Wild Horses

I wonder if there’s a timeline where Hillary won, and I am drinking a blueberry smoothie right now, not worrying if it might kill me, or knowing there are “pastors” who believe if “the welfare state collapses” the church should tell elderly, childless women to go ahead and starve. It is so weird because I don’t remember the verse where Jesus says, “Comply to the patriarchy or die slowly” and that doesn’t sound “Christ-like” at all, but what do I know? Also, what about childless men? Do they starve, too, or just the women?

Sometimes I think about the last ten years and the toll they’ve taken on all of us. I imagine what life would be like if the C-list reality tv star of The Apprentice never went down that embarrassing golden escalator, and Kellyanne Conway didn’t utter the phrase “Alternate Facts!” I feel sure those events opened the portal into this absolute buffoonery of a chronozone we’re experiencing.

I consider what our great, great, great, great, great grand-borgs will process through their holographic databases when they “think” of us. Heck, maybe they’ll have some tiny strands of our DNA running through their code.

She has my fingers. Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Well now, that got dark fast. It’s probably that I haven’t eaten because all of the food in life has been recalled. It’s crazy, huh? Have you been asking yourself whether the number of food recalls is a lot lately? It is, and they are a result of the big, beautiful budget cuts.

Did you know there used to be 11 scientists tracking food parasites at the CDC, and now there are only 3? It’s true! Also, Foodnet, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network — a federal-state partnership that used to track outbreaks of eight different pathogens as a matter of public safety — is now only tracking two pathogens, salmonella and e.coli. Guess just one of the pathogens they’re no longer tracking? Cyclospora! (Hey, Elon, Big Balls, this entire administration, and everyone who voted for them? Those DOGE cuts sure are great, please pass the salad!)

We’ve had over 10,000 reported cases of food-borne illnesses so far this year, and that number is growing. But states can still report cases if they find the budget for it. The grants for local food inspection services have been cut. Once again, this chorus of “leave it to the states” kills people.

I know a lot of people voted for this because RFK, Jr. was going to Make America Healthy Again. America has never been healthy, but anyway, so far he’s brought back measles, and now metal shards in the sourdough, e.coli in the blueberries, listeria in the cheese, salmonella in the 1.5 million (dozen) recalled eggs, and who even knows what’s in the alfalfa sprouts? Seems people have strains of both salmonella and e.coli so it’s a real shit show, pun fully intended.

Turns out these are not the right places to slash grants, as every scientist who was laid off tried to say, along with all the people who did not vote for this. It’s also why you want someone who will listen to medical experts in charge of Health and Human Services, not a conspiracy theorist, a thing no prior president needed to be told.

Could we get any healthier?

We could! In one of the most exciting pieces of news we’ve gotten in quite some time, scientists made a breakthrough with a Moderna and Merck mRNA vaccine for people with melanoma. Doctors map the unique genetic code and mutations of each patient’s surgically removed melanoma, and a custom mRNA vaccine is created and injected. This trains the body’s immune system to hunt down abnormal proteins and kill any matching cancer cells left behind. In clinical trials, it cuts the risk of high-stage melanoma returning, or spreading to other organs in half, compared to immunotherapy alone.

Good thing they were working on it for a decade before RFK, Jr decided to cancel half a billion in funding for research and development of mRNA vaccines of all kinds, including those for many different cancers. As someone who had MOHs surgery on my left shin to remove skin cancer a few years ago, I’d like to personally say thank you to the scientists who’ve been working tirelessly on this vaccine, and Flock you very much to RFK, Jr. His amazing cousin Tatiana Schlossberg shared those same sentiments in her gutting essay, A Battle with My Blood. If you have not read it, grab tissues.

None of this is a surprise, of course, all these budget cuts were laid out in Project 2025, but I suppose they figured no one was going to read 920 pages of endless horrifying policy, or at least no one in their base. I read it on a plane as I was heading to Portugal, and thought these people are truly, deeply unwell. They hate democracy. They are white nationalist tech bro billionaires who want to privatize everything. They like authoritarianism, oligarchy and profit above all else. Why would any normal person want that? Let’s stick with the food supply for a moment, though.

Chapter 10 of Project 2025 (you’ll have to scroll, they don’t make it easy to read by design, but it starts on p.289), is all about the USDA. There’s a lot about Biden/Harris and their annoying emphasis on being “climate smart” when it comes to food production, and also, eye-roll, “equity”, and how their policies have placed too high a burden on the food supply chain. What needs to happen is a removal of barriers. Farmers need to be able to produce the food, and we need to remove any boring environmental or safety regulations to that production, and the ability to import and export food as well. Enough with all these restrictions and concerns and worries about the future, dammit! There’s money to be made now.

“The federal government does not need to transform the food system or develop a national plan to intervene across the supply chain. Instead, it should respect American farmers, truckers, and everyone who makes the food supply chain so resilient and successful. One of the important lessons learned during the COVID19 pandemic was how critical it is to remove barriers in the food supply chain—not to increase them.”

Ah, I see. Don’t tread on my rights, bro. We need to respect farmers and truckers enough to let them get Cyclospora and e.coli if they want to. Also, it doesn’t seem like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is feeling very respected by the president’s decision to undersell them. I’m going to guess a lot of them voted for this, though. There’s also a lot about SNAP benefits in this chapter, and how the next administration needs to make it harder for low-income Americans to qualify for what they call “food stamps.” Remember when the president said he had no idea what Project 2025 was, and how he had nothing to do with it and hadn’t read it?

---

I was up in farm country this week. I went to see my son and his girlfriend a few days ago, they’re in NorCal. I was traveling up the 5 with lots of truckers, and along roads where there used to be a ton of signs for the president and VP the further north I got, once I hit that farmland. Those signs disappeared a few months ago. The farmers are not happy. I’d imagine with gas at $5.69/gallon in California, the truckers can’t be too happy, either.

We went to San Francisco for a day, and walked around Golden Gate Park. They took me to the California Academy of Sciences, which was incredible. There’s an enclosed dome inside, that houses a mini four-story neotropical rainforest, called Osher Rainforest. There were gorgeous butterflies everywhere, and red-crested turacos flying free, and tall, thick, lush trees. There were lizards and spiders and we spent about fifteen minutes watching two butterflies. One was on a leaf, and its wings had become sodden. They were completely flattened against the leaf itself, and my son thought it might be dead.

The other butterfly was flapping its wings furiously, right above the flattened one, and I said I thought it was trying to dry its friend’s wings. My son’s girlfriend said she thought it might be trying to kill it, because every so often it would fly down and kind of aggressively “tap” the wet butterfly. My son started filming, and while we were debating whether the flying butterfly was there out of concern or aggression, the butterfly on the bottom pressed itself to stand. You would’ve thought we were at the races the way we started screaming with excitement.

Then they flew away together and lived happily ever after, or as long as butterflies live in that environment. Butterflies don’t live very long, generally speaking. I told my son’s girlfriend if her wings got soaked in the rainforest, he would not leave her stuck on a leaf, because it’s true.

We hiked around when we left the museum, the park is stunning. There’s a beautiful pagoda by a lake and we sat there for a while, talking about everything and nothing because that’s what you do when you’re in a pagoda. I was saying I really don’t need to do drugs because I have such weird thoughts sometimes, like how did anyone ever decide it was okay to pour concrete all over this planet? I’ll look at the roads and the buildings once in a while and think it’s all just wrong and strange, the idea of covering something living that way.

I feel like we should be Planet Earthians and get rid of all the countries and borders, so we don’t need Presidents (yay) or Prime Ministers or Congress (ours has been so lame aside from maybe seven people, anyway) or Parliament, or dictators or monarchs or any of it. We don’t need passports, either. We need an Earthian Council. The Council should be an organizing body that’s there to help spread and share resources.

All weapons go, immediately. Mass, simultaneous nuclear disarmament. No more guns, they’re smelted and turned into monuments of all the school kids we didn’t save, so we never forget how lost we were and how close we came to total emotional, ethical and moral destruction. We learn each other’s languages and respect one another’s cultures and religions, or lack of religion. We treat the planet and each other with respect, compassion and kindness. If there are people living in poverty, and there are, we send in the builders. We fix the infrastructure.

We make every place hospitable and habitable. We share knowledge, doctors, scientists, and information. We fix what’s broken. Everyone pitches in. No one goes hungry. We help each other rebuild wherever rebuilding needs to happen. We figure it out together. News flash: None of this belongs to any of us. We’re all going to die. We might as well have a massive party down here and be fucking kind, it would be a lot more fun.

I’m so sick of fighting and rage and people taking so much more than they need. Lying and hoarding and acting like absolute asshats.

This Weird Surveillance AI Robot White Supremacist Christian Nationalist WestWorld Billionaire Gilead Fantasy Club has got to go, and it can’t go soon enough. It’s all too much, and I suspect many of us are feeling that way. AI data centers everywhere, when we’re already dealing with drought and water shortages in so many places.

Flock cameras watching us, and now Meta AI glasses? Nudify apps? Elon Musk is literally suing the state of Minnesota because they passed a law banning Grok, etc, from taking photographs of people online, and making them nude, because that violates his 1st Amendment rights to be a trillionaire. Think about how you’d feel if you posted a picture of yourself fully dressed, and a friend or relative sent you a text and said, “Is this you?” and there you were, convincingly naked in all your glory. Except it wasn’t you, it was a picture of you someone grabbed off the internet and ran through a nudify app.

Now imagine it’s you, but you’re in high school, and that picture gets texted from one kid to another. Then someone posts it in a story on Snapchat or Instagram and everyone thinks it’s real. Maybe some guy says he had sex with you and that’s how he has the photo. Or imagine you’re grown and at a job interview, and the person asking questions is looking at you strangely.

Let’s say you’re having lunch somewhere, and a man approaches and asks you out, and you say no thank you. You do it the way women do, you smile in the way that says both, “I’m not interested” and, “I don’t want to die today.” You think you handled it all right because he goes away, but it turns out he was filming the whole thing. Then he posts it online, and the next thing you know, you get a text from a friend you haven’t talked to in years, and she sends a link to the video. That’s what happened to Toluwa Omitowoju, and by the time she looked, it had been viewed over 200K times.

The news covered the story about women being filmed by men in Meta AI glasses and referenced Toluwa, and people in the comments under the video say anyone in a public space should expect to be filmed, we’re all being filmed everywhere we go, and it’s no different than someone filming you from their phone. But it is different. You can see someone’s phone and tell them to stop if they’re intentionally filming you, or pull out your own phone and record them, too. These glasses remove the possibility of consent. These men don’t care about consent.

There isn’t much legal recourse. In public, people can’t expect privacy. Isn’t it interesting how the laws seem to get bent one way, and then the other, and somehow predatory men always benefit? You’d hope you might be able to expect decency, but you’d only hope that if you aren’t a woman.

Meta said don’t worry, the LED light goes on when the glasses are recording, and they won’t record if someone tries to cover the light, which men do all the time. When CBS News’ Anna Schecter tested that out, the glasses recorded just fine. Meta said they’re working on it. I’ll bet they’re working feverishly. Body-worn tech is a menace to women and children, in a world where they are already at risk. You think these men care?

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are embroiled in a lawsuit claiming he purposely and knowingly designed online tools to destroy the mental health of children. He, the monopolistic, revenge-of-the-nerds surveillance-capitalist head of the corporation that commodifies human connection, erodes labor laws, and prioritizes bottomless, ceaseless profit over the greater good, whilst actively censoring people who dare to threaten his bottom line, or any of his billionaire bro friends, including the president. He would never!

Of course, tech titans limit their own children’s screen time more than most parents, because they know the dangers of the tech they’re creating.

Let’s talk about Flock cameras, the surveillance state, and how all of this makes all of us less safe in the hands of untrustworthy men in power, which leads us to Florida, and a just-fired deputy named Lamar Roman. He was hired as security on the set of “Bad Monkey” an Apple TV show starring Vince Vaughn. There was a twenty-seven-year-old actress on set one day, an extra, and Deputy Roman noticed her.

He described her as a “shiny thing” so, not a person. She told him she had a boyfriend, but that didn’t stop him from finding her on Instagram and sending her a message. She did not respond. He continued to talk to her on set, and was so relentless, other actors did their best to intervene. He told her he was going to find her on the road and pull her over. She assumed he was joking. If only.

He used DMV databases and other databases available only to deputies to crosscheck her name, address, date of birth, license plate, and who knows what else. He put her license plate number in a police “hotlist” so he’d be notified when she passed a Flock camera Automated License Plate Reader. When he got the alert, he took off in his police vehicle and sped after her, on a one-lane road, passing cars in front of him by heading into oncoming traffic.

Dash-cam footage from his car shows how close he came to causing a head-on collision. A driver had to pull off the road to avoid him. He pulled in behind this woman and put on his lights. She described her dread to the investigating officer. When she pulled over and rolled down her window, she felt scared, as any of us would be. He asked why she hadn’t responded to his Instagram message. He said he’d hoped her boyfriend would be in the car so he could pull him out and give him a hard time. She said she was late and asked if she could go.

I can hardly describe the rage I feel. These men are not capable of handling this unregulated technology. Not all fucking men, okay? But I promise you, far too many of them. This is not an isolated incident. In May of 2025, Flock cameras were used in Texas to hunt a woman suspected of using abortion medication for a non-viable fetus. Her boyfriend, who was later charged with domestic violence, reported her to the sheriff’s office.

The documents confirm that the woman was not present at the home when the deputies “responded to the death (Non-viable fetus).” As part of the investigation, officers collected evidence that the man had assembled of the self-managed abortion, including photographs, the FedEx envelope the medication arrived in, and the instructions for self-administering the medication.

Another Johnson County official ran two searches through the ALPR database with the note “had an abortion, search for female,” according to Flock Safety search logs obtained by EFF. The first search, which has not been previously reported, probed 1,295 Flock Safety networks–composed of 17,684 different cameras–going back one week. The second search, which was originally exposed by 404 Media, was expanded to a full month of data across 6,809 networks, including 83,345 cameras. Both searches listed the same case number that appears on the death investigation/incident report obtained by EFF.

ALPRs were marketed to the public as tools to find stolen cars and locate missing persons. Instead, they’ve become a dragnet that allows law enforcement to track anyone, anywhere, for any reason—including investigating people’s healthcare decisions. This case makes clear that neither the companies profiting from this technology nor the agencies deploying it can be trusted to tell the full story about how it’s being used.

I don’t think any of us are confused. They will use this technology to hunt anyone they want to hunt. If you think they’ll be ethical, you are dealing with a lack of imagination, or you are so kind, you cannot fathom people could be this terrible. I used to be that way, I suppose I thought we’d learned more from history, but the last ten years have cured me of such delusions. There are depraved people in this world, and there are openhearted, loving people in this world. It can be heaven or hell while we’re here. I have no clue why anyone would choose hell.

Which brings me to this fascinating conversation between Katie Couric and Timothy Snyder, and it caught my attention because of the way it began. Katie Couric asked if he thought people really understood what was at stake right now, and Timothy Snyder said there are a fair number of Americans who would be quite happy living under an authoritarian regime. A lot of Americans would like to be told what to do. Many people are indifferent as long as they think they’ll make a lot of money. “A half-dead henchman is better for some people than democracy”, because it’s better for their bottom line.

He’s right, too. Some people do not care about ideals at all. They don’t care about what these policies do to their neighbors, they don’t care about the immigrant community or women being terrorized by Flock cameras, they don’t care about due process or voting rights or health insurance for other people. They don’t care about SNAP benefits for kids they don’t know, or the LGBTQ community, or wild horses. I don’t know why this continues to stop me in my tracks.

There are people who love to be told what to do because they don’t like to think. Then there’s the other side, the people saying, “We just need to make it to the midterms and vote Blue!” And yes, we do, but that had better mean something different than it used to, and we need to get that message across if we expect people to show up in huge numbers. The same is what got us here.

There’s been too much stark wealth inequality, too many special interest groups, and too much dark money in the halls of Washington. If you try to tell people we just have to get back to “freedom and democracy” you’re forgetting the millions of people who’ve never felt safe or free in this country.

There is a part of the conversation that became very uncomfortable for me, but I think it’s something we should all be talking about. It had to do with terror attacks, and KC asked if TS thought the president was hoping Iran would attack us so he could seize power, and if they didn’t, whether he would truly consider staging a false flag. Once again, TS came back in this very matter-of-fact way saying real and fake terrorist attacks happen all the time.

He said fake Russian terrorist attacks put Putin in power. Russian secret services blew up their own apartment buildings and blamed Muslims for it. He asked who set fire to the Reichstag? It’s still not entirely clear, but it’s the excuse Hitler used to declare a state of emergency. These things happen. Let’s say Iran carries out a terrorist attack. The president would use it to his advantage. This is the kind of thing people like him do. It made me feel sick, but Snyder also said if you lack the imagination to think about how awful things can get, you also lack the imagination to dream of how incredible they can be when people like this are out of power.

I liked that part quite a lot, and I promise I will leave you with that, but first, we need to talk about the Bureau of Land Management, and the wild horses of the American West. Here are some things to know if you don’t:

The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), part of the U.S. Interior Department, oversees both wild horses and the public rangeland they call home across 10 Western states. When the agency determines there are more horses than the land can support, it removes a set number.

For example:

Some federal lands outside Meeker have been denuded by both domestic cows and wild horses, said Troy Osborn, a range expert and former U.S. Forest Service employee. He said that both animals have similar diets and that the range needs to be protected from all those hungry mouths.

“We want to see the ground healthy. We want to see it productive,” he said. “We want to see it used by all animals, by all species.”

Cows vastly outnumber wild horses in the West — the BLM estimates that just over 85,000 wild horses roam federal lands nationwide, compared with millions of cows. But ranchers argue that livestock are carefully managed, while the movements of wild horses are less controlled.

Horse herds can also double in size every few years without human intervention. The BLM says the roundups help keep those numbers in check.

So, sometimes the BLM will set up an event and essentially “herd” a thousand or more wild horses into trailers. A few might get adopted by someone lovely, other times they are kept in a holding facility. American taxpayers spend $100 million annually on their upkeep, which is less than fifty cents a year per taxpayer if you’re someone who wonders about such things. These wild horses (mustangs) are federally protected animals, meaning they may not be killed. They may be adopted or sold.

This is why it was devastating to so many people, people like me, for example, to find out last week that this administration found a loophole. Once these mustangs are gathered up, they must be made available for adoption for three weeks. After that, they can be designated “un-adoptable” and sold. Once sold, the BLM is no longer responsible, so if the person who purchases the mustangs sells them to a slaughterhouse? There’s the loophole.

The sight of helicopters chasing these magnificent creatures knowing what was going to happen to them was somehow a metaphor for the helplessness and hopelessness I feel some days living with these awful people at the helm.

Photo by Sarah Olive on Unsplash

This plan was also in Project 2025, on page 528.

Wild Horses and Burros. In 1971, Congress ordered the BLM to manage wild horses and burros to ensure their iconic presence never disappeared from the western landscape. For decades, Congress watched as these herds overwhelmed the land’s ability to sustain them, crowded out indigenous plant and other animal species, threatened the survival of species listed under the Endangered Species Act, invaded private and permitted public land, disturbed private property rights, and turned the sod into concrete. BLM experts said in 2019 that some affected land will never recover from this unmitigated damage. There are 95,000 wild horses and burros roaming nearly 32 million acres in the West—triple what scientists and land management experts say the range can support. These animals face starvation and death from lack of forage and water. The population has more than doubled in just the past 10 years and continues to grow at a rate of 10 to 15 percent annually. This number includes the more than 47,000 animals the BLM has already gathered from public lands, at a cost to the American taxpayer of nearly $50 million annually to care for them in off-range corrals. This is not a new issue—it is not just a western issue—it is an American issue. What is happening to these once-proud beasts of burden is neither compassionate nor humane, and what these animals are doing to federal lands and fragile ecosystems is unacceptable. In 2019, the American Association of Equine Practitioners and the American Veterinary Medication Association—two of the largest organizations of professional veterinarians in the world—issued a joint policy calling for further reducing overpopulation to protect the health and well-being of wild horses and burros on public lands. The National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, a panel of nine experts and professionals convened to advise the BLM, endorsed the joint policy. Furthermore, animal welfare organizations such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Humane Society of the United States recognize that the prosperity of wild horses and burros on public lands is threatened if herds continue to grow unabated. The BLM’s multi-pronged approach in its 2020 Report to Congress46 included expanded adoptions and sales of horses gathered from overpopulated herds; increased gathers and increased capacity for off-range holding facilities and pastures; more effective use of fertility control efforts; and improved research, in concert with the academic and veterinary communities, to identify more effective — 529 — 2025 Presidential Transition Project contraceptive techniques and strategies. All of that will not be enough to solve the problem, however. Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.

“...to dispose humanely of these animals”?? Why? Their numbers can be controlled by shooting them with birth control darts. They can be spayed and neutered. They can be taught to accept bridles and saddles, making them more adoptable. They do not ever need to be sold to slaughterhouses. There are judges blocking the administration for now. There are a million reasons to vote in November.

I understand there’s something between an authoritarian regime, and burning it all down to become Planet Earthians. At the moment, I am leaning way more toward the second vision, though. The one where we protect wild horses and wild girls and women — and all human beings so they can be exactly who and how they are — a vision where we care about our neighbors and put down our weapons and stop giving our power to men who love robots and being on top and making the rules, and hate anyone who doesn’t comply. They don’t deserve any of this beauty, they don’t deserve any of us, they don’t deserve the redwoods, the poetry, the art, the butterflies, or even a blueberry smoothie, unless it’s the kind with a little e.coli mixed in.

I’m done, friends. I want something so much better for all of us.

---