Posted On X, April 13 2025

If you don't Sin,

then Jesus died for nothing.

pins collected by dr. hilda a. hidalgo during her years of lesbian activism, c. 1970s.

Kate Chopin, from The Awakening

The Biggest Conservative Lie: "But how do you pay for that?"

I think right now, while America is starting yet another global economic crisis is the best time to talk about this one issue. Because oh boy, it sure is an issue. And I think everyone who follows politics in some regard has come across one example of this.

One fairly centrist (lets face it, most of them are not even left) politician goes: "Maybe actually we should just help people/keep our infrastructure running."

To which a conservative or right wing politician will inevitably go: "Yeah, but how do you pay for that? It is not as if I am against it (a total lie), but it is jsut not viable! We do not have the money for it!"

The same arguement also gets pulled on any actually further left-wing idea like Universal Basic Income or such.

The thing is: This answer is a lie from beginning to end. We do know for a fact that any sort of social spending pays for itself - and to help it over thestart issues can be absolutely financed by putting a bit more tax on the wealthy and the companies.

Outside of those Chicago School morons (the ones who still proclaim trickle-down-economics, a by now disproven idea of economics, totally works) pretty much every person working in economics - no matter how much they hate this fact - does agree that indeed, it works.

Lets just go through a couple of examples, alright?

Single-Payer Healthcare: This is easily proven given that a lot of countries have implemented this in one way or another. This very much improves medical outcomes, and lessons the costs of healthcare within the country. Mainly due to the healthcare being paid more fairly, but also due to people actually getting healthcare easier, as they do not need to take out a loan if they stay in the hospital for three days. Plus: People who are healthy are able to do better work, and do hence end up adding more to the economy - if you care about that. (I don't, but you know those psychopaths do.)

Giving Homeless People Homes: This is one that basically so far only Finland does. Homeless people in Finland receive homes through the state - and guess what: Not only do most of them succeed to gain stability in their lives, but they also cost the state a lot less money this way, than if they live in the streets. Win win for everyone.

Making all education free: Again, this one is fairly self-explanatory. Any sort of academic work - from education to research - usually helps the economy. Educated people provide more value for the economy. Research done at the universities often improves the economy. Like, even outside from a general "education is good" thing... If you care about the economy, you want this.

Paying for infrastructure: You know what any sort of economic thing needs to work? Yeah, infrastructure. They will need streets, water, electricity, internet access and shit. If you provide it for free, the companies will more likely settle where you provide this - and you then can tax them.

Universal Basic Income: Let's talk about a more controversal one. But we by now have studies over studies that is proving the concept. Yeah, if you just give all people money, it will help your country and your economy. People who receive money will get more educated, they will take better care of their families, they are more healthy, they eat better, they might start their own businesses. And it is easily paid for by just taxing companies and the super rich so little, that they would barely even notice it - given how filthy rich they are. And normally poor people that have more money to spend, will actually spend it. Shocking, I know!

Privatization and punishing poor people actually tends to cost the state and everyone a whole lot more money than otherwise.

But of course this is not why the conservatives are against it. Most of them know the numbers quite well - but they do not care. Because all that they care about is that those few people who are super rich and finance their political careers to get more and more money - money that they do not need and will hoard like the dragons of yore.

Meanwhile - as Americans are finding out in real time - the financial methods the conservatives are using do not work and have been proven to not work.

Tax cuts for the rich? Yeah, that got us into this issue to begin with. Trickle down economics do not work. And Tariffs? They just make everything more expensive for everyone.

Again: This is not like the conservatives do not know this. They do. Or rather, I certainly hope they do. Because there is simply two options: Either they know this and are lying about that to profit, or they are uneducated morons, who should not be in the position they are, because they clearly do lack the necessary education and abilities to understand complex systems.

But no, fact is: They are lying.

We can pay for this. We always could. For a long time we did. But then things went horribly wrong.

the trolley problem vs. systemic oppression: a comic.

The Santa Anas

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather”. My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.” In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. “At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, ´the ordinary instant.´ I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.“ After Life , by Joan Didion. The best text I have ever read about death, the unpredictability of life, and grief.

To ravish

It is easy to make light of this kind of “writing,” and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words (as well as with people who hung Stellas in their kitchens and went to Mexico for buys in oilcloth), a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs. (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues, and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, other ravishments.) We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there are two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of the eye), learned to rely on the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.” “Give me a shock verb two lines in.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.” Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion. Going to work for Vogue was, in the late nineteen-fifties, not unlike training with the Rockettes. Telling Stories, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion.

Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Wedding Chapel, Las Vegas (1940-2020)

Photo: Undated, mid 50s. ‘51 Studebaker.

This was an adobe home built in the mid 20s at 213 South 5th Street, later 231 Las Vegas Blvd S. When U.S. Route 91 connected through Las Vegas via 5th St in the late 20s, chapels, motels, and other businesses catering to tourists opened along the road.

Mrs. J. Edwards Webb began performing wedding ceremonies in her front room either in the late 30s or early 40s. It came to be known as Webb’s Wedding Chapel and/or Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. According to the chapel when they were still open, “The city decided they needed a business license, so in 1940 they got a license and chose the name Wee Kirk.”

The earliest reference we can find to “Wee Kirk” is a listing in the RJ, 5/5/41. The name might come from the popular Wee Kirk o’ the Heather in Glendale CA, built in the 20s as a replica of a 17th century church in Scotland.

Wee Kirk was modified in the 50s: a steeple was added to the top of the building and the front room was enlarged. Nearby Graceland Chapel aka Gretna Green also started as a home, was converted into a chapel in the same era as Wee Kirk with similar modifications made in the 50s.

Wee Kirk's original sign was remade with neon at some time in the late 40s or early 50s. It was and replaced in the 70s or 80s with a signboard seen in the ‘84 photo below.

Wee Kirk closed during the 2020 pandemic and was demolished 10/3/2020.

Undated circa '40-'43. L.F. Manis Collection, UNLV Special Collections & Archives.

Circa '44

Postcards, circa 40s

Undated photo c. '50

Postcard, circa 60s – with the steeple

4/18/84 – Photo by Jane Kowalewski. Clark County Historic Property, Wee Kirk O' the Heather Wedding Chapel, Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas.