received a beautiful white calcite crystal cluster from a campaign client who wanted to thank me for all my hard work promoting their products. So I guess I don’t suck. Treat yourself as well as you do others It strikes me what what we need more in the world is not less self-love, but more genuine self-love. And you know who needs it most? Actual narcissists. The ones everyone writes about. If you really are ‘all that and a bag of chips’, as a friend of mine used to say, you don’t have to humblebrag constantly, seeking validation from others. Donald Trump may be a world-class narcissist, but I’d bet my bottom dollar somewhere, not too deep inside, he hates himself. Why didn’t he want the world to see his tax returns? Now we know the truth: It illuminates he’s such a failure as a businessman. Why has he threatened to sue any school he attended who releases his grades, since he claims to be a ‘stable genius’? Things that make you go hmmmmmm. Healthy self-love is treating yourself the way you know to treat others. Telling yourself you’re not an idiot when you do something poorly thought-out. Boosting yourself when you’re down, and reminding yourself of the kind things people have said to you. And believing them. Only this past week, when I did something monumentally bone-headed, and had to remind myself not to beat myself up over it, and looked for the elements I couldn’t have known about, and analyzed how my anxiety led me to take an action before I had all the facts, did I finally think, “I really have to practice self-love. Someone who loves herself won’t lead herself astray like I did.” There’s a Promised Land of greater happiness for those who can practice genuine self-love, without moving into narcissism territory. Forgiveness. Compassion. Kindness. Can anyone argue we don’t need more of this in the world? We can be both humble and proud of ourselves at the same time. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A teenage activist outs Andrew Tate, the Internet's most insecure manchild, and teaches us how to pwn these guys ourselves Queen of the Zingers she ain’t, but prompting toxic masculinity influencer Andrew Tate to make a global idiot of himself just before before he got arrested for alleged human trafficking brings major kudos to the biggest stick up his butt, professional perma-scold Greta Thunberg. She triggered the swaggering ‘entrepreneur’ whose greatest skill is offering third-rate getrichquick schemes to clueless men, with a fairly unremarkable tweet about his ‘small dick energy’ when he tried to pick a fight with her after Christmas. I’d never heard of him. Apparently he’s this global phenomenon douchebag, whose skills also include teaching men to be misogynist, and how to invest in cryptocurrency. How’s that working out, fanboys? Are ya rich yet? December 27th: The only mildly interesting element of Thunberg’s tweet is ‘small dick energy’. Tate may have only seen the ‘small dick’ part, or was likely unaware that ‘small dick energy’ doesn’t refer to actual penis size, but is slang for people (not just men) who overcompensate with a lot of cockiness and swagger while covering up some embarrassing secret. Who knew misogynist men were so easily triggered? Tate’s embarrassing secret Andrew Tate demonstrated he does, in fact, have small dick energy, exposing his deep masculinity insecurity. There’s an important learning within the whole Tate-Thunberg affair. The 36-year-old man who tried to start a fight with the pinch-faced activist nearly half his age responded to her mildly amusing tweet with over-the-top rage. Had he let it go, what became one of the most retweeted tweets in Twitter history might have trended for a few hours and died. But no, his failure to elicit the attention he wanted from the activist who advocates for a cleaner, safer planet to live on impelled him to let loose a torrent of abusive invective at Thunberg, who ignored him. She had shit to do, man. She’s saving the world! After a few hours of Twitter twitting him, trending Andrew Tate and #smalldickenergy, Tate released an over-the-top video of himself dressed like a bargain-basement Ming the Merciless, smoking a big-penis cigar like a film noir gangster, staging a pizza delivery, calling after the faux deliveryman to ‘make sure those boxes don’t get recycled’, inexplicably flashing some nip, blathering on about ‘The Matrix’ that Greta Thunberg and the mainstream media are part of, and making himself look like the clueless, desperately insecure little man he is, furious that he got pwned by a teenager. Hours later, he and his brother Tristan were arrested by Romanian police for alleged human sex-trafficking violations, and alleged rape. Twitter went wild again, especially when the story spread that the pizza box in the video gave police an address where they could track Tate down. What kind of perfect Hollywood ending was that? Andrew Tate brought down by his own small dick energy, called out and ridiculed by Greta Thunberg and the global Internet. The pizza box takedown isn’t true, according to Romanian authorities, who had been tracking the Tate bros in Romania, but it’s the sort of J-Edgar-Hoover-in-pantyhose urban legend we should perpetuate, since it will drive Tate absolutely insane. Commented Greta after his arrest, I stand corrected. Maybe she is, in fact, the Queen of the Zingers! Who is Andrew Tate… If, like me, you thought, “Andrew who?” while checking Twitter mid-Christmas week, here’s a brief sketch of the puffed-up social injustice warrior. He’s an Internet influencer and founder of ‘Hustler’s University’, a collection of fairly pedestrian online classes for gullible young men who could just as easily get this information from YouTube. Tate purports to teach them how to getrichquick like he genuinely has, although he leaves out the parts about running fraudulent webcams, human trafficking, and how the most lucrative way to make money as a Hustlers U student is through Tate’s affiliate marketing programs getting others to sign up. He also coaches them on how to ‘reclaim’ their masculinity and be a self-described misogynist like him, with some of his more extreme proclamations including that women are owned by men, that they shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house when they’re in a relationship, and that they need to ‘take some responsibility' if they get raped. Tate is a former professional kickboxer who rose to fame on the TV show Big Brother mostly from being kicked off a week later after producers saw a video in which Tate physically abused some girlfriend with a belt. He claimed it was consensual kinky sex, as does she. He had millions of followers on social media before being banned from about a half-dozen of the majors for misogynist comments and ‘hate speech’, mostly against women. It did nothing to harm his bottom line, turning him into a free-speech martyr for the anti-woke set. He is, nevertheless, a self-made very rich man, having conned a lot of gullible young man into ‘leaving the Matrix’ and teaching them to blame feminism for their problems rather than the toxic masculinity he serves. His Hustlers U website contains several laughable photos of students in the process of leaving The Matrix, many with their faces or heads blocked off because they’re not, I assume, man enough to be identified. If you want to see what The Patriarchy looks like, check out Andrew Tate’s ‘War Room’ website (sorry, you’ll have to Google it, I’m not linking to it). It’s the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert of toxic masculinity - so over-the-top you can only laugh. This is where ‘overcompensation’ goes to be defined. …And what’s wrong with his penis? Tate’s hostility to climate change activist Greta Thunberg is part of what might be termed the Green Resistance. A fair chunk of climate change denial comes from men who see protection of the environment as a feminine activity and therefore something a ‘real man’ should eschew. Toxic masculinity is all about conquest, whether it’s the environment, ‘inferior’ races or women. Men often express their masculinity via their cars and when a man is as desperately insecure as Andrew Tate, it can take as many as 33 big-ass emissions-spewing high-performance sports cars to make him feel better about himself. The grand irony of Tate’s willful dedication to polluting the environment is that his alleged ‘33’ Bugattis (Romanian authorities have only seized eleven which suggests Tate may be exaggerating size) may be directly contributing to the diminishment of he-man masculinity more than the most ball-bustin’ man-hatin’ Jordan Peterson-triggerin’ feminist ever could. Chemical exposure is linked to declining sperm counts while a researcher finds that pollution is actually shrinking penis and testes size and volume, and it’s not doing much for female reproductive capability either, that in some parts of the world, the average woman in her twenties is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35. (Off-topic question: How many more Bugattis would it take to make Andrew Tate’s penis completely disappear?) Why does a rich guy like Tate hate women so much? Shouldn’t Andrew Tate be able to get as much consensual sex as he wants? Many of his followers are angry incels who can’t get laid to save their lives, but know that would change if they got rich. I understand why they’re angry. But not Tate; he now has his pick of the world’s most beautiful women, unless perhaps that’s changed if, nearly twenty-five years into the new century, beautiful women can afford to be pickier and not tolerate an abusive, suspiciously psychopathic cartoon Rambo. Losing his mind over a tweet from Greta Thunberg demonstrates what Margaret Atwood has observed, that what men fear most is being laughed at by women. Except it’s doubtful Thunberg was laughing at him. She merely responded with a lame tweet and moved on. Thunberg, a global activist celebrity who engenders mixed feelings in many, has got to be a stinging slap in the face to a man who claims he only dates 18-19-year olds because they’re not too sexually experienced (leading me to wonder what he’s trying to cover up there, hmmm). Thunberg is famous for her perma-scold demeanor and pinched, unpleasant scowl. She’s supremely annoying despite her sound, valid and human-desperate fight to slow or reverse climate change. She gets a very simple fact that Tate doesn’t: It’s not a good idea to shit where you sleep, and he has to live on this planet too. Still, a message from Greta Thunberg is like being gifted a candy bar wrapped in a shit tamale. You want what’s inside, but have to get past the unpleasant exterior. She lobbed a low-grade insult bomb at Tate and he took the bait. Furious that she accused him of being a swaggering empty masculinity suit, or perhaps he believed she’d insulted his dick, he lost his mind, unleashed his verbal flamethrower and she ignored him while Da Internetz went wild. It was 395 million Twitter users against one, not including any lame-ass supporters who tried to defend him, which opened them up to their own torrent of abuse and derision from others. Twitter: It ain’t for children. Except for Thunberg, still very young, with childhood still in her rearview mirror, and at a highly vulnerable age to criticism and abuse. And she ignored him. He might have driven most other 19-year-olds off social media entirely, except he picked a young woman who’s been a teenage activist for five years, and has been surrounded by older and wiser heads who have guided her through her difficult teenage years, made more challenging with autism, and armored her against the slings and arrows that come the way of any woman who dares to speak up and challenge male authority. Especially men like Andrew Tate who are directly responsible for contributing to climate change with his alleged 33 cars. No, Macho Man picked the woman least likely to shrink off Twitter and delete her account. Someone who has taken vicious abuse from better than the likes of he responded to his boast about his penis enhancers like she figured she should just toss off one dismissive retort. It didn’t sound like she put much thought into it, far less than he put into his laughable and now infamous ‘pizza box’ response. She dissed him, and she fucked off and ignored him, while Twitter picked up the gauntlet and universally laughed at Tate, then renewed and magnified it ten times over when he got arrested and the 'pizza box’ narrative grew. Whenever he gets out of jail he will be haunted and taunted by that silly-ass forever video. The jig is up: We have seen him for what he is, a teenage boy locked in a man’s body who’s easily triggered by the school wallflower. Greta Thunberg shows us chickie-boos how it’s done. As the latest global backlash against women’s rights unfolds (once again) as women continue to make strides around the world (as always), tiny little men like Andrew Tate spew hatred boosted by antediluvian Biblical texts he picks ‘n’ chooses from like salad bar religious fundamentalists. It’s not just I-don’t-give-a-fuck Greta Thunberg who triggers emotional boyos like Tate: It’s all of us who don’t pay attention to their petty gender tyranny, don’t respond to their misogynist manboy comments, who barely give them a glance as we pass them by. It’s something to think about the next time we’re in the presence of a poisonous peacock who’s trying to trigger us with dominating discourse. They want to fight with feminists so they can, in their own minds at least, take our power. But what if we met such abuse with a smug smile and non-triggered responses? “I only date very young women because they’ve been through less dick!” “So, they’re too inexperienced to recognize how sexually inadequate you are? After all, if she’s had some really good men you’re so over at the first push-pull-repeat.” “Women need to share their responsibility when they get raped!” “Is rape the only way you can have sex? Is propositioning women a constant stream of ‘no-no-no’s for you?” “Men own women.” “Interesting. You know, you’re only here because you’re mother allowed you to be born. You’re here because a woman chose to let you.” (Emphasis on the disempowering rhetoric). The point is not to refute what he said (anyone within earshot who isn’t a raging misogynist knows it’s BS) but to always keep the focus of attention not on what he says, but what he is. To make sure he understands you see right through him, and that includes his terrifying vulnerability. Challenging toxic masculinists like Andrew Tate by dismissing them without showing anger diminishes them faster than PCBs in their tap water. These guys live to take feminists’ power by triggering them and making them feel threatened by men like him. We can even take it back by meeting them with humor. Outright laughter may not be the best course of action in the presence of such a man; women have been murdered for laughing at men. Also, it’s not at all helpful, and inducing shame makes people more violent, not less. But you won’t get murdered for smiling and moving on - dismissing him. Greta Thunberg exposed more than Andrew Tate when he flashed a nip: Not only does he have small dick energy, he may well have a smaller penis than he had when he was a kid. Think about that the next time you meet a he-man who drives a vehicle that gets three miles to the gallon. If he didn’t have an undersized dick when he bought it, he may now. If you know where I can get Andrew Tate’s version of I Want to Drive a Pink Cadillac, Wear Diamond Rings, and Kick Women In the Butt, drop me a line! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

What did they know, guess, or suspect, and what did they say about it? If I had one question each I could ask Bill and Hillary Clinton it would be: Mr. Clinton, how could you be friends with someone like Jeffrey Epstein? And Mrs. Clinton, what did you have to say to your husband about it, if anything? My interest is, as always, the female collaborators for male bad behavior, because we forget the perpetrators’ enablers. Not just the Ghislaine Maxwells. These guys couldn’t get away with what they do without a lot of female support. It’s collaboration when we say nothing, do nothing, know nothing. I’ve written about a woman who collaborated with a likely illegal pornophile by not reporting him. She was brave enough to tell her story on Quora, under her real name, and she allegedly used his real name and warned women in the San Francisco area to beware of him. She told horrific stories of the kind of porn he consumed and how suspiciously illegal it looked. But she never reported him to the authorities. Ghislaine Maxwell’s role in Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita empire is well known, and now she cools her aristocratic heels in a jail cell. She’s the most obvious female collaborator, but what about others? The wives of the rich and powerful men whose husbands rode Epstein’s planes, and may have ridden them themselves, when this high-flying financier could give their hubbies access to underage girls? What did they know, and did they tolerate it? Da Gatesez Melinda Gates was not happy with hubby Bill’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and she made her opinion well-understood. She divorced Gates in 2021, citing among other reasons his friendship with Epstein, something Bill Gates says he ‘now regrets’. She said she met Epstein once, out of sheer curiosity, and regretted it immediately, finding him ‘pure evil’. Bill Gates has no excuse for ignorance. He met Epstein in 2011, five years after his first prostitution solicitation conviction. He and Epstein formed a partnership based on Epstein’s claims he could bring trillions of dollars to Gates’s humanitarian projects. His foundation board members were disturbed to discover they were working with a registered sex offender and pushed back on Gates’s personal alliance. Gates never flew the Lolita Express as numerous Internet memes have alleged, nor did he visit the island. But he was good friends with Epstein knowledgeably post-conviction, meeting with him many times, sometimes closed-door, and once spent an overnight with him. Melinda Gates, an advocate for women and young girls, was not amused. She began talking to divorce lawyers in 2019, shortly before Epstein’s suicide and around the time the media began exposing her husband’s friendship and business dealings with him. She’d expressed strong reservations about Epstein to Bill since 2013, but he listened neither to her nor his board members. Melinda Gates was not a ‘good little wifey’. Those horndog Democrats! It’s curious how many politicians associated with the Democratic Party were friends with Epstein and Maxwell, and I include Donald Trump because back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, before he and Epstein had a falling out, the future Republican president identified as a Democrat. Epstein donated money to several Democratic politicians including Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Glenn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chuck Schumer. And oh yeah, Hillary Clinton! He’s also donated to some Republicans, including George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and Robert Packwood. But I can’t find any Republicans personally or closely linked to him, the Lolita Express or his multiple molest-a-thon residences. To be fair, not all Epstein’s donation recipients - perhaps most - likely knew Epstein was a sex trafficker and pervert. Some, like Senator John Kerry, had never met him and perhaps wouldn’t have even known Epstein’s name, who wasn’t a household name yet. Several gave his donations to charity once the truth about him came out, as many did after Harvey Weinstein’s fall. While politicians might be excused for not knowing the names and repuations of every donor they have - and they must have some real doozies whose sins are never known because they’re not celebrities - more prominent politicians, like Trump and the Clintons, might have known or at least suspected that Epstein wasn’t squeaky-clean years before the feds came down on him. Even before Epstein became a registered sex offender, having done time for soliciting sex with a minor back in the mid-2000s and gotten off easy by cutting a ‘sweetheart deal’, it’s hard to believe any of them believed Epstein’s private life, of which they were all a part, was on the up and up. Authorities ignored the evidence Epstein had abused dozens of women by that time, and so too, I suspect, did many of Epstein’s associates. What Clinton and Trump, and their wives, knew about Epstein is much foggier. All ended their connections with him before his first arrest. Da Clintonz Bill’s plane trips occurred before Epstein’s 2006 arrest. While it’s indisputable Clinton rode Epstein’s plane, what’s less certain is whether he ever visited Lolita Island. Some say he did, but the location is missing on the plane’s manifests for 26 documented Clinton trips (Clinton initially claimed only four). Not everyone who rode it ever visited the island or Epstein’s other underage brothels. And Clinton could have gotten there on his own. If Clinton never visited any of Epstein’s personal brothels, and if nothing happened on the plane (the pilot testified he never saw anything sexual on the plane, ever), it’s possible Bill Clinton is clean. But those rumors he was on Lolita Island persist. And with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and ‘deep fakes’ so common, and Bill’s own penchant for lying, who really knows? The unexplained part is how ignorant anyone could be if they lived in the same neighborhood or region as Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s proclivities weren’t a secret to his neighbors. Bestselling author James Patterson, who lived near Epstein in Palm Beach, wrote a book about him and noted that the neighbors knew something wasn’t right. Patterson had heard ‘hair-raising’ stories about him for years, and many had seen young women coming and going from Epstein’s property. And this was all before Epstein’s first arrest. The locals on St. James Island called his island seraglio ‘Pedophile Island’. And if Donald Trump knew about Epstein’s fondness for very young women, it’s a sure bet many others did too. The wives had to have heard about all of this, and who knows what they may have seen or experienced they haven’t spoken about. New York is the biggest small town in America where everyone knows everything about everyone else, if they care to know. The Clintons moved there in 2000, so Hillary could campaign for the Senate. Bill Clinton says he briefly visited Epstein’s Manhattan apartment once, but in the company of staff and Secret Service agents. Maybe it’s on the videos Epstein made. He installed pinhole cameras all over his properties for video surveillance and recording of sexual imbroglios for later potential blackmail. But we don’t know if he had the goods on Clinton. So did Bill or didn’t Bill? And how did even pre-arrest Epstein escape Hillary Clinton’s notice, a highly intelligent, experienced political activist and budding politician who, like Melinda Gates, had been an advocate for women and children, who would have had a finer-tuned sexual predation detector? Especially Hillary Clinton, the target of so much misogyny? When powerful men victimize others, it’s often an open secret, like with Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. Didn’t they hear the rumors? Wonder about stories of young women coming and going from Epstein’s Manhattan address? Word gets around with rich and powerful men who avail themselves of the pleasures denied the less monied and well-connected. The Clintons and Trumps were friends before Hillary decided to run for the presidency (Trump had donated to her Senate runs). Did Hillary Clinton detect nothing about Epstein? And if she did notice anything weird or ‘off’ about him, did she investigate further? Or was she blinded by the Benjamins? Or did she just not want to think about what else her husband might have gotten up to? Hillary Clinton, as we all know, has a loooooong history of ignoring her husband’s sexual peccadilloes, and there’s at least one credible-sounding rape allegation against him as governor of Arkansas, although Clinton was never reported or charged. There’s also the very ugly fact of her successfully defending a rapist early in her legal career out of obligation, and it’s clear she believed he was guilty. She can compartmentalize her brain when necessary. If Hillary Clinton has any strong opinions about Jeffrey Epstein, and her husband’s friendship with him, I can’t find them from the famously private former senator and presidential candidate. There are allegations from an IT director that both Clintons were guests at Epstein’s New Mexico address (where he wasn’t required to register as a sex offender) but no other witnesses or documentable evidence. Da Trumpsez I can’t find indication any of Donald Trump’s wives had a problem with Epstein, and they all hobnobbed with their Palm Beach neighbor and his buddygirl. Ivana used to go shopping with Ghislaine Maxwell. Marla Maples and her daughter Tiffany rode the plane in 1994, and Epstein was a guest at Trump’s and Maples’s wedding in 1993. (Maxwell attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.) I’m not sure if any of Trump’s wives visited any of Epstein’s home brothels, and I wouldn’t be surprised if wives overall weren’t welcome. Donald Trump pretty certainly knew or at least suspected what Epstein was about. He commented favorably on how Epstein ‘leaned toward younger women’. Trump and Epstein have been accused, not in a court of law, of allegedly raping a 13-year-old at Epstein’s Manhattan residence. The case was dismissed because it didn’t raise valid claims under federal law. The Jane Doe filed a federal lawsuit but never pursued it, and alleged she and her family had been subjected to death threats by Trump (none of which has ever been proven in court). After Epstein was arrested in 2019, Trump offered no opinions, and certainly no criticism, of the charges against Epstein sexually abusing young girls. He claimed he was ‘never a fan’ of Epstein (not true, their friendship has been clearly documented), but he wished well arrested madam Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump’s wives may not have witnessed anything sexual themselves, and may not have seen the young girls, but trophy wives pretty much understand their husbands won’t be faithful to them. All of them knew he was a tomcat. And all of them lived near Epstein and were part of the community and culture that saw a lot but spoke very little, at least publicly. Good little wifeys It’s important to remember that the Clintons and all the Trumps were friendly with Jeffrey Epstein before his arrest. But if the police ignored evidence Epstein was molesting young girls at that time, it wasn’t much of a secret. People see things, but they don’t say anything. They don’t talk about it with anyone who can investigate. They don’t want trouble with their neighbors, especially powerful ones. They might pretend they’re not seeing what they don’t want to see. Epstein’s butler handled making sure the girls got paid when they came came over, and claims he didn’t think anything of having to hand over money to them for massages, didn’t think anything was illegal and was ‘shocked’ when police showed up. When asked by an attorney whether he’d wondered if any of this constituted unusual behavior, the man replied, “It’s not my job.” Human denial is powerful, especially when the perpetrator is the hand that feeds you. It’s why HR is useless when the CEO is the accused horndog and he signs her paycheck. Even if you hear the rumors, even if you see attractive young women coming and going and hear stories about ‘massages’, and especially if your husband is a close friend or at least an associate of Epstein, maybe you tell yourself stories about what’s really going on so you can sleep at night. And with your husband. But it’s what makes many indirectly complicit, when they refuse to see what they see, after they’ve heard the ‘hair-raising’ stories. Melinda Gates wasn’t a good little wifey, but she had the evidence of Epstein’s sex offender registration to wave under her husband’s nose. Trump’s three wives were social with Epstein and Maxwell, and Melania was married to him when Epstein was first arrested. So if she didn’t know about his pedo associations before, she certainly did when he was splashed across the news. Neither Trump nor Clinton have been personally implicated in the worst of Epstein’s sordid affair. The stories swirl, including the rape allegations by Epstein and Trump from one alleged then-underage girl, but since she didn’t pursue it in court we may never know the truth. Maybe she’ll spill after Trump dies. Or not. Hillary Clinton has nothing, seemingly, to say about Jeffrey Epstein, and Melania Trump has never been much interested in anything, as far as I can tell, besides staying as far away from her husband as she can. In one photo at Mar-A-Lago when she was engaged to Trump, even then she looked like she didn’t want to be near him. As a global politician, Hillary Clinton is the most suspect for knowing or suspecting something wasn’t right with Epstein, and given her propensity for sticking with her tomcat husband no matter what, she’s the good little wifey I wonder the most about. (No word on whether she donated her Epstein money to charities). Trump’s good little wifeys, on the other hand, were less empowered to do anything or say anything. He wouldn’t have listened anyway, and might have retaliated against them for even daring to do so. Such is the life of a trophy wife, who gives up her power to live a life she can’t afford on her own, especially a failed runway model like Melania Knauss. It makes them every bit as complicit, because they chose the life they married. In the end, they’re unimportant. If Donald and Melania ever divorce, she’ll sink into obscurity like her predecessors. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, will always remain under suspicion. What did she know? What did she suspect? Did she say anything to her husband? And why does she say nothing about Epstein? Because it will draw attention once again to just how deeply involved with Epstein and Maxwell both of them were? Women will decide, not men, when sick crimes like sex trafficking, pedophilia, a viciously misogynist pornography industry, and sexual assault overall will end. The only powerful man in Epstein’s toxic orbit who suffered consequences was Bill Gates, although his own wayward dick with Microsoft staffers contributed as well. It’s unconscionable that the Clintons and the Trumps - all of them - knew fuck all about Epstein before his first arrest. Bill and Donald may be lying about never having visited the infamous island but we’ll never know, until people start swearing under oath or the mysterious videos are released. If ever. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

CNN's Don Lemon's massive WTF moment is just--Did the aliens get him too? A woman is like an egg salad sandwich on a warm Texas day... Full of eggs, and only appealing for a short time. - Sheldon Cooper, quoting his father, The Big Bang Theory Did he drop the brown acid? Go off his nut from an RFID chip Bill Gates planted in his latest COVID booster? Suffer Havana Syndrome? Trance channel his inner Mel Gibson? What in hell possessed Don Lemon, an otherwise likeable, intelligent, and customarily level-headed CNN host to utter sheer madness on last Thursday’s CNN This Morning show with co-anchors Poppy Harlow and Caitlan Collins? The subject? Newly-announced 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who has floated the idea of mandatory competency tests for presidential candidates of, shall we say, a certain age. Like 70. Quite possibly a double-dig at both 80-year-old President Joe Biden and 76-year-old wanna-again Donald Trump, who’s going to be mad as hell that Haley dares to challenge him. Quoth Lemon: “She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry. A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.” I’d be more outraged if it weren’t so jaw-droppingly bizarre. It’s the sort of thing you might expect Donald Trump or Josh Hawley or maybe Nick Cannon to say. His female co-stars looked at him with WTF? looks on their faces. “Wait a minute—prime for what?” asked Harlow with a tight smile. That was Don’s early warning that maybe he’d better ‘splain himself, and make it good. So he ‘splained. “That’s not according to me—” “Prime for what?” Harlow asked again. “—It depends it just like, prime, if you look it up, if you Google ‘When is a woman in her prime?’ it’ll say 20s, 30s and 40s. I’m not saying I agree with that—” Sounding rather a lot like a 1.4 grade point average 15-year-old who uncritically believes everything he sees on Google, Lemon tried to explain himself further when challenged by his co-anchors and only dug himself in deeper. It was like aliens were controlling his mouth or something. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right about the recent upsurge of suspicious unidentified flying skeet over the United States and Canada. I guess we missed one! Alien interference might well be the only logical theory to explain what happened last Thursday morning, the WTF-ness level we haven’t reached since Donald Trump accused ex-President Obama of spying on him. “—So I think she has to be careful about saying politicians aren’t in their prime.” Harlow tried to help him out. “I think you need to put on qualifiers, like prime for like child-bearing or—” “Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just saying Google what the facts are — Google it, everyone at home, when is a woman in her prime,” he said. “And I’m just saying Nikki Haley should be careful about saying that politicians are not in their prime and they need to be in their prime when they serve.” It was like he had no freakin’ clue those ages are commonly cited for what are widely considered women’s best ages for reproduction and sexual attractiveness, however realistic the first and offensively sexist the second. The woman’s campaigning for political office, not Miss America. Not even Ms. Menopausal America. Again I have to ask, WTF, Don??? What truly blew my mind was Don Lemon talking like an aging angry incel about a 51-year-old woman as though she should only be evaluated on her fertility and fuckability. I mean, for fuck’s sakes, Don Lemon is gay! Was he hoping to have a baby with her or something? Maybe he’s worried about her period Never mind the fact that when a woman is ‘in her prime’, according to Lemon, she’s not even eligible to run for President until after the first fifteen years. Which leaves her, what, maybe ten or fifteen good years to campaign for the White House until menopause sets in and God only knows what could happen, she could be one of those crazy mood-swingy menopausal chicks who might start a nuclear war before Putin because she’s having a bad day and Don Lemon just said something mean about her on CNN? Sooooo glad we didn’t have to deal with crazy weirdness and bother about the nuclear button during, say, the Trump years. No periods there to worry us! In 1970 presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey’s physician claimed women’s ‘raging hormonal imbalance’ made them unfit for certain jobs, like, you know, , public office. In 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro became the first female vice-presidential candidate, a female caller to a Boston radio show wondered whether she’d been through menopause yet. (At 48?) It didn’t help this was the same year doctors started talking about ‘pre-menstrual syndrome’, or PMS, when some women experienced heavy-duty mood swings and physical pain in the days leading up to their period, which lent credence to the historical male paranoia that the monthly shedding of the unused uterine lining made women more likely to blow up the world. Even worse, it quickly became many women’s lazy excuse for not taking responsibility for irritable behavior they were well able to control. And anyway, Don, I didn’t know one of the mandates for a woman becoming President is she has to be able to make a baby or something. Maybe that’s the real reason Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. Competency checks for aging presidential wannabe primers What Lemon took issue with was Haley’s competency checks idea. I guess he’s not keen on it. While I don’t intend to vote Republican in 2024 - or ever - I’m with Haley on this. I’ve been saying we need it ever since Washington began whispering during Ronald Reagan’s second term. “The President might be going senile.” In the summer of 1987, while Colonel Oliver North testified about the unraveling Iran-contra scandal on national TV, rumors began swirling around the 76-year-old President’s mental focus. That he couldn’t. That he kept reminiscing about his Hollywood career. That he confused his World War II experiences with scenes from his old movies (his actual service never left the state of California). CBS News reporter Lesley Stahl reported a bizarre meeting with him in which he didn’t seem to know who she was, then snapped out of it and was fine. His aides said they’d witnessed episodes like this before. It’s never been proven Reagan was senile in office, although he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years later, and died ten years after. But we all still wondered. Reagan was the oldest elected President at the time, a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday on his first Inauguration Day. He’s now third oldest, with Donald Trump having broken his record (age 70 and three quarters) and now Joe Biden is the oldest, 78 when he became President. If our Presidents get any older Congress may have to pass a new entitlement for federally-funded Depends. Wait for it—Biden will be 82 if he runs again in 2024. Nikki Haley is practically a teenager by comparison, and at 51, she’s in the age range of what a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found in December many Americans preferred for a candidate, 51 to 65. The only one of the three who are ‘in their prime’, if Americans are evaluating presidential mental acuity vs fertility and fuckability, I’m quite sure only Nikki Haley can pass that test with flying colors. In fact, I’ll bet she can pass the other test. I bet Melania Trump would pick her, too. I don’t know if Haley meant her idea as a dig at her possible future opponents, especially the guy who will probably give her a mean, misogynist nickname if she gets in his way in the polls, but I’m down with her suggestion. Sure thing, a mental competency test for both Biden and Trump, and any other 70 y.o.+ candidates next year. Don Lemon thinks it’s ageist, but I don’t. While there is such a thing as early senility - it can hit people even in their thirties - that’s not nearly as common as in the elderly, and 70 definitely qualifies as elderly. Then again, maybe he’s afraid Nikki lied in her response to his record-breaking cluelessness. Responded Haley, “I wasn't sitting there saying sexist, middle-aged CNN anchors need to have mental competency tests, although [Lemon] may have just proven that point.” She might be right. I’m only half-kidding. The WTFness pandemic Don Lemon will be 57 on March 1st. His comments were so deeply weird, so beyond what I would expect from a CNN commentator - Okay Grandpa! - I’m beginning to wonder about his own mental competency. I won’t call for his suspension, or resignation, I think he’s an otherwise fine commentator, but the supreme WTFness of his superlatively ignorant WTF moment makes me wonder if aliens are really behind America’s national backslide toward imbecility. I mean, WTFness has been in vogue in America for a long time, but got a rocket-powered boost with Donald Trump, a man who demonstrated much sharper mental and verbal acuity twenty years ago. Last week I read Twitter with my Tucker Carlson WTF face (Twitter is Ground Zero for worldwide loopy mentally deranged thinking) and I think I said out loud, “What the fuck? Are you really that fucking stupid? How can you still be preaching pointless mental health solutions to out-of-control gun violence for people who will never want it, use it, or acknowledge they need help, rather than keeping guns out of the hands of violent idiots?” I mean WTF, we can keep abortions out of the hands of women who need them, right? And we can’t do anything about idiots with guns? How hard can this be to comprehend? Whether it’s the left or the right, the U.S., Canada, or elsewhere, my WTF meter just broke from overuse. Some of my WTFs are ongoing, like WTF?? when people claim men are women on their say-so (Can they not see the openly deranged, abusive male-entitled misogyny that characterizes transactivism?) or that whales are being killed by windmills (Marjorie Taylor-Greene, natch, one of Congress’s leading WTF’ers). After all, we also have: People who think COVID vaccines kill more people than COVID An entire ‘news’ organization we now have incontrovertible evidence bald-faced lied to America about a stolen election because telling the truth sent their audience screaming to an even more idiotic news source and dropped their stock price We have to explain to feminists men are not women no matter what they tell you (I’ll bet they’re the easiest women to lay) Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring President Obama was born in Kenya, even with the 1961 Honolulu newspaper birth announcement 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ by George Bush (Or the Jews. A few have suggested Osama bin Laden, but that’s just crazy talk!) Sometimes, you wonder if someone slipped supersized stupidity pills into the nation’s water system. Remember when we used to laugh at the Middle East because they were convinced the Jews were behind 9/11 and that Mossad-controlled sharks were attacking swimmers in the Red Sea? Which brings me back to the aliens who, for all I know, were the real brains behind the Muslim-munching marine monsters. Anyway, I don’t know where Don Lemon got his last glass of water before that morning show but I hope it wasn’t from Lake Huron. They still haven’t found the debris from that last UFO the government shot down and God only knows what the aliens packed it with. Given the way Lemon spoke last week, my money’s on alien RFID chips that turn gay men into Amy Coney Barrett. If you’re interested in learning more about what the aliens may or may not have planned for us I suggest an earlier article, The Aliens Might Be Here And They Probably Don’t Want Kinky Buttsex. (Hope that's not going to ruin your weekend plans ;) ) Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

And she put the kibosh on his future raping activities, at least for now "The more fight you put the more they want to give up. If I keep going, I keep pushing, he's going to stop. He's going to let go and he finally did." It’s every woman’s nightmare. A 24-year-old Tampa woman unlocked the gym door for a man she recognized from seeing him around before and went back to her workout, only to find herself in a titanic struggle when it turned out he wasn’t there for the Stairmaster. He grabbed Nashali Alma, chased her around the gym and they struggled on the floor together. She fought back with every ounce she had and eventually tired him out, upon which she ran away and called 911. It’s horrifying. "The more fight you put the more they want to give up,” she said. "If I keep going, I keep pushing, he's going to stop. He's going to let go and he finally did." She went public with her story to let other women know they can fight back. To be fair, she’s a body builder, although he was still the more powerful of the two. But she didn’t give up. She remembered what her parents had always taught her about life: Never give up, always fight. She urges women to call 911 immediately, rather than waiting. The sooner one reports, the better chance police have of catching him. Twenty-five-year-old Xavier Thomas-Brown, her would-be attacker, went elsewhere looking for easier prey. He rang the bell of someone’s house and told the woman who answered she was pretty and asked if she’d like to hang out. Her fiance appeared and chased him off, and shortly after, the police caught up with him. Who knows what might have happened if the fiance hadn’t been there, but this much is for sure: Nashali Alma put the kibosh on Thomas-Brown’s future rape plans, at least for the time being. There perhaps is a woman or two strolling around Tampa today, blissfully unaware that if Alma hadn’t bravely reported him, she might now be curled up in a ball on her bed, unable to function. Alma refused to be a victim. At least, she wasn’t going down without a fight. When the self-defense mechanism fails The MeToo movement has brought much-needed attention to the ongoing historic problems of sexual assault against women. Victims have taken to social media to tell their stories, some anonymously, some bravely stepping from the shadows to refute the shame with their name. When I blogged on Medium there was a veritable firehose of stories about women who had been sexually assaulted or narrowly escaped it. One early story was a young woman who’d been raped—twice, on two separate occasions—even though she was a kickboxer. She’d studied since a young teen. Papered her bedroom with posters of the legends—Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan. Worked out all the time and had the trophies to prove it. Then one night at a bar a guy dragged her under a pool table and raped her. All that training, all that worship of martial arts champions and heroes, and when she was physically attacked, she did what so many of us would do, or have done in that situation. She froze. She did her best to move beyond it. Then one night, different guy, different place, what went through her mind was, “Here we go again.” She froze again. I wondered what went wrong. How is it, after all that training, she froze when shit got real without a referee? I reached out to a veteran I know of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, someone who’d been trained in handling violent situations. Why did this happen? Could women learn self-defense and actually use it when the chips were down? Lessons from a combat vet Colton told me it was possible to mentally prep yourself against bad situations, run mental scenarios in your head of what you might do and how you might react. “The best way to survive is to listen to your gut. And that is something that absolutely can be trained. It prevents “freezing” in the moment by never having the moment to begin with. But if the moment does happen, recognizing ‘important information’ in the flood of data your senses are collecting for you can mean life or death. The more you train, the better you get at recognizing important and discarding the unimportant.” He spoke of the ‘tells’, the super-subtle signs that allow one to assess a situation, using the example of coming out of a gas station and seeing someone standing to the side who looks like bad news. Most people, he notes, will turn their back on the person, scurry to their car, and drive away as fast as possible. Colton looks at the hands and feet and body distribution. Is the person’s hands inside their pockets? “Is it cold outside? How are they dressed? Do they have a foot on the wall? Are they leaning back? If I look over my shoulder toward them as I walk away, do they hold focus on me or look away? In 1-2 seconds I know if they’re a possible problem. And if they are where is my closest advantage? Maybe my keys in my pocket? A gun in the truck? A bystander?” I practice heightened vigilance on the Toronto transit system. I have no car and no intention of ever owning one again. Eighteen years I’ve ridden the TTC safely, with few incidents, none involving me. Now violent attacks have gone up 60%, many of the perpetrators clearly mentally ill people. Last summer a woman was fatally set on fire at a station one stop from my own; people have been attacked with bottles, knives, and fists. The perp demographics are across the board all over the city: Young men, roaming teenage girl gangs, people of all colors, older people and women. The homeless are no longer harmless. One verbally assaulted and threatened a friend and I last fall. My friends and I trade tips on how to sit on the train, what to do, how to watch for trouble, how to not look like a victim. What to carry in our pockets to defend ourselves. (I recently realized my keys are actually a fairly formidable weapon). I run scenarios mentally about what I’ll do with my first line of attack, a bottle of hair spray (pepper spray is illegal here, and I also don’t want to punish a bus full of riders). I don’t know what will happen if I’m ever confronted, but hair spray will hopefully burn their eyes enough for me to escape and won’t cause lasting damage. I might get in trouble legally, but it’s better than being slashed or burned to death, n’est-ce pas? I’m not likely to get raped at my advanced age, and especially not in late February, but it’s not outside the ken, and hair spray may set someone back long enough for me to escape. If things get more critical, there’s my Mighty Keychain O’ Pain. Colton told me, “If someone freezes in that moment and can not commit violence it’s due to lack of mental preparation. And that comes through training.” He describes his first firefight as ‘traumatic’ because he wasn’t mentally prepared, but he was better prepped for future ones. His mentality now is of surviving through the steps. “The ‘formula’ so to speak. Trust the training, you might cry during or after, you will want to kill, anger is normal etc. etc. I now train my men in the same manner. So they can know what to expect for mental survivability, even if they don’t win the fight.” It matched what I found when I researched how to overcome the ‘freeze’ mode. It’s something you have to work on constantly; it’s not something you never forget like bike riding. Taking a self-defense class isn’t enough; you have to practice, or mentally prepare yourself. Always. It doesn’t apply to just mano-a-mano combat. Freezing, or fumbling in a panic, is why there are so few ‘good guys with a gun’ who stop mass shooters. You can buy a gun, take lessons on how to use it, but unless you practice constantly - and under the pressure of having to react at a moment’s notice - chances are you’re going to get shot before you ever fire a single bullet. The importance of mental preparation In 2009, ABC journalist Diane Sawyer rigged an experiment at Muhlenberg College to see how people who had just been trained to use a gun would react to an active shooter, played by an actor with a paint gun. The participants didn’t know it wasn’t a real active shooter. They put out a call for people who’d like free gun training, then were herded into a classroom ostensibly for a talk on protective gear. They were armed with real Glocks filled with, which they didn’t know, simulated bullets that fired paint. Shooter guy shows up, the guy in front struggles to get the gun out of his pants, and gets shot with a paint gun. Several others in the class failed to stop the shooter as well, and it ended in fake slaughter by a fake shooter. And that was after immediate training, not days, months or years later. Where does that leave us civilians, since daily training simply isn’t practical for those of us who aren’t soldiers or cops? Nashali Alma didn’t mention having undergone self-defense training nor did she mention military service. She simply reacted. Perhaps she was mentally prepared. Freezing can happen to anyone, not just women in rape situations. But she didn’t. And sometimes, women fight back. There’s some middle road there where we don’t necessarily need to train every day, like a soldier, but we can mentally prep ourselves. It’s no guarantee we won’t freeze in battle, like with a man with evil on his mind, but then again, we might not. Colton synopsized ‘The Formula’: Avoid the fight If you’re in the fight trust the training. You’ve been here 1000 times in your mind. So just do, don’t think. There will be a fallout after. Good results or bad, life is different now. I found Nashali Alma on LinkedIn where she’d announced her GoFundMe page for her Never Give Up! Women’s Empowerment Campaign. She admitted to ‘some PTSD’ from her traumatic experience but she’s also expressed she’s not going to stop doing what she loves. She still goes to the gym. She hasn’t let this asshole ruin her life. Colton’s last point seems to be key to dealing with a traumatic event. Your life will never be the same, but it doesn’t have to be 100% negative. Sometimes you emerge stronger, or more confident. “Hey, I got beyond that, and it’s ancient history now.” I’ve spoken and heard the stories of numerous friends and strangers over the decades of sexual assault, from minor groping to full-on rape. No one’s life was ever the same, but some handled it more effectively than others. It’s important to note Alma’s attacker had no weapons. And undoubtedly for many of us, we might comply just to avoid getting hurt any further - what if he had begun beating her? We don’t know how an attacker will react, and many women have gotten seriously hurt or killed fighting back. I don’t know what you should do, but Colton’s advice on assessing the situation sounds worthy of consideration: Your brain will already be taking stock of the situation. How much are you willing to risk to fight back? Another important question: How much is he willing to risk if you do? There are easier victims elsewhere. Thomas-Brown realized this one was too much trouble and preferred to look for easier prey. Every woman is different, and we can’t know what we’ll do in the firefight (as my soldier friend experienced the first time), but we can reduce the chances we’ll come out the worse for it if we think about how we can fight back. I may even practice whacking invisible attackers in the face in my apartment. Will it help me if I ever get cornered? Well, it won’t hurt. What if Thomas-Brown goes to trial? We have to remember at least some of the power is in our own hands. Will we press charges? Or will we listen to naysayers who tell us not to ‘waste our time’, as we’ll never get a conviction, or if we do he’ll get a light sentence? Real possibilities, but there’s still very good reasons for making men go through the justice system. Rapists Who Get Off Easy Don’t Get Off Scot-Free What’s critically important: The sooner police catch this guy, the more women’s lives may be saved. When he’s off the streets he can’t harm others. We’re not powerless. We can fight back, with our strength or with the justice system, however imperfectly. At the very least, make him soil his Fruit-of-the-Looms wondering what will happen to him if he gets convicted, especially if he winds up on the other side of a rape. Maybe he prevails, maybe he doesn’t, but either way we get him off the streets, at least for a little while. And, hopefully, we go back to the gym. Related: What If Human Women Challenged Male Aggression Like Bonobos? Stop Male Abuse When It’s Happening…Maybe? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The Big Dick Is Back, courtesy of black men (of course!) and you can have one too merely for the price of a quickie gang rape! You can have a dick as big as any African’s, white boy, but will the rod match the curtains? No one knows! Photo by Keith Syvinski on Free Images Penis enlargement spam is back! Thicker, harder, larger than life, and now, racist as f — um, hell! I’ve written about how a quest for a really huge monster mandingo was the only welcome spam I received during its Golden Age. Today my digitized shitty lunch pseudo-meat induces sleep. Somewhere, someone got the idea I’m a golfer and I’m flooded with sales pitches for all things Old Retired White Boomer Man. I can’t imagine how I got on their lists since the world’s most boring sport is one I never Google. The New Improved Penis Enlargement Spam offers industrial-strength racism with super-sized misogyny I don’t remember from the Golden Age. Emails promise to make my wife scream with my eight-inch-long Hummer From Hell thanks to African men and their Amazing Big Dick Tribal Secrets. All I have to do is buy a plane ticket to visit the Somba tribesmen in Western Africa and turn my white wife out to them. The gargantuan gherkin is all mine! (Maybe I won’t need those golf clubs after all!) Eddie Murphy on the history of the Big Black Dick. WARNING: 1980s Eddie Murphy is not ‘woke’ for 2021. Don’t watch this if you’re easily offended. Or worry about your white dick size. Or if you’re Chinese. Especially if you’re a Chinese male. This guy offered his white wife to the African tribesmen as a gift in exchange for their secret manhood elongation ritual. And it WORKED! I know it’s fiction but damn, that’s offensive. So I wonder: Who are these guys marketing to? Who’s feeling so emasculated and hateful they’d consider turning their wife out to an African tribe so they could get a big thick rod and nail four chicks in one evening? Not sure what’s up with the guy with the eye patch. Maybe he’s a Republican because of a white ancestor who screwed up his dick size? Photo by outtacontext on Flickr (CC0 2.0) The big tell the target audience is sexually insecure white men is the overall racist assumptions, and the context in which it takes place. It emphasizes the ‘white wife’, so you’re quite clear on who needs some hammer help, since white men are more likely to have white wives than non-whites. Some spam indicates she’s into the idea herself (Husbandly big dick? Doing several Africans? BOTH!) Of further racist note: Sexual success seekers journeying to Africa for The Secret never seem directed into an air-conditioned office in downtown Nairobi talking to tailored-suited businessmen. Their stories always center on painted tribesmen with spears in mud huts sitting around waiting for the next Trumpanzee to show up with his hot-to-trot wife (You Know How Those White Women Are!) perhaps ‘curious’ about trying some boudin noir. It’s no surprise ‘Africans’ possess the alleged secret to ‘elongation’ techniques, since the myth of the Big Black Dick’s roots originate in the American African slavery era. It plays into the old white male slave owner fear that if he’s availing himself of sexual pleasure with his female ‘property’, maybe his wife is doing the same with those big strong field you-know-whats. Now why would Miz Prudence choose an ‘inferior’ black slave when she could have her husband’s pure white superior manly studliness? Well, because Mede is, in one way at least, two or three times the man Massa McCracka is. Oh…. And if you wonder if the African tribe fellows scored on the white chick, the answer is YES! (I never doubted it. Gang rapes are pretty much always a huge success, except from the viewpoint of the victim.) Apparently, some ladies were perfectly okay with being offered to a bunch of strangers because they got to bang a bunch of guys with big penises while her husband worked on making his own Tom of Finland-worthy Louisville Slugger. This dude is crazy but what a secret he discovered… He took his wife to a remote African island to negotiate with the tribe elders, including 3 African priests, the sacred secret to gain 6 inches on his member. But they needed something in exchange. This guys WIFE… Don’t worry, it was just for a short period of time, but what followed after it’s wilder than anything you’d see on the craziest rated movies. What was the concern addressed re the ‘short period of time’? To assure the recipient the wife’s distress was minimized? Or is it more about the pain of seeing your wife getting nailed by guys she might not want to have sex with, or even worse, want to? When she might even decide to stay with them rather than you, since God only knows what other Mandingo Magic these African guys know? What if they also possess the closely-guarded Secret of the Magic Triple-Axle-Twist Propeller Tongue? Little-known fact: Some African tribesmen have up to eight tongues and they know what to do with them. It’s not actually BBD those white wives are running off to Africa for! Public domain image from Pixabay Apparently his wife dug the gangbang so much they might go back ‘just for the fun’. Ironically, while these stories feature a white woman getting ganged by a bunch of black men (or eagerly agreeing, because BBD) they don’t mention the (presumably white) husband nailing a bunch of African chicks while he was there. Maybe African men aren’t as keen to turn their wives out to others as under-endowed white men. After all, what’s in it for them? The Secret To The Lowest Ever Golf Rounds? According to spam about SavageGrowPlus, the current spam king of dicktacular spam (with a website and everything, but you’ll have to Google it yourself — caveat emptor!), white women are allegedly often on the prowl themselves looking for Big African Dicks. The spam promises a 2,000-year-old African ‘twist’ hack that makes one’s penis 48% longer with the subject line White Wife Caught Riding 3 African Priests. One wonders what an African man 2,000 years ago needed with a bigger dick. It certainly wasn’t to make his wives scream with pleasure. Know what African women were doing 2,000 years ago? Mutilating their baby daughters’ genitals to prevent sexual pleasure. That shit is still going on today. Yes, men believe still in the myth of the BBD, including gay men. Including non-white gay men. Think of how much pressure black guys are to meet some deformed ideal birthed in the era of total black subjugation. I’m reminded of the Dove Soap video several years ago showing how a model is ‘created’ for a billboard ad. By the time the makeup and retouching gods are done with her, even she can’t meet the beauty standard gracing motorists on the highway. I always wondered how insecure she must feel if friends wanted to introduce her to someone they knew who loved the billboard. What was he going to think, no matter how dolled up she was? Her neck was too short, her eyes not manga enough, her skin less blemished than advertised? Apparently, the palpable disappointment by men and women alike at unzipping a black man’s pants is similar when they discover a similar awful reality smackdown: Six inches, more or less. What a terrible legacy of hypersexualized expectation to have to live with. I don’t know how much men still believe in penis enlargement phallus-ies (ar ar, I’m on a roll!) but I should point out it IS possible to alter your penis to make it bigger, longer, thicker, more massive. It’s an evidence-based scientifically proven technique known to medical doctors since the 1980s: Phalloplasty, or surgical penis enlargement. In other words, gents, you’re stuck with the same dilemma as women with breast dysmorphia: Those silly-ass creams, exercises, devices and herbal supplements won’t grace you with a longer schlonger any more than they will give your wife Dolly Parton boobs. Did not get these from an ad in Women’s Wear Daily. Photo by Luke Westall on Flickr (CC0 2.0 Generic) You really want to make your body parts bigger? It’s gonna take a few sharpies to make it so, Number One! A second option may be less painful but there will be needles: Dermal filler injections, similar to what women get to boost lips and cheeks. Here’s the real irony: Women don’t care about gigundous johnsons nearly as much as men. Research has shown many men seek penile enlargement to impress other men, although some do it for self-esteem, and some for better bedroom performance (in their own minds, anyway). In fact, dick size isn’t even on the list of reasons why women divorce their husbands. Even African women aren’t impressed with macroscale manmeat. A study of cheating wives in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya found a longer-than-average penis was one of the reasons given for cheating (as was domestic violence. Take note, beaters! Maybe you don’t have to pay someone to cut up your dick after all. An anger management program sounds less painful, doesn’t it, guys? Guys? Guys? Where’d you go’?) Men want to impress each other. Think about it. Your open-mouthed-with-awe Big Dick moment isn’t in her bedroom, but in the locker room at the gym. (Don’t stare!) Do the Somba tribesmen actually seek bigger dicks? Maybe. I can’t find a lot about them so far but I did find a brief historical reference from the turn of the twentieth century talking about what they allegedly did for lengthy lingams, and while it involved herbs rubbed on the penis (not taken orally), one needed to cut a hole ‘of a certain size’ in a tree branch into which the prospective Priapus inserted his dick for several months until he got the desired length. The reference included a photo of a Somba man with what looks like an 8"-9" fully erect penis belted to his belly. I’m guessing white men won’t want to wander around with a giant tree branch strapped to one leg until they get their humongous hot rod. “Hey big boy, is that a Balsam Fir in your pants or are you just happy to see me?” I’ve never ceased to boggle at the capacity of the human mind to believe what it wants to despite the evidence of its lying eyes: There’s no quicky tricky for enlarging body parts. You either work with what you’ve got or you book an appointment with a plastic surgeon. As a teenager I found ridiculous ads for bust creams in magazines. I asked my mother, “Do those really work?” I was only twelve and embarking on my first bra but I couldn’t know whether I’d ‘measure up’ when I was sixteen. “Don’t believe those things. They’re all garbage,” she told me. Uh, duh. After all, if it was that easy to get big boobs, wouldn’t every woman have them? During the Golden Age of Spam, in the ’90s and ’00s, I used to wonder similarly about men. Did they not wonder why they didn’t see more monster masts in the gym or public restrooms? Or does everyone else look like they’ve got 48 pounds of swingin’ schwing when you look at your own perfectly normal six-inch love cannon while your brain screams “MICROPENIS!!!”? Mostly I laughed in the olden days, wondering who the hell was desperate enough for a colossal kielbasa that they’d buy a product calling their dick a ‘custard launcher’. Today it’s not as amusing, even though I know no one is turning their wife out to a mob for some fake tribal secret. Still, it goes to show you: Some guys never learn. Six inches is six inches, guys. And they say women can’t do math. Photo by Deon Black on Unsplash This post originally appeared on Medium in May 2021.

Smokers, the obese and drug addicts aren’t the same. Here’s why. If these are your loved ones, might want to put off Christmas shopping for them until, oh, maybe a few days before Christmas. Photo by Michael_Swann on Flickr CC0 2.0 When sexual headcase Robert Aaron Long killed eight people, including six Asian women at Atlanta spas in March and got arrested because he didn’t kill himself the way many mass shooters do, an outraged public demanded justice. That same month, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was taken into custody after killing ten people including one police officer in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket. Outrage, calls for change, blah blah blah. As did here in Toronto a few years ago when an underlaid nerd ran down women in a van after calling for an Incel Rebellion on Facebook. When now-daily mass shooters are arrested rather than carted out in body bags we practically call for their heads on pikes for the innocent lives they’ve destroyed. When infantile crybabies pitch public tantrums about having to wear masks, socially distance, and not take part in large indoor gatherings, and exercise their ‘freedoms’ by not vaccinating and putting themselves, the lives of their so-called ‘loved’ children, and masses of strangers in danger, we feel understandably helpless. We can’t arrest the suspected killers; they’re doing nothing illegal and no one can prove they killed anyone. Even if their family contracts COVID, oh-so-coincidentally right after an outbreak linked to the Trump rally s/he attended, no one can be sure the family didn’t get infected elsewhere. If they’re all unvaccinated, who knows? As Omnicron warp-speeds around the globe and promises to Make Christmas Suck Again, COVIDiots have become our new mass shooters. They’re the ones breathing potentially toxic germs on others, taking up valuable bed space in hospitals, choking out their last, painful breaths. On Reddit, the Herman Cain Award documents the content COVIDiots tweeted and posted before they drowned in their own lungs, or repented of their former anti-vaxx ways if they survived, or it applauds people who say they decided to get vaxxed after visiting the forum. Those of us who wish we could Make America Great Again are getting very, very tired of COVIDiots doing everything in their power to hold America back. Americans are tired of not being able to live at least semi-normal lives because a bunch of spoiled, overprivileged brats — and I’m including all the black and brown brats too — won’t get vaccinated for a lot of really stupid reasons. None can read properly-sourced advice by subject matter experts documenting overwhelming evidence the vaccines work, that nothing Donald Trump suggests does, and the underwhelming global number of vaccinated people dying from COVID or the vaccine is minuscule compared to the unvaxxed, who are breaking healthcare systems everywhere and creating stress, burnout, mental breakdowns and PTSD in our healthcare workers. We should have been past the worst of the pandemic by now, but healthcare workers watch a perpetual conveyor belt of tantrum-ing brats move into hospital wards or adjacent buildings, putting their own lives at risk and stressing their spirits even more. It didn’t have to happen. COVIDiots did this. It’s not so funny today, is it? Especially the guy on his hands and knees in the mud coughing out his last. Their excuse was they didn’t have access to a Black Plague vaccine, because they lived 700 years ago. All because of overblown narcissistic American individualism and exceptionalism. People who love their politics more than they love their fellow humans or even Jesus. America needs a break. Our healthcare providers need a break. Enough is enough It’s argued that people who made bad lifestyle choices don’t just include the intentionally unvaxxed, yet are treated according to need rather than judged less worthy of immediate healthcare. This includes, among others, smokers, the obese, alcoholics and drug addicts. You could include drunk drivers and people who engage in risky, high-adrenaline activities like bungee jumping or auto racing. But fat people don’t run around stuffing Big Macs down others’ throats, nor do smokers force people to blaze up. They’re no longer allowed to pollute the indoors as they once argued was their precious, God-given ‘right’. Addicts might mug you for drug money but they won’t corner you in an alley and stick a heroin needle in your arm. No one wants to be addicted to substances, including food, and the reasons why people engage in and perpetuate what they know to be unhealthy living decisions are legion. They often pay their own price including increased health problems, decreased standard of living, reduced romantic and job opportunities, higher insurance rates, and increased mental illness. In the U.S., with its broken healthcare system and only a few shreds of a safety net left, there are few worse places to make stupid lifestyle choices. The unvaxxed ‘fortunate’ enough to have survived are often faced with insurmountable hospital bills (Oopsie! Un/derinsured!) in a country where stupidity pays handsomely if you’re a healthcare C-suiter. No, I will not contribute to your crowdfunding account. The number of people for whom the COVID vaccines might be contraindicated are tiny. The best way to know for sure is to consult your doctor to see if you’re on the shortlist. Not Gab and Parler, not QAnon, not numerous dumbass websites and media sources failing accuracy evaluations at Media Bias Fact Check, and certainly not a woman who looks like and contains more plastic than a Barbie doll. Your doctor knows you and your health problems and history best. S/he’s the best source for determining whether to get vaccinated against COVID. Hey, you survived MMR as a kid without becoming autistic, right? Annual childhood DPT shots didn’t Nicki Minaj CC0 2.0 image by Rory on Wikimedia Commons kill you? You haven’t grown a second head out of your shoulder from the smallpox vaccine, amirite? Many COVIDiots probably got an annual ever-changing flu shot until they were harder to source than toilet paper last year. COVIDiots perpetuate each wave, drive small businesses out of business, burn out our healthcare workers and dangle the ever-looming threat of lockdown and restricted access to local goods over our heads. They’re part of the reason Jeff Bezos can shoot into space while underpaying his employees because COVIDiots are forcing us to depend on Amazon for anything we can’t get at a non-‘essential’ business. Intelligent, rational, mature, and responsible people are losing patience with adult babies, especially ones who blithely walk around not caring who they murder because they won’t cover their piehole. The ones who ‘identify’ as Christians believe they have plausible deniability when they meet Jesus: “Whaddaya mean I was responsible for killing over a dozen people at a Stop The Steal rally? How was I to know I was infected? When I got sick I thought it was just a silly old cold! C’mon, you’re messin’ with me, ain’t you, Big J? It was all a big Deep State plandemic! Come on, Jeez, can you prove I did it?” Meanwhile, good people who need immediate healthcare still wait, some of them living with internal time bombs if they don’t get the treatment and surgeries that keep getting postponed to handle so-called ‘more immediate’ COVIDiots. People who refused, in all their overprivileged First World glory, free vaccines to keep them and their so-called ‘loved ones’ alive that billions of other humans would give their meager life savings for. Our little brainiacs prefer conspiracy theories promoted by Tucker Carlson or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaxx documentary targeting particularly vulnerable black and Hispanic communities. Never mind the appalling optics of a white man encouraging POC to, essentially, kill themselves. Maybe we ignore it because it’s Bobby Kennedy’s kid, rather than, say, Steve Bannon’s. Make no mistake: Willfully unvaccinated POC are as blameworthy as MAGA cap COVIDiots. The Tuskegee experiments ended fifty years ago. Open your damn eyes and visit the CDC in 2021. You’re alive today, because of vaccines. You didn’t die of smallpox. You don’t live in an iron lung. You’re welcome. COVID kills black and brown people far more effectively than white scientists ever have. Black Lives Matter, or is that only when white cops take them? The global evidence since vaccines became available this year is plain. It refutes hysterics of all colors. This doesn’t include anyone who can’t easily access the vaccine because of work requirements, child care issues or because they’re unfortunate enough to live in less-served rural areas. Or are genuinely at risk. For them, I reserve all my sympathy. Now some are debating the previously undebatable: Whether the unvaxxed should be moved down the triage line. One problem is some want to vaxx but can’t; at the moment, it’s impossible to determine who really couldn’t get a vaccine they wanted and who’s lying to get medical help. Triaging on the basis of lifestyle choices violates medical ethics and correctly scares other unfortunate lifestyle choosers who wonder whether the obese or smokers will one day be subjected to similar scrutiny. To which I say: All of them put together have NEVER overstressed the system the way COVIDiots have. Pandemics may be with us for some time. How do you feel about a near-future pandemic without healthcare givers? Can you blame them for throwing in the towel and saying, Fuck these people? I think the triage conversation is one we need to have. What’s truly ‘unprecedented’ about the pandemic is how so pigheaded and politically divided we are that getting a proven vaccine is controversial for those who love their political beliefs more than their families, their fellow humans and even Jesus. WWJD in a pandemic? Maybe it’s time to let the unvaxxed exercise their right to wait for care like all the pre-pandemic people who have to wait for surgery today. Because of COVIDiots.. Tick-tock. 1832 cholera pit in Howard Park, Kilmarnock, Ireland. Funeral homes are stacking bodies to the ceiling in some states, so maybe we’ll be digging COVID pits shortly. Photo by summondbyfells on Flickr CC0 2.0 The aspiring Buddhist in me is uncomfortably aware of the value judgment on human life. In this, I understand why black and brown people are mistrustful of largely white healthcare. Or fellow unpopular obese, smokers, or addicts. On the other hand, my inner crappy Buddha doesn’t lose sleep over punishments for mass shooters, and at least they’re not protesting in front of hospitals, because they’re in graves or jail. None of those other lifestyle choosers willfully hurt others. When’s the last time anyone demanded a smoker, obese person or skinny-as-a-rail meth addict customer put their baby’s life in danger to satisfy some MAGAt’s toxic political stance? A Texas couple wore face masks at a restaurant to protect their immunocompromised infant. The owner didn't like that. I bet that restaurant owner is ‘pro-life’, too. I wonder: Why are we urged to show more compassion for the uncovered unvaccinated than we do for mass shooters? Both made decisions to harm others. A UK study reported a link between susceptibility to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, and willingness to promote misinformation about the pandemic to Machiavellianism, psychopathy and collective narcissism. Not unlike similar findings with mass shooters. Fuck psychopaths. #NotAllCOVIDiots, of course, there are those whose reticence is driven by scientific ignorance and risk overestimation rather than toxic politics, but will wear masks and be reasonably responsible. The in-your-face crybabies are selfish, irresponsible, and are now willfully potentially spreading death and sorrow every time they exhale. Call me a terrible person if you like, but I think it’s time to move the unvaxxed down the triage line so that ambulances can pick up accident victims promptly. Yeah, maybe the victims were driving drunk or simply driving while stupid but until idiot drivers necessitate setting up ad-hoc ‘waiting rooms’ in parking garages, let’s keep them higher on the list too. Ditto, everyone else on the ‘unfortunate lifestyle choices’ list. I had a friend who got diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of the pandemic last year but was still able to get proper treatment. They caught it in time and her prognosis is now very good. I’m grateful to all the phenomenal healthcare professionals who saved her life. I’d be ripshit furious if she was still waiting while some COVIDiot stole her hospital bed like these pseudo-scientists: Yes, they look pathetic and in need of compassion. But I wonder how many people they took out along with themselves. I bet mass shooters look pathetic sitting in jail, too. Twitter I don’t like mass shooters, and I don’t like mass breathers. Time to turn these suicidals into social pariahs and restrict their ability to take as many innocents as they can with them. They made their choice. They can always unmake it with a better one. Let them produce their vaccine passport, or a damn good reason why they can’t be vaccinated, or be refused service in all public places, including essential services. Let them pay for food and medicine delivery. Let them lean on friends, family and neighbors if they can’t afford it. Let them feel the consequences of choosing to be social pariahs because of their pigheadedness and unChristian concern for their fellow ‘God’s children’. I wonder how that bright light tunnel greeting with Jesus went. Twitter They don’t have the right to take the rest of us with them to the Pearly or Iron Gates. The rest of us want to LIVE. And move on. MAGA! This was originally published on Medium in September 2021, so I updated it for the Omnicron world here.

Pelosi 'doesn't do fear' and embodies toxic masculinity's worst nightmares about female power U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: She's not afraid of you! Image by Gage Skidmore on Flickr “Power is not anything that anybody gives away. You have to fight for it.” - U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi I don't know how she did it. I don't know how she faced the nation and addressed the horrific January 6th attack on the Capitol with such a cool mien, but U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, targeted by the right-wing mob a day earlier violently assaulting the halls of power in our democracy, faced the nation and addressed what happened. Then she got right back to work, business as usual, one day later to certify what everyone who wasn't a MAGA knew was a done deal: That Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 federal election. How specific the information she had on January 7th concerning intent and threats made against her is unclear, but I marveled to watch this 81-year-old woman comport herself like a boss. Nancy Pelosi elbow bumps a slightly hesitant Mike Pence after the Jan. 7 certification A day before, the Speaker hid underneath a conference table with her terrorized staff while rioters tried to break into the room. They made it through the first door. They gave up with the second. She wasn't factually certain of their intention, but no one questioned their lives were in danger and she knew at least some of the mob had murder on their minds as they howled her name. Months later, in an article in USA Today, Pelosi recounted what happened but acknowledged little personal fear. "Well, I'm pretty tough. I'm a street fighter," she said. "They would have had a battle on their hands." She lifted a four-inch stiletto heel for the reporter and added, "I would have had these," to use as weapons. If you've ever watched the movie Single White Female, you know that's no idle fashion-feminist threat. She was, she explained, more afraid for her staff than herself since the second-in-line for presidential succession has plenty of security. She said she will 'never forgive' the rioters and their supporters who caused such trauma. As for herself? Nancy Pelosi doesn't 'do fear', according to her biographer Molly Ball in Pelosi. Pelosi pretty certainly feels fear, but she'll never admit it. I can't imagine what a punch in the nose it must have been to her haters and would-be murderers to watch her address the press a day later and show no fear. If their intention was to shut that #@$%& up, mission unaccomplished. No one trapped on Capitol Hill, not even the woman who rivals Margaret Thatcher for sheer will and ramrod-stiff spine, can escape the trauma of January 6th. However it affects her, Pelosi hasn't let it show publicly. Never let 'em see you sweat When women one-quarter her age fold up like frightened kittens when a man on the street pays them a compliment, Nancy Pelosi faced down the most virulent, violent display of MAGA toxic masculinity in anyone's memory. There's no question she wondered what would happen not only to herself but to her much younger staff members had the howling mob broken through. Pelosi's lifelong iron will and near-fearlessness stem from intimate connection with power since forever, beginning with her father, Democratic Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. The only woman in history to be Speaker of the House, not once but twice, learned about power while working on his campaign and being present at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Her mother, also active in politics, taught her daughter the value of social networking as she organized Democratic women. But her mother also indirectly taught her daughter the value of independence and the need to control one's own future, which Pelosi's mother didn't have. Former President Barack Obama said of Pelosi, “She was as tough, or tougher, than anybody in the world.” She's everything take-no-prisoners hypermasculine he-men value--in other men. It's no wonder GOP pit bulls relentlessly attack her, blaming her for the insurrection plot and deceptively editing the viral video of the Speaker ripping up Trump's last State of the Union speech. This is the real one. The fake one has been largely taken down, but it went viral. GOP critics call Pelosi 'nasty', 'bitch', and accuse her of 'tantrums'. She doesn't exactly have it easy with clueless men in her own party, either. They didn't understand why she ran for house leadership. She told interviewer Dana Bash, "When people said a lot of the women are supporting Nancy to run, they said, ‘Why, do the women have a list of things they want us to do? Why don’t they just make a list and give us the list?’ This is the Democratic Party in the year 2000!” Just tell us what you want, girls! We'll handle it for you. It seemed audacious to her colleagues when she stated the next time around she was the most qualified candidate for the House Speakership in 2018. Only men do that. On why moms make good politicians “Women--you know how to get it done, know your power.” When most women her age are living in retirement wiling away their days until they pass on, this big-brown-eyed grandmother proves even Silent Generation women, uniformly raised to be Good Girls who served their husbands and children, had the capacity to seek and seize power and be unafraid to use it for the greater good. Women are still afraid of their own power, afraid to assert themselves, afraid of what others will think and even worse, what they might get called. The plaintive whine, When men are assertive they're called effective, when women do it we're called bitches! doesn't fly with Nancy Pelosi. She doesn't care what your hoary old grandpa said about her over Thanksgiving dinner. She was the youngest child in a family of six and all her siblings were brothers. She says it helped her a lot because she was 'unimpressed'. In the Bash interview, she notes how women are no longer raising their families first and entering politics later. They're doing it, exactly as men have always done it, at the same time. Funny how no one thought to question whether a father shouldn't do as mothers were expected to do and put their political aspirations on hold until the children were grown. Pelosi detailed exactly what qualifies mothers to be effective politicians: Mothers are diplomats, into interpersonal relationships, chefs, chauffeurs, problem-solvers, time managers. She says she has tremendous respect for the mothers who are raising families and walking the halls of Congress at the same time. In 1987, when she was first sworn in, there were 24 women there. Today, after the 2018 Blue Wave, there are 102. That's a 400% increase since the Last Years of Reagan. What we can learn about women and power from Nancy Pelosi She's one those rare women who understands her power and fully embraces it. However privately she may fear other things--like the very real danger she's in as the most assertive badass woman in power who dominated Donald Trump's term--Pelosi clearly doesn't fear her own power. "I pwn you, motha----!" CC0 2.0 image by the Washington DC Office of Public Affairs on Wikimedia Commons Here are some of Nancy Pelosi's Greatest Power Hits: STAND FIRM She gave Donald Trump The Clap in a viral video as she thwarted his attempts to fulfill his wall obsession. She wouldn't stand for his crap. Trump shut down the government and she made it clear he wasn't going to blackmail the Democrats, or the country, to get what he wanted. He held his breath until he turned blue. He caved only after Mitch McConnell warned Republicans were losing the public relations war, which any real politician of any political stripe knew was the only conceivable outcome. DON'T TALK THE TALK, DO THE WORK 'The Squad's' young idealistic Congressional newbies learned the hard way that Pelosi isn't impressed with their passions or their feelings. They tried to hold up border wall funding because they didn't think it went far enough and Pelosi shut them down hard. She believes if you're passionate enough about something you'll do the work of getting support because nothing gets done without it. You're just four opinions, she essentially told them. You have no support in our party. Go get it, or public support. That's what she calls being 'operational'. It means working with what you have in a given situation given the challenges and obstacles. She doesn't give a damn about your beliefs, your ideology or your dissatisfaction with why things are the way they are. What can you do to change it, right now, in the real world? SHE DOESN'T GIVE A CRAP WHAT YOU THINK OF HER Pelosi has stated she knows she's effective because she's a target. She doesn't care what the right thinks of her only insofar as it gets in the way of the job she needs to do. She's claimed she doesn't care about her image, but she had to pay attention when it began to obstruct her work within her own party. Not all the criticism and sniping comes from Republicans. The highly diverse Democratic left lends itself easily to its famously internal disputes, which serve the publicly united Republican Party. Our takeaway? We need to take ourselves seriously, but not sweat the Neanderthals who can't handle aggressive, assertive, take-charge and male dominance-challenging women. People take you a lot less seriously, Pelosi learned, especially if you're a woman, until you have authority. And no one gives you that, either. Like power, you have to take it. Like a man does. DON'T BE AFRAID TO PROMOTE YOURSELF If there's one thing women are far less effective at than men it's self-promotion, especially for a better job. Men aren't afraid to state they think they're the best person for the job, and unlike many women, neither is Nancy Pelosi. She was right to be bold about a second run at the House leadership. How differently might the 2016 election have gone had Hillary Clinton boldly stated she was far more qualified than Donald Trump who clearly demonstrated during the debates he didn't have even a rudimentary grasp of critical issues facing the United States and the world? Pelosi told Dana Bash she wants women to see they shouldn't let themselves get pushed around or run away from a fight. It's especially important when men consider an idea great after a man parrots the woman who said it a moment ago. They do it, Pelosi points out, not to be dismissive but because they missed it when she said it. They weren't listening. We need to challenge men who aren't listening to women or they're never gonna learn! Be pushy. Be aggressive. Be a 'bitch'. Who cares what they say as long as you're getting shit done. Be operational. Listen to your colleagues. Men don't listen enough and that's what they can take away from this. And don't let them smell your fear. That, if nothing else, is my biggest takeaway.