Category: rants

Living in the Ruins

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My current morning book is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

After reading the other morning, it occurred to me that we — in this case “we” means progressives who want a better country and are resisting the current destruction — keep trying to come up with fixes for our current messes that don’t change the system very much. So, for example, our ideas about health care are to imitate the European social programs and set up some kind of government-run single-payer system.

And while that’s not a bad idea as far as it goes and far more radical than anything that’s likely to happen anytime soon, I still have a feeling that we’re going to need something more than that, because our health care system is a colosal ruin.

Probably we have to start by recognizing how ruined things really are.

Tsing’s book uses the harvesting of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor – or maybe a guideline – for dealing with with life in an area that has been ruined.

Matsutake only grow in the wild; they can’t be farmed. And they mostly grow in ruined forests, which is why there is a thriving business in them in the forests of Oregon, where the old growth forests were heavily logged. The timber companies replaced them with timber “plantations” of fir and lodgepole pine.

While this doesn’t make for the diverse and healthy forest that came before, it does provide an environment for the matsutake.

The matsutake are a delicacy in Japan, which provides a market.

There are many different kinds of pickers and also a variety of buyers who arrange the international sales. Many of the pickers are immigrants from various parts of Southeast Asia who were displaced by the U.S. war in Vietnam and other parts of the region, but even those come from different ethnic groups and have different approaches.

There are also immigrants from Latin America as well as some White native-born Americans, many of them war veterans who find holding regular jobs difficult.

But also – interestingly – there are Japanese Americans who approach this as a cultural activity, not a business. These are people descended from those who were interred in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. Their approach is quite different from that of the people doing it as a business.

The various immigrant cultures and their descendants are people figuring out how to survive after their worlds have been upended by war and economic crisis. Making a living finding mushrooms that grow in ruins makes sense in their world.

But for people like me, middle class though far from wealthy, the idea of surviving amidst the ruins that capitalism has wrought is scary. Still, when I look around me, I see those ruins everywhere.

I walk around Oakland, where ordinary houses sell for a million dollars (fancy ones for much more) and the rents for cafes and retailers are so exorbitant that far too many go out of business quickly. I see boarded up buildings everywhere alongside new apartment complexes — ugly ones, but still shiny.

Our city has been cut to pieces by highways running through it, tearing apart neighborhoods. Those highways and other badly planned projects add environmental ruin to the mix.

And of course, we have people living on the streets. Some have serious mental illness or addition problems, but a lot of them just don’t have the money for a place to live.

So much money and so much ruin, all at once.

It’s not just Oakland; I mention it because it’s where I live now and I know it. You can see it everywhere. Chris Brown’s book A Natural History of Empty Lots provides detailed looks at what creatures and plants are coming back in ruined urban landscapes, primarily in Austin, Texas.

Now I can see better ways of doing damn near everything and I would love to wave a magic wand and make those things happen. We have the tools, the resources, even the brainpower to make all this happen. Our problem has always been the will, particularly the political will.

But I think we’re only going to build this better world in the ruins of the capitalist state. Continue reading “Living in the Ruins”…

Visceral Rage

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Lots of things make me angry these days. We’re living in those times, the ones where if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention.

But the ones that make me furious on a visceral level are the ones where some misogynist expresses hatred or disdain for women or sets out a plan to strip away our rights.

That’s when I see red, when I’d really like to confront one of them in person and get them to throw a punch at me so I can throw them into the nearest wall.

Now that’s not a healthy response. I mean, I do know how to slip a punch and throw someone, but I also know that when things get physical someone could get hurt and it could well be me. I’m old and while I know something about fighting, I don’t have the illusion that I’m a superstar.

It’s just that the hatred and the contempt bring out my desire to not just tell an asshole that he’s wrong, but show him by dealing with him on that physical level where way too many men are wrongly convinced that they’re better than women.

I don’t just want to beat those men. I want to humiliate them. I want them to know they’re inferior to an old lady.

Like I said, visceral. Continue reading “Visceral Rage”…

Some Thoughts on Cultural Exclusion

personby Gillian Polack
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This is a post from my blog, from 9 years ago. I’ve very mildly edited it. There are two reasons for sharing it with you.

The first is that I have an intermittent fever and that my body feels as if someone is attacking it with a sledgehammer. The illness will be gone in a couple of days, but today I’m not up to much.

The second is that sometimes it helps to see the paths our current problems have travelled. I’ve been dealing with some of the current issues all my life, and yet those who have not tell me it’s all Israel’s fault and our society has nothing to do with the discrimination it carries nor the hate embedded deeply. This is a snapshot of my Australia in 2017, when Australia was adapting some of the positions that dominate today. Most of those who saw me as painted now exclude me because I’m Jewish, for instance. Almost the whole Left (where I used to belong) tells me what I am and ushes me aside or, in some cases, do things that are much worse.  I was never given the academic support to sort everything out properly (I came close), but I have moved a lot further towards understanding. I may talk more about this when I explain my books. I’ve already been explaining what those 9 years have led to, for Jews – today you see one single aspect of how it came to be.

Next week I will try to return to talking about my own books, including the one that led to this post. First, however, I need to be less ill.

 

Right now, the results of my research force me to reassess the world around me. This reassessment shows remarkably clear indications of how perfectly nice and thoughtful people help set up a complex culture from which bigots can source hate. Now that I know a bit more about where it comes from, I need to take a pause in my research and digest it.

I’ve written a summary of key aspects of my latest findings for those who want, and that summary has tentatively been accepted for publication. Watch social media, for I will announce it when it emerges. Beyond those findings, the project might have to wait for years. This post is a bit about the project and a bit about why it’s delayed. And how I’m living the life… but not in the way anyone expected.

Quite simply, if I get the right kind of job then I can do the full academic shebang and hit the subject hard and sort it out. I know what I’m doing and how to turn it into a book. If I don’t get the right kind of job, then slow and gentle is all I can manage, with occasional reports like this one and very occasional conference papers. I’ll be able to teach from it, and each course will be exciting and amazingly useful. That’s all, though. No book. Very few articles.

For those who have seen my work so far and have said “But this is important”, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that kind of research in my current situation. Income matters. At the very least, some of my results will appear in my fiction, for my fiction continues without money. More slowly than if I had money, but it continues.

This knowledge is based on experience. Putting other peoples’ intellectual wishes first has not helped me get enough money to live on, so I now put my own needs first in my big life decisions.

There’s another reason for putting my own needs first in those big life decisions. My research has pointed to a bunch of narratives that set up society to exclude perfectly good people and to nurture bigots. I’m right now observing how it hits the disabled and the cultural and religious minority and gender minorities. I’ve now realised how much my own life in Canberra is affected by this.

It’s complicated, but there are two main outcomes.

The first is that many Canberrans exclude me by making decisions for me regarding what activities they expect from me in my life. Some of the reasons are probably excellent. I don’t know. I don’t know what those reasons are. I am to them sufficiently lower in status to not need an explanation or consultation.

The second is related. One of the most annoying aspects of being minority right now is that earned status is difficult to retain unless one is the token representative of that minority. So in Canberra (but certainly not in all other places) I often have to negotiate work as if I were new to the workforce. And I’m one of the lucky people in my lack of seniority, for who else at my level of the hierarchy has two PhDs and whose short list of publications is four pages long? (there is no long list – I dumped it when my short non-fiction hit the 500 mark, which was while ago) And I have friends, who help. And patrons. And I’ve managed to get to several conferences this year, despite living on around $20,000 annually.

Usually these two factors lead to both exclusion and silencing. I keep pointing out that other people who are excluded are silenced more effectively. I can be left off this list or that, but I still get invitations to write and I still have things to say. This is one of my privileges. (and now I’ve used loads of current jargon – such virtue!)

Taking things back to my research for a moment, I’m talking about these issues today because I found a gap in my knowing. I need to find out if that same gap is present elsewhere, especially in my interpretation of how wider culture affects story. I need to look at who is allowed in a group and who isn’t in novels and other long stories.

I noticed something interesting in The 100 today. Skin colour counts in US tales. This isn’t new. This isn’t what I noticed. What I noticed is that focussing on US definitions of racism and silencing and exclusion to assess who got killed under what circumstances made me miss something else.

In our fiction, our central characters have certain types of personalities. It’s as if they come from a range of action or emotional figurines. We take them out of the box and play with them. Those who lack those characteristics are painted figures on the back of the box. They don’t get full lives. Most people define themselves as the figurines when they place themselves in story, as people with full lives. What I think I’m seeing is how people define those who are merely figures. And I’m seeing the circumstances when I am a figure, left behind when the figurine is brought out to play but considered to be part of the backdrop. I’m not seen as excluded because of my painted role, but my role is limited to being in the backdrop of the lives of others.

Like all of us, I carry my own prejudices and see other people as active in my life (figurines) or as backdrop (painted figures). My personal need is to find out who I see as painted figures and give them the dignity of full lives if I’ve excluded them due to prejudices I bear. I also have to accept that a lot of people who were once close to me have, in the change of culture, shifted me to the painted figure category. They want me on the back of their box to illuminate their life, but they don’t want to have dinner with me. I need to accept that some of this is due to prejudice.

As ever, this is a simplification. I needed a quick and dirty overview so that I could start to think how we do what we do.

I wanted to use the circles shutting people out that are described in Joan G Robinson’s When Marnie Was There. Anna was excluded by these invisible circles and, re-reading the book today, they felt very familiar. The subjective feeling of being excluded by invisible circles, however, rests on whatever draws those circles. In my childhood, it was a primary school child whose name I mentioned the other day to my oldest friend. She laughed and remembered, with equal irony.

This is our old way of seeing it. It works when we move from circles to circles and when we see individuals as having to deal with being alone but assign them equal status as human beings. It’s well encoded and very well described. This means that it’s a part of what’s happening culturally right now. A part. Not the whole thing. For culture is changing. We need to encode the changes. That’s what I’m doing here, but it’s a rough sketch. I need something better than toy figurines and the drawing on the box.

This means it’s back to novels. We encode cultures in the nice straightforward framework of the novel. This means that I can find out a lot about what’s happening around me by looking closely at how we depict ourselves and what we write into a story without knowing. The most worrying discovery so far is the one I explained in my Helsinki paper. The Helsinki paper isn’t for publication yet. This isn’t because it’s bad research. It’s because that paper encapsulated the moment when I realised just how big the thing is that I’m doing and how large its ramifications.

I wish I had that fulltime academic job. I wish that researching this didn’t have to come at the end of the month, after everything else. I only do the amount I do because I’m efficient at it. I can’t spend large amounts of time in archives and libraries right now for I simply need to spend that time earning grocery money. That’s my lifestyle problem.

My scholarly problem right now is that, with this strange lifestyle, I’m carrying too much baggage. I can’t do the research partly because I need income, but the lower status lifestyle gets in my intellectual way. The life carries emotions with it. Every time I’m excluded I feel them come to the surface, for I need to explain them.

Those emotions are why I’m not making as much sense as I’d like tonight. I’m in the middle of big things, intellectually, and my life echoes them.

 

 

The Legal Resistance

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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As most readers know, I’m a volunteer along with more than a hundred other people at Unbreaking.org, which currently describes itself on the main webpage as

Documenting damage and resistance. Unflooding the zone. 

I signed up because I have lots of writing and editing experience, but once I started looking at what needed doing, I realized that a skill I first learned in law school and honed in my years as a legal editor at BNA was particularly valuable: I can look at court documents of all kinds and figure out what’s going on and what’s important about it, if anything.

What this means is that I’ve not only been paying attention to the legal news – which I’d do anyway because looking at legal stuff is the easiest way for me to understand what’s going on – but actually reading about some cases in detail, particularly ones related to the security (or lack thereof) of people’s data.

This is work that is both inspiring and depressing.

It’s inspiring because so many lawyers and judges are working so very hard to combat the ongoing destruction of our democracy and the parts of our government that used to work pretty well.

Every time the grifter’s government does something outrageous, somebody sues. Our attorney general here in California has brought all kinds of cases, usually in company with attorneys general from other states. For example, they’re suing – and winning so far – over efforts to shut down food stamp payments in states that refuse to hand over data on food stamp recipients.

Several clinics and hospitals that do gender-affirming care have fought back when they got subpoenas from the Justice Department demanding that they turn over data on their patients and won.

And 29 states and the District of Columbia refused to provide voter rolls. They’ve been sued for those records, but so far the courts are ruling in their favor.

It’s interesting how many of the cases revolve around the government trying to get their hands on data about citizens and how strongly some of the states and their lawyers are protecting that data.

In a reasonable world, the federal government would be interested in protecting the data of the people who live in this country, but in the mirror world we live in they’re out to exploit it or use it to harm us.

But it’s still depressing. Some of that is just the mind-blowing things we’re having to fight about. It’s also the knowledge that the Supreme Court is packed with right wing extremists.

I mean, I was glad they threw out the tariffs, but that was one small victory from a court that has overwhelmingly ruled in ways that undermine our democracy.

But there are other reasons why legal work can only do so much for the resistance. Continue reading “The Legal Resistance”…

Two Hundred Opinions

personby Gillian Polack
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Let me borrow from the earlier posts to remind you that this is post #3 in an exploration of the various ways people currently use the words Zionism and Zionist. Two years ago, I checked with around 200 people and discovered around eight definitions. This is a perfectly normal number of definitions for a single word. In big dictionaries many words have six to eight definitions. This made them easy to work with. These definitions of Zionism fell into three groups. To understand where someone was coming from culturally or politically, all I had to do two years ago was find which group of definitions they used. Technically, those groups establish diacultural traits on the subject: who shares what with whom shows who knows whom and lives in similar worlds.

Right now, there are a lot more definitions than eight. Language is an ever-changing glory (as is diaculture), and when things come into the public gaze and when there are groups actively trying to erase standard definitions and add new ones, shifts will happen quite quickly. When those changes happen in many countries and in many different cultural and political groups, those changes create a really fuzzy world that’s difficult to navigate.

There is just one more post after this, although if it’s very long, it may be in more than one part. In that post, I will introduce some of the current definitions of Zionism as I saw the word used … until the moment I was blocked by so many bigots that I lost access to their language. Tomorrow’s post will be a snapshot of the use of the word from about December 2025 to the end of January 2026. Establishing a snapshot of key terms is one of the approaches to culture that I use as an historian. When I need to analyse a text (medieval or modern or something else entirely) I often make a private snapshot of the use of key words and phases. This gives me a grounding for understanding the views that are being expressed. It also helps me understand the path language takes after that snapshot. Thank my historian self, then, for leading you astray, and not my novelist self.

I borrowed from my own work, because two books urgently need editing and a short story must be written and there is an essay for Patreon and… I have insufficient time to write this post from the beginning.

 

1. Jewish definitions

There are two general classes of straightforward Jewish definitions of Zionism. I’ve included the religious Christian view here because it didn’t come up in my query and it should have. It really deserves its own sub-heading with several categories, but I didn’t have any descriptions of it back then, so I will just note how it fits into a Jewish definition. I’ve left out the Naturei Karta and other extreme variants, because I’m not convinced that one can call it Zionism when there is no nation contemplated unless we’re in Messianic times. Both the Christian and the fundamentalist Jewish are therefore unsatisfactory – I’m sorry.

a) Herzl’s Zionism – an historical artefact, that died in 1948 with the advent of Israel. This was the least common definition of those from my original query. It was mentioned by only two people of the almost two hundred who gave me their thoughts. Those two people explained that now Israel is in existence, there is no need for Zionism. Herzl’s aim was achieved, end of story. The proper use of this definition, one of them clarified, is in histories.

b) support for Israel as a country. This is the most common use of the word and expresses simple support or complex of the existence of Israel as a modern country, and most of those who said “I am Zionist” as part of their definition of Zionism add the proviso that they reserved the right to criticise the actions of the Israeli government and to express their concern about problematic Israeli individuals or groups. I asked for examples. Those people considered problematic were often connected to Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, or to the West Bank settlers.

Most of those who expressed this view to me were American, Canadian, British, Australian or Israeli, and they represented a wide range of Jewish practice and culture. The Jewish religious practice and culture all link back to Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael. How anyone uses the definitions (because there is variance in their use) depends very much on the relationship between Am, Eretz, and Medinat in their mind. It’s not a definition so much as the expression of a relationship that shows how modern Israel (Medinat Yisrael) fits in with the religious expressions that relate to the land (Eretz Yisrael) and, of course, the Jewish people (Am Yisrael). This complex set of relationships are open to almost infinite variation because we like talking things through rather than dictating belief. They’re also open to an enormous amount of variation because of the complexity of Jewish culture. Even a snapshot of one moment in a Jewish explanation will reflect variants that come from rabbis spoken to, books read, opinions of family and friends and so forth. This is why most of the cute non-Jewish diagrams showing what Zionism is or may be do not actually reflect a great deal of how Jews describe it. Simple words are used to explain this approach to Zionism. The simple words mask a wonderfully fruitful discourse.

The Christian use of it varies according to the nature of the Christian belief. Whether it’s passionate loyalty to a country, belief that the country has the right to exist, or belief that the end of days requires it to exist…it all comes down to Israel existing.

 

2. Russian-origin definitions

The second group of definitions has a fairly straightforward origin. Russia prior to 1917 dealt with its Jews a bit differently to, say Germany in the 1930s. It had extraordinary tough conscription for Jewish boys (my ancestor, Abraham Polack was one) and it also derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which itself plagiarised works that were about entirely different subjects. The Protocols have not been out of print since 1903, as far as I know, and wherever this set of definitions of Zionism is used, it harks back to the Protocols. This is intended and carefully crafted prejudice.

The Russian Empire fell, but their rather nasty explanation of Zionism didn’t.

Soviet Russia used the base the Russian Empire gave. It claimed it didn’t hate Jews, just Zionists and any Jew who saw Am Yisrael or anything related. So many Jews lost their religion and their culture and links to family elsewhere in the world… but were permitted to live.

In this set of definitions, Zionism was linked to Western Imperialism, just as now, it’s linked to Colonialism. This has been called ‘sanitised antisemitism’ – a lot of the hate in Australia right now is yet another version of sanitised antisemitism. Good Jews/Bad Jews, purity statements that mean you’re worthy of remaining in a group – these are two traits of sanitised antisemitism.

Even two years ago, this group of definitions of Zionism was a set. Most people thought they were saying the same thing, but, really, they agreed on the bigotry in the heart of the definitions and not on the definitions themselves. In each of these definitions, Zionists are many, many different things, all of which define Jews as ‘other.’ Most of them are used when people want to share hate for Jews without being seen as antisemites. This brings the use of ‘Zionist’ into play: it’s often used as a deniable replacement for ‘Jew.’ This manifests as “I am not a bigot. I was talking about Zionists, not Jews.”

How you tell the difference is to look at what else the person who uses ‘Zionist’ negatively says. If there are no links to Israel and heaps of links to personal actions or to antisemitic tropes, the person is using ‘Zionist’ but talking about Jews.

While the fervour and the almost religious belief in the accuracy of these definitions are consistent, the actual qualities applied to Zionists varied in 2024. They began from the literature of hate and then found their own paths to express that hate.

In 2025 many of its users do not share their understanding of qualities and explain the word quite vaguely. I was even told “You already know what I’m talking about” when I ask for clarification. Jews are supposed to be marvellously intuitive, I suspect, and also, the person using the word has not considered how to explain it. This explains the passion behind the word ‘Zionism.’ It has the force of emotion without the qualifications of nuance.

Many users, when they talk about matters Jewish and about matters Israeli, follow the classic form of antisemitism. Many don’t. The mix of evil qualities attributed to Zionists changes from person to person. Again, this is passion without clarity. The variants on this usually link with the Russian historical definitions of Zionism. The original of these was the one derived from anti-Jewish propaganda.

 

3. Pure hate

‘Zionism’ according to these people is a word imbued with passion and truth and almost a religious fervour. That fervour contains no love. It is flooded with hate and distrust. Zionists are liars and want to own the world. Zionists are propaganda experts and manipulative and violent.

This group has two categories.

a) It took me a while to realise that, in 2024, when I asked for definitions of Zionism, a number of people gave me a description of an evil individual compiled from their own fears and fears folded into stereotyping and hate. They looked in a mirror and saw hate and said, “These people who are not like me are the cause of that hate because they personally embody the qualities I hate.” These individuals will then apply that definition to anyone Jew who does not follow a route that will demonstrate that they are one of the rare Good Jews. This route often entails expressing active hate for all things Israeli and distrust of Jews in general.

b) Zionism as an evil cult, practising the most evil thing of the moment. Genocide and paedophilia are used a lot right now, for instance. I also encounter worshipping Satan and drinking the blood of children. (By ‘encounter,’ I mean that I have been accused of all these things.) This is irrational hate transformed into the darkest fantasy the person can imagine.

Some of those doing the imagining do a simple translation between their invention and Judaism. Those accusing claim to have read about Judaism and to know it better than me, but when I told them to take their evidence of me as a murderer to the police or when I asked for a definition of Zionism that explains what they’re telling me, they mostly disappeared like snow in summer. Just one person in 2024/5 asked me why I was asking and I linked him to Jewish history sites and… I’ve not seen him hate since. Some of it, then, is lack of education about Judaism, or is education only from antisemites.

The big lesson I learned from exploring these views of Zionism, is that we can’t actually converse until we’re certain we’re on the same page, but that’s another story.

Next up, I’ll talk about current views. That has to wait until Monday, I’m afraid, because I have over 450 pages to edit and the more I can do this weekend, the easier next week will be.

The State of Things

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve seen a lot of pieces about how things are going a year into the grifter’s second occupation of the White House. Apparently most of the people who said “It won’t be that bad” and called the rest of us hysterical don’t have much to say, though they’re still not admitting they were wrong.

I think they’re mostly the kind of people who never admit they were wrong.

Me, I find things absolutely as bad as I thought they would be after I got that very sick feeling on Election Day. About the only thing that surprised me was how fast so many institutions fell apart.

I don’t just mean the law firms and universities that caved early on. And I was already aghast at where big media – newspapers and broadcast – were headed.

I mean I was surprised that the Civil Service and various government agencies weren’t more robust. I’m not blaming government employees for that – this isn’t the case of people caving. In fact, some of them tried hard not to give in.

There turned out to be a lot of loopholes in Civil Service protection, the most obvious one being probationary employees, a system intended to allow removal of people who didn’t work out, not the firing of people wholesale.

The gutting of agencies by the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) minions happened much faster than I thought it could. A lot of it was likely illegal, but it wasn’t something that could be fought quickly.

Our courts have worked reasonably well, despite the embarrassment that is our Supreme Court, but legal action is slow at the best of times and doesn’t do well in handling the move fast and break things crowd, especially when they are trying to break things permanently.

So much of our government has always worked on the assumption that people would stay within the norms.

The last time I remember seeing government destruction on this scale was when Reagan first took office, and there the norms held to a great degree. Reagan did a lot of harm – harm that led to the current grifter – but he didn’t break all the rules wholesale.

I was horrified in November 2016 and even more horrified in November 2024. I learned my lesson about what happens when unqualified and generally awful people end up in the presidency after the 2000 election. I was angry about the Supreme Court handing the job to Junior Bush, but I said, “Oh, well, how much harm can he do in four years? At least we’re not rioting in the streets.”

We should have rioted in the streets.

On the other hand, despite things being not just as bad as I expected, but even worse, I do think the grifter and his fascist crew are losing. Something has given in the last month or so. I’m not the only person who feels that way. Rebecca Solnit has written about it well. (I find her Meditations in an Emergency newsletter well worth reading these days.) Continue reading “The State of Things”…

Avoiding Viruses

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I was at a meeting here in Oakland the other day, one of those wonderful meetings about projects we have around here. There was food – good food, too, not just the usual pizza – and people who had critical things to say were careful in their phrasing.

(As a person who has developed a hatred of meetings after a lifetime of going to them, I am often pleasantly surprised by how good our meetings are in Oakland.)

But there was one thing: I had brought a CO2 meter, because I knew we would be meeting in a basement room, and over the course of the meeting it began to register not just high, but seriously high. I put on a mask, but finally decided to say something.

People were a little surprised, but we opened another door, and the reading dropped back into the good range.

And I realized that very few people are truly aware of the need for indoor air quality, even activists, and even people who are careful to mask in larger gatherings or on airplanes.

Now I’m not measuring CO2 for its own sake – though the higher the CO2 level in a room, the more it makes you drowsy and slows down your brain processing during the time you’re in that space – but as a proxy for the risk of getting Covid or another respiratory virus.

Those viruses are spread in the air, so if you’re sick and exhale – or cough or sneeze – you put the virus into the air. When CO2 levels get above 800, we’re breathing in each other’s lung exhalations, so if one person is sick, we’re all going to be exposed.

There are things you can do about this.

The simplest one is to put more air in the room – open a window or a door, if they are available in that space.

It is possible to put in a heating and air conditioning system that includes good ventilation and also has a filtration system that takes viruses and other particles out of the air. It’s not particularly new technology and if you’re putting in an overall system, it’s not all that expensive.

But it is a lot more expensive than doing nothing, so very few places have done it as a retrofit.

So opening the windows or doors is still the default most places.

There is something cheap and practical you can do in buildings that aren’t being retrofitted and don’t have much access to outside air: you can get an air filter. In fact, if money is a real issue, you can build one cheaply using a box fan and MERV 13 filters. Continue reading “Avoiding Viruses”…

Stop Sharing “AI” Slop!

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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There’s a deluge of “AI”-generated long-form stories, usually accompanied by “AI”-generated pictures, on Facebook. Many of them are clearly made-up feel-good stories about someone doing something unusual and kind for someone else.

They’re easily identified – most start with a similar introduction about how the person never did this before and then something about them, usually including their age, which is often in the 70s – but people still persist in sharing them. And someone always points out in the comments that this particular piece is “AI.”

Actually, the fact that it was written by the predictive software labeled as AI isn’t the major problem here. This crap is a problem regardless of whether it’s generated by software or by some badly paid schmuck trying to cobble together a living.

The stories are presented as if they are true, but they aren’t. They detract both from fiction and from true stories about humans doing something good. And they are put in front of us on social media to keep us from engaging with our friends there.

Another thing I see regularly are supposed biographies of people and other supposedly historical stories presented in a clickbait way – “They thought she was just a little old lady, but then she did this and wowed everyone.” These are often about real people.

Some of the facts are reasonably accurate, but the take is not usually the way things happened. The most recent one I’ve seen has been about Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure these are fake pages with pieces by “AI.” They’re certainly not trustworthy, but they’re even more likely to be shared because they look factual.

When someone shares these things because they want them to be true – and I think that’s why most people share them – they are continuing Facebook’s relentless push to make everything in our lives completely false.

It’s pretty clear that the broligarch crowd thinks the rest of us are NPCs and that nothing we do or say really matters. I don’t think it occurred to the people developing social media that we ordinary folks like having a tool that enables us to keep in touch with our friends; they were making something to gather data on us. Continue reading “Stop Sharing “AI” Slop!”…

Golden threads and weirdness and Australia.

personby Gillian Polack
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I haven’t forgotten that I was going to introduce tsedakah last week. Stuff happens. And then more stuff happens. Much of the stuff has links to matters Jewish.

First we had the Bondi murders, and then a major literary conference fell to bits largely because of internal clashes about ethics. These internal clashes became a national mess. And now, Parliament’s back early and we had so many kind words about those lost at Bondi, and a national day of mourning later in the week and I think the whole country is confused. The latest political opinion poll suggests this. A far right party is coming out of the shadows and making one of the two largest parties in the country scared. The far left has most of its old vote, but not all. And our prime minister has lost most of his personal support: if Labor want a safe election next time, they might need to change their leadership. Or not. Labor is stubborn and full of factions.

All this pales compared with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iran, in the US, and even in the UK. But it’s our mess, and we must handle it. One thing I would like to see us return to is civil society. Discussions and analyses rather than street marches.

Why? The big Sydney Harbour Bridge march last year had a lot of wonderful people doing what they thought was the right thing. Marching alongside them in support of Gazans were the Bondi shooters, and the rather antisemitic writer who upset the applecart in Adelaide and led to one of the most important writers’ festivals in the country being cancelled. Marching alongside this writer was almost everyone I’ve seen who is loudly and opinionatedly antisemitic. Many of these individuals were grouped near a guy holding a picture of Khomeini. I don’t know if it was a photo op, or if all these people actually work together, but the cluster of them in the most famous photo of the march indicates a cluster of problems.

It’s going to be difficult to roll back the performative and to return to the Aussie politics I used to know. I’m not connected in the way I used to be. I was pushed out of the behind-the-scenes stuff through being too Jewish and too ill. Australia admires health. It also has this really stupid habit of sweeping people who belong but should not be heard under the front stairs.

Why am I thinking of front stairs?

I’m back in the Middle Ages this week and ought to be talking about foodways, but have been focused on trying to understand our current very strange politics. What happens when the Middle Ages is there and I try to pretend it isn’t? Literary references happen, most frequently.

The boy under the stairs was Saint Alexis being holy. I’m probably under the stairs, but being sarcastic. The sarcasm means that old friends and new sneak in to join me, and we watch the goings on and are surprised at how people we know to be intelligent get caught up in performance and leave a goodly portion of their intellect behind.

Tsedekah is much nicer, but must wait until life is less exciting.

Just for the record, I could have gone to Parliament House and heard all the sorrowful speeches today. Instead, I watched the second last season of Stranger Things and I did some work and filled in all kinds of questionnaires. I decided it was not wise to hear those who ought to have sorted out the hate when it was straightforward being terribly sorry at all the murders. All those people should still be alive. Synagogues and mosques should not be burning. And all the time we spend trying to find that bolted horse could have been spent in doing so many things that Australia needed.

It will be Purim soon and gifts to two charities are traditional for this festival. I’ve chosen two that are important to me. It’s early, but all this thought led me to think what I could do. One charity gives reading to children. Those children are very rural and living on the land of their ancestors. They do so much better when they have books that concern themselves and are written by people they know in the language they speak. The other is for OzHarvest, which helped me out when I was under the poverty line. It rescues food and makes sure that food reaches people who don’t have the money to buy it.

Maybe around Purim will be an appropriate time to explain why the books are more Jewish as a gift than the food. Not more Jewish. I’m explaining badly. Ranked more highly as a type of gift. You’ll have to wait until March for the explanation.

Tomorrow is research-for-writing. I am interviewing a group of Jewish teenagers for a novel. A rather special novel, and one that I was not expecting to write. It’s not a guaranteed publication, but it’s a guaranteed “I’d love to see this if you’d consider writing it.” It’s the kind of book I’ve been saying we need for the last 20 years, one where Jewish Australia is shown as the driver of a story about Jewish Australians. The US has many YA novels that do just this for Jewish readers, but Australia, far less so.

I’m also finishing a short story where the King of Demons meets a very English vampire in Sydney. I have other fiction happening, including a novel emerging later in the year, but this week everything is Jewish.

The more hate there is, the more I write Jewish stories and Jewish history. Hate has reinforced my Jewishness ever since I was a child. When I was accused of eating baby’s blood in unleavened bread (in primary school), I taught the accusers basic kashruth. These are the type of stories I always tell.

What I don’t always tell is the reason I learned the Grace After Meals (the long one, all in Hebrew). I was so annoyed with several bigots and I decided I would say it every single lunchtime until the haters stopped bugging me. I kept saying it even after they stopped bugging me. Also they would have stopped bugging me anyhow, but I didn’t know this until it happened.

They didn’t stop because I could babble in Hebrew. They stopped because I became the high school student everyone else needed to ask questions of, especially in the lead up to exams. I could teach and I remembered everything teachers’ said and I understood it all. This gave me a place to belong, a role that was so very much mine. After I put the siddur away, someone would sit next to me and ask “Gillian, do you remember the calculus from yesterday?” or, a couple of years later, “Gillian, tell me about this piece of Chaucer.”

What most Jewish Australians have been pushed out of are those places we belong in the wider community. Since Australia is so secular, this is rather more important than it looks. Changing definitions, not listening to our voices, not publishing our books, telling us we have to leave our home country because we’re Jewish, accusing us of all kinds of impossible crimes… this all smudges together and makes an everyday that’s very difficult to handle.

Every single Australian organisation that still accepts me as Gillian (right now, my professional Medieval one, the Tolkien folks, and the Perth science fiction convention) gives me a golden thread to hold and to guide me through this labyrinth. Every single one that cuts off that thread (more than one writers’ organisation), leaves me stumbling. I find my balance within Jewish Australian culture, because that’s the place where my identity is not questioned.

As has been said so many times about Australia, we’re a weird mob. This is just another facet of that weirdness.

Outrage at the Outrageous

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Back when I was a kid, the idea that any kind of authority could stop a person and demand their papers was considered outrageous, the sort of thing that happened in “bad” countries, not in the USA.

I was an Anglo kid, of course – Anglo in the Texas sense of being white and not Mexican American. Black people knew better as did Mexican Americans, including those whose families had lived north of the Rio Grande since before Anglo settlement in Texas in the early 1800s.

These days I know enough history to understand the amount of racial privilege packed into my outrage. Our history is littered with stories of people forced again and again to prove their right to exist while others are accepted even when they’re doing harm.

But I still feel that outrage on behalf of all the persons being harassed by trumped-up semi-cops right now. And I would get very angry if someone asked me for my papers.

I mean, I still get mad every time I’m driving near the Mexican border and have to stop at one of the border patrol stations that are inland from the actual border.

Not that I ever have any problem there. I’m very obviously Anglo and dealing with cops brings out my Anglo Texan accent. But it still pisses me off in a deeply personal way, and not just because I’ve noticed at those places that people whose skin is a little darker than mine end up spending a lot more time answering questions.

In his January 15 issue of his Law Dork newsletter, Chris Giedner reports that the awful woman who is running our Department of Homeland Security (an agency whose very name evokes Nazi Germany in my mind and has since the right wing came up with it after September 11) says anyone in the vicinity of an ICE operation can expect to have to prove their identity.

And of course, even proofs of identity don’t work if they want to abuse you. Or shoot you.

It is reported that a couple of the thugs doing these raids have said to people after the murder of Renee Good, “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” Continue reading “Outrage at the Outrageous”…