There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.
Current Events
Reaching for the Alien Shore
So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.
NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:
- this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
- lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
- not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.
The Time of the Season
Yes, the time of the season has arrived again, although seeing all the pumpkin spice scented and flavored seasonal stuff on the shelves of various retail outlets should have provided what is popularly known as “a clue.” (Along with all the autumn leaf and scarecrow and harvest décor things…)
Yes, Thanksgiving, followed closely by Christmas, featuring a centerpiece dish of what I used to call Eternal Turkey, Strong to Save. Thanksgiving when I was living at a home with my parents and sibs, meant a ginormous turkey on both holidays, followed by my mother’s schedule of dishes incorporating the leftovers thereof: plain old warmed up leftovers initially, followed by hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey a la king, turkey croquettes, turkey and noodle casserole … and when the carcass was stripped to bones, into the pot for broth and another two weeks of turkey stew/soup.
Schadenfreudelicious
Two weeks and a bit more after election day, and the meltdown, panic, and dismay among the progs, the establishment media, and the entertainment world continues. I’m taking an unworthy pleasure in reading reports of panic and back-biting among partisans of the Harris/Walz camp and the noisy laments of their cis-gender or bi significant others. I’m also taking a savage pleasure in reading about or viewing evidence of the dismayed realization among the managerial class in certain industries dependent economically on the choices of the general public – that conservatives and Trump voters buy shoes, too. Also movie tickets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions and other consumer goods.
Stick a Fork In…
… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.