Monday, March 17, 2025

We interrupt this blog to bring you reality.

Things are getting so vile and dangerous that I no longer know what to do.

The United States government has been pulled out of every global partnership possible.

DEI programs have been eliminated.

Transgender youth and their families are being threatened with death.

The SAFE act is being passed by individual states to force women back into the home and into complete obedience to their husbands. It may become a federal law.

LGBTQ people are under threat in more states than I can count, and federal laws that protected their equal rights are on the chopping block.

International students, instructors, physicians and corporate experts here on student and work visas are being grabbed it of classrooms and off the street and deported. Some are leaving before they can be arrested.

Career civil servants are being fired en masse. Some are being doxxed for speaking out.

This is creating a brain drain from which we may not recover in my lifetime.

Congress has been told to vote for Trump’s policies or face the ends of their political careers and even physical injury or death.

President Trump is now openly defying the judiciary.

Musk and his tech kids are attacking the computer files of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and the Department of Defense, with a goal of dismantling those organizations into oblivion and starving Americans into submission and death.


I do not exaggerate.

This is real, and it is happening.


The only question that remains is:

What will American citizens DO about any of it?

Will hundreds of thousands gather at town halls, in state capitals and on the National Mall, to protest and fight and bring this madness to a halt?


Or will we continue to distract ourselves with the hobbies and sporting events and movies that keep us drugged and submissive? 

Will we keep telling ourselves that the courts will bring us back to common sense? 

(Once Trump openly defies the Supreme Court, it is all over.)


I am coming to believe that the only thing that will save this country is a mass uprising on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the first March On Washington back in the 1960s. Dozens or hundreds won’t cut it. It will have to be hundreds of thousands, or millions, to make a dent.

But today, with that scale comes greater risk.

More Americans are armed than ever before, and more gun-owners are willing to shoot other human beings than ever before.

Fighting back today means the real risk of getting killed.

January 6 will have been a cakewalk compared to what’s coming next, and law enforcement won’t be able to protect us.


See, people keep NOT saying these things in the hopes that everything will get better on its own, or because by not saying them, then none of it is really happening.


But it is all happening. 

And keeping quiet about it isn’t working. 

Distracting ourselves isn’t working. 


When they come for us, what will we do? 

How will we respond?


How many of us are willing to risk it all to save the country for ourselves and our children?


This is the central question of our lives right now.

Or it should be.


Who are your people? 

Where can you go to be safer?

If you cannot go anywhere else, where and how will you hide, and will there be room for anyone else to hide with you? What will you live on and how will you prepare?

If you are elderly or disabled, how will you come to terms with the real possibility that you won’t survive what comes next? How will you prepare your loved ones for that very real possibility? 

If you have minor children or grandchildren in your care, have you made plans for where they will go and who will care for them in the event of your death?

This is not going to end easily, or well.

The only question that remains is how each of us and all of us will respond to conditions on the ground in real time.

*********

I accept the likelihood that if and when things get much worse, I WILL DIE.

I accept the likelihood that when things get much worse, I won’t have anywhere to hide out safely or in the long term. Access to medications and healthcare, food and water, will diminish. My passport won’t guarantee safe passage to anywhere else, because I don’t have the means to go anywhere else. I’m disabled and in my sixties, and I’m operating under NO illusions.

So don’t look for anymore distractions here at this blog. Until the big questions are answered and acted upon, there’s no longer any room for distractions, no more bread and circuses. The super-rich white men in power want the rest of us to die, or to be worked to death; and very soon they won’t bother to mask their intentions with fake politics. Our age is nothing special. The middle class was a blip on the radar and will end soon. Once again, we will return to the brutal economics of having to kill, or be killed.

It will be no time for pacifists.

I’m a pacifist, and I accept that if I cannot or will not kill, then I will be killed. I am having conversations with my immortality every day.

This viewpoint is not a failure of my mental health meds or the absence of counseling. 

This is the reality right now in the United States in 2025, and no one will escape it. So I am talking out loud about it, and I hope the rest of you will do the same.

Saturday, March 15, 2025

A personal custom bike garage. But of course.

 

A guy in Portland, lacking a garage, has installed a bike storage unit in front of his house:

https://bikeportland.org/2025/03/14/is-this-bikehangar-a-residential-parking-solution-for-portland-393224

It's interesting. It's big. And it's expensive.

After watching the video (Pet peeve warning: the owner is a Millennial who uses terminal "up-speak," ending every sentence as if it's a question - UGH), I was saddened to find that my first thought was to look for a weak link in the design so you could steal the bikes inside.
My second thought was that bike thieves looking at this were also thinking the very same thing.

Previous bike locker designs have been installed in Portland, going back at least twenty years. Some were simply heavy fiberglass shells on a hinge that swung up and down. Thieves figured those out in a New York minute and a lot of them were destroyed beyond repair within the first three years.
Later lockers were large metal boxes. Stronger than fiberglass, but also easy to destroy with the right tools and the right mindset. (A guy lost his fancy bike in a Bay Area storage locker when the locker next to his was converted into a tiny meth lab, which exploded and destroyed the contents of the lockers on either side. The resulting fire melted his tires and plastic fixtures, bent the fork into a pretzel and baked the paint off the tubes.)

Bike lockers lost some of their appeal when the homelessness situation here reached crisis proportions about ten years ago. Desperate people were breaking into the lockers, emptying the contents and setting up house inside. In a few cases, when the locker's rightful renter came back, they were chased off by the homeless guy who'd moved in. Several of those lockers were subsequently removed.

At this point in our urban history, I can't see these lockers taking off here. Many cities -- including Portland -- are operating at huge budget deficits, unable to provide the most basic safety and health services. There aren't enough public defenders, there isn't enough jail space, there isn't enough affordable housing. Installing a bike locker that costs $5,000 seems rather tone-deaf, even if you install it on your front lawn. Maybe especially if you install it on your front lawn.

Also, while I understand that the UK-based designers tested them with everything but the kitchen sink, There are homeless guys in Portland using a sawz-all to cut through bike racks in order to steal bikes. Why wouldn't they try to blow up one of these to get at the bikes inside?

As my friend Sam Tracy used to say, "If they want your bike badly enough, they'll gank it no mater what."

Also, while I get that when you don't have a garage it's nice to be able to store your bikes securely without having to drag them into your house at night, I wonder at the unwitting message being conveyed by setting up one of these things right outside your house, next to the sidewalk. Yes, it's great to be able to have your bikes handy so you'll want to ride them more; but erecting a five-thousand-dollar structure for that purpose kind of screams privilege in a way that I'd rather not see when it comes to promoting a bicycle-centric way of life. I've hung my bike inside in the entryway of my house for over twenty years, and I know my house is a lot smaller than the one in the article.

I just can't see this making sense right now, when there are more pressing issues on the table.