Fuckin' masks, dude. Little old ladies hissing at me for getting within ten yards of them outside in a park without a mask. Drivers in their cars giving me the stink-eye for running along the street without a mask. Cashiers at bolt stores staring death at me for wearing a mask indoors. Panicked people glaring at my daughter, hiking without a mask, as they stumble by in their chin bras. Butcher shops refusing to serve me unless I take off my mask. We're in negotiations to take over another birth center in a couple years. Couple we've known for fifteen years? Generally lovely people... if you erase that whole Facebook Trump period where they loudly decried the Communist State of California that wouldn't serve them ice cream because they were unvaccinated. You know what? I'm going to erase it. What's the fucking point. She's come around to recognizing that she was a cast iron bitch to my wife back when my wife was a student, and that she was entirely too focused on her own problems to be able to recognize the problems she was creating for everyone else. I think it's important to recognize that for three, four really ugly years there the demagogues managed to make the whole country think it was about their demagoguery. I think rehashing it just leans back into the demagogic bullshit. Do I want to rub the Republicans' nose in their January 6 shit like misbehaving Golden Retrievers? You damn betcha. But I also recognize that focusing on their now chicanery is a lot more pragmatic. There are several reasons you might wear a mask now: - you work with the public a lot and realized you get sick a lot less if you wear a mask in the winter - you had a covid exposure and are mandated to do it for like six days - you're immune compromised and it's helping to keep you alive - you live with someone immune compromised and it's helping keep them alive - you aren't vaxxed but you recognize that COVID can kill ya so you're taking pragmatic steps to not get sick - it smells bad in here ...but you still see everyone walking around trying to parse everyone's reasons like a bunch of East Germans on either side of the Stasi divide. Stephen Colbert's monologue on Monday dealt with the DOE's lab leak take. He went off for a good 30 seconds about how the DOE needs to stay in their lane because of course he did. Why the fuck would the Department of Energy have an opinion? Because "The Department of Energy used to be the Atomic Energy Commission and it's where all the eggheads went and it's where we still keep them and the Human Genome Project was largely funded by and ran on the computers at Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab and in fact biowar and modeling has largely lived wholly within our former atomic program including most of our COVID modeling since the first days of the pandemic" isn't common knowledge, isn't common sense, and isn't funny. Ultimately we just wanna know who to laugh at. That got way too tribal for way too long.