Author: Ginger Stampley

We should just die

“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” 

— Fred Trump, My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’

This quote is from last year, when Fred Trump was hawking his book about his uncle, though I didn’t read it until recently. As a chronically ill person who has developed disabilities through disease progress and age, it doesn’t surprise me that the President is an open eugenicist. (You may remember he got in trouble for openly mocking a disabled reporter during his first campaign.) My lack of surprise isn’t just because he’s an awful person, though; it’s because so many people, even nominally liberal folks, feel the same way.

I’ve heard both sides of the issue: when I was young (in the 1990s) and my disabilities and illness weren’t apparent, I was often told by both older adults and peers that I needed to have kids and mother them, generally with the more or less explicitly stated premise that I was educated, white, and would produce the right kind of kids.

As I got older, people started asking about kids in a more “why don’t you have them?” way, and I learned pretty quickly that admitting that some of my chronic health problems were genetic was the quickest way to get baby-pushers out of my hair. My decision not to have kids stopped being selfish and became wise and brave, on the premise that my children would be the wrong kind of kids.

There’s no moral to this story: just the observation that Trump’s not alone in his feelings even if most people will be horrified by the extremity of this quote and the reference to expenses. I’m just grimly amused by the idea that we might finally get the death panels we’ve been threatened with since the Clinton years under a Trump presidency.

Closing my tabs – 2025 02 08

Some things I found interesting recently:

Resources/Sources: KERA

KERA, our local public broadcasting news station, has a news site that’s one of the more reliable sources for local metroplex news. The nice thing about KERA, along with their colleagues at the Fort Worth Report and its spin-off the Arlington Report, is that they cover not just the city news in Dallas and Fort Worth, but across the Metroplex and throughout the suburbs. They’re particularly important for researching elections and school district news outside DISD and FWISD.

KERA is an NPR station (along with its sister station, KXT, which is the Gen X music station) and so their biases are obvious. I don’t listen to them in the car–KXT is my station of choice–but their local news is NPR quality and I never hesitate to use the news I find there.

HERO yesterday, trouble everywhere tomorrow.

I’m sure you’ve heard about Pete Marocco, the new head of USAID, aka the guy in charge of closing USAID down. Dallas folks may remember him as the face of the HERO amendments (Props S, T, and U in the recent elections) and a close friend of hotel billionaire and Dallas Express owner Monty Bennett. You may also know him from other greatest hits like his previous stint at USAID, which he ended up taking leave from after only three months, and also his presence in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I guess Marocco had to have somewhere to go to wait out the J6 prosecutions. Too bad for us all he and all of his friends are out, and in his case, in government.

That Mavericks trade

I’m not a sports person. I like my Houston teams, from when I was growing up; I have a soft spot for my alma mater in sports even though their football team was terrible when I was a student; and I cheered for the Rangers along with my mother-in-law because she was a fan. I don’t have much interest in the Cowboys (see: grew up in Houston) but the Mavericks haven’t earned my ire, at least not over sports.

When Miriam Adelson of the Sands casino conglomeration bought the team, I cast some side-eye in her general direction. As her wikipedia article notes, she’s not just a gambling billionaire, she’s also a huge financial and political supporter of Donald Trump and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from him. I’m not a huge fan of the billionaire class in general but at least Mark Cuban seemed to be spending some of his money toward the public good.

Jump forward to this weekend, when the Mavericks executed a complex three-way trade sending Luca Doncic to the Lakers in exchange for two other players and a 2029 draft pick. I don’t know much about the players involved, other than that Doncic is a local favorite, but I do know he’s expensive and has a long future and it seems like they’re getting cheaper players, since one of them will be no salary until he’s drafted four years down the road. So it seems to me like this is about money.

Here’s the thing about Adelson and money: she’s a casino person. Gambling people have been trying to get casinos in Texas for decades. It’s an open secret that Adelson bought the Mavericks as part of a pitch to bring a casino complex with a new NBA stadium to Arlington. The Mavericks’ lease on their current home, American Airlines Center, expires in 2031, so it’s about time for the push for a new stadium to start. Also, this is a Lege year, so it’s a good time for the push to make a casino happen that would be necessary. Adelson has probably already contributed her limit to the local folks whose vote she’d need; it’s time to get out there and put some money down on other legislators. She just had the team unload an expensive asset in favor other athletes, including one who won’t be on payroll for several seasons yet. That’s got to help her money quest.

I personally don’t know how she can get around the Christian Dominionists and other reactionaries who run the state Senate and have a strong presence in the House, but that’s just me. I could be wrong about what Adelson is thinking, or about what Dan Patrick is thinking (pretty sure gambling isn’t on his radar this session). Maybe she’s ruining the team to send it to Las Vegas, which is another rumor I’ve read online. But the timing sure seems right for pushing for some big change, and the Arlington rumor seems a lot more likely than moving the Mavs to Vegas.

Resources/Sources: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram

The Star-Telegram, or the Startlegram, as the late Molly Ivins used to call it, is the second-largest newspaper in the Metroplex. It used to be the second-largest daily, but as of last fall it only prints a physical paper three times a week. The web site is updated constantly, though. It’s owned by McClatchy Media Company, a conglomerate that also owns about 30 newspapers and some magazines.

If I had to say what sort of reader the Star-Telegram is aimed at, I’d say it’s more of a casual reader than the DMN. The Star-Telegram focuses more on sports, weather, and entertainment and less on politics and business news than the DMN. Their editorial slant is further to the right with a couple of exceptions, including their newest columnist, whose work I have enjoyed so far. (He’s Black and frankly, the Star-Telegram needed to expand their editorial vision beyond the diversity of conservative white women.)

I receive the Star-Telegram’s morning newsletter and I think they focus on what the most-read stories were yesterday, which is why I notice the focus on sports and weather. Sometimes the newsletter is all about the weather and the game that were going to happen last night. I find a quick scan of the front page gets me more useful information about local and state news.

Their news stories are a little shorter and a little less informative than the DMN but they’re still worthwhile to read and I do learn from them. Their editorial section is useful to read if I want to know what the talk radio crowd is thinking, and occasionally they have local politicians and newsmakers writing op-eds as well.

I refer to and link the Star-Telegram regularly. They are my second-choice newspaper after the DMN, but I still think they’re worth paying for.

That Simple

I managed to get COVID this year after almost five years of avoiding it through a lot of care, isolation, and masking (though less of that as time has gone on). My spouse brought it home from a mandatory work trip and I’ve been flat on my back for a while now. As a chronically ill person, though, I have found one advantage to being flat on my back: it’s remarkably clarifying.

What I figured out this week while I was flat on my back is that you can figure out what’s going on by reading the headlines. The new administration is flooding the zone with crap, so there’s a lot of news, but you don’t need to analyze it that deeply. There’s no twelve-dimensional chess. Occam’s razor will serve you just fine.

Trump really just wanted to avoid going to jail, and now that he’s dodged that for at least four years, he wants to make money and lash out at his perceived enemies. You don’t need to look for more than that. Also, if he’s not making sense, it’s probably because he doesn’t know what he’s doing or suffering from the effects of age and/or illness.

Vance really is a hand-picked tool of Peter Thiel, with all the policy interests that entails. Yes, that’s pretty scary, considering Trump is really that old and not in great shape.

The Project 2025 people really meant what they said about what they were going to do to American society. And unless they do something to piss off Trump, he’s going to let them do it because he doesn’t care about governing (see: making money, avoiding jail, and lashing out at perceived enemies).

Musk really did a Nazi salute. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because he’s a Nazi or, as I suspect, he’s a 4Chan-style troll who thinks it’s funny. The man is the heir of an apartheid South African emerald mine shareholder who bought a bunch of tech companies. He’s the stereotype of a James Bond villain. Assume he’s operating in bad faith and move on.

The biggest problem for the Project 2025 guys and Musk is going to be when they want different things and Trump has to decide. Trump doesn’t really give a shit so his rulings will have no rhyme or reason other than what fulfills his own agenda and beyond that, whim and flattery.

And your MAGA neighbors, especially if you live in a suburb, exurb, or rural area? If they’re that kind of Jesus-y, the kind that says preaching mercy to the downtrodden and frightened should get you deported, they have no idea what’s coming. They think that in the hierarchical society that Project 2025 leans toward, they will be big fishes in small ponds, who get to decide the exceptions to the harsh rules. They’re overestimating their importance. Your local poobahs are not wielding the Shirley exception in the Project 2025 regime.

(They’ve also drastically underestimated the number of things in their own lives the federal government funds, things that executive orders and DOGE will bring to a standstill, but that’s a whole nother discussion.)

This particular line of thought is brought to you by the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, a drunk and a rapist and so on whom Trump hired because Trump liked how he looked on TV. And by the shady way that Senators Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell were let off the hook for voting against him this one time because Republicans knew the Vice President would break the tie. Senator Ernst was whipped into line, and I’m waiting for the moment when Collins and Murkowski either lose their free pass or get primaried for too many wrong votes.

That’s how it is now. It really is that simple.

Dreams and nightmare monsters

If you haven’t read the recent news about sexual assault allegations against author Neil Gaiman, NPR has a good summary. If you want the details, the Vulture article has them, but you should exercise caution as there are detailed descriptions of sexual assault and abuse, including sexual assault in the presence of a child. Gaiman’s ex-wife, Amanda Palmer, is also implicated in putting women in Gaiman’s way, and has issued a statement of her own, mostly saying she can’t talk about it.

I’m watching a lot of people wonder who in SFF authorial circles knew what and when about Gaiman. Apparently Gaiman was known as a missing stair who had sex with young female fans, but nothing has come up that suggested he was known to be a rapist. Most of the fannish people, like other authors, who know Gaiman deal with him in a professional context, and only know his professional persona. Tori Amos, the first spokesperson for the sexual assault hotline RAINN, was a close friend of Gaiman’s and addressed the allegations against Gaiman after the news first broke in July. If a woman who was close enough to Gaiman to ask her to be a godparent to her daughter didn’t see it, how was anyone else supposed to?

I’ve read a lot of people wondering what to do with Gaiman’s work: his books, his comics, the TV shows based on his works. For me it’ll be on a case-by-case basis. I was once a fan of the Darkover books, but parts of the stories I loved were recast by finding out her history with her husband and her abuse of her daughter. With J.K. Rowling, I came to the books as an adult with life experience and some feminist classes in college under my belt, so I noticed some hinky gender politics that many of her fans who got the books in childhood reasonably missed. Rowling’s heel turn into radical transphobia was disappointing but not shocking to me. Gaiman is going to fall somewhere in between for me. I’ll figure out how I feel about the collaborative works, particularly the Good Omens TV series, when I try to watch them.

Meanwhile I’m rereading Claire Dederer’s essay What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? again and moving her book on the same subject further up my TBR pile.

Bird flu is coming

One of the long-running stories I’ve been following over the last year is the spread of H5N1 (bird flu). I initially noticed it because we were having trouble with dairy herds in North Texas and there were some articles in the local and state press about it. There was some talk of it jumping to cats and to humans, but nobody had died of it.

That has now changed. The first bird flu death happened this week in Louisiana. News reports say he was over 65 and had underlying conditions, which is supposed to relieve the public but honestly scares me. Most of us have underlying conditions these days; I have several. If you take meds for any chronic health problem, congratulations: you’re on the less valuable list of people who can die without alarming the masses.

As a person with a chronic illness, I’m well aware that COVID isn’t over. I have a large enough circle of in-person and online friends that I get regular reports of folks who are getting the current strain even after they’ve had previous rounds. I also know a number of people who’ve had aftereffects that range from the mild to the completely debilitating. We don’t do enough in America, and certainly not in North Texas, to protect folks from COVID. That we’re starting to see people die from H5N1 and not taking measures to protect ourselves is terrifying, especially with an anti-vaccine Health and Human Services Secretary about to be nominated by the new administration. It’s only a matter of time before we get human-to-human transmission, and we could get back to where we were in March 2020 but without the will to lock down all too easily.

I’m also selfishly scared for cats. My cats are indoor-only, don’t drink raw milk, and don’t eat raw food. But I’m going to be very careful about touching any outdoor cats and potentially bringing deadly germs home to them.

Public Domain Day

One of my favorite things about the new year is Public Domain Day, when works come out of copyright and into the public domain. This year, in the United States, works from 1929 join the public doman, as do sound recordings from 1924. Duke University School of Law has a web page celebrating Public Domain Day each year that lists some of the works that will be free of copyright in the US. This year, the list includes The Skeleton Dance (the first Silly Symphony Cartoon), The Cup (John Steinbeck’s first novel), Pandora’s Box (a silent film starring Louise Brooks), The Cocoanuts (the first Marx Brothers feature film), Singing in the Rain (the song), An American in Paris (the song), Ravel’s Bolero, and George Gershwin’s recording of Rhapsody in Blue.

The Standard eBooks project has already put out twenty free ebooks from 1925’s new public domain works, including books you read in high school like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Not on their list, but on mine to read, is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which also is now in the public domain in the US.