…for real [DOT 1/8/21]

to them that know...

1/8/21 SplinterRIP 39

…if home is where where the heart is…then do we get to point out it isn’t the people losing theirs that came at this from a position of heartlessness?

A nationwide moratorium on residential evictions is set to expire on Saturday after a last-minute effort by the Biden administration to win an extension failed, putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing shelter, while tens of billions in federal funding intended to pay their back rent sit untapped.
[…]
The collapse of those efforts reflected the culmination of months of frustration, as the White House pushed hard on states to speed housing assistance to tenants — with mixed results — before the moratorium expired. Hampered by a lack of action by the Trump administration, which left no real plan to carry out the program, Mr. Biden’s team has struggled to build a viable federal-local funding pipeline, hindered by state governments that view the initiative as a burden and the ambivalence of many landlords.

As a result, the $47 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program, to date, disbursed only $3 billion — about 7 percent of what was supposed to be a crisis-averting infusion of cash.

Adding to the urgency, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh warned last month, when the Supreme Court allowed a one-month extension of the eviction moratorium to stand, that any further extensions would have to go through Congress. But there was little chance that Republicans on Capitol Hill would agree, and by the time White House officials asked, only two days remained before the freeze expired, angering Democratic leaders who said they had no time to build support for the move.

Eviction Freeze Set to Lapse as Biden Housing Aid Effort Lags [NYT]

…now…brett-likes-beer may be fucking dumb…but not so dumb as not to know what that little stunt would mean…but I guess it comes down to perspective

Now, the moratorium’s scheduled expiration at midnight on Saturday has left renters around the country packing their belongings and facing an uncertain future as they search for housing options. Already, homeless shelters have been adding beds in preparation for an influx of people in need of a safe place to live.

The Census Bureau’s most recent Household Pulse Survey, which captures the impacts of the pandemic, found that 3.6 million people thought it was somewhat or very likely they would be evicted within the next two months.
[…]
Now, many renters fear that the bill is coming due at a time when they have no way to pay it.
[…]
The moratorium has shielded struggling renters from eviction whether they lived in public or private housing, as long as they could prove they had lost income during the pandemic, attempted to obtain rental assistance and made an effort to pay as much rent as possible.
[…]
“The most frustrating and maddening thing about facing down this eviction cliff,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, “is knowing that there are abundant resources to assist tenants.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/us/eviction-moratorium-rent.html

…& I guess it’s not a co-incidence that the term rent-seeking has kind of specific meaning

Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth-creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] and potential national decline.

Attempts at capture of regulatory agencies to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

…so…at the risk of stating the obvious…that whole situation seems like a disaster as unjustifiable as it was predictable…but somehow I doubt that the blame will fall on the people who most deserve it

Traditionally, Democrats sought to justify big spending plans, like the Obama stimulus, by arguing that they were needed to boost demand in a weak economy. This was even true to a limited degree about the arguments made for the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion package Biden got enacted soon after taking office — although as its name suggests, the plan was pitched largely as disaster relief rather than as Keynesian stimulus.

Republicans, by contrast, derided Keynesian arguments. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, they called for cutting spending, not increasing it, buying fully into the doctrine of “expansionary austerity” — the claim that spending cuts would actually increase demand by inspiring confidence (or as I put it, they believed in the confidence fairy).
[…]
For what it’s worth, the evidence suggests that Democrats were right and Republicans wrong on both counts. The case for expansionary austerity was overwhelmingly refuted by experience, especially in the euro area, while the Keynesian multiplier-type analysis was vindicated. Supply-side economics has yet to offer a single convincing success story; the underwhelming results of the 2017 Trump tax cut are just the latest entry in an unbroken record of failure.

But a funny thing has happened. Republicans are now warning that Biden’s spending plans will cause the economy to overheat, feeding inflation — which is basically a Keynesian position, although it’s being used to argue against government expenditure. I guess the confidence fairy has left the building. Or maybe G.O.P. economics is situational — Keynesian or not depending on which position can be used to argue against Democratic spending plans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opinion/american-rescue-plan-stimulus-keynes.html

…it’s been said before…but in a sane world the GOP wouldn’t be considered to be a legitimate political organization at this point…they’re a racket

Republicans in Congress have dismissed the need for an investigation into what happened on Jan. 6 and in the days and weeks before the Capitol was overrun. They claim there’s nothing of value left to learn. However, new revelations about former president Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election show there is likely much more that still needs unearthing.

For months, Trump has been on a political jihad. It began the night of the election and has never ended. The latest disclosures offer a reminder that it was the president himself who was doing the most to corrupt the election results. The House select committee and other investigations are one way to begin to hold him more accountable.

These revelations are from notes kept by then-acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, top aide to then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, including a conversation the two men had with Trump on Dec. 27. The documents were provided by the Justice Department to Congress and released publicly on Friday.

Post journalists Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey had reported on Wednesday the existence of the notes, describing Trump as in regular, almost daily, contact with DOJ officials as he pressed them to investigate and prove various (false) claims of election irregularities. In that Dec. 27 conversation, Trump was told that the information he had about fraud claims was not accurate. Trump replied, according to the notes: “You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do.”

Trump was told further that the department would not and could not simply “snap its fingers” and change the outcome of the election. Trump said he understood but nonetheless wanted the department to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. congressmen,” according to Donoghue’s summary of the conversation.
[…]
Trump waged a public campaign of lies and falsehoods and, as the DOJ notes underscore anew, a behind-the-scenes campaign to pressure federal, state or local officials, hoping someone in an official capacity would offer a patina of credibility to those unproved or often disproved claims of fraud.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/leave-the-rest-to-me-new-doj-memos-show-theres-more-to-learn-about-trump-and-jan-6/2021/07/31/story.html

…with essentially little interest in that whole “for the people, by the people” thing…not that that’s new

Voting rights have been under assault from every quarter in 2021, as 18 states that have passed 30 voting restrictions and the Supreme Court has upheld state election rules that disadvantage minority voters. So far, the official response seems to be that the public should accept these laws and work around the burdens they impose. President Biden, for example, recently suggested that Democrats might counter the Republican voter suppression machine with some savvy grass-roots organizing. But there is also growing enthusiasm about these laws’ supposed “backlash effect.”
[…]
Increasingly, Republican-controlled legislatures are closing campus polling places, limiting early voting at colleges and universities, banning the use of student ID cards to meet voter identification requirements and making it harder for young adults to request mail-in ballots. Democratic members of Congress introduced a bill last August to protect young adults’ voting rights, citing “efforts to disenfranchise youth” that “could have lasting effects for decades to come.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/29/youth-vote-backlash-effect/

…in the same way that the people hit hardest always seem to have some striking similarities

The Federal Housing Act. The Social Security Act. The G.I. Bill. To list these landmark 20th-century laws is to understand how important government support was to building a broad middle class, endowed with a modest but meaningful “piece of the rock,” in the United States. It is also to acknowledge that this historic effort mostly bypassed people of African descent — who were deliberately, if often implicitly, denied the benefits. Of the $120 billion worth of housing built with federal backing between 1934 and 1962, only 2 percent was available to Black people due to “redlining” and other obstacles. Because agricultural and domestic workers — disproportionately Black at the time — were not covered by Social Security in 1935, Black Americans made up 23 percent of those initially left out of the program, twice their share of the total labor force. Benefits for World War II veterans were administered on a discriminatory basis. Not until the late 1960s were these disparities corrected, at least on paper, but the damage had been done.

Thus was the dispossession of Black people, which began with enslavement and continued through the Jim Crow era, compounded and perpetuated within living memory. The effects on household wealth persist to this day. The median White household had a net worth of $188,200 in 2019, of which residential real estate composed a major share, whereas the median Black family had $24,100 — about one-eighth as much — according to the Federal Reserve. If Black household wealth were proportionate to the Black share of the U.S. population, it would amount to $12.68 trillion, or about 13 percent of the total, rather than the actual $2.54 trillion, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis.

Narrowing the U.S. wealth gap in general is important; narrowing the racial wealth gap is urgent. It is not the outcome of impersonal market forces but the legacy of oppressive policy. As a country we have already wasted too many opportunities to tackle it head-on.

Narrowing the U.S. wealth gap is important. Narrowing the racial wealth gap is urgent. [WaPo]

…whereas…in a similarly predictable fashion

Save America, the leadership PAC where former president Donald Trump is asking loyalists to direct their political contributions, paid for lodging about two dozen times in the first six months of 2021.

Nine of those times, the payments went to properties owned by the former president, according to a filing made public on Saturday. All told, the PAC sent at least $68,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection, showing how the real estate mogul — long after ending his presidential campaign and leaving office — continues to use donor money at his own properties.

Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, separately spent $2,200 at Trump properties so far this year, according to a filing by the committee. And a Trump-backed PAC overseen by Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager, paid $21,810 to rent space at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, according to that group’s filing.

These are small sums compared to the kind of spending Trump did at his properties on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office. But they stand out because of the relatively little spending Trump has done from his post-presidency war chest. His Save America PAC spent little more than $3 million in the first half of the year, while raking in $62 million — part of a haul that left him with a political war chest of $102 million.

Since Trump entered the presidential race in June 2015, he has used his political campaigns and associated committees to pump more than $19 million into his own businesses, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal campaign-finance records.

His campaign is over. But Trump’s political groups are still spending donor money at his properties. [WaPo]

…not that you could take his word even for that

In the first half of 2021, the former president raised far more money online than any other Republican, federal records show. But his team claimed he had raised more than he actually did.
[…]
Mr. Trump raised far more money than any other Republican via WinRed, the party’s main processing site for online donations, records show, and more than each of the three main fund-raising arms of the Republican Party itself. His nearly $102 million in cash on hand was also more than each of the party committees.
[…]
Mr. Trump’s advisers inaccurately announced on Saturday that “his affiliated political committees raised nearly $82 million” in the first six months of 2021.

That figure counted at least $23 million in transfers to his new political action committees that had actually been raised last year in other Trump-affiliated accounts, according to an analysis of federal filings.
[…]
All told, WinRed’s filings showed that Mr. Trump had collected more than $56 million online into various accounts in the first six months of the year.

The biggest share, $34.3 million, came into a shared account with the Republican National Committee, which is known as the Trump Make America Great Again Committee; Mr. Trump’s political action committee is set to receive 75 percent of what went into the shared account, and the party received 25 percent.

In addition, Mr. Trump raised more than $21 million online directly into two new Save America political action committees that he controls.

Trump Has Built War Chest of More Than $100 Million [NYT]

…seriously…I’m not a lawyer & all…but it seems a whole hell of a lot like you could tick all the requisite boxes to run up a RICO case against the GOP in general & the trump cabal in particular?

Donald Trump insisted on Saturday that when he told senior justice department officials to “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me”, he was not attempting to subvert US democracy, but to “uphold the integrity and honesty of elections and the sanctity of our vote”.

The former president’s restatement of his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud came a day after Washington was rocked by news of his December call with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, a senior DoJ official.

Trump’s pressure on federal and state officials to overturn his national defeat and state losses to Biden has been well documented. Cases mounted by his campaign claiming electoral fraud were repeatedly thrown out of court.
[…]
But on Friday, the House oversight committee released memos taken by Richard Donoghue, a senior DoJ official, regarding a call with Rosen on 27 December. The memos brought Trump’s startling demand to light.

One Washington editor, Benjy Sarlin of NBC News, wrote on Twitter: “We can’t take a continuous historic scandal for granted just because he says it out loud all the time. These are Watergate-level allegations.”

Trump tries to defend ‘just say the election was corrupt’ demand [Guardian]

…oh, yeah…& them books keep getting hit…that’s gotta be a worry for some deserving people

The US Department of Justice on Friday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to hand Donald Trump’s tax returns to a House committee, saying the panel had “invoked sufficient reasons” for requesting them.

The news was a second blow for Trump in a matter of hours, after released DoJ memos revealed that as part of his campaign to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, he pressured top officials to falsely label the 2020 election as corrupt, then “leave the rest to me”.
[…]
“Today, the Biden administration has delivered a victory for the rule of law, as it respects the public interest by complying with Chairman [Richard] Neal’s request for Donald Trump’s tax returns,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“Access to former President Trump’s tax returns is a matter of national security. The American people deserve to know the facts of his troubling conflicts of interest and undermining of our security and democracy as president.”
[…]
Under federal law, the OLC said, the Department of the Treasury “must furnish the information to the committee”.
[…]
Elsewhere, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, has obtained copies of Trump’s personal and business tax records as part of a criminal investigation.

Trump tried to prevent his accountants from handing over the documents, taking the issue to the supreme court. The justices rejected Trump’s argument that he had broad immunity as president.

IRS must turn over Trump tax returns to Congress, DoJ says [WaPO]

…now there’s no shortage of other things we ought to be paying attention to…so I’m sorry I seem to have wasted most of this on that one orange obstruction that seems like nothing can clear…but…well…goddamn but I’m tired…& apparently this computer is determined to operate as slowly as I am this morning…so this is overdue already & I haven’t got to the part with the tunes…which I guess means I’m out of time for getting to most of the rest of the laundry list of links I could otherwise continue to extend this with in defiance of the whole “day of rest” thing…speaking of which…while I’d claim to be lucky in a good few ways…not the least of which being that nobody’s liable to turn me out of the spot where I lay my head…I have to confess I’d quite like to see for myself what the sleep of the rich feels like?

Remember the lines from that old folk song?

“If living were a thing that money could buy

“You know the rich would live and the poor would die.”

Sadly, research shows there’s little “if” about it. On average, poor people live less healthy lives and are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as the rich. That’s true for many well-documented reasons, including less healthy diets with too much processed food, polluted neighborhoods and a lot more toxic stress. In recent years, however, researchers have added one more factor to this mix: It turns out that the poor, as well as socially disadvantaged racial minorities, sleep much less well on average than the rich, which can take a major toll on their physical and mental health.
[…]
But here’s where the great sleep divide comes in. Over the years, researchers have repeatedly have found evidence that people in poverty get less sleep than those with more money.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/sleep-deficits-minorities-poor/2021/07/30/story.html

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39 Comments

  2. I thought this was interesting:

    https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/let-it-rip-f9c

    Andrew Sullivan, a native of the county of Surrey, England, tried for years to get US citizenship but was denied because of his HIV+ status. He finally has it, I think. 

    This story, of all things, made me realize why the Covid pandemic seemed so familiar and why my reaction swung from “yes, mask mask mask” and “despite my masking if I die from this so be it.” You see, friends, I lived through the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and the 1990s. AIDS is still around and it’s still deadly and there’s no vaccine, but there are palliative measures. We have a friend who, it is thought, contracted HIV in the summer of 1980. He’s still alive and thriving. But he, like me, like us, me and the Better Half, has endured hospital bedside vigils and funerals and memorial services. I was 22 when I first visited a friend in a hospital. He was also 22. He was hooked up to a respirator and could barely speak (he had thrush in his throat.) 

    I managed to understand him enough for him to say, “They don’t know what this is. It’s like a transmissable blood cancer. How the fuck is that possible?”

    This friend was a platonic friend, I’d never slept with him, so I said, “Would it be OK if I sort of came in to that bed with you and told you some stories and maybe you could get some rest?” He was skeletal. I think he was down to well under 100 pounds. But I crawled in, careful not to disturb the machinery he was hooked up to, and started talking.  I had just met Better Half so I described his many charms but though I had baited my hook I hadn’t landed the fish.

    “You don’t have any problem attracting men,” rasped my friend, as I cozied up next to him in that grim little hospital bed.

    “No, you’re the man magnet. You’ve slept with more men than I will in my entire lifetime.”

    “I hope your lifetime lasts longer than mine.” And with that he fell asleep, and I gingerly left that awful hospital bed, and he was dead two weeks later.

    HAPPY SUNDAY!!!!

    • …not that I don’t see your point…or sympathize since I’ve known people who aren’t around any more thanks to that virus…but I think it’s around the “let ‘er rip” part where I don’t know if I’m still on board?

      …I’d agree that we need to find a way to not have the folks who literally won’t take their medicine fucking life up for those of us who either have or for whatever reason can’t…because that’s wrong & dumb & a whole bunch of different kinds of unfair

      …not least when vaccination rates globally are nowhere near reaching a point that would allow for pretending the pandemic has run out of steam

      …but at the risk of going back on my promise not to rant about the tories in the UK…who are very much trying to do exactly that

      “We are going to see problems with Covid for a long time,” said Prof Adam Finn of Bristol University. “The virus has shown itself to be genetically more nimble than we expected, though not as much as the influenza virus. So I would envisage Covid being a continuing problem for some time, with annual death tolls reaching thousands and possibly tens of thousands.”
      […]
      Most of those who will die will probably be the old and the seriously ill – the same set of people who have succumbed every winter to influenza and other respiratory diseases. It remains to be seen if Covid-19 will increase average fatality numbers or merely act as a new addition to the repertoire of illnesses that kill vulnerable people every year.
      […]
      “This is what we will have to live with: a new nasty disease that will continue to cause problems. I think we can use influenza as an example here. We have vaccines for influenza and yet we still have perhaps an average of 20,000 deaths a year in the UK.”

      [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/31/uk-can-expect-thousands-of-covid-deaths-every-year-warn-scientists]

      …there’s definitely a part of me that feels like the people refusing to take the shots aren’t as much to blame as the ones who’ve deliberately cultivated the kind of cognitive landscape in which that seems like a choice they think is in their interests?

      • That was kind of my point, which was kind of buried in my unhinged Joyce-ian stream-of-consciousness comment. We DO have a vaccine to protect us against this, Covid, and if a fully vaccinated person, like I am, and the Better Half is, somehow contracts it the chances of us being hospitalized are low, and dying from it is even lower.

        As a “practicing homosexual” (there’s an old joke in the gay community about this: who needs practice?) I’m often offered/asked to take blood drawn so they can test for HIV. I always go for this because it’s free (for me) and why not?

        This comes with some caveats, though. A positive result is forwarded to the New York State Department of Health. As we saw with the mass extermination of nursing home residents during the onset of the Covid pandemic they’re…

        Anyway, they will then contact you and demand that you turn over contact information for anyone you have ever had sex with. That’s fine if you’re a randy 22-year-old, as that friend in the hospital bed was and I was, but not if you’ve been coupled off monogamously for 35 years, as I have. I was with the same medical practice for 20 years. It was run by two gay male doctors. It’s really tough to get in there, and I only got Better Half in if he agreed to see the founding partner’s (my doctor) partner. Better Half goes there to this day.

        About 10 years ago I left that practice because I had an AIDS test and that other doctor (Better Half’s doctor) told me that I was HIV+. Before I could say anything he said, “Knowing you both, I had the lab rerun the results, and you’re negative.”

        I kept my temperature down to a simmer but as I walked to the subway I said out loud to myself, “You’re telling a gay man my age that I’m HIV+?!?! All the deaths…and I’m not fucking HIV+?!?!”

        It being NYC no one even noticed my muttered rage but it was enough for me to leave that doctor behind.

    • I was 33 when my best friend died of AIDS. I sat in his room too. I’ve lost several friends to AIDS since, but it hasn’t happened in a long time thanks to medical advances. 
       
      The elderly in Florida have something like a 95% vaccination rate (working from memory and can’t find a citation). Why? They’re almost all shitty Republicans who watch Fox News daily. But they’re vaccinated. One theory is that they lived through smallpox and polio and diptheria and tetanus and measles and mumps and all the things we commonly get vaccinated against. They’re used to vaccines. Most of them get annual flu shots.
       
      My point is that once you’ve watched someone die of something that no one understood and that no one could stop, it occurs to you that dying of something completely preventable is fucking stupid. Even Fox News can’t wipe that out of the old people’s memories. They’re certainly not going to wipe it from mine. 

      • It was a really shocking and horrible time to go through. This is a weird and very trivial and possibly offensive comment, but I happened to be at my mother’s house when Rock Hudson died. My father died fairly young and my mother’s father died very young and her mother had just died, so she was a lot more accustomed to death than I was, though I think my AIDS-related death count was up to three at that point, one by suicide.

        My mother never acknowledged the fact that I was gay but she wasn’t hostile about it, it just never came up. But when this announcement about Rock Hudson was broadcast over the nightly news my mother turned to me and said, “I don’t want to attend your funeral. I want you to attend mine. Do whatever you can to protect yourself.” Wise words, Mom. I did it by coupling off less than a year after Rock Hudson’s death.

        • I tried to have the same conversation with my friend. He told me he was very healthy and took good care of himself and he felt like AIDS was something that happened to men who didn’t have healthy lifestyles. That was … not accurate.
           
          It’s odd you should mention suicide, though. My friend stopped taking the medications that were available to him then (1993) which weren’t as sophisticated as what’s available now, but did help. It wasn’t a financial issue — he was a successful attorney. He just stopped. His partner lived another 14 years, but he chose not to. 

          • I had a fairly famous friend (he’ll remain nameless here) who lived with HIV for about 30 years post-diagnosis. He was in his late 50s. One day he phoned me and, among other things, said, “Mattie, I miss so many of my friends. They’re all dead.” “Well, that that’s the thing about being among the living. You can always make new friends. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

            He killed himself two months later.

    • Sullivan is a hardliner on immigration for minorities, demanding the strictest enforcement possible of the most trivial rules, but was able to pull strings to get his own pot bust thrown out, which was sufficient to deny him his Green Card and eventual citizenship.
       
       https://www.gawker.com/5356925/andrew-sullivans-federal-pot-favors
       
      It is completely in line with his broader racism. The guy is obsessed with crackpot theories about African Americans, including genetic intellectual disabilities, and there is a reason people like Adam Serwer and Jamelle    despise him.
       
      And despite what he repeats ad nauseum, he’s not a racist because he’s just asking questions. It’s because, as any examination of his record shows, he is determined to ignore the answers.
       
      https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/04/andrew-sullivans-perpetuation-of-model-minority-and-black-pathology-myths-is-pretty-boring-at-this-point.html
       
       https://mobile.twitter.com/adamserwer/status/1303712738129084421

    • I’m still reading “And The Band Played On” ( it’s really long, and quite taxing so I’ve taken a couple breaks). There are so many parallels between COVID and the start of AIDS in the 80s. The stonewalling from the government, denial from various groups, religious interference. Humans really don’t learn anything. The only difference is this isn’t just targeting a sinful, marginalized group so they did manage to eke out a vax.

          • The author (Randy Shilts) would go on to die of AIDS himself. He was diagnosed as HIV+ the year Band was published. 

            My copy, the one I’ve read twice, is a hardcover 1st edition. I picked it up at Housing Works, which is (I’m grossly simplifying this) a thrift store whose proceeds go to fighting AIDS and housing the homeless. My copy is unmarked, no handwritten inscriptions or anything. I’m willing to bet that its original owner, whoever that person may have been, died of AIDS. 

            If Better Half predeceases me, a future that I can’t even rationally contemplate, and then I die, I’m going to donate our physical possessions to Housing Works. Band will begin life anew, as will all kinds of other books, and high-end mid-century modern furniture, and electronics and tech in abundance.

            Much as they may want it, no one I know needs any of this stuff so free to a good home. Or, because it’s Housing Works, free to a new home for someone who finally has one. Careful with that deceptively sleek living room sofa. It contains a pullout queen-size bed and weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

            • Great organization!! I will add it to my list of places I donate to. Maybe even arrange something similar since i expect to be a childless singleton upon my demise. Some scientific organization is already getting my body.
               
              And i did know Randy died of AIDS. I watched a thing about him on CSPAN during Pride month (what a weird sentence), which is how I knew about the priest project. And i got my hands on his 2nd book too, about gays in the military. Both that and my Band copy were bought used.

              • This is more overshare on my part so forgive me in advance. Years ago during a routine driver’s license renewal I signed up to be an organ donor. Better Half was dubious.

                “Mattie, you’re blind as a bat without your glasses. You’ve smoked since you were a teenager. You could drink Boris Yeltsin under the table [that’s how long ago this was.] What exactly do you think would be helpful when you die?”

                No good deed goes unpunished.

                • Lol, i do wonder wth they’re going to do with me. I’ve got chronic complaints, never had a kid, am covered in tattoos… Otoh I don’t know what they’re looking for either. The Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois takes all comers. I could be plopped at a body farm or blown up by military contractors. 

    • I also couldn’t help but think how so many people (mostly republicans/conservatives, but also plenty of dems…) reacted to the AIDs crisis.
      I remember people wanted to have public lists of people who tested positive, ban them from schools, work, housing, and transit, medical professionals didn’t want to treat them, etc.
      Long after we knew better, people acted as if HIV was transmissible by mere proximity or casual contact.
      and, now that we have a pandemic that actually is transmissible by proximity and casual contact, all of a sudden these very same people pretend to care about medical privacy and personal choices…

      • There was a time when you weren’t allowed to travel to certain places abroad if you were HIV+, let alone try to move there and get citizenship. I can’t remember how this was supposed to be enforced, I think it was if the country required a special visa and you were planning to stay for more than 60 days you had to provide proof of HIV negativity. 

    • …I suspect it isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this but the thing I mostly think of when the subject of water privatization comes up is the film even the rain

      …much as there are some unpleasant statistics about the relative scarcity of fresh water, globally speaking…the idea that access to it should be treated like a commodity rather than a right on a par with breathing is…well…hard to swallow?

  4. This is probably old news for everyone here but really important for people that don’t understand how we got where we are with dark money in politics and more importantly the court…
     
     

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