Mayor of Los Angeles Proposes Banning Masks at Protests

Now that North Carolina is close to passing a ban on public masks (yes, in includes an exemption for wearing certain masks to prevent the spread of infection, but excludes other types of masks some people use to prevent covid, and wearing masks to cope with allergies or air pollution would be illegal under the proposed law), and the governor of New York proposed banning masks on subways, a few days ago the Mayor of Los Angeles proposed banning masks at protests.

As soon as I found out about the North Carolina bill, I knew it could happen here in California too, but many other people were saying it wouldn’t since California has more people who use masks in public to prevent covid than any other state.

A Double Standard for Climate Migrants

The new book On the Move by Abrahm Lustgarten is about how people in the United States relocate in response to climate change—including people arriving from the climate-ravaged regions of Central America.

Lustgarten claims subsidies which encourage people to stay in vulnerable places—such as below-market-cost insurance for homes in low-lying coastal areas which are likely to be lost in the next few decades—ultimately do more harm than good. Subsidies mask the problems with climate change until it’s harder and more costly for people to leave, and people who’ve lost the ability to leave perish.

Most climate migrants move to nearby urban areas. For example, many people who lost their homes to the Camp Fire in Paradise moved to the nearly city, Chico. This drove up Chico’s cost of housing and homelessness, but it also increased the size of Chico’s economy.

Some regions in Central America are already losing their farms to climate change and a lack of funds to build irrigation systems, and people who otherwise would starve move to the city, and then some move to Mexico and, eventually, the United States. Lustgarten shares a few stories from these Central Americans. He points out that as the southern United States—the region most negatively affected by climate change—empties, these migrants will come in from places which are even less livable.

His proposed solution? Send aid to allow more of these Central Americans to stay where they are and not migrate, such as by funding irrigation projects so their crops don’t die.

People Bash Colleen Hoover Because They Don’t Want to Admit She’s Right About Domestic Violence

I recently read Colleen Hoover’s It Starts With Us, the sequel to It Ends With Us. Before I’d read either book, I’d seen talk about how Hoover allegedly romanticizes abusive relationships. After I read It Ends With Us, I thought this accusation was mostly unfair but had a little grain of truth. Now that I’ve read both these novels, I’m impressed with how accurately Hoover handles the topic of abuse in intimate relationships—and convinced it’s her critics who are holding onto harmful myths.

(This post includes major spoilers from both novels, and this is your final spoiler warning.)

Reading My Allosexual Half-Doppelgänger’s Memoir

I just read the memoir of someone who is almost the same age as me. That made it easy for me to compare their personal chronology with my own.

No, I won’t tell you whose memoir it is, mainly to avoid putting some of my personal information out in public.

Some parallels in our lives make for eerie echoes. She moved to another continent at about the same time I did. She started a blog around the same time I started this one (early 2012). She had been reluctant to learn how to drive as a teenager while all their peers were eager to get their licenses. I had to drive as a teenager anyway and pushed myself through it, but she’d evaded it until well into her twenties by choosing to live in places where she could get by with just walking and public transit. Meanwhile, when my life circumstances allowed it, I avoided driving a vehicle for over a decade by also choosing to live in places where I didn’t need a car.

And yet, in some ways, we’re the total opposite.