Early symptoms of MS same across ethnic and social groups – study

Study reveal early warning signs of multiple sclerosis appear years before diagnosis

Queen Mary University of London

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A major UK study has revealed that the early warning signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) - including pain, mood changes, and neurological symptoms such as numbness and tingling – may appear years before diagnosis and affect all communities in similar ways.  

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London analysed electronic health records of more than 96,000 people, including 15,000 people with MS, making this one of the largest and most diverse investigations into the MS prodrome – the constellation of non-specific symptoms experience by people with MS before a diagnosis– to date. While the MS prodrome is a well-documented phenomenon, little is known about whether or how symptoms during this period vary depending on ethnicity or socio-economic status. A better understanding of this phase across the entire population could help our understanding of the onset of the disease and could aid in early diagnosis. 

The study, published in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, confirms that these early symptoms are consistent across gender, ethnicity and socio-economic backgrounds, strengthening the case for these symptoms being used to help detect MS earlier. 

The researchers found that, in the five years before diagnosis, people with MS were:  

• 8 times more likely to report neurological symptoms such as vision changes or numbness 
• 2.5 times more likely to have memory or concentration problems  
• Twice more likely to report chronic pain or bladder/bowel issues 
• 1.7 times more likely to experience depression or anxiety  

These patterns hold true for people of White, Black, South Asian and mixed/other ethnicities, as well as those living in both rural and urban areas. 

Ruth Dobson, Professor of Clinical Neurology at Queen Mary and lead author of the study said: “This is the strongest evidence yet that MS gives us clues years before diagnosis. If doctors know what to look for, they can potentially spot the disease earlier and act to start treatment before significant damage is done.”  

Interestingly, the link between neurological symptoms and later MS diagnosis was even stronger for men and people from Black and Asian backgrounds. These are groups that are often typically less likely to be diagnosed with MS overall.  

Ben Jacobs, Clinical Lecturer in Neurology at Queen Mary and co-author on the study said: “Our study shows that the very earliest features of MS are similar regardless of someone’s ethnic or socio-economic background. Efforts to detect MS earlier or identify people at high risk should therefore be inclusive and representative of the whole population.” 

Why it matters 

MS is a chronic neurological condition affecting 150,000 people in the UK and more than two million people worldwide. Early diagnosis and treatment can slow progression, reduce disability and improve quality of life. 

However, diagnosis is often delayed until a major neurological episode occurs, sometimes after years of unexplained symptoms. These new findings could help doctors identify people at high risk much sooner.  

Dr Catherine Godbold, Senior Research Communications Manager at the MS Society, says: "Understanding more about the early signs of MS could help speed up MS diagnosis and get people onto treatments sooner. This can help to slow down disease progression and prevent disability. So, we're really pleased to see these early symptoms being studied in a large, diverse group.  

“Over 150,000 people live with MS in the UK, and the condition can affect all communities, ages, ethnic backgrounds and genders. But almost everything we know about how MS develops is based on people of White ethnicity. Research like this is crucial in helping us ensure healthcare services can benefit everyone living with MS and those at an increased risk of developing the condition, regardless of their background.” 

The research team is now working on risk prediction tools that could flag high-risk individuals for closer monitoring or referral. This could pave the way for trials of preventive treatments, shifting MS care from reactive to proactive. 

The study used anonymised data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, which covers around 20 per cent of the UK population. It was funded by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS). 

ENDS 

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Journal

Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology

DOI

10.1002/acn3.70175 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Pre-diagnostic features of Multiple Sclerosis in a diverse UK cohort: a nested case-control study

Article Publication Date

24-Sep-2025

COI Statement

RD has received honoraria for speaking and/or travelling from Biogen, Merck, Teva, Roche, Janssen and Sanofi. She served on advisory boards for Roche, Biogen, Janssen and Merck and study steering committees for Roche. All honoraria are paid into an institutional account and used to support research and training. She has received grant support from Biogen, Merck, Celgene. PT, JB and BJ report no disclosures

PALEONTOLOGY

From mosasaurs to snakes and lizards, “megafilters” shape reptile fossil collections

The environment and the durability of their bones are the drivers behind which reptiles—and which parts of reptiles—end up shaping museum collections and our understanding of the fossil record

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

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image: 

The global fossil record of squamates, which includes lizards, mosasaurs, snakes, and amphisbaenians (A) is overwhelmingly incomplete, with most fossil species containing less than 20% of the totality of physical characteristics observable in their skeletal remains (B). C-G include examples of fossil species with various completeness scores. 
 

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Credit: Hank Woolley

For the more than 242 million years that lizards and snakes appear in the fossil record, they show up as mostly pieces of lizard jaws and snake vertebrae. Exactly why these parts survive as fossils has been a mystery—until now.

In a new study published in Paleobiology, Dr. Hank Woolley from the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County’s Dinosaur Institute looks at the entire history of squamates (the reptile group that includes lizards, snakes, and mosasaurs among others) to understand why only certain parts show up—the bias of the record—and to quantify that bias for the first time. Woolley and his co-authors found that physical characteristics like bone density and body size, along with where the animals lived and died, were the main predictors of how complete a fossil would be. Woolley identifies these patterns as megafilters, which refer to processes that have an outsized effect on the way we understand the fossil record. This unprecedented high-resolution view of the group’s biodiversity through multiple mass-extinction events illuminates mysteries of squamates’ evolutionary history and can help guide future work that examines how animals are preserved as fossils. 

 

Woolley and colleagues examine in detail the relationship between inferred environments in which a fossil squamate species was buried and the completeness of its remains. Environmental and geological processes play a strong role in how complete the fossil record can be. You’ll notice that mosasaurs are almost exclusively found in marine settings and are more complete on average than other groups. Snakes, on the other hand, are found nearly everywhere, but are highly incomplete.

Hank Woolley

“Squamates are super adaptable, widespread, and incredibly diverse throughout their whole evolutionary history,” says Woolley. “However, our new study shows that the majority of fossil squamate species are known from incomplete and scrappy skeletal material: isolated jaw bones and vertebrae. Understanding why this happens on global scales is a key first step in sorting through the biases that have stood in the way of having a clear picture of the history of this important group of animals.”

Many people took up hobbies like baking sourdough bread over the COVID-19 lockdowns, but nobody on Earth took up  Dr. Woolley’s pandemic project: reading every paper describing a squamate fossil from their 240ish million years on the planet. “I think it's almost 500 papers,” says Woolley. The study leverages the first digital revolution of museum science and newly digitized collections made available to researchers around the world, and is a product of the second digital revolution, where those collections are combined into databases, such as the Paleobiology Database, letting researchers like Woolley get a bigger, clearer picture than ever before of the totality of the fossil record. But to understand how complete each fossil was, he had to dive into each published paper describing the fossils in those digitized collections, hence the pandemic reading project.

“It was the only way to look at each bone that's described and count it towards the completeness of what we know about a squamate species. We just don’t have that level of detailed information available yet from the Paleobiology Database, and hopefully, studies like ours can help build toward more and more comprehensive information available to researchers online. For the time being,  you still have to go to the papers and museum collections themselves.” 

The purpose of this deep dive was to explore the concept of megabiases—things like regional/global geologic processes and human-based sampling issues—and how they shape our fossil data. From a human-based sampling perspective, examples of megafilters could include whether resources have been mustered to explore one particular region over others, or asymmetries in the number of scientists researching a group of organisms—dinosaurs get more attention than the smaller creatures living among them, for example. 

The key finding of this study is that the chief determinants of how complete a squamate fossil can be are how durable the bones themselves are (for example, bigger bones and fused bones are more resistant to decay and breakage over time), and the environment in which the squamate species died and was buried in (like a river, lake, desert, or open ocean). Woolley and his co-authors found that human-based sampling issues, which can be the main culprit in fossil record completeness in other groups of animals like dinosaurs, appear to play a secondary role in determining the completeness of a fossil squamate species.
 

Having such a clear picture of squamates’ history through deep time could be key to answering some of the questions around this incredibly diverse group of reptiles. For instance, the extinct group of marine lizards known as mosasaurs has the most complete fossil record of any squamate group. The relative incompleteness of other squamate groups’ fossil records may play a role in obscuring mosasaurs’ evolutionary history. 

 

LACM 128319, on display in NHMLAC’s Dinosaur Hall, is an exceptionally preserved specimen belonging to the mosasaur Platecarpus tympaniticus. This is just one of the many examples of exquisite mosasaur fossils that contribute to our more complete understanding of their record compared to other squamate groups.

“Paleontologists disagree about where mosasaurs fit on the squamate tree of life,” says Woolley. “Some workers think they're related to snakes, some think they're related to monitor lizards, and some hypotheses place them in a completely different part of the tree.” All this data could make it easier to find a reptile-sized hole in Mosasaur evolutionary history.  

Understanding the biases in collections could also help researchers understand how these giants of the Mesozoic oceans radiated across the globe so quickly, and how other squamates, like lizards and snakes, survived mass extinction events and thrive today. “Between the early evolutionary history of groups and after mass extinction events, this study helps identify key gaps in the fossil record that have the potential to teach us a lot about these lizards and snakes that are around today,” says Woolley.

 

The global fossil record of squamates, which includes lizards, mosasaurs, snakes, and amphisbaenians (A) is overwhelmingly incomplete, with most fossil species containing less than 20% of the totality of physical characteristics observable in their skeletal remains (B). C-G include examples of fossil species with various completeness scores.

Hank Woolley

“This study is a great example of how the next generation of paleontologists like Hank are taking advantage of digitized records such as the Paleobiology Database, and combining them with the sweat equity spent combing through the literature and museum collections to help answer “big-picture” questions about the bias and quality of the fossil record.” says co-author and Gretchen Augustyn Director & Curator of the Dinosaur Institute Dr. Nathan Smith. “Darwin himself devoted a whole chapter of the Origin of Species to the imperfection of the fossil record, but Hank’s work is helping to finally quantify those biases and tease out how they impact our understanding of the evolutionary history of major vertebrate groups.”

Rather than being discouraged by the inherent “low ceiling” of lizard and snake remains to end up as complete fossils, Woolley points to ground-breaking research and rich data yet to be gleaned from fragmentary fossils. “If we don't quantify these biases,  we could be overlooking some of the very real information that these incomplete fossils can give us,” says Woolley. It’s a promising case study that shows a better understanding of other collections of fragmentary fossils is possible. “Continuing to build these detailed fossil datasets can only help our endeavor to understand how our Earth system’s natural processes—and how we study fossils—shape the field of paleontology.” 

About the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County: 
The Natural History Museum (NHM) is one of Los Angeles’ oldest cultural institutions and anchor of the evolving cultural, educational, and entertainment nexus in Exposition Park. NHM’s collection ranges from 4.5-million-year-old meteorites to newly discovered species explored throughout immersive visitor experiences such as Age of Mammals and the award-winning Dinosaur Hall. The outdoor 3.5-acre Nature Gardens and indoor Nature Lab look at people’s relationship with the environment in L.A., while another beloved permanent exhibit, Becoming Los Angeles, examines how L.A. has changed over time. NHM also features industry-leading habitat dioramas, an exquisite gem and mineral hall, a hands-on Discovery Center, and behind-the-scenes experiences such as the Dino Lab, where fossils are prepared in public view. NHM recently opened NHM Commons, a new community-focused wing designed to open new doors to natural history and celebrate the intersections of science, nature, and culture.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Tyler Hayden
Science Communications Specialist
thayden@nhm.org 

Amy Hood
Director of Communications
ahood@nhm.org 

---

Journal

Paleobiology

DOI

10.1017/pab.2025.10060 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Taphonomic megabiases constrain phylogenetic information in the squamate fossil record

Article Publication Date

24-Sep-2025

LACM 128319, on display in NHMLAC’s Dinosaur Hall, is an exceptionally preserved specimen belonging to the mosasaur Platecarpus tympaniticus. This is just one of the many examples of exquisite mosasaur fossils that contribute to our more complete understanding of their record compared to other squamate groups.

Credit

Courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Woolley and colleagues examine in detail the relationship between inferred environments in which a fossil squamate species was buried and the completeness of its remains. Environmental and geological processes play a strong role in how complete the fossil record can be. You’ll notice that mosasaurs are almost exclusively found in marine settings and are more complete on average than other groups. Snakes, on the other hand, are found nearly everywhere, but are highly incomplete.  

 

Credit

Hank Woolley

House Speaker Mike Johnson Is a Leading War Criminal

By illegally refusing to hold votes on whether or not to halt wars, Speaker Mike Johnson has made himself responsible for those wars and every death, injury, traumatic impact, bit of destruction, degree of global warming, and brutal influence on our culture that stems from those wars.

by David Swanson / September 20th, 2025

It’s a crowded field, I know. Soldiers are proudly publishing videos of their own gruesome crimes. Prime Ministers are touring the world in defiance of arrest warrants. But I want to make sure we’re aware of one prominent member of the list of individuals responsible for the crime of war: U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican from the state of total submission to Trump).

War is a crime under numerous laws and treaties, absolutely regardless of who does it. There is no exception for legislatures. But let’s assume that you define all distant murders (such as of Venezuelan boaters) as war, and that you commit to total non-recognition of all the laws against war (and of the U.S. Constitution’s mandate that treaties be the supreme law of the land) — in other words, let’s assume that you are the New York Times. Then you’re left with the problem that the U.S. Constitution allows Congress and not the Executive to declare wars.

In 1973, the Congress, overriding the veto of the Executive, created a new law called “The War Powers Resolution” which allowed presidents to do what they’d long been doing anyway, namely launch unconstitutional wars, but put time limits and reporting requirements on those wars, and established the means for any single member of either house of the Congress to compel a vote in that house on whether to, in effect, declare:

“Not this time. This particular war, the Congress says no to, as the first branch of the government and the branch in possession of Constitutional war powers. End it immediately, or cease threatening and do not begin it.”

If we were not steadfastly ignoring all treaties, we might note that threatening wars is always a violation of the United Nations Charter. Ignoring treaties or not, the U.S. Congress needs to do something to halt each war/crime. Just as every shipment of weapons to Israel violates numerous U.S. laws and treaties, yet we still require Congress to pass yet another law before the shipments are stopped, a U.S. war may violate numerous laws and yet roll on unless somebody does something to stop it. So, what can Congress do?

This is where the War Powers Resolution comes in. It is a tool that can be used to, at the very least, compel our so-called “representatives” to vote yes or no on a deeply unpopular and malevolent war that their funders and party leaders expect them to keep rolling on.

Or, rather, the War Powers Resolution used to be such a tool. Now, we have a man running the U.S. House of Representatives who is violating the War Powers Resolution by not holding the votes that it requires. By illegally refusing to hold votes on whether or not to halt wars, Speaker Mike Johnson has made himself responsible for those wars and every death, injury, traumatic impact, bit of destruction, degree of global warming, and brutal influence on our culture that stems from those wars.

For decades, a single Congress Member, or a small number of them — Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul were a frequent “bipartisan” combination in relatively recent history — could introduce a resolution and force a vote, despite the wishes of the House “leadership” or the president or even the weapons dealers — on whether to end or forestall a particular war. The votes failed, over and over again, but they created pressure against wars and helped ordinary people identify which Congress Members needed to hear from them. (If someone has a detailed record of all such votes, I wish they’d tell me.)

And then came Yemen. For the first time, a house of Congress — and in fact it was both of them — was not just forced to hold a vote, but saw the vote pass. (When one house passes one of these things, the other house has to vote too.) The bill was sent to President Trump 1.0, requiring an end to U.S. warmaking in Yemen. Trump vetoed, and Congress failed to override. The Congress then chose not to send the same bill to President Biden at all. But a new threat to the war machine had appeared.

Now there are resolutions in the House that legally require swift votes on Venezuela and on Iran, but no votes are expected, because Mike Johnson doesn’t want them.

Here’s how FCNL’s “War Powers Resolution Activist Guide” accurately describes the law, but not the reality:

“Any member of the House or Senate, regardless of committee assignment, can invoke section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution and get a full floor vote on whether to require the president to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities. Under the procedural rules of the War Powers Act, these bills are granted expedited status—requiring a full floor vote in the House within 15 calendar days, and in the Senate within 10 calendar days of introduction. This provision is especially powerful because it allows members of Congress to force timely debates and votes on the president’s use of military force, reinforcing Congress’s constitutional authority over decisions of war and peace.”

(What the law actually says is 15 days for action in a committee plus three more days for a vote by the full house.)

But, according to National Review, Johnson has “come out against” holding a legally mandated vote on war on Iran. That publication explains that “Johnson could remove the privileged nature of the resolution and prevent it from getting a vote, according to Politico.” That sounds as though Politico has made some legalistic case for Johnson’s right to violate the law. Still, you’ll find no such thing at the Politico link, which merely says: “Speaker Mike Johnson could move this week to kill the effort with language getting rid of the privileged nature of the resolution, according to a person granted anonymity to relay the private discussions.” But “language” is not a pass to violate a law.

Congressman Ro Khanna has a statement on why the House should vote on Iran, but it focuses on the substantive reasons to vote and vote yes, noting on the legal requirement of holding the vote merely “It is structured as a privileged resolution, meaning it will receive a vote. Every member of Congress will have to decide whether they stand for diplomacy and the Constitution, or for endless war and executive overreach.” Will they?

According to The Hill, Khanna and Congressman Massie could force a vote regardless of what Johnson wants. Can they? Why haven’t they?

There are other required votes, including on the same war and on Venezuela, that have also not been happening. The Senate, meanwhile, has held a vote on (and not passed) a resolution to prevent war on Iran. I suppose there’s little risk to the merchants of death for the Senate to comply with the law and hold mandated votes as long as the House does not.

H.Con.Res.38 on Iran has been waiting for a vote since June 17.

H.Con.Res.40 on Iran has been waiting for a vote since June 23.

Does that seem like 18 days to anybody?

Each of these resolutions has an unusually large number of cosponsors for a resolution that only requires one sponsor to compel a vote, possibly because the new reality is one of people demanding that their representatives cosponsor these things, something they have infinite amounts of time to do, since there’s never any vote on them.

This piece originally appeared on https://progressivehub.net/house-speaker-mike-johnson-is-a-leading-war-criminal/ 

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David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and War Is a Crime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Read other articles by David.

Five Actions that Definitively Disqualify Trump for his Coveted Nobel Peace Prize

by Kim Petersen / September 15th, 2025

I am especially proud to be the first President in decades who has started no new wars.
— Donald Trump, Farewell Address, 20 January 2021

I am the Peace President and only I will prevent WW3!
— Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, 6 September 2024

I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t.
— Donald Trump, Washington Post, 23 September 2019

Seemingly crushing Trump’s aspirations, Cross World News has headlined: “Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize Push Rejected.”

It has long been obvious that the self-described “president of peace” Donald Trump has been immodestly pining and campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Trump figures if Barack Obama — audaciously though — was awarded the peace prize, then he should be as well. “They gave it to Obama. He didn’t even know what he got it for. He was there for about 15 seconds and he got the Nobel Prize.” Trump complained, “With me, I probably will never get it.”

Nonetheless, Trump believes that he has the bona fides to win a vaunted and tainted Nobel Peace Prize. Trump prides himself on his having held negotiations with the DPRK and on his role in pushing for the Abraham Accords in the Middle East. In more recent times, he has taken credit for having ended seven wars. Even if all this were indisputably true, he still should not be in contention for a peace prize.

Five solid reasons that invalidate peace credentials

To start, a nomination from Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu — indicted for alleged responsibility “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024” as cited by the  UN-backed International Criminal Court (ICC) — should raise some eyebrows.

Even so, Berg Harpviken, who guides the Nobel Peace Prize committee said, “To be nominated is not necessarily a great achievement. The great achievement is to become a laureate.” Trump is just one of 338 individuals and organizations nominated this year.

1) — More egregious for Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize aspirations are his administration’s actions that are strongly supportive of the Israeli government’s genocidal actions in Palestine.

2) — There is the case of the ongoing US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. This was admitted by secretary of state Marco Rubio, in an interview with Sean Hannity, saying, “And frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers – the United States, helping Ukraine…” US involvement is cited as prolonging the fighting that has seen, according to retired US colonel Douglas Macgregor, over 1.7 million Ukrainian soldiers killed or missing in action, including over a hundred thousand Russians.

3) — In March 2025, the United States launched Operation Rough Rider, a large campaign of air and naval strikes against Ansar Allah targets in war-ravaged Yemen.

4) — On 22 June 2025, the US air force and navy bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran, this despite Iran having not attacked or threatened the US and being in negotiations at that time with the US over Iran’s nuclear program.

5) — On 3 September 2025, the US Trump attacked a small Venezuelan boat, allegedly carrying drugs bound for the US, killing all eleven people onboard. The BBC cites experts calling the attack illegal:

[Prof Michael Becker:] “Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law.”

Prof [Luke] Moffett said that the use of force in this case could amount to an “extrajudicial arbitrary killing” and “a fundamental violation of human rights”.

The US narrative has since been heavily called into question.

Subsequently, on 13 September 2025, according to the Venezuelan foreign minister Yvan Gil, the US navy further ratcheted up tensions by raiding a Venezuelan tuna boat with nine fishermen while it was sailing in Venezuelan waters.

Conclusion

Actively abetting a genocide, promoting a proxy war, launching attacks on nuclear facilities, bombing war-ravaged Yemen, and illegally bombing and raiding small boats in open water on unproven claims, separately, and definitively in totality, must rule out any consideration for a peace prize.

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Read other articles by Kim.

It’s a Bitch

by E.R. Bills / September 16th, 2025

As I walked into a Fort Worth Post office the other day, I passed a young redneck wearing a patently ignorant t-shirt. Not just ordinarily stupid, run-of-the-mill cretinous or incredibly ignorant. But extraordinarily ignorant—if not full-blown delusional.

The wearer was the usual type. Hair high and tight underneath a straw cowboy hat, a forearm tattoo or three, with at least one rendering of his favorite phallic stand-in … daring a nonexistent mob to “Come and Take It.” He was flaunting his pseudo-badassery for all who were susceptible (or as ill-informed as he).

I rolled my eyes as we passed, but I didn’t look back. It was pointless for me to respond, even nonverbally. But it was too much, really. Too much of too much on a tortuous loop.

The teen ranger’s t-shirt read: “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: YOU MEAN TEXAS AND ITS 49 BITCHES”

Yeah.

Yeah, I thought. Sexist, asinine and perversely grandiose.

I mean, I’m a native Texan and all, and proud to be so. Except when young troglodytes brandish apparel that flagrantly illustrates Lone Star idiocy. He might as well have been wearing an “I’m With Stupid” tee except, instead of the arrow pointing left or right, it pointed straight up, at the dip’s dip-stained chin.

To be fair, though, the teen ranger was probably educated in Texas, where—in the teen ranger’s vernacular—literacy rates are inferior to the citizens of 47 other bitches in America. But he did get the current number of states right, and that’s reassuring. Because the numeracy levels of the wayward denizens in 45 other bitches are superior to those of Texas.

Forty-five? Forty-seven? Why do those numbers ring a bell? Hmmm.

For the peanut gallery, numeracy is the capacity to understand, reason with, and apply basic numerical concepts. It’s essentially the numerical counterpart of literacy. As in, if you’re ranked 46th out of 50, you’re darn near illiterate in terms of math, which is why you may still consider the state of your birth swell. And why your clueless opinion of said birthplace is so groundlessly swollen.

A colloquial corollary to someone being one’s bitch is making someone one’s bitch. Are Texas conservatives watching too many prison dramas? Or is it an unconscious itch they’ve found a way to metaphorically scratch?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to explain things to Jethro Q. Pudwhack, because he is fiercely unworldly, proudly ill-informed and comfortably illiterate in terms of culture, politics and ethics. Not to mention insensate in terms of his own sexism, chauvinism and—yes, again—perverse braggadocio.

Now, I, myself, grew up a redneck. We had a small pasture, a garden, a few dogs and spent a little time around cattle. But even I know that if you’re trotting near the rear of fifty head of cattle, you’re getting the last lick of feed, grass or hay, and you’re settling for backwash at the trough.

The real head-scratcher for me is, why are teen ranger and his ilk okay with backwash?

Where were his ma and pa when conservative knuckle-draggers rode into their town, and why didn’t they run them off before their little Jethro Q. Pudwhack was intellectually handicapped by their talking points?

Stupid may be as stupid does, but Joannie and Jethro Q. Pudwhack elected the current batch of scamps and they, in turn, made “stupid” the state bird. But what’s the point in Bocephus going around giving every state that’s not full of doofuses the bird?

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

Well, maybe not thinking, but vaguely wondering.

You’re wondering if I’m really from Texas, because, in that dim space between your ears, you suspect real Texans don’t run their heads about education or opine polysyllabic about the lack or sad state thereof. But you and yers are simply mistaken simps.

Not everyone in Texas drinks piss from a boot and breathes through their mouth. And a bunch of us are plumb tired of settling for backwash at a shrinking trough and teen rangers who don’t have a lick of sense.

You may not have realized our state is no longer great, and you may not be able to get your hat around the implications of our current morass: our legislature is full of dumbasses and the only thing really big around here these days is our clear and present acceleration backwards … or, in the words of teen rangers, moving backwards bigly.

It’s a bitch.

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E.R. Bills, a native of Fort Worth, is the author of Letters from Texas, 2021-2023, Texas Obscurities: Stories of the Peculiar, Exceptional & Nefarious and Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations in Infamous History. Read other articles by E.R..