With each day, another piece of the moving puzzle comes into place. Landscaping, minor repairs around the house, roofing, pest control. We have maybe four significant pieces of furniture left, and they won’t be coming with us when we depart. Dresser up for sale and using suitcases. This will be the fastest closing these realtors have ever seen. The minute the house is sold, we accept the bid, etc., we are ready to depart. Just get the money deposited in our account, and we are off. One of our friends in our destination country has found a very promising job opportunity for my wife where she works, so if we arrive and one of us already has a job, that would be even better. These days the idea of leaving is more and more enticing. More on that in a minute.
Here’s this week’s Spotify playlist.
We also just put up our review of Space Jam: A New Legacy over here.
Well, COVID-19 is back in the USA because it never left in the first place. Cases nationally were up 70% last week, mainly among unvaccinated. The CDC and White House seem to be pushing the same broken American narrative of individual responsibility, though, acting as though the vaccinated don’t have to worry. I think people are very unclear that the vaccine doesn’t sterilize a person from coronavirus. You can still get it; the chances of your body fighting it off and it not being a severe case is just higher than a non-vaccinated person. You probably won’t die if you have the vaccine, but there are still long-term medical effects from having the virus. We’re still learning about those, and I always point to the chickenpox/shingles connection of how a virus you had as a child can have surprise effects decades later.
My beautiful state of Tennessee saw a 400% increase in cases for the week. This came after the doctor who was over vaccines for the state Department of Health was fired. That was followed by the state legislature (dominated by right-wing fascists) forcing the DoH to stop giving out information to teenagers about vaccines of any kind. So Tennessee has essentially gone full anti-vax. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I also learned my right-wing mother, whom I am currently estranged from, has been seeing an herbalist who is straight-up conning her. First, the herbalist rubs magnets on my mother; the magnets then speak to the herbalist and tell her my mother’s ailments. Then, of course, this is followed by the herbalist just happening to have snake oil she can sell that cures my mother. This all started with the multi-level marketing scheme of essential oils and led her down this path of pure insanity.
When dealing with this level of complete mental breakdown, I just have to throw up my hands. It tells me now is the time to leave. The whole country is descending into madness. Look at the growing economic inequality, the breakdown in the supply chains across all industries, the looming restart of housing evictions at the end of this month. Then you have these morons working themselves into a fervor over Cuba, for christ’s sake. Cuba has done so much better during this pandemic than we have. They developed vaccines with higher efficacy rates than ours and have had a robust medical ambassadorship program that sent doctors across the globe to help. I don’t think any government is beyond critique, but when the anti-communists in Cuba are carrying American flags, and the massive pro-communist rallies aren’t being reported by American media, then it’s pretty clear we have a case of manufacturing consent. Socialism and communism are sweeping Central & South America, and people are being lifted out of poverty there. I simply don’t trust American media sources any longer because their parent companies always have a vested interest in resource extraction in these places.
This morning on Twitter, I saw Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, Spider-Verse, etc.) ranting about the U.S. needing to take military action in Cuba. He also called for Criterion to remove Steven Soderbergh’s Che film from their website and was joined by Natalie Morales (Parks & Rec). These people have swiss cheese for brains, gobbling up the corporate narrative they are fed. I’d love to hear from the Cuban diaspora in Florida about what their grandfathers’ lines of work were that caused them to have to flee. I’m sure it had nothing to do with enslavement or doing the dirty work of Batista. And it turns out Lord’s mother (maiden name Betancourt) was from Cuba where her family owned….dun dun dun, a plantation! Anyone surprised? Anyone? He also said if any American president had been this brutal to citizens, they would have been met with a firing squad. Notice the qualifier of “citizen” to discount indigenous people, chattel slaves, undocumented immigrants, and refugees. This country is a joke, and more people are waking up to that fact every day. If the United States really wanted to stop human rights abuses in Cuba, they’d close Guantanamo Bay, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.
PopCult Reviews 