It’s been raining for two days, we’ve got a high temp in the low 60s today, the leaves are changing color, and it’s finally fall. 🍂🍂🍂 Finally. After this long, hot, dry summer, I’m just about ready to go flop down on the ground under the rain and soak it in, folks. While I’m talking myself out of that idea, here’s some news to read.
🏡 New York Times: She Bought Her Dream Home. Then a ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Changed the Locks.
Sovereign Citizens used to be one of my favorite kinds of absolute bananapants people to read about, back when they were hardly known and rarely encountered. But there’s more of them than there used to be, and they’re getting more active and scarier than they used to be, and in this day and age where the idea of an observable, provable shared reality is rapidly crumbling under the constant onslaught of Fox News, OANN, MAGAcultists, and other fact-adverse freaks, SovCits aren’t that much fun anymore.
⛈️ NBC News: Triple jeopardy: Children face dark future of climate disasters
I love how these stories like to throw in lines like “But there’s still reason for hope, if we just blahblahblah…” Like, guys. We have proven definitively that we are absolutely not going to take any action to moderate this mess. We’ve been proving that for decades now, and if the pandemic years have done anything, they’ve underlined the fact that we will not act to save ourselves in time. I don’t know what to tell you about all this. Learn to swim and build your bunker-style houses out of concrete, I guess? Get really into the prepper lifestyle? Meeting the challenge of climate change is going to require immediate action of the swift and painful variety from the government, and these assholes can’t even get together long enough to agree to pay the bills they ran up last year, so I think we’re probably all just boned.
🤬 Charlie Warzel, Galaxy Brain: What Do We Do With All This Rage?
Dude, I don’t know. I spend entire days gagging on rage and despair. When I leave the house I want to bring a stick with me, so I can just lay into the people around me while screaming “STOP SUCKING AT BEING HUMAN.” Which would admittedly be a not-helpful response, but like, I’m pretty sure I’d feel better. It’s been almost two years, we have a mask mandate here, and I still saw people dicknosing or not wearing masks at all and utterly failing at physical distancing when I had to sprint through the grocery store in person the other day. I’m furious all day every day and I can only call or email my representatives so many times in one day before I start ending up on watch lists.
For starters, don’t buy this book. Bitch don’t deserve the money. If you must read it, steal it. But do read this article, there’s some fun/terrifying stuff in it. For example, you remember when Trump got rushed to the hospital a couple of years ago to “start his annual physical” and everyone was all like “Well, he definitely must’ve had a heart attack or something because that’s obviously a bullshit story”? Turns out he was getting a colonoscopy, according to Stephanie Grisham, former chief of staff to the First Lady and former “press secretary” who never held a single press conference. Could still be bullshit, but at least it’s funny and embarrassing bullshit, which is a slight improvement.
🌀 Ars Technica: We’re about to run out of Atlantic hurricane names—again
Hey, we’re running out of hurricane names again this year. We’ve had 19 named storms so far, and hurricane season isn’t over yet. See above, re: growing up in a time of near-constant climate disasters.
Notes & Thoughts 