I gaze out into my yard
In disbelieving surprise
At 30-50 feral hogs
As their tusks, they rise

Does their hogginess upset me?
Will it be my children’s doom?
Emerging 3-5 per minute
Through the forest gloom

That’s why I need my guns
To make sure those hogs die
As I spray bullets over my kids’ heads
Just watch the 5.56mm fly

Do you want me to go full auto?
Lowered head and crazed eyes?
Shell casings falling like teardrops
Those hogs, now their tusks don’t rise

(With apologies to Maya Angelou.)

The face you make when you realize you’ve somehow opened about 20 science papers over the last week and see you’ve read about a quarter of all of them:

Both the left and the right are too enamored of magical solutions to hard problems to achieve anything before calamity.

The left believes that strategic magic words, the sheer power of identity, and a weird new form of censorious prudishness will solve everything.

The right believes that re-confining women to the kitchen, creating a white nationalist state and lots and lots of guns will certainly right the ship.

Of course, like all magical solutions, none of this is useful though some of it is very harmful in itself. Hard problems require large changes. The magic approach is just a way to forestall these changes.

There’s nothing you could do to convince me to wear AirPods or other wireless headphones. They sound like a trash bin, look worse and I’d lose them every day. I guess the modern age is just not for me.