A note on formatting, in case it’s not clear. Comments on new topics are separated by “==” (a double equal sign) while parts of reply threads are separated by “-” (an en dash). That said, let’s get on with this.

==

2026-05-15
[A post, the link to which I unfortunately failed to record, discussed the requirement for new cars to have a kill switch, supposedly to prevent drunk driving. It included four questions for discussion.]

Answering the questions in order:

Do you have an analog car and are you planning to keep it? Yes, and I’m keeping it as long as I can keep it running.

Does this bother you, or honestly, does it not? Yes, it bothers me, bothers me both because of the invasion of privacy (or, rather, the off-handed assumption of a lack of it) and the paucity of attention to the potential for unintended consequences.

Do you think saving 13,000 lives a year [the claimed benefit] is worth it? “Lives saved” is a claim, not a fact, and should be treated with the same skepticism as any other promotional claim should be. On the other hand, “false accusations” is a reality and while we can’t quantify the effect of these measures on that, we can safely assume based on the historical record that it will primarily affect minorities and other marginalized communities.

Is there a bigger agenda behind the legislation that we aren’t being told about? Maybe not an “agenda” in the sense of a conscious plan but it is part of an overall trend, an overall bias call it, toward the government in general and the police in particular knowing more and more about us while we are more and more restricted about what we can know about them - with the phrases “public safety” and “national security” waved like magic incantations.

Or do you think there’s a better way to get there? “You got anything better?” is not an argument, it’s a way of avoiding the issues and objections by demanding that you on the fly come up with something “better” - which assumes the supposedly desired end, whatever it is in a given case, requires no justification to a degree that “the ends justify the means” and thus the method is the only question involved while unintended consequences are irrelevant.

==

2026-05-16
[Popular Information revealed that The Orange Overlord had been investing in stocks just before acting in a way to promote them, clear evidence of insider training. Some commentators bemoaned a supposed inability to do anything about it because of presidential immunity.]

Will people puh-leeze stop saying that SCOTUS gave The Orange Overlord “absolute immunity” so he can do whatever the hell he wants, commit whatever crimes he chooses. That immunity decision was horrible but it was limited to actions related to “core presidential duties and powers,” if I recall the quote correctly. I don’t see how even this court could create a fig leaf big enough to define insider stock trading as a “core presidential duty.”

The statute of limitations for insider trading is five years for civil cases and six years for criminal ones. So yes, the SOB can be held responsible. Very likely not until he’s out of office, but yes.

Stop letting him off the hook before you even cast your line.

==

2026-05-17
[Re the White House video of TOO doing his bit during a Bible reading event]

Okay I will say he didn’t look as bad as I’d been told but otherwise, what a disaster.

He obviously had never seen those words before, had made no preparation - but my word, even for a cold reading, what a crappy job!

==

2026-05-18
[On May 18, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that hospitals which stopped GAC because of The Orange Overlord’s anti-trans EO discriminated against transgender youth in violation of state law.]

The most important sentence in the whole thing: “Because the Kennedy Declaration isn’t federal law.”

YES! And it’s damn well about time everybody - and I mean anybody and everybody - stopped acting as if any of that mass of heinous Executive Orders is anything other than what it is: the vapid ramblings spewed by biased fanatics dreaming of what they wish the law would be, not what it is.

-

2026-05-18
[Excellent news but can it be overturned by the Supreme Court?]

Not easily, anyway. This is a ruling by the Supreme Court of Colorado - a state court, not a federal one. SCOTUS should have no say unless there is a federal law to the contrary - and, as the decision points out, a declaration from Robert F. “My father would be ashamed of me” Kennedy Jr. is NOT a law.

==

2026-05-20
[Erin Reed reported that California has reaffirmed its policy re trans girl high school athletes where if a cis girl places lower than a trans girl, for the purposes of awards and meet records, she is treated as if the trans girl didn’t compete at all.]

In this case, as in a number of others, the thing that strikes me is that the people supposedly damaged by the presence of someone like A. B. - that is, the other competitors - seem to be the ones who are the least troubled by it.

==

2026-05-20
[In a discussion of supposed advantages trans women athletes have over cis women athletes, it was noted how the idea was being applies in competitions like disc golf, darts, and chess. Another unrecorded link, dang it.]

Just a bit of trivia to throw in: There is a way in which physicality can provide an advantage in chess, particularly at its highest levels. A game of tournament or match chess at master or grandmaster level can take a physical toll on a player because of the mental effort involved. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a long, hard-fought game to be lost because someone got tired enough to make mistakes.

That is, physical endurance can make a difference.

It’s trivia because there is so much individual variation and it’s such an individual quality that it’s silly to suggest men have more endurance than women.

==

Leave a comment

2026-05-21
Why are there no ethical complaints against Reed O’Conner [the notorious judge in the notorious Northern District of Texas]?

He is patently biased to the point that he essentially has decided LGBTQ+-related cases even before they are filed. Overt animus drips from his every order. (Why is that not an issue in every such case he handles?)

He got a request to enforce a subpoena against Rhode Island Hospital signed by two of his former law clerks (Why didn’t he recuse himself?) and issued it hours later. (Why was the target not allowed a chance to respond?)

He has continued to press the matter even after learning (assuming he didn’t know originally) that the parties were in active negotiations literally the day before the request for the enforcement order. (Why didn’t he withdraw the order as not ripe?)

And now he has declared that he can decide where the targets of his bigoted wrath can seek relief and by implication what cases and motions other courts can accept.

And yet nothing happens and lawyers wonder why people don’t trust the system.

-

2026-05-21
[It’s really not that difficult: Just don’t hand over the information. Do not obey a single ruling handed down by Reed O’Connor]

I expect it will soon - indeed it has - come to that, where people need to just say “no.” The problem, the difficulty, with what we used to call “doing ‘no’” is that it involves consequences and it’s always easier to convince ourselves that those consequences (which seem real and immediate) are of greater weight than the potential gains (which seem distant and uncertain) than it is to convince ourselves that despite that the risks are worth the goal.

Breaking through that psychological barrier takes a good deal of courage, perhaps even more so for those in situations like hospitals, where people may fear the consequences not only to themselves but to others.

So I have some sympathy for places like Rhode Island Hospital even as I agree that the moral (and in the long run, more effective) course of action would be to tell Reed O’Connor and the entire 5th Circuit to stick it.

-

2026-05-21
[”These people should suffer such overwhelming personal / professional consequences from their collaboration that whatever the Trump regime threatens them with looks preferable.” (quote edited for length)]

My sympathy (or, as you tellingly put it, “sympathy”) was specifically directed at people in the crosshairs of the state, including situations such as that involving Rhode Island Hospital where those targeted may be deterred from resistance not only by the consequences to themselves but to the broader community; in the specific example, those whose access to care might be damaged by institutional resistance - which could, for example, result in the loss of Medicaid funding.

I recognize that you refer to “people in positions of power” but also say every person who “failed to say no” should be “hounded from polite society” and include those who acted under “whatever the Trump regime threaten[ed] them with” among the collaborators.

I find it both strategically dumb and morally offensive to lump those who wind up bending before the power of the state together with actual collaborators, who by definition are those who willingly cooperate with an enemy or oppressor.

Reed O’Conner (who faces no threat from Trump) is a collaborator - indeed, we could properly call him an oppressor. Rhode Island Hospital (which is under threat) is not. And we should not confuse the two.

I repeat: I have sympathy for places like Rhode Island Hospital even as I agree that the ethical and (ultimately) more effective course would have been to say “no.”

In the immortal words of Mr. Spock, “I understand. I do not approve.”

==

Subscribe now

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

2026-05-22
After surviving a major heart attack, my wife was involved for several years with a group called WomenHeart, speaking to community groups and doing outreach at health fairs and the like. The stories I heard about women not receiving proper care because of the ignorance ranging from EMTs to MDs about women’s heart heath were both jaw-dropping and revealing.

It’s truly disturbing to hear now that in the six years since her death (ironically - and I maintain that is a correct use of the word here - not from a heart issue) it seems not much has changed.

==

2026-05-22
Please don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.

“Right-wingers falsely claim San Diego mosque shooters were trans”

OTOH, it admittedly was amusing to see the San Diego police described as “leftists.”

==

2026-05-24
[Jess Craven said some were upset that she said the Harris campaign’s silence on Israel/ Gaza cost the election.]

Just a quick note about the postmortem and Gaza: Don’t sweat the critics. You were right.

Openly calling out the slaughter in Gaza might have cost Harris the votes of some folks, but it for damn sure would have gained her those of a whole lot more. Enough to change the outcome? Precisely because the gap in so many states was so small, I’d say yes - but anyone reasonable would have to at least allow there was a good chance.

What can’t be denied is that her silence hurt her chances.

More to come!

I aim to sorta more or less kinda do one of these every week (or so) but it really depends on when I have enough to make it worth reading. This time of year is hard for me for personal reasons I will not inflict on you, so the schedule might be kinda stretched. Just remember it is worth at least what you paid for it. :-)

That said, on we go.

2026-04-28
[One I missed from last time, about Trump as “a successful businessman” in response to a post about a filing “sounding like a Truth Social post.”]

“Successful businessmen don’t claim bankruptcy SIX TIMES on other people’s money.”

Actually, that’s the best way to declare bankruptcy. :-)

And as long as the suckers keep investing, he’ll keep peddling the BS, grabbing whatever profits he can before it does under, and letting others take the losses. He’s still doing it.

==

2026-05-03
[A video about contranyms, words that can have contradictory meanings (think “clip” meaning both “cut” and “attach”), used as one example “quite.”]

The bit about “quite good” meaning either “passable” or “excellent” depending on delivery raises the (not really related to the topic but I’m going to raise anyway) issue of the significance of inflection in language. I recall a museum program I was involved in, in which one part referred to the sentence “What are you doing?” and how the meaning changed depending on which word was stressed. The idea being expressed in each case, as in the cases of “quite good” and some others, was in more than the words alone.

==

2026-05-08
[The FTC demanded extensive records from the Endocrine Society and WPATH re trans health care, including identifying information about those who have received treatment. A comment: “I suppose the next step for the FTC is to file these cases in the Fifth Circuit so they end up in front of Judge Kacsmaryk.”]

That, they can’t do. This was in the DC District Court so an appeal would go to the DC Court of Appeals. Despite my cynicism, I can’t imagine that even the 5th CCoA would take an appeal from a case in a different circuit.

They could try to re-file the case from scratch in the 5th Circuit, but even that would face a hard-to-refuse motion for change of venue because the agency is in DC.

-

2026-05-08
[That’s what they did with a hospital in Rhode Island - got a subpoena in Texas.]

Not exactly. As I understand it, what happened there is that the DOJ issued a subpoena and both sought and got an order to enforce it all on the same day (April 30). They technically could file for that order anywhere since it’s a new order unrelated to an existing suit.

It’s true that the Texas court could and should have said “You filed this in the wrong place. Go away.” But what matters here is that this is not a case of trying to appeal a district court ruling in a different circuit.

What’s happening in the other case is that the subpoena itself is being challenged in the federal district court for Rhode Island. If that court issues an injunction (which, as the brief notes, seven other courts have done with similar demands), an appeal would have to go to the 1st CCoA, not the 5th.

As a sidebar, I was amused to see that the filing by the ACLU on behalf of the Child Advocate for RI used the Skrmetti decision against the DOJ, noting that in it (quoting the filing) “the Supreme Court reaffirmed that ‘[w]e afford States “wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty,”’ including specifically in the area of medical care for gender dysphoria.”

In other words, the ACLU is arguing that the DOJ is trying to deny Rhode Island the very latitude that Skremetti allowed it.

-

2026-05-13
[Don’t think that will stop 5th circuit. How do they get to rule on that Rhode Island case?]

Sorry for the delayed response; I’ve been out of it of late.

I thought I was clear but apparently I wasn’t, so I’ll try again.

First, I’ll give the “I’m not a lawyer” speech so there may be subtleties and sneaky moves available of which I’m unaware, but that said, I’m confident I’ve got the basics right.

Okay. There are two things here: the subpoena and the order to enforce it. They came out of the notorious Northern District of Texas. That court could have (and reasonably should have) said the motion to obtain the order was filed in the wrong venue - but it didn’t. No surprise there.

So if there was to be some appeal of the enforcement order on some grounds like it was overly broad or didn’t allow enough time to comply or whatever, that would be in the 5th Circuit, since that’s where it was issued.

HOWEVER, another rather common course is to move to quash the subpoena itself. Such a motion has been filed in federal court in Rhode Island along with the argument that this is the proper venue (which it would certainly appear to be). If that is successful, which I hope it will be, it would leave nothing for the 5th Circuit to rule on because the order to enforce would be moot. (You can hardly order enforcement of a subpoena that effectively doesn’t exist.)

What’s more, if the feds wanted to appeal a decision to quash the subpoena they would have to pursue it in the 1st Circuit (since that’s where the decision was from) - again leaving the 5th Circuit with nothing to do.

The feds will likely argue that the 5th Circuit is the correct venue because that’s where the case arose, but considering that the subpoena is to a hospital in Rhode Island, that is such a tissue-thin argument that I can’t see any self-respecting court - which I gather those of the 1st Circuit are, even if the 5th CCoA isn’t - buying it.

I’m sorry I wasn’t clear before; I was trying to avoid going on too long.

[Update: There was an attempt in Texas to stay the order; the judge and the 5th CCoA both refused. However, in an appropriately-harsh ruling on May 13, Judge Mary McElroy of the District Court for the District of Rhode Island accused the DOJ of having misled both the Texas court and hers as part of an “ideological crusade” against transgender people and then quashed the subpoena on three separate grounds: the underlying legal theory was wrong as a matter of law, it was issued in bad faith, and it violated the right of personal privacy under the 14th Amendment.]

[Update of the Update: The Texas judge said in effect “Screw Rhode Island, send me the stuff.” Because the subpoena had been modified so that the records went to the judge and not the DOI (Department of Injustice) and were now - supposedly - anonymized, the 1st CCoA failed to uphold McElroy’s ruling and the records are being transferred into the questionable hands of the reactionary, anti-LGBTQ+ and even more anti-trans hands of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas.]

==

2026-05-09
[A video of members of the TN legislature after the redistricting vote prompted the comment “It’s always old white guys.”]

Not all old white guys! As a 77 y.o. white guy, I resent that!

And yes, absolutely, I am being sarcastic. In fact, when I saw the vid, I had the same thought: “A buncha old white guys. Of course.”

==

2026-05-09
[Re the same video.]

Contrary to some thoughts here, the size of their dicks is irrelevant. What matters is the size of their souls, so shriveled, desiccated, and evacuated as to no longer be worthy of the word.

==

2026-05-09
[Some Democrats are finding a way of talking about trans rights: contrasting GOPper focus on it with other issues.]

Kinda like what I suggested for candidates a bit ago: You don’t have to make trans rights the - or even a - centerpiece of your campaign, because it’s not something high on the list of most people’s concerns. But you support it, you acknowledge it, and when challenged on it, you Don’t. Back. Down.

For all of us who are trans folks and trans allies but aren’t public figures, the bottom line remains: Got to somehow keep on keepin’ on, taking strength from whatever we can whenever we can.

==

Subscribe now

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Leave a comment

2026-05-12
[The FCC called for public comment on a proposal to add notification of LGBTQ+ (particularly trans) content in programs to TV warning labels. This was my comment.]

The proposal to add “transgender and gender non-binary” and “gender identity themes” to the list of TVOMB [the TV Oversight Management Board] warning labels is unnecessary, stigmatizing, and driven by animus. It should be withdrawn.

It’s generally agreed - at least to a degree sufficient to impact policy - that exposure to themes such as sex and violence is unhealthy for children too young to put it in context. Recognizing and considering the existence of LGBTQ+, particularly here transgender people, is neither; that is, there is no such general agreement and indeed such exposure is not harmful - but essentially equating it with exposure to sex, violence, unnecessarily coarse language, and so on is in fact harmful to the people whose very existence is being labeled a source of concern.

This proposal neither reflects nor advances the public interest; rather, it reflects and advances the bias of a repressive, fearful fringe to which the FCC and the White House wrongly seem eager to cater.

At a time when restrictions on gender-affirming care are under attacks that increasingly include adults as well as young folks, perhaps the FCC would like to drop the pretense of this being about “protect the children” and go all the way to a TV version of the Hayes Code. The people of this country, even its children, are too grown up for that.

Withdraw this proposal.

See you again - keep those cards and letters coming!

Allons-y!

===

2026-04-22
[YouTuber Jesse Dollemore cited polls showing majorities in favor of impeachment/removal of TOO but kept wondering about the undecided.]

To answer Jesse’s question about “Who are these people,” the 8% unsure about impeachment, I’d suggest that some of them are those who might favor impeachment/removal but think success is so unlikely that it’s a waste of energy and political capital to make it a focus.

Consider: There are now 45 Dem Senators plus 2 Independents who caucus with the party, for a total of 47. There are 22 GOPpers up for reelection to the Senate this fall. If the Dems hold every one of their seats and flip fully half of those GOPper seats, that total rises to 58. Even then if in a Senate trial every one of that 58 (including such as John Fetterman) voted to convict, it would still take the votes of 9 GOPers to reach a 2/3 majority.

Not an impossible task but if you don’t find those numbers daunting, you’re not paying attention.

===

2026-04-23
[From Erin in the Morning: The FCC is seeking comment on whether the TV Parental Guidelines rating system needs to be changed to penalize shows for transgender or nonbinary content.]

It’s worth noting that if TV programs should be expected should have some sort of indication that themes relating to gender are involved, then every single program with people, real or animated (and maybe some without), should have such a notice because the failure to include characters who are some flavor of LGBTQ+ is every bit as much a statement of “gender ideology” as is having any who are.

-

2026-04-23
[Comment: The rating system I support: parents review the content and decide if it’s appropriate for their child, no one else’s.]

Just be aware that you will get the response “How can I review a TV show before it’s broadcast? Isn’t that what the ratings system is for? So shouldn’t it be expanded?”

Of course that argument becomes self-defeating because you’d either have to have ratings for every single topic that anyone at all might find offensive or concerning - which is a practical impossibility - or say it’ll be up to the government to decide what topics “need parental review” and which don’t and how many potentially concerned parents/guardians are necessary for the government to provide the government-determined appropriate warning.

In other words, chaos or censorship.

The problem is, most people won’t get past mentally adding “to include MY concerns” to the end of my opening quote.

===

2026-04-23
[Texas Tech bans LGBTQ+ topics, including in theses and dissertations]

As bans are being applied even to graduate level research, does anyone remember when the whole thing was about THE CHILDREN!!! OMG SAVE THE CHILDREN!!!

I seem to remember that....

===

2026-04-26
What we now have in hand [thanks to Chris Geidner] is proof of what we thought and expected (and any among us who didn’t should have): This SCOTUS is making it up as it goes along, inventing and ignoring procedures and legal principles as needed to obtain pre-decided, ideologically desired, results.

Bear in mind that the power - really the only power - of any court is the acceptance of its authority and legitimacy. Even violent enforcement of its rulings requires that acceptance among the enforcers. And the loss of respect and legitimacy of this court has gone so far that I can’t help but both wonder and fear there may soon come a time when people in some position of power start saying “I don’t care what the Supreme Court says, I’m doing it anyway.”

===

2026-04-26
The death penalty is a relic of barbarism that has no place in a society that even claims to be civilized. That it’s being pushed by an administration that prides itself on being “tough” and “manly” and “lethal” headed by a man-child so doubtful of his own merit that he has to plaster his name on anything available in the (no doubt vain) hope that he will be remembered by history as someone powerful and worthy of that notice should come as no surprise.

We are a shameful outlier. We are the only UN member state in the Americas to have executed anyone since 2008. We are virtually alone among - I almost used the passé term “our allies” - NATO nations in maintaining this badge of brutality, this symbol of savagery, which despite the lack of any evidence that it reduces the murder rate, despite the demonstrated racist bias in its imposition, despite the execution of innocent people, despite the murder rate continuing to gradually decline, despite dropping support, it itself refuses to die.

Twenty-three US states, Washington, DC, and four US territories have banned capital punishment. Of the 27 states and one territory that allow it, seven have a moratorium on it and five more have had no executions for over 10 years, leaving 16 states and the feds with active death penalties.

That’s 16 too many.

===

Leave a comment

2026-04-28
[The DOI - Department of Injustice - filed a motion to lift the injunction blocking The Orange Overlord’s ballroom; the motion “more closely resembled a Truth social post than a legal filing.” One comment defended the filing, saying “It reads like advocacy. So what? Where is the sanctionable conduct?”]

The “what” is that while it can be generously described as advocacy, it is advocacy not addressed to the court but to The Orange Overlord in an on-going effort to maintain favor in his sight by stringing together a list of his fantasies punctuated with effusive praise of his “ability, foresight, [and] talent” - even as the facts related to the ballroom have not shifted and “public safety” is “central” only as a means to advance a selfish ego-driven project undertaken without lawful authority.

So the sanctionable conduct is in filing such a patently frivolous motion.

===

2026-04-30
[An image showed ‘70s homophobia and ‘20s transphobia using the same language.]

Exactly. Not just the same clams, the same damn words.

Oh, but you missed one, the perpetual “THE CHILDREN! OMG SAVE THE CHILDREN!”

-

2026-04-30
[I do fight to protect our trans kids.]

Okay…. but that reads like you think I was disagreeing with you somehow. I wasn’t. I’ve been struck before how it’s not only the same claims being made in each case, it is frequently in the exact same words. (Although for me, the “then” case stretches back to the ‘50s, when again, it was the same claims in the same words.

Which was why my last remark, more a case of bitter humor than actually suggesting it be included (it really is too long) because “save the children” always seems to be at the heart of this sort of fear-driven social panic - especially this one, which unlike most social panics did not arise organically but was deliberately designed and created (and is being maintained) for selfish ideological reasons of social and political dominance.

===

2026-04-30
[Idaho passed an extreme bathroom ban, covering all public facilities, government and private, including single-stall ones. One trans person spoke about the difficulties that presented.]

“do I avoid going out altogether?”

Yes. That is exactly the point, to make trans folks disappear from society.

===

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Subscribe now

2026-05-01
[On April 9, responding to a post about a methodologically-flawed study saying puberty blockers are dangerous, someone asked what kind of review the study received. I answered by describing the general impression of the publication’s standards. On May 1, a reply to that said they think the publication has an anti-trans bias based on earlier having published an equally-flawed survey of related studies. Got all that? Okay.]

Thank you for this. I hadn’t known about the Baxendale study you examined, but I did note that it pursued the same logic that anti-trans studies of the literature often do: Studies producing what I’ll call pro-trans results (defined as “not producing results useful to anti-trans ideologues”) are dismissed for not having RCTs and/or for having a small sample while neither of those standards are required for those that produce anti-trans results.

I hope it was clear that in my original comment I wasn’t defending the study in question; someone asked about what standards for publication the study had met, so I described the publication.

Without being more familiar with the journal, I don’t know if Acta Paediatrica has a bias on the topic but if it has a bias, I rather suspect it lies in the “moderately picky about what it accepts” and “cited relatively rarely” parts. “Sure, we’ll take it. Got pages to fill.”

===

2026-05-01
[Pete “Manly Man” Hegseth claimed that the first message from the pilot downed in Iran was “Good is good.” A TikTok video said that was a a lie because the transponder couldn’t send custom messages.]

Recalling first that a lie can be reasonably defined as “a statement intended to deceive” and second the saying that “a lie is most effective when wrapped around a kernel of truth,” I can but wonder if the lie here is not one of falsification but of misleading.

That is, yes, that was the message - and it was a pre-programmed one as code for, I dunno, something like “I’m alive and capable of getting into a helicopter without assistance.”

More blather in (about) a week.

Furious, but not surprised. No, not surprised.

We’ve been watching this coming step by step for years as the increasingly-reactionary SCOTUS has chipped and sliced away at targets including affirmative action as well as voting, at what were for a time standard basic protections for equal justice for racial and ethnic minorities.

I saw the predetermined conclusion 19 years ago, back in 2007, in the case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (also known as the PICS case), which was about using race as a factor in assigning students to schools. In his ruling opinion, John Roberts wrote that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

As I said at the time, that farcical libel on logic amounted to the Supreme Court declaring as a basis for future judgment that the way to end racism is to pretend it doesn’t exist. (Or, as I’ve also expressed it, saying the best way to drive from DC to NYC is to park at some random spot on I-95 and declare it to be Times Square while pointing at a couple of trees and insisting they are the Twin Towers.)

To the degree that John Roberts and the faction of the Court for which he spoke and speaks believes that is a standard connected to the real world, they are not only racist but also delusional. And embracing that delusion, demanding that we act as if it was true, is exactly what the Roberts Court has been about all along, a project which the Whitest House of The Orange Overlord has enthusiastically endorsed and now celebrates.

And now we are being forced to live in that delusion.

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

I know, I know, I KNOW that at some point, at some point, this will turn around, at some point we as a people will realize what we have done and have become and we will if I can use what is thought of as a religious term repent and recover our sense of justice as an unrealized goal worth striving for in more than slogans and greeting card sentiments.

Please know that by that I do not in any underestimate or fail to recognize the years-long, on-going, and continuing struggles of the people and organizations in the fight for racial and ethnic justice - especially all those people who are for the most part the grunts in the trenches, whose names we will never hear, but without whose work and resilience there would be no progress at all.

What I envision, rather, is a time when we as a nation, as a society, as a whole, will find the notion of people like John Roberts and the rest of the Scurrilous Six being in the positions of power which they now occupy utterly intolerable.

Leave a comment

I am naive enough still to believe in the line about the moral arc of the universe. But I confess that right now I feel that old nagging fear that these aging bones will not live to see anything like that day.

My one sentence response is that if this thing does come your way, do not forward it.

Here’s why: First, it’s been kicking around the Internet for at least 14 years and has been fact-checked by Snopes (2012), USA Today (2020), and Yahoo.com1 (2012 and 2025) and they all said the lead claim about the supposed change in name is crap. (Being professional and overly polite, they called it “false,” but yeah, “crap” is what they clearly meant.) In fact, the term “Federal Benefit Payment” has been used for Social Security outlays ever since the program was established in 1935.

As for everything else, Snopes said it well: It “gets nearly everything wrong.” It’s an anti-Social Security screed with the usual tropes that I first encountered in 2004 and which have changed very little in the decades since.

For example, it uses questionable numbers, including overstating the tax burden and making no allowance for employer contributions. It offers rosy scenarios of “coulda-beens,” of how rich you could have been if only - oh if only - Social Security taxes had not drained your ability to make market investments, while basing such calculations, as they always do, on assuming you invested 15% of your gross income every year of your entire working life, never lost on an investment, never withdrew a penny for any reason, and never had to pay any capital gains tax.

Beyond that, calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” is utterly false to the point of absurd if not consciously misleading. A Ponzi scheme is a type of fraud involving paying investors “returns” out of the money coming in from additional investors. It inevitably collapses under its own weight when it runs out of enough new investors. Your taxes going into Social Security are not making an investment in the hope of future profit, they are buying insurance against the impact of future events including loss of income because of retirement, disability, or loss of a spouse or parent - which is why what we think of as Social Security is more properly called “Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance” or OASDI.

The screed also says of Social Security “They took our money and used it elsewhere.” The word “elsewhere” goes curiously unexplained - maybe because “invested the money in US Treasury bonds” (precisely the sort of “low-risk” investments the author advocated) didn’t sound sufficiently conspiratorial, especially after invoking the all-encompassing scare term “they.”

What’s more, the statement “They didn’t pay interest on the debt they assumed” is garbled nonsense. The Social Security system is barred by federal law from borrowing money so has assumed no such debts.

But that does relate to the final issue, the claim that “the money won’t support us for very much longer,” the by-now standard “SS is going bankrupt!” fear-mongering I first heard from George Bush in 2005 and has been a Chicken Little incantation since -including from, as I expect a number of us have conveniently forgotten, the Obama-established Simpson-Bowles Commission, which became known as the “Cat Food Commission” because of its proposal for sharp cuts in social services including Social Security and Medicare.

The point is a bit complex, so excuse me as I go on for a bit.

There is a narrow legal definition for use in bankruptcy proceedings under which being “bankrupt” is equated with being insolvent, that is, being unable to meet all current debts and without - this is an important part often overlooked - a reasonable expectation of being able to meet them in the future. In such a proceeding, the assets of the bankrupt party are taken by the court and distributed to creditors.

But no one imagines Social Security going into bankruptcy proceedings. There will be no creditors banging on its doors. And in fact if we’re going to speak in narrow legal terms, there is no way SS could go “bankrupt” because, again, it does not have “debts.” The money in the fund was not obtained by loans and it was not obtained by accepting services with a promise of future payment. In fact, by virtue of those bonds it buys, which are in effect a loan to the rest of the government, the system is a creditor, not a debtor.

What the system has are “obligations,” which are not the same thing. Obligations are promises of future behavior as opposed to legal financial commitments arising from past behavior (as debts are). As a crude illustration, consider a union which has a contract with a company under which the workers are supposed to get a 3% raise next year. The employer has a contractual “obligation” to pay that raise, but is not in “debt” to the workers. If the employer pleads poverty, threatens to close up shop and move, and pressures the union into givebacks so that the raise becomes 1%, then that is now the obligation. The employer has not failed to pay any “debt” because the obligation for that extra 2% never came due.

Leave a comment

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Subscribe now

The obligations Social Security has are ones it has as a federal government program, that is, ones it has taken on itself as a matter of law. It’s a social contract rather than a legal one and one which the government has the legal authority to change as it sees fit. The government could, if it chose, simply slash future benefits to whatever degree it felt necessary and :poof: any “insolvency” is gone.

That - it shouldn’t be necessary to say but probably is - does not mean the government should, would, or would ever have the need to do any such thing. It does mean any claim that SS is going “bankrupt” is nonsense.

Rather, what’s being claimed as “bankruptcy” is actually the prospect that the surplus in Social Security accounts that was deliberately built up since the Reagan years specifically to deal with the demographic bulge of the “baby boom” generation2 will have been used up and the system would be back on the pay-as-you-go status it has been on for most of its just-shy of 90 years of existence - and all the doom-saying is about the fact that if nothing is done and no changes are made3, benefit levels would be something less than 80% of projected ones.

But note that’s “projected,” not “current,” which is important because the way benefits are calculated means those projected benefits are higher than today’s current ones. In fact, they could wind up being higher in real terms - that is, after accounting for inflation - than current ones. And remember, that is if nothing is done, no adjustments are made, in the meantime, ignoring the fact that the system has been tweaked any number of times across its history and can be again.

So I repeat: Do NOT forward this.

As always, necessary context is given at the top. Replies to which I’m replying are summarized and any added within a comment here are in square brackets and italicized. Comments are always welcome.

Time to hit the road.

2026-04-15
[Re a WaPo op-ed about a proposal in Connecticut to limit/regulate self-service grocery checkouts]

It is, of course, not surprising that a newspaper with an openly declared editorial bias in favor of “the free market” - that is, favoring corporations over the public and the bosses over workers - would carry something from “a newsletter on the consequences of overregulation” without a whisper of a concern about the consequences of under-regulation.

But as to the particular case, I refuse to use the self-checkouts on principle because I am aware of how they are marketed to the corporations.

Simply put, the pitch is that the company can boast about “service” and “speed” and “convenience” while the real impact is to get customers to do more of the work so the company can hire fewer workers. The net effect is that they are job-killers, especially of the sort of entry-level jobs long lauded by corporate America as a “way into the job market” for the young and those lacking specialized skills.

So limit them. Regulate them. It’s probably unrealistic, but I’d say get rid of them as not only imposing costs on the jobs market (meaning our neighbors) but because those costs are unnecessary, recalling how long and how well we got along without them.

In the meantime, I’ll deal with the “slowness” and “inconvenience” of waiting in a grocery store line. So should you.

-

2026-04-15
[“So should you?” Wow, talk about sanctimonious.]

1. There is nothing either smug or condescending about my statement. There are occasions where the wider impacts of our choices makes YMMV inadequate as a response. I say this is one. (If you want to mentally add “unless limited by physical inability/disability” to my closing, go ahead.)

2. Attempting to wave off my argument with a dismissive sneer is not a rebuttal.

-

2026-04-15
[Let the businesses run themselves and legislature keep your nose out of their business if what they’re doing is not illegal.]

Did it ever occur to you that everything is legal until it’s not? “Don’t act unless it’s illegal” would have blocked every law ever passed anywhere. Say what you will about this proposal, but the principle you’re applying needs much better definition.

-

2026-04-15
[One person describe the proposed requirement of having eight regular checkout lanes for every four self-checkout lanes as requiring four cashiers on duty at all times regardless of traffic and referred to cashiers as “jobs for buggy whip makers.”]

Just for clarity, as I read this, a store with (for example) eight self-checkouts would not have to have four cashiers always on duty at a register regardless of traffic but rather that it would have to have a minimum of four such lanes that could be staffed if traffic called for it.

If it did intend what you say, I’d agree that was silly. But I strongly suspect, indeed expect, it does not but was if anything (and assuming there is an issue) the result of sloppy language that could easily be corrected by amendment.

As for the rest, as the AI-driven self-checkout wonderworld you image for grocery stores inevitably starts to spread to the rest of retail, I’d advise you to be careful what you wish for.

===

2026-04-15
[A WaPo article discussed how SCOTUS is making religion outweigh all other considerations; in this case, allowing exemptions from public school vaccination requirements.]

I will say this and only this: We told you so.

If you’re surprised by any of this: You were warned.

If you say “I didn’t know,” you just weren’t paying attention.

And most particularly if you say anything like “I voted for Trump, but I didn’t vote for that,” yes you did. It’s on you. Because we told you so. You were warned. And you just wouldn’t listen.

-

2026-04-15
[”Atheists have the worst of it in America. Discrimination is not only tolerated but celebrated and we have to follow ALL of the laws instead of picking and choosing.”]

In at least some ways, the legal question about atheists has already been answered. In US v. Seeger (1965), SCOTUS ruled that conscientious objector status under the draft was available to non-theists if they had beliefs that if I recall the term correctly “occupied the same position” in their life as a traditional religion would. In Welsh v. US (1970), the Court expanded that to make explicit that those beliefs need not be religious or called such, that a personal moral code would suffice.

In short, if you had a set of core beliefs that would guide your judgment in the same way traditional religious principles (supposedly) did, you were eligible for CO status. (It was still tough to get for anyone not a member of a traditional “peace church,” but you were eligible.)

It’d be very interesting to see someone pursue a demand for an exemption from some civic duty on the grounds of their atheist beliefs being as valid as those of right-wing Xians to see if the Court would be true to its declared principles. The downside is I’m afraid such a suit would be successful, ripping out another support from the already-rickety concept of community responsibility.

===

2026-04-15
[Commenting on an article about a decision from the Montana Supreme Court that the state constitution provided broad protection for trans rights, someone wondered if GOPpers in Congress would try to pass a law overruling it.]

The “supremacy clause” in the Constitution says federal law can (depending on the particulars) override state law and the same is generally true about state versus local law - but here we’re not talking about a state law but a state constitution and federal law cannot override that. And as I think the article notes, the guiding principle is that your rights within a given state are protected to the extent guaranteed by the state or federal constitution, whichever is greater.

This is why the efforts of The Orange Overlord and RFK “My father would be ashamed of me” Jr. to cripple trans health care have revolved not around outright bans but through threats to cut off various sources of funding, i.e., banning it through fiscal blackmail, making such care inaccessible, even though not technically illegal.

===

2026-04-16
[A discussion re oral arguments on a Colorado Supreme Court case about ordering the reopening of trans health care clinic noted that the trial court was sympathetic to the plaintiffs but denied relief for fear of potential reactions from the feds about hospital financing.]

District Court Judge Ericka F.H. Englert was wrong. She was not being asked to “call the bluff of the federal government.” She was being asked to rule in accordance with the Colorado constitution without relying on speculation of what actions the feds might take outside the court system.

And, oh yeah, there is no federal law involved here. Neither an Executive Order nor an agency declaration is a law.

It’s an indication of how far were have come towards authoritarianism that even a state judge is treating whatever foams out of the mouths of RFK “My dad would be ashamed of me” Jr. and hydroxychloroquine fan Mehmet “I really am from” Oz as instantly becoming law.

===

2026-04-17
[YouTuber Farron Cousins reacted to a subpoena issued to Reddit for personal information on an anonymous poster over their criticisms of ICE,]

“Be careful what you say” is exactly what we should not do. Be honest, yes. Be truthful, yes. If you are asserting particular facts (as opposed to expressing opinion), be correct or at least have a reasonable basis to believe you are correct. (In other words, don’t just make crap up. There are more than enough hard facts to suffice.) In any event, do not engage in the self-censorship of “be careful.” Rather, be defiant.

As for this particular case, the latest news I can find is that John Doe is going to file a motion to quash the subpoena. Personally, I would think the absence of any legitimate law enforcement purpose would suffice, but we’ll have to keep watching.

-

2026-04-18
[A comment said “I never imagined I’d see the rise of the 4th Reich in this country.” Another said it was because people “got complacent” and ignored warning signs. In response, someone wrote “It’s not that simple. The super rich have been undermining the system.”]

“It’s not that simple” is a truism, but we should never forget that it implicitly acknowledges that the original assertion is indeed part of the cause. Shifting blame does not absolve us of our responsibility as citizens.

===

2026-04-18
[An unsourced meme cited a CNN story to say 62 million cishet men attend an “online rape academy.”]

I found a link to the original CNN story.

I also found an analysis by Snopes.

(The link is to a re-posting because Snopes.com is now behind a paywall.)

The criticism Snopes had is that the “62 million” figure is an estimate of the total traffic to the entire website over that month, which safely does not consist of 62 million individual cishet men going once each.

And please don’t anyone try to claim I’m downplaying or minimizing the horror here. It’s rather my conviction that when what you can prove is bad enough, exaggeration only invites dismissal.

Footnote: What was not clear from either the CNN article or Snopes was if the whole site the sort of stuff that is the topic here or is it a pornsite where that is one part.

So I bit the bullet and went there.

It is indeed a site with what I suppose is the usual range of material; I didn’t even find a link on the main page to “sleep” content, although I may well have missed it or it might be deliberately buried. (The main page being as far as I went.)

I think this reinforces my concern about exaggeration. You never want to be in a position where your argument leans on a number where a more accurate figure could generate the response “Actually, it’s only such-and-so,” thereby trying to dismiss your entire argument even if the “only” number is more than enough to make the point.

===

2026-04-18
[A re-post opened “Republicans just introduced a bill to force doctors [to] build a government list of trans people.”]

Links, dammit! What GOPpers? Where? This reads like it’s referring to a state-level proposal in which case “where” matters in terms of resistance.

Certainly it is painfully obvious to anyone who looks that the ultimate goal is to wipe trans folks from society altogether, to drive them so far into the closet that they couldn’t even find the door even with a flashlight. But while resistance is rooted in awareness, it requires actionable knowledge to bloom.

===

2026-04-18
So the real estate salesman who became The Orange Overlord by convincing people to vote for him on a promise of “no more wars” is now saying the federal government “can’t take care of day care ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”

Why? “We’re fighting wars.”

So everything that doesn’t involve being ever-more ready to kill ever-more people has to be up to individual states.

I’d say “Any questions?” but if at this point you still have any, it’s too late for you.

===

2026-04-18
[Regarding a post about why some folks may not realize they are trans until well into adulthood.]

I thank you for this even though as a cis male I have little to add to the conversation.

I do have one passing observation: When folks say “I always knew,” I don’t think they’re saying they had “independently formulate[d] an entirely different theory of gender” but rather that looking back later, they “always knew” that things just felt, well, wrong; not that they always knew “I’m really a boy” or “really a girl,” but that what was expected of them didn’t fit somehow.

Thanks for adding to my understanding, including to some degree of myself.

===

2026-04-19

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

[Responding to Jonathan Larsen’s April 17 The Fucking News; the quote is from The Orange Overlord.]

This certainly is up to your usual standard. (How’s THAT for a politician’s answer?)

However, the phrase “will ‘restore the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE at the CDC’” sent a little shiver through me.

“Gold standard” is a term used regularly in trying to deny gender-affirming care on the grounds that the evidence is “low quality” - most commonly by people who don’t know the first thing about the scale or what it’s for.

The term “gold standard” in this context is usually taken to mean blind randomized controlled studies. The problem is that a great deal of modern medicine is not based on such studies but on observational studies, i.e., “what has been tried, what worked, what didn’t,” which are by definition lower quality.

What’s more, it is sometimes impossible to do those kinds of controlled studies in an ethical manner. Consider puberty blockers and hormone therapy. It’s well-established that they work and how they work. Doing such a study today would mean denying people needed medication, giving people undesired medication, or both.

And blind? How is a young person to not know if they are or are not going through puberty? If they are or aren’t experiencing the effects of prescribed hormones?

Hearing The Orange Overlord reference “the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE” in the context of the CDC does not give me hope; it gives me pause. We need to watch this space.

===

2026-04-19
[Oligarch Watch carried a post about AI companies promoting using chatbots for guidance on personal health care.]

I thought this might be worthy of inclusion. Back in November I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices. This is quoting my responses.

Q: What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?

I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed. During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

Q: What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?

Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Q: Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?

AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data. But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities. Which makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

===

2026-04-20

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

[Open ended YouGov poll question: “How do you feel about the use of AI in making movies?”]

I can see its use as a tool in areas such as special effects in ways similar to how previous technologies have been used to make them more realistic. Beyond such areas, that is, those where it functions as an improved version of already-existing tools employed under the same sorts of conditions, direction, and control as those, I would strongly prefer it was not used at all.

===

2026-04-21
[Ruling en banc, the 5th CCoA upheld a Texas law requiring posting the 10 Commandments in every classroom.]

Wait wait wait.

“They compared it to the Pledge of Allegiance - which is also religious, with its ‘one Nation, under God’ line - to argue that students aren’t forced to say it.”

Did they actually say the part about the Pledge being religious? You say they made the comparison but don’t present it as a quote, so it’s not clear.

Because if they did, I clearly recall a SCOTUS decision that said the Pledge was NOT religious and “under God” was a mere “civic exercise” which had at most a “tinge” of religion - which was why having to say it did not intrude on the rights of atheists.

In either event, I have to say I disagree on one point: The majority was not “delusional.” That knew damn well what they were doing and they did it consciously and deliberately.

-

2026-04-21
[SCOTUS will deny cert, and it will stand.]

Just to make it clear, it will stand in the 5th Circuit, nowhere else. However, the danger there is that it will serve as precedent for other circuits to consider. So either it will spread to significant parts of the country or at some point there will be a split in circuits, at which point SCOTUS would feel entirely justified in stepping in, even feeling obligated to.

More in a week or so!

A rather light week even including the exchange where I got a little testy. The outside world made its claim on my time, including a new commitment to the folks at a weekly rally I attend to doing a regular 5-7 minute presentation which is called for the moment “News Worth Knowing Which You Might Have Missed.”

As always, I’ll try to include enough relevant context to make the comments understandable.

With that said, onward. (I’d say “onward!” but again, content is a bit light this week, so no exclamation point.)

==

2026-04-10
[In comments on an article about Boise’s resistance to attempts to ban Pride flags, someone asked if the rainbow design was related to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.]

Design of the Pride flag, by all accounts, was the work of San Francisco artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker. His original version, from 1978, had eight stripes in different colors and the flag went through a couple of revisions until the now-standard one with six.

Although the Rainbow Coalition itself predates the flag, Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition postdates it. Baker said the use of colors was inspired by the hippie movement of the ‘60s and suggested it was inspired to some degree by the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow.”

Oh, and to answer more directly, use of a rainbow in symbolism is ancient.

==

2026-04-10
[Lelaina Brandt posted on the source of the gap between polls reflecting support for equal rights for trans folks with others finding opposition to specifics.]

I will have to go back and read this closely, but I did want to throw in this immediate reaction (beyond noting it’s clearly worth taking that close read), which is what may be a quibble about the phrase “people are no longer responding to an idea; they are reacting to its implications.”

Rather than “implications,” I think a better word is “impacts,” recalling Phil Ochs definition of a liberal as “someone who is 10 degrees left of center in good times and 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.”

==

Leave a comment

2026-04-10
[Hemant Mehta posted about a Puppeteers of America “World Puppetry Day,” which included a Christian group which gave an inoffensive performance but later proved to be extremist.]

I think the statement “It seems like the group’s Board was simply unaware that a Christian group in their subculture might be problematic... even though you would think the name itself would raise red flags everywhere” is too harsh.

Without details about how any decision was made we’re not in a position to judge. For all we know, the PofA did check - enough to feel secure that nothing in the performance would be offensive and that’s what they focused on.

Contrary to the implication, being Christian does not by definition equal bigot to the point that PofA should have assumed the group was packed with bigots based on the word. “Well, they shoulda known” is not a persuasive argument.
-
[Three different people responded;]
2026-04-10
[1st person: It’s in (the group’s) constitution and bylaws. Not hard to find.]

Did they do that for all groups? Do you? Should they have? If “no,” then you’re arguing that “Christian” means “presumptively bigoted.” And I’ve known too many people in my life for who their religious faith provided a foundation for a life of courage and justice to accept that. No, you don’t need religion for such a foundation, don’t be stupid, but it was theirs and it worked for them.
-
2026-04-10
[2nd person: “NALT argument” - referring to “Not All Like That,” an attempt to down play or excuse abuses in one’s own group and so implying that’s what I was doimg.]

I doubt this will l move you, but based on the median age of US adults, I can reasonably expect that I have been when we used to call a “hard” atheist longer than you’ve been alive. But thanks for confirming that you’re acting on pure presumption, not knowledge.
-
2026-04-10
[Lyndon Johnson was president when i was born.]

I stand corrected. I’ve been a hard atheist since you were in nursery school.
-
2026-04-10
[Sure, Jan.]

If you were born during LBJ’s term, you were born no earlier than the tail end of 1963. I was born in 1948 and became an atheist at around 19 or 20, i.e., around 1967-1968, when you would have been no more than 5 and very likely younger.

So yeah, nursery school. If that.

I’m done here.
-
2026-04-10
[3rd person: You should consult with your physician (in response to my comment about me being older than most).]

Median age of US adults is 39, i.e., half are older, half younger. I’ve been an atheist for 57-58 years. So yeah, good chance.

But thanks for playing.

==

2026-04-10
[OynxRose reposted a graphic about grammatical mistakes in referring to trans folks.]

The real problem with “transgendered” from my perspective is that is appears to be a transitive verb, i.e., being transgender is something done to someone, not what someone is.

On the other hand and just to maintain my reputation for persnicketiness, if you were going to make some generalized comment about tall people, then referring to them as “talls,” (e.g. “Talls tend to look down on other people”) while being, yeah, kinda weird, is not grammatically incorrect. It’s called nominalization.

==

2026-04-11
As we deal with what appears to be another horrendous case of abuse of power and sexual assault, this time in the form of Eric Swalwell, there is one thing I will not hear.

And that is one effing word from the GOPpers.

Dozens of women have accused the Orange Overlord of crimes and abuses including rape, child rape, sexual assault, physical abuse, kissing and groping without consent, and voyeurism, including both peeking under skirts and walking in on naked pageant contestants.

He’s repeatedly cheated on his wives, was close friends with a known pedophile and trafficker, and was twice found liable for sexual assault.

And still you GOPpers grovel at his feet, pleading for his favor.

Until you turn your collective backs on him, completely and permanently, you lack the moral standing to say anything at all on the matter. So shut up.

==

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

2026-04-11
A reality check for those who are calling for invoking the 25th Amendment to get The Orange Overlord out of office, based around I mean, have you actually read it?

Section 4 of the Amendment says if a majority of the cabinet tells the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House in writing that Trump is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” Vance becomes Acting President.

But - if Trump responds with a written declaration that “no inability exists,” he’s back in charge.

Except - if within four days after that a majority of the Cabinet repeats the previous assertion, Congress will decide the matter and can remove Trump and make Vance Acting President …

here it comes…

by a two-thirds vote of both Houses, which is a higher standard than impeachment, which only requires a majority in the House.

I’ll be blunt, friends and neighbors: I figure it ain’t gonna happen.

First the real issue, another example of the continuing attempts by the Orange Overlord to rewrite American history to fit his sanitized, glorified version, scrubbed of anything “woke” - excuse me, that should have read “non-white.”

Specifically, the US Mint is planning to release over the course of this year various coins to commemorate the US’s 250th anniversary.1

The original designs included ones depicting Frederick Douglass, a scene about women’s fight for the right to vote, and Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend a formerly whites-only school in 1960 - honoring the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement, respectively.

But at the direction of Treasury Secretary and top contender for “Smug Prick of the Year” Award Scott Bessent, they were replaced by ones featuring the “Mayflower Compact,” the Gettysburg Address, and the Revolutionary War. The “Mayflower Compact” quarter, featuring “two Pilgrims embracing as they behold the New World,”2 was the first to be issued, going into circulation in January.

And this is where my personal privilege comes in. I’m not a historian, but I do very much want the history we get presented to be accurate. And the Mayflower Compact was, to be blunt, not all that important in US history. And it absolutely was NOT a founding document or pretty much the “first” anything.

Now, what follows is a lot of background so if you want to skip all that and get to the meat of my argument, scroll down to the break marked by the “---.”

I mentioned this quickly a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m going to tell the story in a good amount - probably too much - detail. So get comfortable.

Okay, we could go back further, but we’ll start at 1603 and the accession of King John I of England (James VI of Scotland). At that time it was illegal not to be a member of the Church of England. There were dissenters of various stripes, who John said he would force to conform or “harry out of the land.” Some the dissenters argued that congregations should be independent and separate, with no hierarchy above them. Sneered at as “separatists,” today we would just call them Congregationalists.

One such group (including some who had been in prison for their religious dissension) fled England in 1608 for Holland in search of religious tolerance and “liberty of conscience.” They found it there, but they also found something else: poverty. Poverty extreme enough that after several years they feared their small community was evaporating, fear great enough to push an intent to move again.

They dare not move back to England, but there was an alternative: establish a colony in “the New World” on what they would agree was “the King’s land.” (Despite their exile, they still thought of themselves as English and loyal to the King on everything that did not conflict with their view of the Bible.)

We’ll skip the parts about planning, negotiations with financial backers, and making legal arrangements, all of which took up about two years and move to summer of 1620. Having secured a patent - legal permission to set up a colony - for Virginia and obtained supplies, they were ready to go. Two ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell, the former contracted for the voyage and the latter purchased and meant to remain with the colonists, set out from Southampton. But the master of the Speedwell complained of leaks, so they put in at Plymouth, tightened things up, and headed out again and got 100 leagues - 300 miles at sea - past Land’s End only to have that master again complain of leaks. They put back in at Plymouth and abandoned the Speedwell, losing more time to shuffle passengers and cargo around.

Finally, the Mayflower and 102 passengers set sail.

(I’m getting to the Compact, I promise.)

Leave a comment

There were at this time two main routes to cross the Atlantic, one using the trade winds and the other tacking along the 40th parallel to Cape Cod and then skimming the coast north or south to your destination. They chose the latter because their aim was to go to the northern reaches of Virginia, the boundaries of which, set by latitude, were from about where Florida meets the mainland to about the mouth of the Hudson River. The northern reaches because further south was Jamestown, which had been there from 1607 and was definitely Church of England people, so better to stay a good distance away.

Upon arriving at Cape Cod, they tried to go south but it was too late. With all the problems, they had been delayed six weeks in their departure and so also six weeks in their arrival and by the time they got there the prospect of seasonal storms made it too risky to try to sail the shoals on the south side of the Cape. The master of the Mayflower said he would take them back to England or, if they preferred, would stay until they found a place to settle and then head back. With nothing to go back to, there really was no choice.

---

The Mayflower set anchor in what’s now Provincetown harbor while some of the folks set out looking for a place to stay. After a month, with winter hard on them, they opted for the best place they’d found, which became Plymouth. (There are some wonderful stories about that month and about finding Plymouth Harbor, but I’ve already tried your patience and yes, we’ve just about arrived at the Compact.)

Okay, but now they have a problem. They are not in Virginia. They are in what was then called Northern Virginia. They have no lawful patent. No clear rights and more importantly, no authority. Some among the passengers started to declare that they would do as they pleased, as no one had any authority over them.

Faced with the vision of the colony collapsing into chaos before it even began, plunging into bickering, fights over who decides or gets what, and people scattering into the what they considered wilderness, the group (meaning the adult “free” men, i.e., not servants) agreed - with let’s call it the encouragement of “sign or you don’t get off the ship” - to form a “civil body politic.”

Which, we’ve been told and you may have been taught in school, was the foundation of American democracy and/or even constitutional government itself.

But here’s the money part: Because of the time and distance involved in being on opposite sides of the Atlantic, when a round trip could take 3-4 months in travel time alone, the agents of the King who granted patents for settlements knew the settlers had to have a fair degree of authority for self-government. Doing otherwise was simply impractical.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

And while the original patent the settlers got has been lost to history, the replacement one they later got, along with others from other settlements both before and after, have survived. And they make clear that not one element of the Compact, not one part of the agreement, not one power or authority included, was new or original or not well-established in practice or English law.

So in essence they agreed to govern themselves as if they had a patent until they got one. When the Mayflower got back to England with news of where the settlement was, a patent from the newly-formed Council for New England was secured and delivered to the settlement the following November, at which point the Compact lost its relevance. It was a stopgap, and it worked. But it was not and was not intended to be anything beyond that.

So. Was the whole story one of courage and resilience and the Mayflower Compact an example of wise governance? I’d say absolutely. But was it a founding document of the United States? No freaking way.

And as someone who admits to being persnickety about historical accuracy, it irritates the hell out of me to see it portrayed as more than it was.

As always, I’ve included context where I thought it would help understanding the comment itself along with links to the original if you’d like to check it out. With that, here we go.

2026-03-31
[Most comments in WaPo on SCOTUS oral arguments re Trump’s birthright citizenship order supported the 14th Amendment being read literally. Supporting Trump, someone wrote dismissively “Please tell me which Supreme Court case ruled where the plaintiff’s parents were in the US illegally. This reminds me of being told the 14th amendment case about getting Trump off ballot was a slam dunk, only to lose 9-0.”]

I expect this will not satisfy you but US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) involved a child who was born to parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China and so had neither US citizenship nor allegiance but yes, were here legally. But his parents had no diplomatic exception (they were “not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China”), so he was “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US - interpreted to mean “required to obey US law.” So yes, the Court did rule on that very point. Thus, the Court ruled, Wong Kim Ark was a citizen by birth.

Bluntly, it’s hard to imagine a space in there where the argument “Yeah, but they were documented so that doesn’t count” would fit unless you were to argue that being undocumented means you’re not required to obey the law, an argument I doubt would find much support.

Oh, as for those “legal scholars,” a phrase I strongly suspect was used sarcastically, you should have asked me. I predicted it would fail, albeit on a different basis.1
-
[Wong Kim Ark was actually a test case. In 1884, a person named Look Tin Eli had sued the government in the US Circuit Court for the Central District of California over his citizenship. He won, as the court affirmed that a native-born person is a US citizen regardless of race or ancestry. Some supporters were disappointed that the US declined to appeal because they wanted to get the matter before SCOTUS and the case of Wong Kim Ark provided the opportunity. The Look Tin Eli case was cited by SCOTUS in its favorable opinion.]

==

2026-04-01
There should be a requirement that any client considering conversion “therapy” should be given accurate information on all risks involved, including psychological harm and increased risk of suicide, and the success rate. Then they can make an informed decision and bluntly I wonder how many would continue in that event.

==

2026-04-01
[A woman in Kansas named Samantha Boucher noted Trans Day of Visibility by openly defying the state’s new bathroom ban.]

Bravo to her.

I wonder if [Gov. Kris] Koback would try to dodge the whole thing by saying he doesn’t want to bring attention to a “stunt” so will do nothing because she didn’t really “use” the restroom, just went in and right out.

I doubt he’s that clever, but these kinds of laws are often passed with the idea that trans folks will simply disappear from the restrooms and there will be no consequences that might get attention or even some sympathy among the public.

==

2026-04-03
[Referring to a list of suggested responses to being challenged for using the “wrong” restroom.]

I’ve re-written this three or four times because I keep thinking it could by misunderstood. This is my last shot at this.

I doubt the situation described will arise for me (I’m cis and in a safe state) since the freakage level over transmen in restrooms seems quite muted (which I say supports my contention that a lot of this is old-fashioned, albeit an extreme form of, sexism) but it ever did I would be the bystander.

I think in that case my first instinct would be to blurt out “Why?” and if anything about being trans figured in a response, follow with “Prove it.” That is, “put up or shut up,” intending to shield the target from the harassment. (It occurs to me now that a better response would be “And?”)

But my favorite among the proposed bystander responses is #3 - actually, forget the first part as unnecessary; just use the second.

[The whole #3 was ”Who polices other people’s restroom use? You’re being really weird right now.”]

==

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

2026-04-03
[The Ohio House passed a bill to outlaw drag shows. Someone argued that some provisions could make it illegal for transgender folks to appear in public.]

The bill is indeed bad and hopefully will be killed or at least significantly modified, but I have to say I think your description in some ways goes too far.

Specifically, the section on “adult cabaret performance” (lines 153-173 of the bill, found at https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb249/02_PH/pdf/) repeatedly uses the terms “performance,” performers,” and “entertainers.” Applying that to “a transgender individual simply walking down the street wearing makeup” stretches the wording (the “legislative intent”) far past the breaking point.

But! That “cisgender woman playing a guitar in a park” wearing “too masculine” clothing? Oh, yeah. Just call her a performer and bang, covered by the law. Um, except wait - the section also says the performance must be “harmful to juveniles or obscene,” so just playing a guitar in a park isn’t enough, regardless of the clothing. (Yes, I looked up the definitions of “harmful to juveniles” and “obscene.” They’re all about “prurient interest” and “arousing lust.” https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2907.01)

I wholeheartedly embrace your (implied but accurate) argument that actually defining what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine” expression is a fool’s errand and I also agree that any attempt to do so, even by implication, is a threat to trans rights.

But here I’d focus on the obvious intention to ban drag shows by regarding them as de facto sexual and thus obscene. One thing I think the attempt shows is how difficult (if it’s even possible, which I very much doubt) to do that without trampling on basic rights and opening the door to “guilt by personal opinion of a cop.” Such bills can and should be rejected outright.

==

Leave a comment

2026-04-03
Ben Meiselas reports that in a talk at George Washington University, Karoline Leavitt told the audience that her advice is to always be the most well-read person in the room - then said Trump always is.

I used to call her Levity because no one should take her seriously but this goes beyond that. She is either a pathological liar or in some other way deeply mentally disturbed.

==

2026-04-03
[The Georgia legislature ended its session with all of the nearly 15 anti-trans bills having failed.]

This is excellent news and everyone involved in this achievement should savor the moment and accept congratulations.

In passing, this raises something I’ve wondered about. This isn’t the first time a state legislature has come to the end of a session with a whole bunch of anti-trans laws dying without action.

So do some of these people sometimes introduce such legislation without really caring if it passes or not, they just want to be able to use “I introduced” or “I supported” such-and-such on the campaign trail, avoiding both the possibility of being “out anti-transed” by some opponent and the stronger pushback from the other side that could arise if it actually passed?

Just speculating; as a practical matter, I doubt it makes any difference.

==

2026-04-04
[Referring to forgiving MAGAs: “My gut instinct is to NEVER forgive them for their cruelty and greed.”]

I’ll just offer a variation on what I said about this very topic several days ago on a different site.

I’m what used to be called a fallen-away Catholic. In fact, I fell so far I fell away from theism altogether. But I can remember from my Catechism what’s required for forgiveness in Confession: contrition and penance - genuine regret and a sacrifice to make up for what you did.

The penance was pretty invariably symbolic, saying some prayers and the like, but still was a necessary part of the process of forgiveness.

The same should apply here. You want me to “welcome you into our tent?” First, give me good cause to believe you sincerely regret what you’ve done. (I think of the woman in that viral clip who said she voted for the Orange Overlord three times, punctuated with “That’s on me. Obviously, I’m an idiot.”)

Second, tell me what you’ll now do to make up for - more importantly, to undo - the harm you’ve helped to cause. Note that “I’ll never vote for another Republican” is not good enough. It is not penance and will not serve the purpose any more than a convicted robber saying “I’ll never steal anything else” does not excuse them from consequences. Tell me what positive action you will take (or have taken).

Then we can talk about forgiveness.

==

2026-04-04
So Gregg Phillips, associate administrator for FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has doubled down on his claim of having been repeatedly teleported and connected it to his religious beliefs, claiming that the Bible refers to being “translated” or “transported” - that is, he got to a Waffle House through divine intervention.

“Here’s the real question,” he said. “What’s harder to believe? That God could move in a moment during a spiritual battle, or Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is coming again?”

In other words, which is harder to believe: 1+1=5 or 2+2=pi?

==

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

2026-04-04
[Various extremist Xians want women to be unable to vote.]

Whenever I read about this sort of bigoted insanity presuming a Biblical basis for their anti-democratic, anti-freedom, male-supremacist crackpot notions, I recall seeing (as part of my job at the time) a marriage manual from either the late 16th or early 17th century advising that, as near as I can quote from memory, a man who marries a woman from who he can’t get advice has a fool for a wife - and she has a fool for a husband.

==

2026-04-05
[In a comment, a parent told how their trans daughter, despite having adopted a new name at school, had declined using it at home until some time later.]

I can understand how that would hurt. But I suspect there was a reason: The whole purpose of the sort of social transitioning she did at school could have well been for her a matter of, if you will, trying it on, seeing if it fits, if it feels right, “is this me.” You said it yourself: She “tried” new pronouns and a new name.

Doing it with you, OTOH, isn’t a trial or a test, it’s a conclusion. A decision. She just needed more time to make it.

So when she did come out to you, she was saying “This is who I am. I’ve decided.” By giving her that time, you did the right thing.

==

2026-04-05
My response to “Yeah, well, all lives matter!” was to say “Yes, all lives matter. And if we actually acted like all lives matter, it wouldn’t be necessary to say ‘Black lives matter.’”

[I also used to say that in saying or thinking the phrase, the stress should be on the last word, not the first.]

==

2026-04-05
[“Some Democrats soften or side step trans rights. It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation in the face of coordinated attacks.”]

“It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation.”

More accurately, it reads as fear. The same old fear that has plagued the Democratic party for decades, the fear that the reactionaries might say something nasty about you in a campaign, so better to downplay the issue, even better to avoid mentioning it at all and be forever prepared to yield ground if it comes up. Consider it a political version of “duck and cover.”

Transgender rights are not the only example. There have been many over the years. The issue here, narrowly defined, is not trans rights but institutional cowardice, the kind of stark political cowardice that has had a major role in getting us into our current mess.

I know I have several times on this platform recalled seeing a survey from all the way back in the Gingrich era finding that people didn’t dislike Democrats for what they stood for but because they didn’t seem to stand for anything.

Well, that remains true today, as the intensity of Democrats’ active opposition to The Orange Overlord (TOO) is pretty much in inverse ratio to his favorability rating and the safer it looks politically on a given issue the more willing they are to go after him.

(I still cringe when I recall Hakeem Jeffries, around the time of the OBBB - the Obnoxious Barbarous Bigoted Bill - actually saying something to the effect that the Dems were waiting for TOO’s favorability rating to drop below 40% - in other words, when it was safe enough - promising that then, they’d really go after him. You can decide for yourself how well they followed through on that.)

I’ve said this before, perhaps even here, but I think it bears repeating. It’s not necessary for Dems to make trans rights the or even a centerpiece of their campaign, particularly as it ranks low on lists of people’s concerns and even Republicans in some polls say their party spends too much time on the issue.

What is necessary is to say clearly that you support trans rights and when challenged don’t evade and don’t back down.

And don’t settle for defense. Instead say something like “Of course I support trans rights because they are human rights. Trans folks have every bit as much right to grow and flourish, to go through their lives smoothly, without discrimination, and to be treated with respect and fairness the same as anyone else does. The really important question is why the other side is so damned focused on people’s genitalia instead of on” whatever issue or issues seem appropriate at the moment.

I’ve gone on long enough. Probably too long. So I’ll stop.

==

2026-04-06
The Pentagon has failed its department-wide financial audit eight years in a row.

Admittedly, US military operations are very complex, so clean audits are a challenge.

But if any “woke” program had a record anything like that, Faux News would be melting TV screens with the heat of its rage.

==

2026-04-06
I was watching the live NASA coverage of the Artemis mission. As the crew went to the Moon’s dark side (losing contact for 40 minutes) one of them just had to invoke Jesus to say “love your neighbor,” punctuated by ground control echoing the statement and adding “How great Thou art.”

:sigh:

==

2026-04-07
[Erin Reed demolished a study claiming to prove GAC actually harms the mental health of trans youth.]

Okay, I gotta be honest. I got as far as the percentages (the 9.8% before vs. 60.7% after) and a vibrantly bright red flag started flying.

Phrased rather more coherently than my initial response, it was “Wait - they’re comparing the mental health of folks who got and didn’t get GAC based on psychiatric visits after an initial one? But if someone was at that initial visit to obtain GAC, getting additional counseling would be a pretty normal part of the process of transitioning. Of course they’d have more visits than the general population!”

And that was before learning that they might have years of visits before they could even start actual medical transitioning (i.e. GAHT) - not to mention the history of the study author.

And this tripe got published? Just wow.

==

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

2026-04-07
[A commenter responded to Megan Rapinoe saying “They lost the battle on gay marriage” with “If they don’t lose hard enough over transgender issues, they will level their political guns to reverse that loss.”]

“they will next level all their political guns to reverse that loss”

They already are. The “LGB without the T” folks who think they’re safe are fools.
-
2026-04-07
[They are. I do think that attacking us is distracting some of the SoCons efforts from that though...]

True enough. But the reactionaries have already legitimized the notion “transgender = drag queen = sex” and it’s not that far a reach to reprising “disgusting” descriptions of “disgusting” gay/lesbian sex of the sort I remember from not that many decades ago.

The LGB/noT crowd should remember that Martin Niemöller’s poem is not just about Germany.

THAT’S IT! SEE YA IN A WEEK OR SO!

On March 31, the Scurrilous Six - plus two others (Sotomayor and Kagan) who demonstrated in a supporting opinion that they utterly missed the reality surrounding the entire matter - but I’ll get to that later…

Anyway, SCOTUS, by 8-1, declared that the state of Colorado cannot ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors, framing it as a “content-based regulation” of free speech while rather desperately (and largely successfully) avoiding mention of the actual real-world impact that can be expected to arise from this ruling.

Instead, the Supremes devoted an inordinate amount of time to fine-lining a difference between “speech” and “action” in order to declare conversion therapy is the former and not the latter and so is protected speech - even though the Court had long ago recognized that action can be speech1 and speech can constitute action.2

The result is that the Court wound up arguing in pretty much just these words that a state expecting a licensed therapist to treat clients in accord with prevailing standards of care is an offense to the Constitution.

In fact, according to Neil Gore-much, writing for the majority, prevailing standards of care are irrelevant if indeed they exist at all.

Wholly embracing the Department of Injustice’s argument, he cited the fact that homosexuality was once considered an illness to declare that “medical consensus is not static” and may change3 and so cannot be allowed to impact the speech of a therapist.

But if current best knowledge and practice is not to be the standard the state can expect of a licensed medical practitioner, what is the basis for any regulation? You are left, it would appear, only with regulations that are purely arbitrary (and so even less likely to be “static” because of being based on the prejudices and personal advantage of whoever has power at the moment) or with no regulations at all and anyone, even licensed practitioners, can claim anything4 - provided, that is, their targets are transgender young folks.

The idea of standards, though, raises something else I found deeply offensive in the ruling, which is the tendency of SCOTUS - especially the Scurrilous Six making up the majority of this bunch - to treat standards like modeling clay, to be shaped to whatever form fits the moment and their ideology.

Consider that in the Skrmetti decision, the Court found that Tennessee’s ban on GAC for young trans folks merely “removes one set of diagnoses,” that is, those relating to gender dysphoria, “from the range of treatable conditions,” labeling that drastic restriction on access to health care as legitimate because the state has the power to regulate the practice of medicine.5

But here, according to the majority, the state does not have the power to regulate the practice of medicine to remove one method from the range of acceptable therapies - even though, unlike GAC, that therapy, “conversion” or “reparative” therapy, is rejected by every major medical organization as “pseudoscientific,” “discredited,” ineffective, and downright harmful. Put less delicately because I don’t have to be, it’s claptrap and its only effect is to make things worse.

According to the Trevor Project, research shows that “LGBTQ+ youth who experienced conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year” and the experience is “associated with long-lasting social and emotional consequences, including depression, anxiety, suicidality, substance abuse, post-traumatic responses, loss of connection to community, damaged familial relationships, self-blame, guilt, and shame.”

But all of that is irrelevant, unimportant, just collateral damage to be justified on the grounds that, as Gore-much put it, “the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

But the whole damn point of conversion therapy is to enforce orthodoxy! The whole purpose is to enforce orthodoxy! Eagerly embraced by reactionary faux-”Christian” bigots, the whole notion is to turn gay and lesbian minors straight and get transgender children to identify as their birth sex rather than their true gender - in other words, to insure every child is heteronormative without regard to whether they are happy or not, whole or not.

The name itself gives it away: When it’s not called “conversion therapy,” as in “we’re going to convert you,” it’s “reparative therapy,” as in “you’re broken and we’re going to ‘repair’ you.”

Even Kaley Chiles, the therapist at the center of the case, who calls herself “a practicing Christian” who believes that “people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design” gives the game away even as she tries to hide it within carefully-chosen and movement-approved language. In the wake of the decision, she talked about “look[ing] forward to being able to help them when they choose the goal of growing comfortable with their bodies” - that is, becoming cis straight - and about “walking alongside these young people” when in reality she is behind them, consciously pushing them to a pre-determined (by her) conclusion, while (in her mind) bravely refusing “to promot[e] state-approved goals like gender transition, which often leads to harmful drugs and surgeries.”6

So how in flaming hell could Kagan and Sotomayor, who we thought would have some grasp of what this decision means, sign on to it?

The simple answer is that they did not grasp what it means, preferring to dwell in some ethereal realm of legal theory instead of the real world and real impacts on real people, rather like looking to use Plato’s perfect forms to deal with the daily physical reality we inhabit.

In the concurring opinion she wrote for herself and Sotomayor, Kagan bizarrely suggested that a complete ban on therapy aimed at a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity might be lawful - that is, the state can ban pseudoscientific, discredited, conversion therapy provided that it denies all youth access to any LGBTQ+-related therapy at all. Which is not only ridiculous on its face, it would effectively ban transition entirely because no one does that without counseling as part of the process. A case of “you really didn’t think this through, did you?”

It gets worse, though, because the real issue with the law, she wrote, is that “the State has suppressed one side of a debate, while aiding the other, [and so] the constitutional issue is straightforward.”

Except this is not a goddam political debate! This is not a philosophical discussion about varying perspectives on some hypothetical situation. This is about scientific fact. This is about the authority of a state government to protect its people from being victimized by bogus treatments, and banning conversion therapy should be no more controversial and with no more impact on the Constitution than banning snake oil.

Subscribe now

Share

And the failure of Kagan and Sotomayor to recognize that is and I’m being gentle here profoundly disappointing and bluntly they should be ashamed of themselves.

There was one person who saw the situation for what it was and is and addressed the actual impact and for that reason said “No.”

That was, of course, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who not only dissented, she did so loudly, taking the unusual step of reading her opinion (or maybe a summary of it, it wasn’t clear in the sources I saw) in the courtroom, something traditionally done by a Justice to register just how strongly they disagreed with the ruling.

And it was indeed strong, going after every aspect of the majority opinion, for example calling the conclusion that regulating speech-based medical treatments is unconstitutional7 because the treatment is being administered solely through speech “maddeningly circular” and “based on happenstance, not logic.”

She also pointed directly to the record of damage caused by conversion therapy and accused the majority of potentially “ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care” with some forms of treatment are effectively unregulated.

She concluded by saying that “the correct course of action here is to hold” a line set by precedent: “Speech uttered for purposes of providing medical treatment may be restricted incidentally when the State reasonably regulates the speaker’s provision of medical treatments to patients.

“To do anything else opens a dangerous can of worms. It threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect. It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”8

That clatter you hear is a mic hitting the floor.

For my own closing statement, I will defer to the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, who note something that at this moment it is vital for all of us, LGBTQ+ folks and allies alike, to remember:

Leave a comment

“This case is about how conversion therapy can be regulated NOT whether conversion therapy is safe or legal. No matter how the Supreme Court ruled, conversion therapy will remain malpractice, consumer fraud, and a violation of the ethical standards that govern every licensed mental health professional in this country.”

We can, we should, we must carry it on.

Let’s go.

2026-03-21
[Chris Giedner (Law Dork) posted about a recent court action in a case involving employees of the US Agency for Global Media who had been placed on administrative leave during the DOGE days of defenestrations.]

Your last line - “it is likely that a number of employees have left the agency for other work” - raises something I think hasn’t been considered enough.

The minions and jesters of the court of The Orange Overlord don’t have to outright win to do significant damage to the ability of the federal government to do useful work, they just have to stall long enough for the employees booted out to be unable to wait for a resolution.

Suppose half of those employees have gone on to other jobs. The result would be a court-approved 30% cut in USAGM staff with no requirement (or reason to expect) that those open positions would be filled.

For a similar reason, I’m also concerned about another topic up for discussion which I will make bold to refer to here: The Orange Overlord’s half-brag, half-threat to issue an EO federalizing the midterms. I keep hearing it said that in that event he’d be sued and he’d lose because the law, the Constitution, and history are so clear on the matter.

But my worry is that, just like with DOGE (which I always pronounce “dodgy,” because it was/is), he doesn’t have to win - he just has to cause enough confusion and delay to screw things up, disrupt the whole voting process, in enough places to give him a reason (not a good one, just a “reason”) to declare a national emergency and start seizing ballot boxes and declaring the vote void.

This doesn’t mean he’d succeed or even that he’d try; maybe he’ll think the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) raised by his constant ranting about “voter fraud” will be sufficiently useful to convince the faithful the election was “stolen” and enough others that elections are “insecure” and voting must be restricted.

But either way, it is a potential for social chaos that we ignore at our peril.

==

2026-03-22
[YouTuber Farron Cousins posted about a report that the USPS is within a year of bankruptcy. Just to be clear, Cousins was speaking in support of the USPS.]

Thanks for the attention to this, but you left out the part about requiring the USPS to pre-finance retirement benefits out to 75 years - meaning the USPS is putting aside money to pay future benefits for future retirees who haven’t been born yet. Oh, and the rules limiting how much the prices for stamps and services can go up. And how Congress can make all these rules for how the USPS operates while - as you note - not putting a single damn dollar toward the cost.

That last is particular infuriating because the wingnuts are forever going on about how people too poor to pay federal income taxes should have to pay them in order to have “skin in the game.” Shouldn’t the same apply here?

==

2026-03-23
[A discussion about Flat Earth brought in a reference to Einstein and the Theory of Relativity.]

Just a correction about the history: Einstein did not think the universe was shrinking. He thought it was eternal, steady, neither shrinking nor expanding - because that was the accepted belief at the time. But someone (I’m embarrassed to admit I’m both unable to remember the name and too lazy to look it up) [Credit is usually given to Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman in 1922.] proved that Einstein’s universe was unstable, it had to be growing or shrinking. So he created the so-called “cosmological constant,” an arbitrary factor inserted to keep the universe stable. When it was proved the universe is expanding,, he took it out, calling his failure to trust his own work his “greatest blunder.”

==

2026-03-24
[A meme criticized using “they” as 3rd-person singular - and used it that way in the meme.]

Use of “they” as a third person singular has been in use since the 14th Century. At some point, apparently in the mid-1700s, some tight-ass grammarians decided it was wrong or low-class or some such crap.

The meme only serves to puts an exclamation point on how stupid the complaint is.

==

2026-03-24
[A video showed a dog aggressively defending a stray kitten during a rainstorm. A passing driver rescued both. People claimed it was AI because the dog appeared to have an extra paw.]

The argument is not entirely convincing because if the dog was leaning against the curb with its back legs sprawled out to the other side, that “extra foot” could easily be the foot of the left back leg folded under the dog’s body - particularly because the “extra” paw is turned in the way that such a paw would be in that case.

However - my problem is that I can’t see a way to trace that paw back to a leg. Maybe there is, but I’m not seeing it.

My conclusion: AI? Yeah, I suppose more likely than not - but not for the reasons people here have cited. And I’m not convinced it is.

What’s sad is not only that now we have to think “Is it real or is it AI” (Anyone else old enough to recall “Is it live or is it Memorex?”) but that it’s become an ego game to pore over details of cute but ultimately unimportant videos in order to be the first to shout “AI!” and thus demonstrate your supposed cleverness. Or cynicism, whatever.

==

2026-03-24
So now it’s “extermination” rather than “obliteration” in Iran? What, did The Orange Overlord turn the page on his “Word of the Week” desk calendar?

==

2026-03-25
A the risk of appearing in a future video about odd comments, I have to dispute one assertion you made about sex and gender. They are indeed different things, but gender is not a social construct. Gender expression, what behaviors, dress, and the like mark “masculine” and “feminine” in a given culture, is. But the concept of gender itself is not.

==

2026-03-28
[Kentucky is about to pass a bill declaring trans people to be mentally ill and barring them from being teachers. A response referred to a likely veto by Gov. Andy Beshear.]

GOPpers hold super-majorities in both Houses of the Kentucky legislature. Beshear’s likely veto is for them a mere momentary glitch.

There was a time - not even all that long ago - when it was possible to regard moves like this as cold-blooded political calculation driven by selfish interest and rooted in the the notion that it was good for votes.

But we have gone far past that. There is nothing cold-blooded about this; rather, it is the fiery blood of hatred fueled by fanaticism - and, I strongly suspect, the self-loathing over guilty fantasies turned outward.
-
2026-03-28
[By the time the red and blue states finish passing their “Soft Secession” laws, there will be no “United” in United States.]

True enough. You can get a reasonable sense of the geographic nature of that division by examining a map of the US Courts of Appeal and looking at the 5th, 8th, 10th, and 11th Circuits, removing Minnesota, Colorado, and New Mexico, and adding Montana and Idaho.
-
2026-03-28

Subscribe now

Share

[A different comment on the same post referred to the Kentucky bill as “stupid” because of the mixture of standards it uses.]

It’s not stupid. Offensive, hating, vicious, lots of other noxious qualities, but not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing, picking and choosing what works and words serve their twisted impulses.

It’s much like Humpty Dumpty, who said “When I use a word” - or a citation - “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

I look to the time when these Humpty Dumptys have their great fall and can’t be put together again.

==

2026-03-29
[At a hearing on March 26, Minnesota State Rep. Mary Franson dismissed a panel discussing climate change because “my faith is not in climate change ... my faith is in Jesus” and the world doesn’t end that way. The post also referred to Sen. James Inhofe who once carried a snowball onto the Senate floor to deny climate change.]

To Rep. Mary QuiteContrary, who says “My faith is not in climate change.” That’s because recognizing climate change does not require faith. You have actual physical evidence and records; you have observations and measurements; you have predictions borne out by later observations and measurements. You don’t need the “evidence of things not seen” if the things are seen.

Oh, and climatologists are not predicting the end of the world, you dumb bozo. They are predicting mass damage to human civilization. You may in your delusion think they’re the same. I suspect both those who die from the coming changes and those who manage to survive them will think differently.

You might do well to contemplate Mark 8:18 - “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”

(As a footnote, I clearly remember five-time winner of my “Clown Award” James “RocksInHisHead” Inhofe - my appropriate name for him because his middle name was no joke “Mountain” - and his being repeatedly mocked by Sheldon Whitehouse after his stunt by going through a list of proofs for climate change and punctuating each by saying the Senate could believe the science or “the senator with the snowball.”)

==

2026-03-30
A few brief thoughts on my New Kings day.

All the expected adjectives - exciting, invigorating, enthusiastic, simultaneously joyful and angry, and more - all apply. The crowd was larger than the last time (although the organizers did fall short of their hope to double it) but the growth in energy clearly outstripped the growth in numbers.

I have a decent degree of confidence in my own crowd size estimates but I do lean toward being conservative because I envision a protest crowd as a measure of potential energy and I like thinking that the energy present is more than I’m estimating rather than less. With that in mind, I estimated 4,000 were present.

Beyond that, I was surprised even maybe taken aback by the overwhelmingly favorable response by the cars coming by on this busy roadway to the point that I didn’t hear a single vulgar shout and my housemate only noticed two - and it wasn’t just a single beep going by, it was people riding the horn the length of the line.

But what really did my heart good is that when things broke up, I hopped in my car to catch the last quarter hour or so of another rally because it was in the town I grew up and the idea there was one there, well, I had to see that. As I approached, I saw a small group at one corner of an intersection, okay, maybe they turned out 200 or maybe more - only to then realize that the line actually stretched out in all four directions and there were by my guess pushing 1000 people there. And yes, that made me smile. To steal a phrase, bigly.

Next up big day: May 1.

Leave a comment

The simple answer is yes, the real answer a bit more complicated.

The administration of The Amazing Mr. O was a mess of contradictions on immigration.

On the one hand, it supported things like DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and the DREAM Act, which would have provided people who came here as children with a path to citizenship.

On the other hand, it did deport more people than any previous administration and yes the total came to about 3 million over the eight years, leading immigration-rights communities to call him “the Deporter-in-Chief.”

On the other other hand, over time, particularly after a policy change in 2014, the deportations came to focus more and more on people who had actually been convicted of serious crimes, as result of which the rate of deportations pretty steadily dropped over the period 2009-2016. And a not-insignificant percentage of the deportations were I forget the technical term but were people who were caught crossing the border and were sent back immediately, so that in the technical legal sense they never entered the US but were counted as deportations - as even the administration of The Orange Overlord not only admitted but criticized as suggesting Obama was overstating his administration’s attempts to “secure the border.”

Oh, wait, I need a fourth hand. A lot of the people now targeted by the reactionaries populating what should be called the wrong wing are those who had entered legally and simply overstayed their visa. They were supposed to obtain a green card within a year. The Orange Overlord canceled a policy that said that simply not having done that by then was not by itself sufficient grounds for detention or deportation. That policy was adopted in 2010 - that is, during Obama’s first term (and therefore existed throughout TOO’s first term).

As for outrage, it was indeed muted (I have groused often enough about how the left goes silent when a D is in the White House) but not absent; thus the “Deporter-in-Chief” label and the shift in later years in the direction of the actually convicted. So yeah, definitely bad - but today is way worse.

The outrage now is driven by four differences: The open violence and racism of the approach, intentionally designed to spread terror among immigrant communities; the indiscriminate sweeping up of citizens and legal residents1; the refusal to acknowledge and deliberate efforts to avoid providing an opportunity for habeas relief; and the openly-declared intent to deport not the roughly 400,000 per year of the Obama term, but a million per year while all but openly declaring they want the US to be a white ethno-state. (”America is for Americans and Americans only.” - Stephen Miller, October 2024)

Oh, and don’t forget the attacks on birthright citizenship and the recrudescence of family separation. (I recently learned the word “recrudescence,” meaning “the return of something bad after a period of relief,” and I love it.)

Bottom line for me: Yes, Obama deported three million people and yes that was more than any previous administration and yes he didn’t get near enough pushback. I was among the guilty on that, as immigration was a topic I only occasionally addressed prior to about 2016. I did do a three-parter on the overall topic in 2019 which I reposted in 2024; if you want, you can see them here:

https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-three-fer-on-immiagration-part-one.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-three-fer-on-immigration-part-two.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-three-fer-on-immigration-part-three.html

As for the bombing, yeah, he absolutely did bomb seven countries (some claim eight, but that involves stretching definitions): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen. And yes, it absolutely was without specific Congressional authorization.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Obama claimed the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) from either 2001 or, in the case of Iraq, 2002 gave him the authority, an assertion at best called a cheap and convenient excuse (more accurately, complete bullshit) to avoid any necessity to justify any of it and knowing he could get away with exercising extraordinary and extra-legal power because Congress was too feckless or in the case of Democrats too anxious about the horrifying prospect of challenging their popular president to do anything about it.2 All he had to do was to wave around the label “terrorist” and anything goes3 - including goes “boom.”

It wasn’t only bombing, by the way. Over his time in office, he also blew through his own declared limits on US forces in Iraq, the time frame for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and no “boots on the ground” in Syria.

And again, the outrage was muted - but I had enough of my own. You might like to watch this starting at about 11:15 to see my 10 reasons I wasn’t going to vote for Obama in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVz_Ecm5A9I

I just realized that this was very likely TMI but screw it, I’m not going to edit it. Just correcting typos takes more energy than I case to devote.

Hell there’s no evidence of even “spread,” never mind “wide.” Studies repeatedly and I would easily venture invariably show such non-citizen voting at tiny fractions of one percent.

In fact, just today (3/12) came news that in January, the DOJ dropped an investigation into claims of non-citizen voting in Nevada in 2020 after finding just 38 *possible* - not confirmed, just maybe - non-citizen voters. That’s 0.003% of the vote.

==

2026-03-14
[Alina Habba attacked Kamala Harris’ talk at Jesse Jackson’s funeral, calling it “comments of desperation at Reggie Jackson’s funeral, and she didn’t even know him.”]

I’m with Alina! Obviously, Harris didn’t know Jackson. I mean, she didn’t even mention “Thriller!”

==

2026-03-14
[Amber (Eevie) Bateman posted about her rejection of MAGA types who now regret voting for The Orange Overlord and “want to find community with the left,” saying “I will never forgive them for the chaos, fear and cruelty.” In response, someone said “What would it take?” and that not “accept[ing] those willing to admit that they made a mistake” would make them turn back to TOO.]

I’ll tell you what it would take for me. Genuine contrition. Not just the banal “I didn’t vote for that” which just deflects responsibility onto some unspecified other, but a recognition that “I did vote for that because through my vote I helped it to happen” and “I either knew and did it anyway or damn well should have and it’s on me that I didn’t” and most importantly, “I was wrong.” Not just “I made a mistake,” but “I was wrong.”

Combine those with an actual commitment to doing something to undo the damage done - and I mean something both positive and goes beyond voting a different way in November - and we’ll have a basis to talk.

I was raised Roman Catholic and I recall the key elements of Confession were admitting your sins, being genuinely sorry, and doing penance. I also remember learning about existentialism, including the principle that you are responsible for your decisions. Put those together in principle and forgiveness becomes a possibility; put them in together in practice and it can be offered.

==

2026-03-14
[The Women’s Institute announced it would continue accepting trans women despite complaints.]

Years ago in another forum I used to have a heading of “Another Small Victory In The Struggle.” This definitely would have made the list. I would have been happier if the WI was active in the US, but I will take what I can get.

==

2026-03-14
[Mindy OkayIloveyoubyebye wrote about returning to it, i.e., writing, modestly dismissing having been in a couple of anthologies.]

“No big deal, trust me.”

I beg to differ. Being in an anthology is a big deal. Period.

For the literally hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written over the years, my entire list of “published by others” is a stolen leaflet text and an acknowledgement in a book about deterrence theory1. So being in an anthology would be a thrill.

And I think you for this note because it has spurred me to get back in touch with an old friend, a woman who writes horror fiction and, like you, was in a couple of anthologies - that last being the spark.

==

2026-03-14
And now for today’s Clown Award:

Pete “I’m a manly man” Hogsbreath: “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

And the only reason for a traffic jam is the number of cars on the highway. It would be open if no people were driving.

==

2026-03-17
So when will the Israel-US war on Iran end?

Apparently, when The Orange Overlord feels it in his bone spurs.

==

2026-03-17
[A young Dem candidate was asked on CNN if Dems need to “moderate” positions on social issues and “move to the center.”]

“Do we need to “moderate, move to the center?”

No effing way. What we need to do is aggressively advocate for what we believe in, for what is just and right and stop trying build campaigns on anodyne aphorisms only to shrink away from even those as soon as the right wing - which should be called the wrong wing - cocks an eyebrow in our direction.

I still remember all these years later polling that was done in the early days of the Newt Gingrich era that found that people didn’t like Democrats - but not because of what they stood for but because they didn’t seem to stand for anything, seemed to have no core values from which they would not shrink in the face of opposition, no convictions that were not subject to focus-group-based re-writes.

This doesn’t mean that we have to make any given issue, including trans rights, the centerpiece of a campaign. Candidates and parties certainly can focus on the issues most important to them or most likely to bring victory.

What is does mean, however, is that we have to have ethical and moral standards on which we will stand.

It does mean that we hold some things to be basic truths - including, as here, that trans rights, including access to health care and full engagement in society, are human rights and therefore worthy of support and we are called to meet that need.

It does mean that we do not evade or hide our commitment to those basic truths and when challenged on them we do. not. back. down. And that includes ditching Gavin Newsom-style triangulation.

And it does mean as a practical and tactical matter that we should adopt one part of the reactionary playbook: Attack, attack, attack. A past world chess champion named Emanuel Lasker advised players that no move should be entirely defensive. Every move should carry some threat. It’s wise advice in politics as well as chess: Even defense should involve counterattack.

“Moving to the center” as a result of political calculation rather than genuine commitment violates all those principles and generally serves to lose you supporters without gaining ground among your adversaries. In all honesty, I can’t say it never works - but it has failed often enough to file it under “Use only as desperation.”

==

2025-03-18
[The TN House has advanced a bill ordering health care providers to give the state personal medical information that would enable the public identification of anyone receiving transgender care.]

I didn’t get to the end your subhead before I was looking up HIPPA to confirm my understanding of it.

I’m certainly not known for any Pollyanna-ish tendencies, but I have to say that after spending some time at that, including your link to the discussion of exceptions, I am still mystified as to how these buffoons and bozos can think - for all their self-satisfied pretensions to the contrary - that this bill does not violate HIPPA and by passing it Tennessee will not be setting itself up for an embarrassing defeat in court.
-
2026-03-19
[A cruel, draconian, and needless bill designed as a test case for the Supreme Court with the aim of codifying transphobia into law.]

No argument there. But what I think will cripple it in court is that the whole impact on trans folks, desired by the bill’s supporters or not, doesn’t impact the claim that it violates federal law.
-
2026-03-18
[I hope they pass it so they can get their asses sued so hard - problem with that is if it passes, trans folks will be persecuted by this law until it gets thrown out.]

Which is why it would be good for opponents to very publicly note before the bill gets final passage that in the likely event of the bill being tossed there could be potential for legal consequences for those who cooperate.

==

2026-03-18

Leave a comment

[An anti-trans ballot initiative was certified for the November ballot in Colorado, prompting a comment saying to scratch the state off the list of “safe” states.]

No, not yet. Remember, what’s happened is that a ballot question got certified. That’s all. It’s a long way from passing. Considering it’s common for ballot questions to lose support as a campaign goes on and that we don’t even know if it has majority support now (personally, I suspect it doesn’t), while there is a battle to be fought, it’s way too early to throw in the towel.
-
2026-03-19
As a footnote, I’ve just seen where Colorado’s second largest school district rejected demands from the Orange Overlord’s Dept. of Miseducation to enact anti-trans policies.

==

2026-03-20
[A woman named Alexia Moore has been charged by Georgia with attempted murder because she took an abortion pill.]

It’s what women have been saying all along. What health care advocates have been saying all along. The drive to ban abortion doesn’t have an effing thing to do with “the sanctity of life” or any of the rest of that bs.

It’s about domination, control, and subjugation. And anyone who tells you otherwise is either a damn fool or a despicable liar.

I mention this because a popular regular feature was “Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages.” There were usually a couple of “nominees” and a “winner” in each category.

The Clown Award was for what I found for whatever reason utterly mockable, whether for straight-up stupidity or deep-set dumbness, while the Outrage was something that particularly aggrieved me - almost always, and frequently precisely because it was, something that I thought didn’t get the attention it deserved.

This surely could have been a example of the latter.

On March 17, the Alabama Supreme Court effectively ruled that everyone in Alabama - residents and visitors alike - must carry personal identification with them at all times even though there is no law requiring it.

This came as the result of a suit filed by Michael Jennings, a Black pastor who was arrested in May 2022 by Childersburg police while watering his neighbor’s flowers after a woman called 911 about a “young Black male” on the property.

When the cops came, Jennings identified himself as “Pastor Jennings,” said he lived across the street, and that he was caring for his neighbor’s yard while they were vacationing.

Apparently still suspicious that this Black man (Did I mention Jennings is Black?) seen in police body camera videos standing in a driveway holding a garden hose and spraying flowers was up to something nefarious, the cops demanded he produce identification.

He refused, saying he’d done nothing wrong.

So the cops arrested him for “obstructing a government operation.” The charge was later dismissed, and he sued the city and the officers in federal court for false arrest.

Federal District Judge R. David Proctor dismissed the claim but in what could well be thought a surprise twist, the reliably right-wing 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision, finding that the cops did not have sufficient cause for an arrest.

Here’s where it becomes an Outrage.

Proctor took it on himself to ask the Alabama Supreme Court to weigh in - much like Daddy says “no,” so you run to Mommy to see if you can get a different answer.

Well, the Mommy court ruled 6-3 that the state’s “stop-and-identify” law “does not,” wrote Justice William Sellers for the majority, “exclude from its purview a request” - “request” being legalese for “do it or else” - “for physical identification when a suspect provides an incomplete or unsatisfactory response to an officer’s demand” for ID. Meaning the demand for physical ID was legit and so was the arrest.

Okay, but who gets to decide when a “suspect” had offered an “incomplete or unsatisfactory response?” Who gets to decide if that response is incomplete or unsatisfactory enough to justify a demand for physical ID? Why, the cop, of course.

What’s more, Sellers’ opinion referred to “Terry stops,” named for the 1968 SCOTUS case Terry v. Ohio, in which the Supremes said cops only need reasonable suspicion to stop and question someone, “reasonable suspicion” meaning they could specify an “articulable reason” - no hunches or feelings, but a reason they could actually state - for suspecting the person stopped is, or is about to be, engaged in criminal activity. Apparently in Alabama a Black man watering flowers (Did I mention Jennings is Black?) constitutes reasonable suspicion of criminal intent.

The ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Woods Foundation, and the Cato Institute all filed amicus briefs in support of Jennings, to no avail. Matthew Cavedon of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice accurately described the decision as a “significant expansion of government power over people.”

Which it is. Applied to the real world, this gives cops, at least (for now) in Alabama, the effective power to stop anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts and demand physical ID anytime they want to and to arrest you if you won’t produce it - or if you can’t because you’re not carrying any because there is no law requiring you to. Put another way, the cops can demand physical proof of ID because the law doesn’t say they can’t.

Leave a comment

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Which seems to be the standard rule which is being applied here: Cops can do whatever the laws don’t say they can’t, a principle predating and extending well beyond the injustice to Jennings, who is just another example of the long history of abuse we have wrapped in that standard.

And it properly can be said of both the particular wrong to Jennings and the collective long train of wrongs done to a long train of people under that principle: It is an Outrage.

A note on style: If within a comment something is in brackets - [ ] - and it is in regular type, that’s how it appeared in my original comment. If it’s in italics, it’s something I’ve added here for additional clarity for those who didn’t see the original.

Onward.

2026-03-05
[A friend asked me via email where was the school that was bombed in Iran at the opening of the war and for a suggestion for keeping up with events. Unfortunately, I overlooked the mail for a couple of days.]

A little late for the purpose, I expect, but yeah, there was a school bombed in Minab, a small city in southern Iran on the Straits of Hormuz. I had heard about a second school, but now I don’t see any reference to it.

The US and Israel both deny responsibility (although the Pentagon is “investigating”), so I guess the place just spontaneously combusted - or engaged in what the Department of Death would probably call a “self-initiated rapid kinetic disassembly.”

It is possible the school wasn’t the target (there is a military site nearby) but al-Jazeera did an investigation showing that either the school was hit deliberately or that the US and/or Israel relied on intelligence that was 10 years out of date.

[To save you having to check the link: Intelligence images showed that 10 years ago the building where the school was had been physically separated from the rest of the base and facilities like a sports field had been added. As a footnote, major US media have started reporting the same thing - over a week later.]

Neither case changes the fact that it was hit and “oops, my bad, oh well,” is not an acceptable response - particularly in light of the fact that there have now been large-scale attacks on undeniably civilian targets including hospitals, residential buildings and schools across Tehran and other locations with repeated accounts of “double-tapping,” that is, bombing a site, pausing long enough for assistance to arrive, then bombing the same place again.

(As a sidebar, that’s a tactic for which the US has been known; for one example, the fire bombing of Dresden in WW2 involved a wave of bombing followed by a second one deliberately timed to catch fire-fighting equipment out in the open.)

For a general source of info beyond regular media (where I STRONGLY recommend non-US sources), two that are good on keeping up with events in the vicinity are Drop Site News and within that Jeremy Scahill because they have contacts within the Iranian government (and also Hamas) for perspectives we generally never see in US media. I’m usually very suspicious of partisan sources, but I’ve seen enough cases of something reported on Drop Site being confirmed - days later - in major media to give them a fair degree of credibility.

==

2026-03-05
[Indiana AG Todd Rokita has been compiling a list of his state’s trans people, apparently intending to copy Kansas in invalidating their IDs and maybe charging them with the felony of “falsified” documents.]

FWIW, “retroactively enforcing this would pose a significant legal question” is an understatement as it would appear to be a blatant example of an ex post facto law, trying to make into a crime an action that was not illegal at the time it was performed.

That may be why [Kansas AG Kris] Kobach, who has never shown any shyness about pursuing his own personal obsessions (including extremism in restrictive voter laws, being anti-choice, and xenophobia, the latter of which being where I first encountered him in 2004) didn’t try that route in Kansas.

==

2026-03-06
[This was about a video by Dave McKeegan about Bill Kaysing, considered the father of the “we never landed on the Moon” conspiracy theory. McKeegan is a professional photographer who uses that expertise to debunk photo and video “evidence” that the landing was faked.]

Something that struck me was in the clip about the interview that mentioned the [Werner] von Braun memo supposedly saying a Moon landing was impossible. Part of the answer got rather buried under the interviewer’s next question; that part being that the memo reported von Braun as saying there was a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting to the Moon on the first try.

Considering the idea of just shooting a rocket straight to the Moon and landing there was at one time on the table, the existence of such a memo is plausible. But since we didn’t do it that way, we first just went around the Moon and later sent a multi-stage rocket to end with a module orbiting the Moon with a lander that descended from that orbiting module to make the actual landing, that memo, even if real, is wholly irrelevant.

==

2026-03-06
[This is sort of out of sequence. In the previous issue of “So I said...” I posted my reaction to a video by the Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta questioning the report about a US military commandeer preaching “last days” theology to his troops. Subsequent to that posting, I got a reply to my comment; I think my response is worthy of including here. For the original, go here and scroll down to March 3.]

“Until it’s sourced, it’s just more smoke and that’s the last thing we need more of. Don’t you think?”

It’s not unsourced. It’s from a reputable source with access to the original material whose accounts have proven accurate in the past.

Should we dismiss as “smoke” accusations of Trump abusing a child because we don’t have the original source? In fact all we truly have is a paper reading that someone whose name we don’t know said that someone whose name we don’t know said it was so. But given the overall circumstances, I have no trouble giving a great deal of credence to that report even though a court could legitimately dismiss it as hearsay.

Same here. Lack of perfect knowledge does not prevent reaching justifiable conclusions. And my conclusion is that, given that Hegseth is a Christian nationalist who has conducted Bible study classes while in office and has opened the gates to proselytizing (plus the fact that right-wing religion being pushed in the military has been an issue before), yes, there was a commander preaching apocalypticism and yes, there are others preaching some flavor of fundamentalist Christianity to those under their command.

And I find Hemant’s doubts quite unpersuasive.

==

2026-03-08
[Still more on this. Jonathan Larsen, author of the piece Hemant questioned, replied to the critique. In comments there some suggested Hemant acted out of jealousy that he hadn’t broken the story himself.]

I don’t think jealousy is part of it. Hemant tends to work in the areas of court cases, public and organizational statements, and news accounts - that is, areas where questions about sources generally don’t arise. So I expect he’s not used to dealing with stories like this where you have to some degree make the call as to the trustworthiness of sources.

Jonathan touched on one of the reasons I found the story persuasive: MRFF has been reliable in the past, so it may be a single source, but it’s one that has demonstrated trustworthiness.

==

Leave a comment

2026-03-08
Sam Ames (sames) recently posted an essay about forced outing of transgender students in schools.

He referred to his “least favorite line” in a recent SCOTUS action upholding at least for now an injunction against a California law barring the practice. (To be clear, this doesn’t mean California now has forced outing; it means that such outing can’t be banned statewide pending further court action.)

That line was “But those [student privacy] policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

“Least favorite” is a worthy description because a world of hurt can be found in that supposedly self-evident homily.

I started to say “because it assumes,” but that’s not strong enough. It doesn’t just assume, it sets as a baseline declaration not only that parents protect the best interests of their children but also that they know what those interests are, that parents by definition “know what’s best” for their kids.

And we do like to tell ourselves that. But in fact, in practice, we don’t say that, not by definition. Rather, it’s a “rebuttable assumption,” an assumed stating point that can be overcome by evidence - where possible before any harm arises. That’s why there are agencies like Child Protective Services, why there is such a thing as foster care, why there are custody battles in divorce proceedings, because we as a society recognize that parents don’t always know what’s best for their children, that sometimes they are even harmful to them.

Forced outing policies strip away a layer of protection for children, turning “rebuttable assumption” into “final decision” and opening LGBTQ+ (these days, mostly trans) children to risk of harm without the chance for questions to be raised until it’s too late and without providing them any benefit.

In fact, I wrote somewhere else recently that I can recall from my youth seeing PSAs saying that if there’s trouble at home, “tell someone,” with one specific example being “a trusted teacher.” With forced outing, a teacher becomes someone you must not trust, not just because they might out you but because they would have no true choice in the matter, not when silence risks their entire career.

Trans children get no benefit from forced outing and supportive parents effectively have no need for it. Rather, I would argue that the only people who benefit from such a policy - other than the trans-hating ideologues who just want to force all trans folks so far into the closet they couldn’t even find the door much less open it - are the hostile parents, those whose response to having a transgender child would range from fury to forced conversion therapy to total rejection and ejection from the home.

So to any parent who would say “Why didn’t the school tell me my kid says they’re trans,” my reply is that’s the wrong question. The right one is to ask yourself “Why couldn’t my kid tell me? What message am I giving out such that they felt they needed to hide this from me?” Or, both more philosophical and harsher, “Do I really love my kid? Or do I just love the idea of what I imagine them to be?”

Forced outing answers neither of those questions. It just provides a means to avoid them.

=

2026-03-09
On February 25, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said an “historic” agreement with the US was “within reach” ahead of renewed talks in Geneva. On the 27th, Oman’s foreign minister said a “breakthrough” had been reached in the negotiations.

On the 28th, the bombing began.

In the ST:TOS episode “The Savage Curtain,” one character is a reincarnated version of an Earth warlord named Colonel Phillip Green. Kirk says he was known for attacking his enemies in the middle of peace negotiations.

That description was used to establish Green as representative of historic evil.

Just a thought.

==

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

026-03-09
Wait - so Dep. UN Ambassador Tammy Bruce says “two times they voted for him,” that is, Trump? (About 7:15 at the linked video.)

So Bruce is saying The Orange Overlord lost the 2020 election? She better hope the The Boss doesn’t notice!

==

2026-03-11
[The 4th CCoA upheld a West Virginia law that denied Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming surgery, in so doing effectively extending the Skrmetti ruling allowing bans on transgender care from youth to adults.]

“It is not irrational for a legislature to forgo Medicaid coverage of arguably ineffective and dangerous procedures.”

The word “arguably” is doing a hell of a lot of work - in fact, all the work - in that sentence.

I suppose we can expect the same panel at some point in the future to rule that a state can ban the teaching of evolution because it is “arguably” (according to creationists) incorrect and ban the use of globes in schools because the planet is “arguably” (according to flat Earthers) a flat disc while asserting, as it did here, the state “did not have to take any third party at its word to find a good reason” for the bans - that is, “We don’t need to hear from no stinkin’ experts.”

It sometimes seems the 4th and 5th Circuits are in some private competition as to which can make the stupidest argument to support the cruelest outcome. This one will be hard to beat, but I’m sure the 5th will take up the challenge.

Oh, btw, for all the terfs and “LGB without the T” types out there who I’m sure are quite gleeful over this, who will you turn to when some court rules that a state’s authority to “encourage citizens to appreciate their sex” is interpreted to mean their “natural” sex, so “becom[ing] disdainful of their sex” by rejecting “normal reproduction” sex by being gay or lesbian can legitimately be outlawed?

Reminder: Niemöller’s poem was not just about Nazi Germany.

==

2026-03-12
[Under a new rule, the State Department will be able to revoke trans people’s visas over “misrepresentation,” giving ICE grounds to suspect all non-native born trans people of being in the US illegally. In response, someone asked “Why is our government so obsessed with the genitals of strangers?”]

Because they are trying to suppress the lurid, guilty fantasies the concept of being transgender stirs in them, an outgrowth of our on-going, Puritanical, gross immaturity about anything even remotely related to sex or sexuality.

2026-02-25
[In the SOTU, the Orange Overlord endorsed forced school outing of trans kids.]

What still seems so tragic to me that is I can recall from a good number of years ago PSAs on TV (okay, maybe it was radio; the words are what I remember) telling children that if there were problems at home and they needed help, to tell an adult, including, I remember this specifically, “a trusted teacher.”

Now, that’s simply no longer true. If you’re trans and home feels like a hostile environment, a teacher is someone you dare not trust. Not just because they might expose you to your parents but because they might have no choice in the matter, so you remain silent, feeling trapped and isolated and alone - and potentially suicidal.

Ignorance leads to fear (transphobia). Fear leads to hate (transmisia). Hate leads to inflicting suffering. And the infliction of suffering will be described as doing good - because the alternative is facing the reality of what it is being done and that is too much to bear.

[Footnote: “Tell a trusted adult” is still standard guidance. The issue is, if you’re a trans child, who could such a person be?]

==

2026-02-26
[H.R. 7661, introduced hours after the SOTU, would prohibit schools from “promoting” or “facilitating” anything involving “gender dysphoria” or “transgenderism” and codify the idea that anything to do with trans people is “sexually explicit.” The only thing other than being trans designated “sexually explicit” is depictions of sexual intercourse as defined in 18 USC §2256.]

This just goes to confirm what I’ve been saying for a long time: These are mentally disturbed, ethically warped people driven nearly mad by their obsession with sex such that they can’t conceive of being transgender as a matter of who a person is but only in terms of how they “do it” and “what’s in their pants” and all their attempts at disappearing trans folks are really attempts to repress their hidden, lurid, guilty fantasies.

==

2026-02-27
A simple question I have not seen asked regarding impending war on Iran:

WHAT THE FLAMING HELL IS “COMMERCIAL-GRADE ENRICHED WEAPONS MATERIAL??”

I have to assume the “enriched weapons material” refers to enriched uranium or plutonium. The only sense I can make of “commercial grade” is that it’s enriched to a degree useful for commercial applications - specifically, running a nuclear reactor.

That’s an enrichment level of 3-5% (i.e. 3-5% of the fuel is actual U-235 or Pu-239). Weapons-grade is >90% enriched.

So unless there is some explanation of which I am unaware, the administration of The Orange Overlord and his coterie of clowns and lickspittle liars is threatening to go to war because Iran is “a week away” from being able to operate a nuclear reactor.

[I made essentially the same comment just in a shorter form on another site on March 1 in reply to the observation that “they’ve been saying Iran is days away from producing nuclear weapons for decades. They’re probably hoping we don’t remember that so they can justify what he wants to do.]

==

2026-02-27
[In the Orange Overlord’s SOTU he said “The first duty of government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” The same day, a nearly-blind, non-English-speaking Burmese refugee was found dead after being dumped by CPB at night, in a Buffalo winter, five miles from his home.]

“If he’s going to die, the better he do it sooner, so to reduce the illegal population!”

Seems to me I heard that or something like it sometime in I think it was December.

==

2026-02-28
So Secretary of “War is Peace” Pete “Manly Man” Hogsbreath says the Pentagon has made a deal with Scouting America to eliminate DEI programs and end tolerance of transgender scouts.

To the relief of some, the group declared it would still “have transgender people in our program going forward.”

For my part, I’ll hold my applause until I hear more details. The statement says that yes, trans kids are still welcome - but it does not say that they will not be programmatically segregated by birth sex nor does it say anything about the cutting back on or elimination of DEI programs.

Suppose some state said “Of course trans people are welcome to use our bathrooms or compete in sports - as long as they do it according to their sex assigned at birth.” Would that satisfy? Because it shouldn’t.

This may turn out better than I think it sounds, but I’ll need to be convinced it isn’t just a smokescreen over what is essentially a surrender.

In any event and personally, I think Scouting America should tell the Pentagon to, as I used to put it, “remove thyself to an alternate location, there to engage in autoerotic activities” - i.e., GFY. Crafts, outdoor camping, and sports should not be pipelines to the military.

==

2026-02-28
[In response to the same announcement, someone noted the Scouts are significantly dependent on the DOD, e.g., the Corps of Engineers maintains a lot of Summer Camp infrastructure.]

Yes, and why do they do it? Civic duty? Contribution to the public good?

Nah. It’s because Scouting America acts - whether consciously or by default - as recruitment for the military. The group will even brag about how many of its participants wind up in the military.

==

2026-03-01
[Robert Reich referred again to how offended he was by Randy Newman’s song “Short People.”]

Randy Newman’s song “Short “People” was intended as a satire about prejudice. Apparently he was unaware of the prejudice based on height, saying later he couldn’t see why people would think that anyone “was as crazy as that character” or something to that effect. It was not his only satirical song about bigotry where he spoke in the voice of the bigot, it was just the one that became well known. If you still wonder, you should read the lyrics to see that it is deliberately way over the top.

Just remember, Newman also wrote “Political Science” in which he said we should “drop the big one” on everybody because everybody hates us - except on Australia because we “don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo.” Failing to recognize obvious satire is a rookie mistake.

==

2026-03-01
So I see people saying “Iran is just another distraction from Epstein.”

NOT EVERYTHING IS A DISTRACTION, DAMMIT!

This is a real war with real people really dying, not a damn sideshow and I guarantee you it’s not a “distraction” to the people doing the suffering and dying.

Do you really think that there would be no war, no attacks on immigrants, no undermining of science and public health, no stripping of LGBTQ+, particularly trans, rights, no voter suppression, no pushing of white Christian nationalism, no assertions of near-dictatorial powers, no threats about Greenland or Canada, no the list just goes on and on and on, if it wasn’t for Epstein?

Get a flaming grip!

[This resulted in my being accused of being unconcerned with child rape so I’ll add this addendum, something I apparently should have included but didn’t because I thought it was apparent: When you label something as “a distraction,” you are saying it is unimportant, irrelevant, not worthy of attention and can be safely ignored; in fact it should be ignored so as to keep all focus on whatever is claimed in the particular case to be the singular “real” issue.

As horrific as the facts and the further implications surrounding the Epstein files are, I find myself incapable of letting pass without resistance all the other examples of heinousness coming from the court of the Orange Overlord. I will make no apologies for that and I reject the underlying suggestion that those actions would not have been undertaken, that is, were done only to serve as distractions, were it not for Epstein.]

==

2026-03-03
[Hemant Mehta wrote about his doubts about a story that a combat-lever commander told officers under their command that Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon,” leading to the Second Coming.]

I come to this as, if you will, a virgin, as while I had seen the headline on [Jonathan] Larsen’s story, I hadn’t read it. I still haven’t.

That said, I was put off by your “just asking questions” approach, one that despite your disclaimers came across much more as debunking the story than as expressing healthy skepticism.

For example, you took a couple of personal shots at [Mikey] Weinstein[, President and Founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the source of the story] - “he brags about being repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize,” “every email publicized by MRFF reads more like an internal fundraising email,” the group “takes in a lot of donations on the backs of stories like these,” he personally gets paid about $375,000, about half the group’s total income - while insisting they’re not relevant or “not accusations, just observations.” Then why bring them up?

What’s more, some of your “red flags” aren’t even flags, much less red ones. So the theology expressed by this commander isn’t the same as that of Pete Hegseth? Okay, now that is irrelevant not only to the truth of the story but to the central issue of such “last days” theology being expressed in the military and how far it is being spread, if it is.

You also said “If they’re actively editing the emails, then they need to admit that” just a few paragraphs before stating that he did precisely that when you asked for an original.

So do I think that some commander could have expressed that sort of “final days” theology to those under their command? Yes. Considering the number of examples of right-wing pastors declaring Trump was “anointed of God” to be president and “Jesus is returning,” I have no doubt.

Beyond that, I suspect that a lot of the reports were repeating scuttlebutt and that they didn’t “call a reporter” because beyond concern about being outed - seriously, how many reporters would be willing to deal with a report from someone who wouldn’t ID themselves, leaving no way know the source - they didn’t have additional info to offer and it was more a case of “I heard about this and I thought you should know.”

The question of how widespread the particular form of religious extremism involved is in the military and if it’s being promoted by higher-ups are important ones and wholly worthy of investigation. But neither was the question at hand; the reliability of the story and therefore the trustworthiness of the MRFF was.

Bottom line: At this point, do I have cause to doubt that basic story? No. And bluntly, neither do you.

==

Leave a comment

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

2026-03-04
[In this case, literally “said.” A local Board of Education was considering revoking its guidance on dealing with transgender students, that is, stripping away their protections. Several folks spoke against it at the meeting; this is from what I prepared (which likely makes it seem more polished than it was as delivered). In the end, the motion lost on a tie vote of 4-4.]

Good evening.

I come before the Board tonight to urge you to continue to support and indeed where possible to strengthen the Transgender Student Guidance.

I say this despite the fact that I am not trans, no one in my family is trans, and in fact as far as I know I do not personally know a single transgender person.

The point is, you don’t need to have a personal connection to be aware, to understand, to have empathy.

I was bullied growing up. A lot. I was a fat, shy, bookish kid, the kind who becomes a natural target for bullying, for mockery, being picked on, teasing, and “jokes.” The result was that I never felt connected, never felt I belonged.

It was bad enough that in my teen years I seriously considered suicide and a few years later I attempted it.

Looking back on that time, I can understand to some degree what it’s like to be trans, indeed how much harder to be trans than it was for me. Because if you’re trans, you’re not just made to feel apart, you’re actively set apart, tagged, marked as the “other,” as the “not us” by the society around you - increasingly, even legally so.

Transgender children deserve support, protection, and encouragement sufficient to thrive of the sort that any child should be able expect in any public school.

I’m not an expert, but as a layperson I’m fairly conversant with the science involved here. But you don’t have to be an expert to know the difference between what is right and what is wrong, between fair and unfair, just and unjust, between what is kindness and what is cruelty, to recognize the difference between performative concern and concealed contempt.

So I want to again, call on the Board of Education to continue, and where possible deepen, the support. the protection, the inclusion for trans students in this school system.

What’s more, I call on you to not be deterred or stampeded by the fears, fables, and fairy tales likely to be thrown at you in the course of considering this issue but rather to adopt just some portion of the courage it takes to be transgender and embrace the right, the fair, the just, and the kind.

I want to thank the members of the Board for taking on this civic responsibility of being on the BOE and I thank you for your time.

2026-02-14
[A trans woman was identified as committing a mass shooting, leading various right-wingers to declaim on the “violent nature” of trans people. A reply noted that the same rhetoric is never directed against white male mass shooters.]

That’s because what we’re seeing here is classic, definitional, bigot behavior, whether the bigotry is racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-trans, antisemitism, anti-Muslim, whatever.

If you are someone who is in some way “othered,” you are every person othered in the same way. If you do wrong or behave badly in any way or context, the bigot will say “That’s what those people do, that’s who they are.” But if you are not othered, the bigot will say “That’s what that one individual does, that’s who that one person is.”

So of course they don’t say the same about white men. White men are not “the other.” That’s why a trans shooter generates talk of “trans people are violent and dangerous” while every white male shooter generates talk of “one lone wacko.” It’s what bigots do. (And yes, I am aware of the irony there. But I will stand by my othering of bigots.)

==

2026-02-15
[About as non-political as something could be, this was from a YouTube discussion about “7 British Phrases That Completely Baffle Americans.” Not everyone was baffled. :-) ]

Coupla comments:

From one Larry to another, “Happy as Larry” [meaning “very happy” or “extremely content”] is very unlikely to have been for [Australian boxer] Larry Foley because there is a use of “happy as Larry” in print in an Australian newspaper in 1857 in a manner that indicates it’s a common phrase (The Illawarra Mercury, November 23, 1857) - at which time Foley, born December 12, 1849, was a month short of eight. Other options have the same difficulty of having the supposed source arise after first use. I expect the OED got it right: “Etymology uncertain.”

“Do the washing up” always to me meant doing the dishes.

I always thought “happy as a clam” referred to clams looking like they are smiling, but as others have noted, the original form was “happy as a clam at high tide,” that is, when it was most secure from predators.

I used to think the Mickey in taking same [i.e., in “taking the Mickey”] referred to a Mickey Finn, with the idea you were befuddled by what the other person was saying. Turns out the Mickey Finn originated in Chicago [and had nothing to do with the phrase, which means something like “pulling your leg”].

“Bob’s your uncle” always confused me, although I’d come to think it meant “You’re okay, everything’s fine, situation dealt with.” Which I suppose is close enough [to “and just like that”]. An apparently unresolved question is who the heck was Bob.

==

2026-02-16
Kristi No-one announced at a presser the DHS aims to take a major role in the midterms. “When it gets to Election Day, we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Re-read that sentence very carefully and think about what she’s saying. The DHS intends to “make sure” the “right people” are the ones who vote and “the right leaders” are the ones they elect.

They’re (again and again) showing us who they are. Believe them.

==

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

2026-02-17
[Quoting ID state rep Clint Hostetler on passage of an extreme anti-trans bathroom bill.]

“I think is a noble and right cause…”

...said the slave owners in support of the Civil War.

Oh, and PS:

“protect our children and our ladies.”

“Our ladies?” The 1950s called; they want their sexism back.

==

2026-02-17
[CBS censored Stephen Colbert’s interview with TX candidate for US Senate James Talarico.]

This happened after [FCC chair Brendan] Carr said he was thinking about extending the Equal Time rules to cover late-night TV.

In other words, CBS censored the interview on the grounds of a rule that didn’t exist yet.

This is what’s known as “obeying in advance,” or, in my own way of expressing it, “preemptive capitulation.”

==

Leave a comment

2026-02-17
[A YouTube host referred to an article in The Independent describing Americans selling blood plasma to make ends meet.]

The Independent’s article notes that this rise is over the past four years, meaning it predates Trump 2.0, aka The Orange Overlord. And this is by no means the first time I’ve seen stories like these.

The point here being that this is not the result of Trump policies but of the structure of our economy, with a continuing increase in economic inequality spanning decades. Over the period 1980-2021, the average income of the poorest 20% among us grew by 31% while that of the richest 1% (not counting the richest .01%) grew by 574% and those of the richest .01% grew by 832%.

This is not a Trump issue. This is an economy issue. And we should always remember that - or we will fall into the old pattern of “If we just get rid of so-and-so, everything be fine” and then wondering another election or two down the line why “things” aren’t “fine.”

==

2026-02-18
[Comment: Since ‘68, Boomers have blamed the left for what the right does, bothsiding us to death. “Biden didn’t fix it so we’ll let Trump keep screwing up.”]

That’s utter BS but I suppose should be filed under “every generation blames the one before.”

But fact: Men over 65 voted for Harris (2024) at the same rate they voted for Biden (2020). Women over 65 voted for Harris a little more than they did for Biden. Together, those over 65 were about 2 points more supportive of Harris than they had been of Biden. Meanwhile, young (18-44) women supported Harris, but by five points less compared to 2020, while young men swung 16 points in The Orange Overlord’s direction, supporting him by an 8 point margin.

Blaming Trump on the all-purpose snide dismissal “boomer” will not wash.

==

2026-02-19
Democracy Docket reports that “Trump claimed that Republicans will never lose an election ‘for 50 years’ if they pass the SAVE America Act, which critics have called the most repressive anti-voting law in U.S. history.”

I don’t see any disconnect between the two clauses.

==

2026-02-20
1. According to our Orange Overlord, if SCOTUS ruled against his illegal, unconstitutional tariffs it would be “a body blow to the economy,” an utter disaster.

2. SCOTUS strikes them down, and the Spray Tan Who Would Be King says “No big deal, we’ll just do it this way instead.”

Some reporter willing to lose access should ask which of those two statements is a lie. Because one of them is.

Amend that: At least one of them is.

==

2026-02-21
[A commenter asked for background after another said Muslims fought in the US Revolution]

I did some looking and didn’t find anything definitive, but I did find one source, a Congressional resolution (H. Res. 276, April 1, 2019), that specifically named two Muslims who fought in the US Revolution and another source that named the same two as appearing on muster roles.

Beyond that, there are multiple sources about there being perhaps thousands of Muslims in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, mostly brought over as slaves. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that certainly some (and more than two) fought in the war.

==

2026-02-21
[A commenter said one of his US Senators told him they would refuse to respond to any of his communications because he isn’t MAGA.]

I certainly hope in that letter you described his refusal to respond.

I, however, would prefer that to my own burning-coal red Rep, who just doesn’t respond at all. The only two times I’ve ever heard back from his office was once when he wrongly thought I agreed with him on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and once with a one-size-fits-all attempt to defend the OBBB (the Obnoxious, Bilious, Bombastic Bill). Other than those two, total silence, nada, zilch.

At least your way gives you a means to publicly show his silence is a deliberate conscious snub by a partisan extremist, not just a case of not bothering to answer.

Footnote, purely as an irrelevant sidebar: I was trying to pick an adjective to apply to “red” in the second sentence. I thought of “ruby, but a ruby is a lovely gem and he most certainly is neither lovely nor a gem. I then thought of “fire engine,” but I think of fire engines as relating to rescue and genuine public service. Nope, that doesn’t fit him, either.

Then I thought of a glowing red goal, something that would burn you if you tried to deal with it directly. Right. Better. That will do.

==

Share

2026-02-22
[A Louisiana law requiring posting the 10 Commandments in schools included the Mayflower Compact in a list of “optional” documents to be posted alongside the other.]

Personally, I’m tired of hearing the Mayflower Compact described as if it was some kind of founding document.

The VERY short version of the story is that they had a patent for Virginia but wound up beyond its northern border, which meant that technically there was no government. To avoid anarchy, they essentially agreed to govern themselves as if they had a patent until they got one, which they did the following November.

It was a wise decision, but the Compact broke no new political or philosophical ground.

-

Okay, this is the somewhat longer version, not included in that comment, which I add here for anyone who might be interested.

First know that a patent is legal authority to establish a settlement on “the King’s land.” Because of the practical issues raised by time and distance, they typically included the settlers’ right to govern themselves and their own local affairs “in accordance with the laws of England.”

Second, know that Jamestown is not the same as Virginia. Jamestown was one place within the colony of Virginia, the boundaries of which extended from about where Florida meets the mainland to about the mouth of the Hudson River.

Third, a then-recently developed route to the “New World” was to tack along the 40th parallel from Europe to Cape Cod and then skim the coast north or south, depending on your destination.

Okay. In 1620 a group left England with a patent for creating a settlement in Virginia and traveled that route, heading ultimately for the northern reaches of that colony. (There was a reason for that, for aiming for the very northern parts of Virginia, but going into that would make this explanation even longer.)

Unfortunately, there had been problems in leaving Europe. There were originally two ships going, the Mayflower and the Speedwell, the latter of which was to stay with the colonists (the Mayflower was hired for the voyage). Twice they set out and twice they had to return to port because the master of the Speedwell complained of leaks.

Ultimately they gave up on the Speedwell and the Mayflower left alone - six weeks late.

Which also meant they arrived six weeks later than intended. Upon arriving at Cape Cod and trying to turn south, it became apparent it was too late in the season to safely sail the shoals on the cape’s south side and the master of the Mayflower refused to continue. He told them he’d take them back to England or if they’d rather, he’d stay until they found a place to settle where they were. Most of them had effectively nothing to go back to, so they chose the latter. The Mayflower waited in what’s now Provincetown Harbor while the colonists searched the inside of Cape Cod until, with winter coming hard on, they picked the best place they’d found so far - which became the site of Plymouth. (There’s a great story about their discovery of the harbor, but again, I expect I’m already trying your patience.)

But that raised the issue that they were now north of the boundary of Virginia. Some dissension arose as some of the passengers began to say that because they were beyond the bounds of the patent, no one had any authority over them and they would do as they pleased. Fearing that would lead to the settlement dissolving into chaos before it ever began, with people bickering and scattering into the what they considered wilderness, the group (meaning the adult “free” men - i.e., not servants) agreed - with let’s call it the encouragement of “sign or you don’t get off the ship” - to form a “civil body politic” and govern themselves according to the terms of the patent they’d had.

That is, again, they essentially agreed to act as if they had a patent with the intent of seeking a new one. And it was, again, a wise decision. But it was a stopgap and again broke no new ground; it claimed no rights or powers or freedoms which they were not otherwise granted by law or patent.

When the Mayflower got back to England with the news of where the settlement was, a new patent was obtained, one valid in what had become known as New England. It was delivered to the settlement - Plymouth - in November 1621, at which time the Mayflower Compact, having served its purpose, became void.

==

Leave a comment

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Subscribe now

2026-02-22
[A meme addressed a claim about hormones for transition causing violence by noting the same hormones are used to treat conditions among cis folks.]

Okay, read the following and then I have a question.

Ooh! Ooh! I see it now!

All those men committing all those school shootings must be on testosterone supplements!

Ban testosterone! OMG SAVE THE CHILDREN!

Okay, the question: I was going to post that as a sarcastic remark about how something intended as an attack on trans folks could be twisted into paranoia against cis folks.

Then I wondered if I should not, for fear that people wouldn’t get the sarcasm and think I was intending to mock the point being raised.

So should I have been worried or could I have just posted it without the explanation?

==

2026-02-23
From Chris Geidner (Law Dork) we get the latest brag from the regime of The Orange Overlord about its campaign of murder on the high seas.

It just (not for the first time on this) raises another of those questions that could be asked by some reporter prepared to break their addiction to the sweet, sweet narcotic of access.

Mr. President, just where do these “known narco-trafficking routes” lie? Show up a map so we can see that these routes aren’t being used for any legal activities. You can’t say it’s classified, because you can’t expect us to believe that these “narco-terrorists” don’t know where the “known narco-trafficking routes” these same “narco-terrorists” are using, are.

When you’re talking about bombing boats on open waters without offering any evidence, “Trust me, bro’” just isn’t good enough.

After that reporter is thrown off the plane while it’s still in the air, someone could ask about the deliberately dehumanizing language of “lethal kinetic strike.” Oh, and just what “Designated Terrorist Organizations” are we talking about? Name them. Speaking of which, why the plural? Is this some sort of joint enterprise? Why won’t you actually offer proof of your claims?

I really wish the media was as aggressive and (deservedly) hostile as the reactionaries and court jesters of the court of King Donald the Self would have us believe.

I can remember a time just a few years ago when I spoke to the manager of my local Target to thank them for resisting the fear mongers and bigots who were demanding the chain strip down all its LGBTQ+ clothing and items on display for Pride Month.

I wish I could still visit the stores of that corporation, the one that had a tradition of advocating for the rights of LGBTQ+ people, of Black and other nonwhite people, and of advocating for social and racial justice.

I don’t know what happened to that company, I don’t know just how or when the change occurred, but I do know it collapsed, it caved, as soon as the right wing and later the Trump White House turned its baleful glance in its direction.

It scaled way back on its admired DEI programs. Its LGBTQ+ merch for Pride Month was stripped from the front of store, stuck all but hidden in the back - where there was any at all. (There was none in the particular store I mentioned at the top.)

And now it has not only turned its back on those whose rights it previously championed, it has actively supported the active denial of Constitutional and human rights to immigrants - including those lawfully present, not just the vilified “illegal aliens” - by allowing the violent thugs who have become the face of ICE and CBP to stage in its parking lots and standing silent in the harsh light of the racism and xenophobia of the current White House loudly declaimed by Stephen Miller, who in an undeniable echo of Hitler’s henchmen, declared “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

I would wish to be able to add Target back on my list of places to shop. Right now, I can’t. But you can help me take a step in that direction. I realize that you do not speak for the company but as a manager of a Target you are a, perhaps the, face of the company in this community.

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

A number of organizations concerned with justice for immigrants have come together with a list of demands we wish to see Target take to disentangle itself from the noxious web of oppression in which it has tangled itself. As part of that, people have been urged to express in some way on February 11 their concerns about Target’s policies. This letter is my small part toward that end.

I strongly urge you to pass on these demands (and if you wish a copy of this letter) to higher-ups in the company. Target should:

- publicly call for an immediate end to the ICE “surge” into Minnesota and for ICE and the CBP to leave the state;

Leave a comment

- affirm Target as a 4th Amendment Workplace, that is, exercise its 4th Amendment rights and publicly post signage denying entrance to immigration agents who do not have signed judicial warrants as required by law, as well train staff on how to respond when immigration agents arrive at stores;

- publicly call to shut down ICE and lobby Congress for no federal funding for ICE in the budget negotiations; and

- demand any federal officer who kills or harms a civilian be held legally accountable, starting with legitimate investigations and charges by local officials.

I look forward to any response you wish to offer. My contact information is below.

2026-01-26
The White House gangsters, including Greg Bovine (not a typo) and Kristi No-one, have made much of the claim that Alex Pretti was not carrying ID while armed, which meant, they claim, he was breaking the law and that somehow proved he intended to “slaughter” the DHS thugs and deserved to be shot down.

YouTuber Jesse Dollemore bothered to look up the actual law. It turns out the penalty is a max fine of $25 and if you later show the court or the arresting officer your ID plus permit it goes away.

Truly a major crime worthy of instant death.

The clip starts ~3:30 at this link.

==

2026-01-27
So the face of The Orange Overlord’s repression regime in Minnesota is going to go from Greg Bovine (not a typo) to Tom Homan, well-named because he’s almost human.

Color me unimpressed.

==

2026-01-27
According to Ron Filipkowski, John Fetterman says he’d like to see DHS funding separated from the mini-bus and voted on separately. But it it’s not (and it won’t be), he’ll vote for the full bill anyway. He ended by saying he’s “committed to being a voice of reason and common sense.”

A worthwhile goal. I hope someday he achieves it.

==

2026-01-29
[Background: Julia Serano did a video essay on “marked” vs. “unmarked” (that is, “othered”) people]

I watched the essay with appreciation. Thank you for doing it. I gave a little fist pump when you referred to part of being “unmarked” is not just what others think about you, it’s what they don’t think about you - having made the same point a couple of years ago in discussing white privilege.

Related to that is the idea that if you are “marked” and in some way misbehave, it’s taken as “that’s what ‘those people’ do” - but if you are “unmarked,” it becomes “that’s what that one individual does.”

Again, thanks for the essay.

==

2026-01-30
[A collection of 47 groups - including faux-Christian ministries, anti-choice twits, and state-based far-right outfits - have started something they’re calling the “Greater Than” campaign to push for overturning Obergefell based on the vacuous claim that children of same-sex parents have been “failed” by marriage equality.

The campaign was started by right-wing activist Katy Faust, who has previously blathered that children with same-sex parents are inherently “victimized.”]

So I just checked out their website and three things struck me:

One: The first person they picture and quote is Charlie Kirk and they quote Barack Obama as if he is a supporter - which, it shouldn’t be necessary to say, he is not.

Two: There is no hint they oppose divorce, which would be required to be consistent with their insistence that “mother and father are never optional, they are essential.” (Then again, when has ethical or logical consistency ever been a requirement for this crowd?)

Three: They equate children’s “needs, rights, safety, [and] development” with not having same-sex parents without a word about prenatal care, WIC, SNAP, health care, educational and housing programs, the list would be quite long. (Repeat previous parenthetical.)

Conclusion: Exactly what you’d expect. A concoction of bigots, bozos, and buffoons united in their homophobic paranoia.

==

2026-01-30
[A poll cited by Erin Reed says voters prefer Democrats to GOPpers on trans issues, suggesting there is no need for Dems to shy away from defending trans rights. An objection was raised that trans issues rank low on lists of voter concerns, so extremists dominate on the issue.]

The answer, then, is to be loud. To show it matters to (the generic) you.

Political parties don’t just look for voters, they look for motivated voters, not only because they’re a source for campaign volunteers but more importantly because they’re the ones most likely to turn out if they think the party is on their side and also are the ones most likely to say “the hell with it” and not vote at all if they think you’re not.

That “extremely radical vocal minority” you cite fits that description: loud and motivated. So should we.

-

2026-01-30
[In response to a different person’s comment on the same poll.]

I expect the coming campaigns to be even more vicious than those to date and the wave of continuously increasingly evil legislation to continue - in spite of the diminishing returns in elections.

Why? Because the most fanatical among the reactionaries know, they can’t NOT know, that they are in the long run losing. They’ll even say it; their constant desperate whining about the approaching collapse of civilization unless unless unless - that’s not just posturing, it’s a primal scream and they will fight to hold off the denouement as long as they can.

But at the same time, the rest of the right wing knows that’s the only thing they’ve got. They are so far underwater that they have already essentially surrendered the House and are getting twitchy about the Senate. They can’t hope to run and win on issues that people care most about and they know it, so they have to exploit our all-too common discomfort about anything elated to sex to arouse fear and then ride a social panic.

Combine the most fanatical with the merely ordinarily fanatical and you’ve got a recipe for a very very bad several months.

==

Leave a comment

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

2026-01-31
[A post with a link I failed to record described anti-trans legislation as genocide.]

A bit under three years ago I compared what the right wing wants to do to trans folks with an oubliette (from the French oublier, “to forget”), a type of Medieval prison cell in which people would be stuffed and then, well, forgotten.

“That’s what the right wing wants to do to trans people in this country. Not physically, at least not yet, but legally, socially, politically, psychologically, wants them to be disappeared and forgotten as if they simply do not exist, do not have the right to exist, do not even have the right to say ‘I exist.’”

I didn’t use the term “genocide,” but damn, it fits.

==

2026-01-31
CBS network news just this moment, on its Sunday evening broadcast, referred to the new DHS policy that its agents can enter private homes without a judicial warrant.

NO THEY CAN’T! PERIOD TRIPLE-EXCLAMATION POINT ALL CAPS!!!

The masked thugs are claiming an administrative warrant is sufficient. IT’S NOT. End of argument. But I guarantee you there will be more smashed-in doors as a result.

Why why WHY do our major “news” media treat any claims to powers and authorities claimed by The Orange Overlord and his Brownshirted underlings as if they actually had them? Why it is always “Donald Trump did such-and-such” or “ordered such-and-such” and only several graphs down (if at all) offer some mealy-mouthed CYA like “Constitutional scholars question if the president has the authority?” Is it cowardice? Sloppiness? Incompetence? Indifference?

It really doesn’t matter. It’s just another example of how we are uninformed, misinformed, and malinformed by corporate media.

==

2026-01-31
[The following involves an exchange with another commenter. As always in such cases, I have edited their remarks to the points to which I was responding. If you suspect I may be being unfair, I urge you to check out the unedited exchange, which can be found at this link.

It began with a comment that defended the arrest of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort by citing 1 Corinthians 3:17: “If anybody should destroy the temple of God, God will destroy that person, because God’s temple is holy; and you are that temple.”]

I think I’m going to remember that quote. The next time some transphobe wants to deny needed health care to a trans person, I will tell them that they are destroying the temple of God.

As for its use here, I recall the line from “Pilgrims Progress” that says “The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose.”

-

2026-02-01
[Their response: “Let’s be clear about targets and responsibility. I quoted Scripture to talk about physical intrusion into holy space and natural law fundaments of the Western legal tradition.” He also laid healthcare issues faced by trans folks on insurance companies, not the laws.]

Macbeth may have been referring to life, but he could just have well meant your argument.

So let’s skip the attempts to change the subject (to “Who is REALLY to blame for trans people being denied care: profit-mongering insurance companies or the right-wing fundamentalist Christian Bible-thumpers behind the drives to legislate trans folks out of existence?”) and get back to the point.

That point being that you quoted the Bible - you know, that book that “has been debated for two thousand years” without even reaching a consensus as to what should be included in it but with a plethora of sects claiming their particular interpretation of their preferred translation is THE TRUTH - as expressing “natural law” and therefore as the foundation of common law and the Constitution.

Which says at minimum that you don’t understand the concept of natural law while indicating strongly that you would have our secular laws be “Bible-based,” thereby rejecting the very Constitution you claim as a backing, all in service of justifying the arrest of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort in contravention of the social contract that allows journalists to bear witness to and report on events.

That contention is given weight by your choice of closing [Bible] quote [about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah], which bears no connection anything certainly I and as far as I know anyone else has said but seems to be just a random rant threatening divine retribution for, well, for something from your imagination but not for anything here.

And since you brought up Sodom and Gomorrah, I’ll reply with Ezekiel 16:49 (NIV): “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

I believe I’ve given you as much time as you deserve. Last licks are yours if you want them.

-

2026-02-01
Except for this, which I separate to a reply to myself because it’s more of a sidebar than part of the actual argument.

Would your contention that Lemon was an “appendage of the protest mob, an added feature ... part and parcel of the intimidation” and therefore deserves punishment be the same if the site had been, say, the HQ of one of those insurance companies you consider “the real enemy of trans people in health-care disputes?”

If yes, your argument about “sacred spaces” goes out the window.

If no, should it be assumed that you would likewise demand punishment for ICE or CBP agents who entered a “sacred space” to arrest a so-called “illegal immigrant?” (Note that the answer “yes, with the permission of those in charge of that space” by definition gives those same authorities the power to absolutely bar entry.)

Finally, who and what gets to define what is a “sacred space?” Does it include all Christian (including Catholic) sects? Does it include synagogues, mosques, Native American sacred lands, various shrines around the world where entry is only by permission? And note that using “a house of God” as a reference point only throws you back onto the already-rejected “’cause the Bible says so.”

-
2026-02-02
[“Societies define what is a sacred space.”]

I said I wouldn’t reply and it’s taking considerable will to keep to that, but I can’t resist noting your statement “The moment you redefine reporters as ‘appendages’ of a mob, you’ve justified the baton,” etc.

That “redefinition” of Don Lemon was yours. No one else’s. By your own words you have “justified the baton, the cuff, and the cell - forever.”

And “societies” don’t define sacred spaces - the dominant forces in a society do. Consider as illustration the cavalier treatment still accorded to sacred spaces of Native Americans. One of the roles of government is - or, rather, should be - to protect the rights of those lacking the economic, social, or political power to protect them on their own. Which will of necessity at times involve a use of state power in a way that inconveniences the powerful or privileged.

==

Leave a comment

2026-02-01
[A different comment from the same person on the same topic. He noted the case of Owen Shroyer, who “never entered the Capitol. He was there as a journalist. He got 60 days, fully supported by the Biden DOJ” so Lemon should get the same.]

I looked up Shroyer.

First, by trespassing he violated an earlier agreement he made after he disrupted an impeachment hearing.

He made speeches endorsing the claim the election was stolen.

On Jan 5, he put out a video saying “Are we just going to sit here or are we going to actually do something about this?”

On Jan 6, he joined a crowd in shouting “We aren’t going to accept it.”

While he could have had some claim to being a journalist (even if it was for Infowars), the fact is, he was not there as a journalist. He was there as an advocate and a participant.

Equating the two cases - Lemon and Shroyer - is flatly false.

==

2026-02-05
[Another case where I failed to note the source, but as I was only expanding on what was said, which was “if you can’t see a trans person without sexualizing them, that’s your sin,” I think it’s okay.]

Geez, how long have I been saying this? So much of the bigotry and social panic about trans folks is driven by our cultural discomfort with, our cultural immaturity about, anything in any way related to sex and for the transphobes, it’s all about sex. They can’t look at, hear about, or even consider a trans person without thinking about “how they ‘do it’” and “what’s in their pants” and desperately needing to reject the guilty fantasies such thoughts arouse.

==

2026-02-06
[The Orange Overlord says he’ll release the money for a major NJ-NY construction project if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed for him.]

He is acting like an Egyptian pharaoh, building monuments to make himself appear greater than all who came before and so in a sense immortal. He should check out the poem “Ozymandias.”

==

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

2026-02-08
[A YouTube creator mentioned Martin Niemöller’s famous poem but added “But I just found out her was an antisemite, so, whatever….”]

It’s not proper to dismiss Niemöller as an antisemite; his story is much more complex than the single label.

He did indeed embrace that sort of presumptive antisemitism with which we are still afflicted but was even worse then - but he came to regret it and alter his views (while in a concentration camp for being insufficiently pro-Hitler) and the poem was intended not just as a warning but to express his own guilt and shame for his own silence in the face of oppression of others.

Well, the incident was real (and police have arrested a suspect), but Locke’s supposed audio was a fake.

It was supposedly from some home security system but sounded fake to me when I first heard it. Even so, I was prepared to chalk it up to the quality of the system’s recording ability until I looked up the info about the weapon.

See, the police said the weapon was a .40 caliber automatic pistol. That is a SEMI-automatic weapon - meaning the trigger has to be pulled for each shot - with a capacity of up to 15 rounds.

So if he did fire 60 shots, he had to fire 15 times, pause to reload (which police said he did), fire 15 times, reload, and so on. No flaming way in hell did he do than in, as Locke claimed, three seconds.

Why he felt it necessary to manipulate or manufacture the audio I can’t say; maybe he thought the original didn’t sound as scary as he wanted. Whatever the reason, is was a fake.

==

2026-01-18
I’ve asserted several times that much of the bigotry and hatred around trans folks is actually about discomfort and fear about sex, our societal sickness about the subject. For way too many of us, anything and everything about LGBTQ+ folks in general and trans folks in particular isn’t about who a person is, but about how they “do it,” about “what’s in their pants,” with the unwanted lurid thoughts such notions arouse and the self-loathing guilt they produce turned outward as self-protection.

Here we have another example.

RJ May is - or was until he quit — a member of the South Carolina state legislature.

During his time in office he claimed that children are being “harmed” by “exposing” them to drag shows and “pushing sex changes on toddlers,” ranting about “child exploitation.”

And to what should be no one’s surprise he has been sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to distributing child sex abuse material, including nearly 500 explicit videos featuring toddlers and young children involved in sex acts and incest between young children and their parents. (He has a seven-year-old child.)

After his indictment in June, he claimed he’d been framed by his political enemies (of course he did) but wound up pleading guilty to five counts in exchange for the dropping of five others.

From the post:

Moms for Liberty — the anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group that regularly seeks to ban LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books as a form of “pornography” and regularly accuses LGBTQ+ people and their allies of “grooming” children for sexual abuse — honored May as their 2023 Legislator of the Year and had him speak at their 2022 event on “Reclaiming Education in America.”

I wonder if they’ll take back the honor.

Actually, I doubt it. Just like I doubt there aren’t a lot more just like May among the haters.

Share Larry Erickson’s Substack: Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

==

2026-01-19
It is time for Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to be disbarred for judicial misconduct for accepting and ruling on issues where he clearly has a profound personal bias.

==

026-01-21
[This was right after funding was passed out of committee but before the House vote.]

The public, not to mention Congress, being given just days to consider and react to funding for DHS in general and ICE in particular is disturbing at best, evasive of public response at a time when those agencies are significantly unpopular more likely.

I call on you to vote NO on any appropriations for DHS or ICE until after - repeat, after - major reforms are agreed to and acted on.

DHS, a product of post-9/11 paranoia, should be dismantled. ICE should be stripped down and rebuilt from scratch with strict controls; to steal a phrase, it should be “repealed and replaced.” Until then, they should get nothing.

On this, I will not be satisfied with less.

Leave a comment

==

2026-01-21
A post suggested that The Orange Overlord’s desire for Greenland is because the area distortions inherent to the Mercator Projection map makes it look much bigger than it actually is.

The post itself is much more about maps than TOO’s Greenland obsession and is interesting and worthwhile. Still, I have to contest that starting point as I rather doubt that has much if anything at all to do with it. I think it’s much more to do with TOO’s vision of a “greater America,” the same vision that drove the business of Canada being “the 51st state” - something that still sits in the back of his head; note that he recently referred to Greenland becoming the “52nd state.”

(And people in Puerto Rico went “um, hey!”)

He thinks in 19th “sphere of influence” terms, with one nation dominating it’s own sphere: China in Asia, Russia in Europe, and the US in the Americas. In that view, each of those dominant nations should be free to do pretty much what it wants within their own sphere so long as it does not intrude into one of the others.

In that way of thinking, expanding our borders would be the ultimate establishment in the historical record of the US being a great power and him a great leader, something he so desperately desires (which, parenthetically, I think relates to his practice of plastering his name on things and his pathetic desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, ways to be seen and remembered as someone worthy of note). It’s not so much the size of the expansion per se (although it would be significant, increasing the area of the US by about 22%) as the sheer fact of it that provokes his dreams of grandeur.

Footnote: Post author Christopher Lockett protested (with a smile) that he didn’t say that’s why TOO was saying that, rather it was just an excuse to “nerd out about cartography.” To which I replied, that’s okay, I was doing the same thing: using a remark as a hook for my own rant. And that I enjoyed the article.

==

2026-01-23
[Background: A commenter on an article at Erin in the Morning said the people behind anti-trans laws should be imprisoned and fined and barred from seeking office “until they are as politically dead as the Whigs.”

NOTE WELL: The writer’s responses to me have been edited. While I think they still reflect what was argued, to be completely fair, you should see the whole exchange, which can be found here.]

I hate to be a downer, but what you’re suggesting is an incredibly heavy lift.

The first citation [42 USC §1983] is about suing public officials, the second [18 USC §241] is about conspiracy, the third [18 USC §242] is about wrongful official actions under color of law. What all have in common is that they involve violations of rights secured either under the Constitution or by federal law.

There is no federal law establishing a right to GAC (or any health care, for that matter - note that Medicare, the ACA, and the like are about access to care, not a right to it). Even the Biden-era protections for trans folks were an Executive Order based on an interpretation of Title IX and rescinded by The Orange Overlord.

Nor is there any established Constitutional right to GAC or even just to being transgender. In fact, in US v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee ban on GAC for youth, the Scurrilous Six majority said the ban is valid because it merely “removes one set of diagnoses,” that is, gender dysphoria, “from the range of treatable conditions” so no violation of rights was involved. I expect any claim that denial of access to GAC violates a Constitutional right would likely be treated dismissively.

The closest I think we could come now is Bostock v. Clayton County, but since that was about employment, not health care and preceded Skrmetti (2020 vs. 2025) I doubt it would be persuasive.

-

2026-01-24
[There are laws on state and federal interference with rights to property, commerce, etc. Rights don’t need to be in the Constitution; rather, there must be government power to limit them, otherwise they are plenary.]

On the first point, the established power of a state to regulate commerce, in this case the practice of medicine, is exactly what SCOTUS relied on in Skrmetti, arguing that’s what Tennessee did: regulate the practice of medicine.

On the second, it’s true that the 9th Amendment refers to “enumerated” rights and that a right not being listed does not mean it doesn’t exist. But that does not mean that any given non-enumerated right exists legally, rather it must be discovered, usually by implication of those that are.

For example, a right of married couples to obtain contraceptives was found in to exist within the “penumbra” of the 4th Amendment’s relation to personal privacy. The principle was later extended to cover unmarried couples and still later to strike down sodomy laws, but legally, that right didn’t exist until 1965.

So it seems to me the only way to pursue the suits and prosecutions you suggest is to establish an overall right to health care and then have GAC be an accepted right within that, so that it could not be regulated out of bounds.

Like I said, an incredibly heavy lift.

And as a footnote, all this is without considering the impact of the Constitution’s ban on ex post facto laws on your hoped-for prosecutions.

-

2026-01-24
]These laws are constitutionally impermissible attempts to mandate that transgender youth be abused with their own sex. Child abuse is already illegal. Those in favor of these laws have no case. And you have no idea what ex post facto means.]

I was addressing the legal landscape facing the course you argued for. I stand by it.

Now you are arguing that laws barring GAC (particularly puberty blockers) are “constitutionally impermissible” even though Skrmetti, by virtue of upholding Tennessee’s ban, said they are valid.

So at least you have to overcome that barrier. That alone makes it a heavy lift. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but do not pretend it would be anything short of that.

As for ex post facto, you are proposing criminalizing actions that were not considered criminal at the time they were performed, which at the least raises ex post facto concerns. While child abuse laws already exist, the application of them to deny access to GAC doesn’t; in fact, it is far more common to hear the opposite, to hear the transmisics and reactionaries screaming that GAC is itself “child abuse” and some places - Texas, for example - have proposed prosecuting parents on just that basis.

Morally and ethically, as you say, “those in favor of these laws have no case.” But unhappily, as someone (I don’t recall who) said, “The law is not about justice. The law is about the law.” And that is what we’re dealing with here.

Bottom line and I think the end from my side: Not impossible. But know how hard it will be to get there and the obstacles to be overcome.

==

2026-01-24
[Background: Dr. Kirk Milhoan is the head of RF (my father would be ashamed of me) Kennedy Jr’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He is also an evangelical Christian pastor with no background in immunology who says vaccination should be voluntary.]

So Milhoan is “returning individual autonomy to the first order, not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order,” even though “declin[ing] a vaccine may also affect others,” is he?

How does he feel about speed limit laws? Sure, speeding “may affect others,” but if “individual autonomy” can outweigh public health, why not public safety?

By the way, is he a flat-Earther? I mean, he says “I don’t like established science” and “Science is what I observe.” Central arguments of flat-Earthers revolve around the “observation” that “Hey, it looks flat” and how you can’t trust “the scientific establishment.” Sounds pretty flerfy to me.