It Ends With The Saints

"Declining life expectancy is a choice, but taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wage income was a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai."

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 5, 2019

Not for some of us it isn't, so who is Douthat speaking to? Vox contributors like Ezra Klein seem to presume that ideology can triumph over biological entropy when warranted, and it is presumptuous, whether in reference to Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, or William Rehnquist, whom some of us remember perfectly well died as chief justice during Bush 43's second term. If Douthat annoys me so much with his ironic biblical allusions I can simply remove him from my feed, but we pay these people to think, and where is the thought here? Regardless of the ideological spectrum from which we ponder these things, this ghoulish death watch barometer surrounding Ginsburg diminishes feminine authority. It is hardly an enhancement or augmentation to continually quote Colbert's "bubble wrap" dig for one of the most powerful senior citizens in the country, whose health outcome blots out the sun when it comes to a comparison with people like my aunt, Marie Varenas, who has also had her share of oncological battles with tumor masses, first in the stomach, then the lung. She is now a frail 79, which doesn't seem to be a foreshortening of the average American woman's "span," although the quality of her independence has been arguably impacted after a lifetime adhesion to the habit, three packs of Marlboros a day, at one point, but Douthat isn't speaking to her self-destructive behavior either. He merely references it as a universal critique of how the working class rewards itself, without hesitating for one moment to reflect that just maybe those diagnosed with autism, downs syndrome, muscular dystrophy, or the recently deceased Lucasian's motor neurone disease, didn't have a choice.

Does this mean I am assigning blame for the suffering obstacles of cerebral palsy's flash in the pan successes snuffed out by lengthy periods of impoverished ennui? Yes, in part, but it is a complex interlocking of ableism and its clueless ignorance, and the way we respond to Ginsburg's age is symptomatic of that, with a few, like Dr. Barnett, offering the appropriate level of decorum. James Woods, akin to my aunt, trumpets her resilience. This may amount to a form of denial, certainly in Marie's case, while conservatives like myself neigh off with her head, a "get real" concern about functionality. In truth, I have erroneously associated Ginsburg's elevation as a palliative for President Clinton's withdrawn nomination of Lani Guinier for Attorney General, a woman who might have served as Ocasio-Cortez's clit licking doubles book end if she wasn't a crone herself by now, but I cannot think of any key decisions of Ginsburg's which fundamentally improved those niceties like gender equality, or the self-immolation of affirmative action. It was O'Connor, not Ginsburg, who sided with liberalism to preserve the ADA as a hollowed out veneer to frightening anarchists like myself.

Mining Twitter for provocation and paying absurdist fees

"I've seen men hurt worse and lose more."-- Joseph Cotton, the third man

Trivial detail: Twitter notifications emailed me October 27, 2015. "You have a new follower!" Neil Thomas Stacey, whose thin and languid ambulatory poise rather recently infuriated me, the insulated self-interest. I flagged him down on twitter's web page to get a sense of who I lost, and became angry. Not with a South African civil engineer tossing out pithy trinket tweets so much as with ambulatory blithe assumptions about its privilege. I have, in point of fact, lost hundreds-- maybe decades instead, of followers since I opened a twitter account, including Nicholas Kristof, and as of Sunday, Neil's follow countryman, and my sentimental favorite, Nate. Every bitter bitch needs at least one twinkie for sentimental comfort, and I wanted to chase after Maingard, and suppose I did sorta, trying to explain. He claims he blocked me accidentally and cannot find my account, and it feels like I've lost an adoptive nephew, or the good fuck, worth more than 5 rand, if only, but it is my fault for hating the able-bodied. I went on o small rampage and booted Trump's daughter, Ivanka. How many gulfs can I expect to leap, after all? Why should she bridge my divide? She is a status mogul descendant, tweeting what wealthy blonds tweet about babies, and I am just a spastic, slowly losing, but also failing to see the late Roger Ebert's awe of social media. I also parted from Dale Reardon, a blind Australian who may have believed I wanted back in the throng. Shared experience, all that, in disability land. And no, I need a job, not the segregation of disability empowerment. When I tweeted, "I am saying goodbye to you," however, Dale understood what Stacey could not grasp: Cripples, even smart ones, emotionally invest a little more, and I liked having Maingard as a sugared sex fantasy to show off to the vanquished Karina. Sniffling a little, but over what? That Nate misunderstood the dots I connected to get from A to B? Is a long time follower a relationship? The age of automation gets on all our nerves.

I asked my sister to ask her children who Shelita Burke was. I followed her back, initially, for the sake of the chasm between us, but during my mini-rebellion, all she wanted me for was to prop her label profile, and the humane fascist said no more. Screw the damn numbers. (Ali Spagnola is a different context, one enumerated many posts back in archive.) And I only knew one thing about the Singh before Harjinder found me. A Singh assassinated Indira Gandhi, who overruled her advisers and kept her guard. "How else can we prove we're secular?" She inquired. But I can understand a sect who know what they are, and I followed the proud father foodie back, with respect, even if he too has to work on my profundity.