Digital Manticore

Hello, friends and enemies. It’s been a very long two weeks, but we are finally free of my father-in-law’s dogs. I really tried to give these guys the benefit of the doubt but they have driven me INSANE. They had me completely overstimulated from constantly running around, panting, and licking me, not to mention having to take them outside every hour (if not more frequently) because they are bad at understanding how going outside to pee works. Fortunately, they returned to their home on Thursday and I am no longer responsible for them. They are cute and loving dogs but holy shit I am not built for this.

Kirk has recovered from covid and I, despite all odds, never tested positive or had any symptoms. We did work very hard to keep me from getting it, but it’s still shocking that I avoided the virus. I really thought this was going to be it for me. I’m not going to start slacking on masking but it does make me wonder if I’m just not going to get it? This is a question without an answer, I fear.

Current Events

Somehow, Mothers Are Always to Blame

This week, the United States government made “unsubstantiated claims about a link between Tylenol and autism.” Readers may recall that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in April that we would know the cause of autism by September. At the time, I wrote For the last fucking time: Vaccines do not cause autism. I guess now I have to add that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism either. I have a lot of questions about whether only brand-name drugs cause autism. Do you get generic autism if your mom took acetaminophen or paracetamol instead? Great Value autism? I bet Kenvue (the company that owns Tylenol) is big mad right now. I hope there’s an expensive and juicy lawsuit.

You know what causes autism? As this lady on instagram put it: autistic people be fucking. That is to say, autism is genetic. There are autistic people because autistic people had sex and made babies. There seem to be more autistic people now than in the past because of changes to diagnostic criteria that made it possible for more people to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, as well as increased awareness of what autism is and how it presents.

Blaming pregnant women for taking Tylenol and “causing” autism immediately made me think of the discredited “refrigerator mothers” theory that was popular in the mid-20th century. According to this theory, “the cause of autism is a lack of parental, and in particular, maternal emotional warmth.” Look, I’m not a doctor or anything but could this be as simple as non-autistic people think autistic people seem “cold” and stand-offish? Might it be that these “refrigerator” mothers were just autistic moms of autistic kids? Their alleged lack of maternal warmth wasn’t the problem. Autistic people be fucking! We find each other in the world and create more autistic people! That’s it! Furthermore: how come no one blames the dads? Fathers are half the equation of making a baby but no one ever says dumb shit like “men need to stop taking Tylenol because it’s turning their sperm autistic.” Our culture remains obsessed with policing what women do with their bodies and lives and it’s killing us.

The Cruelty Remains the Point

Trump got on the mic this week and urged pregnant women not to take Tylenol, stating that they should “fight like hell not to take it.” So, the thing about that it is not safe to take most medications during pregnancy. According the the Cleveland Clinic, “other pain relievers, like, ibuprofen (Advil) and naproxen (Aleve®) can affect fetal development and aren’t recommended during pregnancy.” Tylenol is all they have! The government seems to seriously be recommending that pregnant people just walk it off and tough it out. They’re already making a whole baby and you don’t even want them to have a little Tylenol! Fuck off!

The government wants to force (white) women to make babies and seems intent on making everything about the process as miserable as possible. Just this week, Trump threatened to “impos[e] tarffis as high as 250% on pharmaceutical imports …with commonly prescribed oral contraceptives at the top of the list.” Abortion is currently illegal in 12 states and highly restricted in another 10. The government is trying to make it impossible to avoid or terminate pregnancy, yet pregnancy is one of the most difficult bodily processes that someone can endure during what can be one of the most dangerous times of their life. Not only that, but the U.S. still has a very high maternal mortality rate compared to other developed countries. We have recently learned that some places in the U.S. don’t even care if the mother dies in the process, the important thing is getting that baby out.

Always Be Grifting

If I’ve learned anything about Trump and his associates’ modus operandi, it’s that the grift never stops. Someone always stands to make money from the administration’s choices.

While the Tylenol news has dominated the discourse this week, there is also the matter of a supplement called leucovorin, or folinic acid. Reuters reports that “the U.S. Food and Drug Administration published a notice to the Federal Register ahead of a speech by President Donald Trump, approving a version of leucovorin made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L), opens new tab that the company had previously withdrawn from the FDA’s consideration when it stopped manufacturing the drug.” The drug is essentially a B vitamin and is FDA approved for “counteracting the toxic effects of certain cancer drugs … and to treat specific types of anemia.” There is limited research that treatment with leucovorin can improve some skills in young autistic people in specific circumstances. However, more research is needed and this is not a cure for autism. In any case, autism is a developmental disorder; it isn’t something that can be cured. Autism is a whole way of brain functioning and that’s not something you can just take a pill about. If I were to “cure” my autism, I’d need a whole new brain (or—not to give anyone any ideas—perhaps a lobotomy).

Dr. Mehmet Oz, our current Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator (and, in a very distant way, my boss), has a history of shady dealings when it comes to shilling supplements. It’s not certain that he would make money directly from promoting folinic acid as an autism treatment, but the evidence is suggestive. Dr. Oz previously partnered with an online supplement company called iHerb, which does sell folinic acid, as a “Global Advisor.” For the record, I tried to save a link to the press release about Dr. Oz working with iHerb in the Internet Archive, but was met with a message that this site is excluded from the archive. Still, even of Dr. Oz is no longer officially affiliated with the supplement company, American corporations have invented many ways to reward individuals, so I remain skeptical.

Despite this past connection, all the news articles I could find on the subject now are quick to make statements like “As a condition of taking the job of Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz pledged in writing to close out by July 3, 2025 his stake in iHerb, an LLC that sells folinic acid supplements.” iHerb’s spokesperson also says Dr. Oz is no longer affiliated with the company. It is possible that Dr. Oz could hold stock in GlaxoSmithKline, the company behind leucovorin, but we can’t know for sure. Unfortunately, even congresspeople can own and trade stocks while in office, so Oz holding GSK stock would barely rate as a scandal, as sad as that is.

Regardless of Dr. Oz’s apparent lack of personal stake in leucovorin, we do know that supplements are a huge industry. In 2022, the the U.S. supplement industry was worth over $160 billion, and the average profit margin on supplements is 38 percent (for reference, the average restaurant has a five to ten percent profit margin and the average profit margin for gyms is ten to fifteen percent). Will Dr. Oz personally enrich himself off this decision? I don’t know, but I am certain people all throughout the Trump administration are going to find a way to make money here. Otherwise, why promote a product with a huge profit margin? Why not promote interventions that autistic people need, like ways to help us find jobs, or aides to help us with daily tasks. Oh right, no one is making money off that and our culture finds no value in care work. Go buy a supplement, I guess!

It’s Still Eugenics

Even if Tylenol or vaccines caused autism … so what? What is wrong with autistic people existing? Yes, autism is a disability and many people struggle with it. I am sure there are also autistic people who would wish their autism away if they could. Still, that doesn’t give our government the right to decide that there shouldn’t autistic people. What message other than that are we meant to derive from Trump and RFK Jr. telling us (incorrectly) that Tylenol taken during pregnancy causes autism and that women should “fight like hell” to avoid taking it? The only message here is eugenics.

The groundwork for criminalizing women for “causing” autism has already been laid. Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, multiple women have faced criminal charges for miscarriages (in Ohio, in Georgia, and many others). The state has already made it clear that women do not have sovereignty over their own bodies. Taking a painkiller—something that helps the mother but, per the logic of the Trump administration, “endangers” the baby (putting them at risk of disability)—would also be something that prioritizes the mother rather than producing “healthy” babies for the nation. This is really ugly stuff. I know I keep bringing up Nazi Germany when we talk about this shit, but there are such obvious parallels that it can’t be helped. In July 1933, Nazi Germany enacted the Law of the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, which stated “Any person suffering from a hereditary disease may be rendered incapable of procreation by means of a surgical operation (sterilization), if the experience of medical science shows that it is highly probable that his descendants would suffer from some serious physical or mental hereditary defect.” Is this where the U.S. is heading? It doesn’t seem far-fetched that some states would pass laws on the logic if that if ladies can’t keep themselves from taking Tylenol then, well, they ought to be sterilized to prevent more autistic people being born. Despite, and I cannot stress this enough, the fact that there is no evidence linking Tylenol and autism.

At this point, please indulge me as I quote myself from my April post because I realized I was about to write a bunch of things I already said:

All this shit is eugenics. It was always eugenics and Trump has always been a eugenicist president. It’s not a secret. One of Trump’s early acts as a candidate in 2015 was to mock a disabled reporter. Trump’s speeches have often echoed Hitler and he reportedly keeps a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. He said there were “very fine people on both sides” in reference to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville in 2017. He’s a white supremacist who brings people with the same ideology into his government. Given this, it’s not surprising that RFK Jr. is out here talking about autistic people being a drain on the economy in a way that evokes Nazi Germany’s concept of “useless eaters.”

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this administration seems to be establishing a framework that positions autistic and ADHD people as enemies of America or, at best, freeloaders. There was the February 13 Executive Order Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, which explicitly named autism as a “dire threat to the American way of life.”

If you think autistic people, or any group of people, shouldn’t exist: why? How are these people bothering you? Do you think autistic or disabled people aren’t “pulling their weight” in society? Guess what, the point of civilization is that everyone can spend less effort on survival. There are surely times that any of us are taking more than we put in. We aren’t all out hunting, gathering, building shelters, and fighting to survive every day. This was and remains the dream. Babies can’t take care of themselves either but no one is arguing that they shouldn’t exist. Older adults often can’t take care of themselves and, with some notable exceptions, people aren’t arguing that old people should all voluntarily submit to death like we live in Logan’s Run. This might blow some minds, but I think that even if a someone can’t ever “contribute” a single thing to society, they should still be allowed to live the fullest life they can. The moment you decide that some babies shouldn’t be born or some people aren’t worth it, you open the door for deranged authoritarians to rank whose lives have value and whose don’t, and you may not like what they decide.

In conclusion: if you think there shouldn’t be autistic people, you can fucking fight me.

Laugh or Cry

I often say that you can laugh or you can cry. I choose laugh as much as I can. I appreciate the good people of the internet posting jokes on this subject because it lets me know that we all think this is deserving of ridicule. Here are some memes for posterity.

Books and Other Words

I was not a fan of pyramid schemes before reading Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by Bridget Read, but afterwards, I’m fairly convinced that multi-level marketing (MLM) has done incalculable harm to our society. Read takes us through the history of MLMs, which began with a struggling vitamin company called Nutrilite in the 1930s. The vitamin business wasn’t going anywhere until a pair of “middle-aged nobodies” came up with the concept of the pyramid scheme as we know it today, which renders selling product moot because the real money is in signing up more sales people. At first, people thought MLMs were a nice way to make some extra cash and it was seen as a step up from the “unsavory reputation” of door-to-door salesman. Eventually, America’s ultimate MLM, Amway came on the scene. Amway’s founders, Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos, have since used their Amway wealth, which was “wrung … out of the failures of countless Americans,” (because no one makes money from MLMs except the people who start them) to influence politics. For just one example, Van Andel was a founding trustee of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025. Additionally, the Amway families are huge Republican donors, and you would probably recognize Devos’ daughter-in-law: former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Unfortunately, the MLM and Amway mindset has done a lot of indirect damage as well. The whole concept of the “gig” economy has ultimately grown out of this idea that everyone can be selling something and making money, when really, only the people at the top are reaping any profits from the collective hustle. Or, as Read much more artfully states, “MLM foreshadows the failure of a society that entrusts the care of its citizens, their independence, the administration of democracy itself to the forces of capitalism.” Lots of other concepts like that businessmen’s “ability to get rich should be important to everyone else” and the “law of attraction” (a precursor to the ideas popularized in The Secret) have been popularized through MLMs. This kind of self-help junk has filtered out into wider society so much that nearly everyone knows what “manifesting” is and many use it unironically. Yet, the idea of picturing your success is deeply rooted in the Amway process. In fact, the phrase “living the dream” originates with Amway (and knowing this has instantly cured me of sarcastically saying I’m “living the dream” when asked how I’m doing). All that said, I recommend this book. It’s an exhaustive study of how MLMs have been part of shaping our laws and culture. It’s full of interesting tidbits but, as with many books I read, it will probably make you mad.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

• Understanding what the far-right thinks of bisexuality will help us fight for all queer rights via Xtra. From the article: “In the imagination of the far-right, bisexuality is a symptom of the so-called sexual degeneracy of Western women, and functions as a gateway into other ‘progressive’ or ‘anti-family’ beliefs … The most common way that bisexuality is mentioned or discussed is as a misogynistic shorthand to indicate that a woman is promiscuous, untrustworthy or degenerate.” Happy Bisexual Visibility Week lol.
• We’re about to find out if Silicon Valley owns Gavin Newsom via Blood in the Machine. The California legislature has passed some bills that would curb AI companies’ power and now it’s up to Newsom to sign them or veto them. From the article: “This is a crucial moment. If even the barest-bones laws can’t pass here right now, it will come down to one reason above all: Gavin Newsom is currently preparing to run for president and he doesn’t want to upset Silicon Valley and its deep-pocketed donors and platform operators. It will show us that, even in supposedly liberal California, Silicon Valley’s iron grip has become nearly unbreakable, and offer a grim omen for future hopes of subjecting Big Tech to anything resembling democracy.”
• Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books via 404 Media. We really have to stop large language model-based “AI” before it poisons the entire internet.
• House Arab via Bidoun. This is a moving and incisive essay about being Arab while working as a fact checker at a prominent publication during Israel’s war on Palestinians.

Rampant Consumerism

This might be more anti-consumerist than rampant consumerist, but I did spend money so I’m putting it here. I’ve started using the Focus Friend app and it rules. The app is a cute way to help you stop mindlessly looking at your phone! You set a timer for how long to focus and then a little bean character (I named mine Beanly) knits while the timer is going. If you interrupt the timer, he will have to stop knitting and he’ll be sad. Once the timer ends, you get socks as currency to spend on decorating the space. It’s simple but so effective and it is helping me avoid mindlessly opening instagram when I’m trying to read. I upgraded to the premium version, which has the option for creating an allow list of apps to use while focus friend knits. I’ve set it up so I can use my flashcard apps, dictionary, and Wikipedia while the app is active. I’ve been trying to set aside at least 30 minutes of non-phone time at night to read (hard because I want to text my friends about every single thought I have), so I’ve been turning this on to keep me focused and is helping.

Icelandic

I reached an exciting Icelandic milestone this weekend! You may recall that I’ve been translating Icelandic Wikpedia articles about the Skagafjörður region into English. Today, I reviewed the last one on my list with my Icelandic teacher! I still have a few left to publish to Wikipedia, and I’ve been reviewing some of the earlier translations because I understand how to render some things better now, but the bulk of the work is done! I started this around April last year and there were maybe 15 articles in the Skagafjörður category. Now there are 147 and my running document of Skagafjörður translations has reached 191 pages. I’m proud of myself and I’m excited to find a new thing to start working on in Icelandic.

Corporeal Form

Let’s start with the good news: I got my blood tested and I’m no longer pre-diabetic! You may remember I mentioned in July that I had gotten a blood test and was a little bit into the pre-diabetes range. The threshold for pre-diabetes is an A1c level of 5.6, and mine is now 5.4, so I think I’m pretty safe. I’m relieved because I really don’t need anything else to be wrong with me.

In bad news, I got a migraine with an aura for the first time last Saturday, which was scary and unpleasant. When it happened again the following Monday, I called the advice nurse to ask if I should be concerned. Unfortunately, she advised me to go to the ER. The doctor I saw ultimately determined that nothing more serious than a migraine was going on and gave me some medication to take if it happens again. I’m desperately hoping this is just a matter of stress and not some new neurological issue that I’ll have to contend with. I didn’t think it was possible to unlock a whole new type of headache, but here I am. I am fine now and I really think the stress of the last few weeks is what triggered it, so let’s hope this migraine business does not return.

Kitchen Witchery

I kept it pretty simple over the last couple of weeks out of necessity as much as anything else. I made a bean and fake meat (Trader Joe’s meat crumbles) chili, loosely based on the recipe in The Bean Book. For any real bean-heads out there: I used a combination of whipple and rio zape beans, but you can really use almost any bean for chili. I made cheese and chive biscuits to go with it because that sounded good to me. Last weekend I made lasagna—just a basic one using the recipe from How to Cook Everything. It was good! It’s lasagna, of course it’s good!

The only new recipe I tried was the Smitten Kitchen double chocolate zucchini bread. It is obviously delicious. I will be making it again.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz is pleased to be king of the house again. He wanted nothing to do with the dogs and he wants me all to himself.