shannon_a

Yesterday I was writing so much that I lost track of a few things.

DUMPLING DINNER. When I met Kimberly in Berkeley, we had dinner at a new(ish?) restaurant on Durant called Dumpling Kitchen. We had long longed for some sort of dim sum in Berkeley, and this fit the definition. And it was tasty. Woe that it wasn't there in the long years we lived near Cal!

PERFORMATIVE PROGRESSIVISM. I define myself as a progressive, but Berkeley still drives me crazy sometimes and that's because of a lot of over-the-top crap. I often complain about progressive purism, where people like Mayor Arreguin knock down great progressive ideas (like an express bus line that would have better linked Berkeley and Oakland and also offered much safer bicycling as part of the street redesign) because they're not good enough. I don't complain about performative progressivism as much because it's hard to draw the line between that and conservative whining about "virtue signaling".

But we definitely saw a lot of performative progressivism when we were at Berkeley Rep last night.

The worst was the bathrooms. We headed there when we got in and stopped in deep puzzlement at the signage, which showed a cacophony of iconic people pointing toward both bathrooms. We finally puzzled out the signs which said something like "Everyone may use either bathroom." They'd both been turned into non-gendered restrooms. But one of the signs had a HINT for users: it said "urinals and toilets" where the other said "toilets only". Going in to the urinal bathroom, it was obvious that they screwed up the bathrooms because the urinals were now all encased in stalls, which means their number was halfed, more or less. So there was lots of milling around.

But, the true uselessness of this all became obvious when I went back outside afterward and waited for Kimberly. I saw maybe twenty people going into the bathrooms and every single man went into the side marked "urinals and toilets" and every single woman went into the side marked "toilets only".

Well, except Kimberly, who'd headed into the same bathroom that I did, "urinals and toilets". When she came out she said, "I just used the men's bathroom."

That's pretty much my definition of performative: a gesture toward progressivism that's clearly not desired or used by ... anyone.

CONCRETE CATASROPHE. I also didn't write about our recent cat sitter problems. Oh, our cat sitter has been great. She seems to be putting real effort into the cats. We've been stocking up on Trader Joe's gifts for her as thanks. But the night before last (I think) she ran into a major problem going to see the cats: there was a cement spill at Halfway Bridge (the problems are always at Halfway Bridge!) that totally blocked the only road between our main town where she lives and the smaller town where we live.

She was stuck in traffic for 3 hours to see our cats! (It should be a 15-20 minute trip!) We felt really bad that we'd missed her initial message about the spill, because we would have told her to turn back. But she stayed through it all, and our cats got their attention from her.

So Kimberly went and redoubled our Trader Joe's gift supply afterward. (It's all so CHEAP off island.)

--

Anyway, that was other stuff I'd planned to write about yesterday. Today was a much quieter day, as Kimberly and I both recovered, and I went out to see Wicked, since it's not showing on island and won't be as far as I know.

WICKED! Fabulous! I loved it! I've loved the soundtrack for quite some time, but never seen the movie. So it was terrific to see how all the songs fit together into a narrative. And the effects and directing of Wicked were entirely gorgeous. Any critics who complains about them has no soul. This isn't the first musical that I've only seen after hearing the songs, and they always become more clear to me just when I can see who's singing. But there was a surprising amount of narrative between the songs that sometimes revealed entirely subplots that I hadn't realized where there. I also discovered that some character motivations weren't what I thought (especially Boq, which put "Dancing in Life" into a whole new perspective) and one big secret (which hasn't technically been revealed yet, but which was a thunderous surprise when it was obviously hinted at in "A Sentimental Man"). Much recommended! Would watch again! (And probably will!) Looking forward to the back half next year.

MILLENNIUM! Oh, and we ended our day with dinner at Millennium. Kimberly and I have been going to this fancy vegan restaurant for about 25 years, through three different locations. We were thrilled to enjoy a return visit. Appetizers, main courses, desserts, *and* drinks were had. Whew! (And it was still cheaper than a fancy Hawaiian meal.)

--

Tomorrow I'd been thinking about hiking around Golden Gate Park, but I'm a little tired of being cold, so I might figure out an alternative. Then there's gaming at night. Then we return to our kitties, family, and the island on Friday.

JABJABJAB

Got my bivalent booster yesterday.

I'm actually really tired of getting stabbed (and moreso: making the time to get stabbed) as that's the fourth in three months: my flu vaccine, my first shingles vaccine, my fourth COVID vaccine, and now my fifth (bivalent) COVID vaccine.

I had to get a new COVID vaccine card because my old one was all full up! How can we not have a nation-wide secure digital record of these if we consider them so important?

I'd been running behind on my COVID vaccines because I'd "saved" my fourth one to be three or four weeks before my Netherlands trip, so that I was maximally boosted for that trip. (Result: success! No COVID despite extensive travel.) And now I'm heading to the Bay Area in two weeks, so it seemed a good time to get up-to-date with the current (recent) variants. I won't have it at full efficacy when I arrive, but it was a compromise with the previous shot just 2.5 months away and 2 months being the minimum recommended interval.

I felt a little bit beat up last night, a little less today, and I didn't have the best night's sleep, but this is the first COVID shot where there weren't some number of hours that I felt fairly horrible. (Does that means my immune system wasn't affected as much this time? Perhaps because of the relatively short 2.5 month interval between the last two COVID vaccines? Quite possibly. Or maybe I'm just getting used to them. And I still do feel a bit beat up!)

Anyway, I'm still not clear yet of medical obligations as I have another Shingles to get, but I've decided after-the-holidays is the time for that. And I have an unpleasant getting-old medical procedure next Friday.

Staying healthy and alive takes effort!

STUPID PEOPLE

This morning on my Facebook feed I got a post from someone I don't particular know about how Facebook was starting a bronze/silver/gold payment system, but that you could avoid it by posting a message. I thought, "Do I really want someone this stupidly credulous in my Facebook feed?"

And then when I went and looked over his feed, it was full of jokes about an 80-year-old-man getting assaulted as part of an attempted assassination on one of our country's political leaders, enabled and encouraging by Republican sociopaths purposefully lying to the country to improve their political position.

And I thought, yeah, shockingly, the same credulity that leads people to believe that magic incantations can prevent them from getting charged by Facebook powers the whole modern Republican party.

And yeah, that idiot isn't on my "friends" list any more.

COSTCO

No, no Costco Gas, don't put pylons down the middle of the gas-station lot preventing people from getting from one half to the other. Never have I seen such a mess there, including some lanes with almost no cars in them because people couldn't get to them with all the mess! (And the rest of the lanes 6-8 cars deep and full of people who incredibly didn't know how to use the pumps! Or even to follow lane discipline!)

REST!

I pretty much never have a day of rest where I just lounge around the house. Usually I either get up and start work (either my own work or contract work) or I get up and prepare to go out somewhere to hike and bike or I get up and start doing housework and yardwork.

Well, today, I decided I was going to laze around with no destination or work in mind (though I'll surely work on some research over the course of the day) because I knew I'd still be recovering from that jab.

Thumbs up so far. Would recommend.

I started the week running on fumes. That was due to my hike with L. last Friday and my podcast that I did for Wandering DMs on Sunday. They were both entirely fun events when they happened (which is why I did them), but before they happened they were set points on my schedule that raised a little anxiety.

Here's the funniest bit of why the hike was a little anxious in advance: because we were going to meet up at the Arboretum, and I knew I wouldn't have cell coverage up there, so there was no way to communicate if there was a problem. You know, it was like it would have been for *ANYONE* doing any hike together 20 years ago!

Anyhow, that all meant that last week felt less relaxing than usual, and then we tumbled into ELECTION WEEK.

I've had an adversarial relationship with presidential elections in recent years. I generally figure out how to get the heck away from my computer for the day.

This year, I didn't want to interrupt my regular tech-writing work schedule so instead I decided I would just do my regular work day from 7.30-3.30, and stay away from media. And, that worked. I kept my nose down and pushed through my Blockchain Commons work. It went great until Apple started sending my notifications at 3pm that the polls were closing.

So, after I knocked off work and before I did anything else, I couldn't help but look at how things were going ... and Florida was already slipping away from us. It felt like a repeat of 2016, where we saw Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina all slip away in the early evening, and then the Blue Wall of the Midwest fall in the late evening, naming a malignant narcissistic sociopath to the presidency.

My plans for the afternoon were also spoiled, because I was going to go do yard work for an hour or an hour and a half, but it was raining, so instead I went straight to the next step: I took my laptop and my Fire out to the pavilion on the golf course without my cell phone. There, I read some comics, played some Wingspan, organized the next chapter of The TSR Codex V2, and tried not to think too much about the potential crumbling of our democracy. I stayed out until almost sunset.

When I got home, I called out for pizza, looked a bit more at the results, which were increasingly undecided, got the pizza, then watched Hamilton for the next two and a half hours, the first 20 minutes of which I was joined by Kimberly, before she decided it really wasn't her thing. She didn't even make it to A Winter's Ball / Helpless / Satisfied, the high-point of the first act!

So, Hamilton. I've listened to it any number of times on my computers, my phone, and through Amazon Music, but this was a first viewing. It brought much of the show into better focus, and was wonderful to see.

Part of that wonder was being able to see the marvelous staging of things like the rewind in the Winter's Ball sequence and the Philip Hamilton duel ("Blow Us All Away" / "Stay Alive").

But actually seeing the actors on stage really helps to connect all the dots.

I appreciated the humor a bit more in songs like "Farmer Refuted" and "You'll be Back" and was surprised how much humor there was in other parts of the play. I'd never realized that a lot of laugh lines were just that.

I understand better how Hamilton isn't presented in an entirely positive light: that his "Not throwing away my shot" refrain often feels desperate and dogmatic and that it's very selfish. That seems particularly true when Washington asks Hamilton to return, somewhere amidst "That Would be Enough" / "Guns and Ships" and it's obviously a contest between Washington and Eliza for Hamilton's loyalties, but Hamilton then storms off on his own, not directly joining Washington.

And Burr, wow, he comes across as a stalker. Through the soundtrack alone, it's easy to think he's mostly off-stage, but when you see him actually giving all the narration, it's more obvious how obsessed he is with Hamilton and his success, and the biting nature of much of that narration suddenly clicks into place.

I also suddenly met James Madison as a separate character.

Also, the same actress playing Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds? Ick! Though that "ick" might partially be because Peggy comes across younger on the soundtrack.

I was somewhat surprised to see how much the play really jumps straight from song to song without anything between, but I was even more surprised by the one thing I noticed cut from the soundtrack, which is the letter from Lawrence's father about his death. I'd always been puzzled by the "I died for him" statement in "Alexander Hamilton", and I can't believe that if they were going to cut a minute from the soundtrack, that's what they chose.

Overall, a wonderful experience, and as planned a distracting one.

By the time I went to bed, Fox had called Arizona (in what turns out to have been a premature call that reflected their poor understanding of the remaining ballots, a recurring patterns at the big networks, while internet analysts totally got it right). So, the election was looking a bit more positive.

Still, Wednesday felt like a hazy day as I fought through a day of very scattered, small Blockchain Commons work. I can't say I really recall the evening after that, but fortunately on Thursday it was increasingly clear that Biden would be the winner, because he was running far enough ahead in the vote-counting in Pennsylvania.

Seriously, though, f*** a bunch of Republican legislators in the Midwest who blocked mail-in vote counting prior to election day (and in some cases after it). They purposefully created a multi-day spectacle that put an extreme strain on the entire fabric of America. And they did so hoping to somehow finagle that into an illegitimate victory, where they could reinstall King Don solely based on the votes that they chose to count first.

It was raw political game-playing at its worst, and it exerted a heavy toll on America, whose full repercussions we have yet to see.

On Friday, I decided to head out to Mahaulepu, my most-quiet, least-stressful possible day out (trading it for my usual hiking day on Saturday, not because of the electoral stress, but because the forecast was looking increasingly rainy starting on Saturday, and I wanted to make sure that my relaxing day out wasn't spoiled).

It was great getting out, away from everything, and relaxing, as planned. And, I actually got a lot of work done, mostly finishing up two of my Designers & Dragons updates for November (one of which is already sent out, the other of which is scheduled).

And this morning the networks finally had the balls to make the call. I mean, I feel like it had been inevitable since Thursday, but it was still good to hear.

And the celebrations all over the world, wow. Crowds out on the streets, fireworks and bells ringing in Europe like it was the end of WWII.

Wow.

We'll see what 2021 will bring.

Sonoma was not one of the six Bay Area counties to declare a shelter-in-place order, and they had a good reason: they thought it would cause panic.

And, I think they were right.

San Jose reported that the panic buying of food has spread to panic buying of guns, and so began shutting down gun stores as "non-essential" services.

And as I wrote yesterday, a genuine existential fear seems to be at the heart of our stager deciding to throw her professional reputation in the toilet: an existential fear that's just not (yet?) justified by the current situation.

And we were even seeing overflow of that here in Hawaii, which has tight connections to California, as that 10% or so of patrons at Costco on Monday were jamming their carts full of water, then shuffling out as fast as they could, not talking to anyone, then tossing it into illegally stopped vans that had avoided the fence of carts that CostCo has put up to prevent exactly that sort of illegal panic buying and loading.

And it's equally obvious to me that those Bay Area counties have just the faintest idea of what they've done.

I wrote about the mad scrambling of the recorders offices yesterday.

Today I spent four hours on hold with the Berkeley Public Health Office, trying to get them to confirm that moving services are essential (and how could they not be? People could literally end up homeless during a shelter-in-place order because the counties didn't think to include moving in their essential-services list.) For four wretched hours I sat programming the thin-auth server for Skotos, trying to ignore the homicide inducing Berkeley hold message, looping every thirty seconds and telling me that they'd get to me shortly.

It was a relief when my carrier cut my call off at precisely four hours, though of course that meant that I didn't get my confirmation, and that I can't yet show our stager proof that she needs to do her job.

I've tried to follow-up with a few emails instead, and meanwhile my realtor is working on getting similar input from Alameda County, though they're not technically who's in charge of the shelter-in-place in Berkeley.

(Berkeley is in fact the only city in the six-county area going it alone. AS USUAL. And that seems to be working out aces.)

Yep, I'm in an annoyed, pissy mood tonight.

It's mainly having to listen to that infernal hold message for four hours straight.

But I'm also very non-plussed over the decisions now being made by Hawaiian politicians, which seem very wrong-headed and at odds with the rest of the US.

The governor's order yesterday was generally what we'd expect at this stage in the pandemic for a country that has woefully botched its ability to test for COVID-19. Shut down bars and clubs. Make restaurants go take-out only. There were two rather shocking bits: he closed down churches (which is a big deal in Hawaii) and he asked tourists to stay away for thirty days (which is going to devastate an already reeling economy).

But the thing at odds with current wisdom was that he also closed state parks. In other parts of the country that are being locked down, people are being encouraged to get out into parks and exercise (and at a respectful distance), so that they don't go crazy. Federal parks went free today. But the governor of Hawaii doesn't seem to get it and is closing down our open spaces instead.

Meanwhile, the really wrong-headed move came from Kauai's mayor, who today laid down a curfew saying that everyone must be in their residence from 9pm-5am every day. Wow. Does he think the biggest crowds are at night? Does he think that COVID-19 spreads worse at night? It's pretty hard to figure out what's going through his head when he finds it necessary to lay down one of the most fascist rules anywhere in the country.

I certainly won't ever be voting for Mayor Derek Kawakami, who has gone full-on fascist in my mind, and Governor David Ige has gone onto my questionable list, for such a dramatic misunderstanding of the human psyche, even if the rest of his order was just following the same unfortunate direction as the rest of the US.

It's an unfortunate direction because South Korea has shown us the proper answer, and it's testing and tracing, not extreme social isolation. And they're done great.

We can't follow in that direction, unfortunately, because of the entirely pathetic Federal response. We hoped for four years that Trump wouldn't have a crisis, because we knew he'd be entirely insufficient for the task, and that's now proven true. We had our first case the same day as South Korea's, and they've done a magnificent job of controlling the crisis without destroying their economy (or their freedoms) and we've had the president jumping up and down with his fingers in his ears.

He refused tests from other sources, he said it wasn't a problem, and now he's screwed us all.

Whoever asked to live in interesting times can bite me.

Endgame announced today that they were closing. We've just got seven Wednesdays of board gaming left.

I looked through my blogs and discovered that I started gaming at Endgame toward the end of 2004. That means that I've been there almost every Wednesday night for 14 years, or through about 30% of my life. I estimate that I've played somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 games there. I met great people, some of whom I still game with and many more of whom have moved on. I've got to play hundreds of games from other peoples' collections there. I've enjoyed parties and tried to avoid buying things at auctions. I've run entire roleplaying campaigns there.

I made the contacts that resulted in the second, much more successful publication of Designers & Dragons.

I know my story is far from the only one like that.

Obviously, my severance from Endgame was inevitable, since Kimberly and I are leaving the Bay Area. But I've lost out on my last 50 or so games there, with the friends I've made over the last decade and a half, and I've lost my gaming home base when I come back to visit (and everyone staying in the Bay Area has lost much more).

The election was on Tuesday, and it was somewhat disappointing. But that was primarily due to the southeast where Democrats really underperformed. They'll still pickup about 35 House seats and lose 2 or 3 Senate seats, which is just slightly low of the median of reliable analytic sites like 538.

But, we were hoping for more. We were hoping that the polls were oversampling conservatives after the embarrassment of 2016. We were hoping the blue wave, which did crest over Washing D.C. really would be a blue tsunami.

And that disappointment has given the idiots in the media the ability to roll out the newest nefarious instance of bothsidism: the Democrats won the House but the Republicans retained the Senate. I mean, it's a particularly shitty frame, because even in the Senate the Democrats won far more seats than the Republicans did (more than 2x as much, it seems likely), they just had more to defend.

But that shitty frame has corrupted the coverage and given Trump and his sociopaths the cover they need to keep doing horrible things while claiming the people are with them. (They're not.)

There's going to be another reckoning in 2020. (Unless Pence and his cohorts 25th Trump as soon as he's more than halfway through his term. That's what I'd do if I was a soulless manipulator intent on climbing the ladder of political power.)

And I am sick of constantly smelling smoke. I feel filthy.

It's another fire up north, and a particular horrible one from the reports. Huge damage to structures, some people dead, lots displaced. But the Bay Area is impacted too. The air was crap yesterday and today the sun went orange again. It's just like last October, when we had the horrible Napa fires.

It does seem like these constant huge fires are another result of the climate change that Trump and his pet GOP continue to deny. And that's another reason I'm happy to move to Hawaii (though it's looking like hurricanes are becoming more common there; we're just f***ed all over this world).

The last two weeks of news have been devastating. I thought that I could not be more disgusted by my country, than when that asshole Trump had us stop accepting Muslim immigrants. It went against everything our country stands for while pandering to the racists and xenophobes who don't deserve to call themselves Americans.

But then the Republicans in the Senate spent two weeks putting on a sham confirmation hearing, where they never cared about the fact that their nominee had been very credibly accused of being a rapist. (And an overprivileged rich white asshole who thinks that he deserves everything, including a seat on the Supreme Court.) We talked about it some at RWOT and I'd say I was on the verge of tears, but there was no verge about it. I wept not just for our country but the millions that the Republicans damaged in their faux confirmation by ripping open the wounds of every assault victim in the country.

Now, the Supreme Court is tainted by Kavanagh's illegitimacy and our legislature is tainted by 20 years of the Republicans manipulating and perverting it and our country is headed to a very, very dark place. We all hope and pray that we can limit the damage by overcoming the Republican's manipulated and gerrymandered House majorities this November and even more than we can somehow manage to take the Senate from them, to prevent Trump from putting even more monsters into the courts in the next two years.

But it's a dark time.

So, I was happy to hike on Saturday, to get far away from the news, to sweat away my concerns under the blazing sun east of the hills.

I went out to Las Trampas, which is quite a ways, requiring a BART ride and a bike ride.

It was a nice park, full of hills and canyons like a lot of the parks that side of the hills. But it was also quite bountiful with trees, something rarer over that way. The valleys and hillsides alike had a lot of cover, and they were that much more attractive for it.

I did a big hike from the northeast corner to the southwest-ish, via a couple of the highest peaks: Eagle Peak (1720 ft.) and Vail Peak (1787 ft.). I got all the way to the top of Eagle Peak and took some panoramics, but afterward was happy just to walk by Vail Peak, especially since there'd been a big downhill between the two.

The only problems with the hike came about near the picnic areas, which was my turnaround.

First up, I was walking up the Bollinger Creek Loop Trail and saw a huge mass of excitedly chattering people ahead of me. Totally blocking the trail and not getting out of my way. I could see a park guide was with them as I neared. A young woman begins chattering at me as I approach. She acts like it's Christmas Day or something, and she's just gotten an unexpected and thrilling present. Pointing at a log off the trail, past a railing, she says, "There's a RATTLESNAKE over there, and we keep hearing it and we can't see it." (I don't respond, "Thank god for that," but it definitely runs through my head.)

I get as far over to the other side of the trail as I can, putting all those meat shields between myself and the hidden rattlesnake and start pushing through the group, as I'm not stupid enough to stand around agog while a rattlesnake sits just a few feet away. We all start hearing a rattling sound, amplified by the hollowness of the log, and I think, "That's one pissed-off rattler." "There it is, there it is," says Christmas girl. And everyone else in the group is going "sssshhhh", "sssshhh", because the priority is apparently to hear the snake, not get the hell away. Someone needs to tell them that a rattlesnake can spring two or three times its length.

Not me, though. I'm suddenly confronting a kid who's just dumbly standing there and not moving out of my way at all. I physically push past him and he finally notices he's in the way and apologizes. Apparently hes' hypnotized by the rattle. Then I'm past the rattlesnake fodder. As I keep walking toward the picnic grounds, I'm waiting to see if one of them is going to coming running up behind me, shrieking, with an angry rattlesnake attached to his face.

(It never happens.)

The second problem is lower key but more annoying. There's a sign at the picnic area saying there's no water available until they finish repairs. Great. I take my last small swig of water, which had been carefully timed for this leg of the trip, and walk almost two hours back without any more water. At least the day's cooled down.

Overall, it's a nice hike, and sure enough it keeps me busy so that I don't even think to look until the late afternoon to see that indeed, we've confirmed a rapist to a seat on the Supreme Court.

Go us.

Donald J. Trump is a criminal. He fooled people. He got into office. Now he's using the United States government to enrich himself and his friends. That's what criminals do. It's a horrible blot on our country that we put such a blatantly criminal and openly racist man into office, but we have a system of checks and balances to correct any such mistake.

Except we don't.

That's because the Republican Party is the real problem. For twenty years they've been walking a corrosive path, where they put party ahead of country, where they put winning at all costs ahead of the health of this nation.

Their desire to push forward on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh despite credible claims of sexual abuse is deplorable. Especially as they tried to speed up the nomination last week after learning that more credible claims were on their way. Especially as they refused any type of meaningful investigation, and instead have done their best to turn it into a non-evidentiary he-says-she-says. That's not about putting a good justice on the Supreme Court. That's about "winning" at any costs, even if it means giving a misogynist and potential rapist control over every woman in this country.

Their refusal to support the investigation into a foreign government's apparently successful attempt to corrupt our election is even worse. And we aren't taking any foreign government, but the Russian's. Not only have they refused to aid the investigation in any meaningful way, but they also have refused to protect the special counsel from the very president that is inevitably part of it.

Why are you so afraid of investigation, GOP? Why are you so afraid of the truth?

And that brings us to today. September 24, 2018. That's the day we hit the CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS. The man in charge of the man in charge of the Russian investigation has been forced out of office — due to apparently unprofessional but understandable statements about protecting himself and the country from the criminal Trump, using tape recording and the 25th Amendment.

It's the Saturday Night Massacre all over again.

The man poised to step up into his place has been Trump's legal sycophant for almost two years. He argued against the appointment of the special counsel and for Trump's right to fire whoever well he pleases. And this is the last bulwark of our country's fragile democracy?

This, and a Republican legislature that's proven time and time again that they'll support their president over all?

EDIT: The rumors of Rod Rosenstein's demise were greatly exaggerated. But that doesn't change the fundamental problems with the Republican party. They need to grow some patriotism, to check criminal presidents and keep criminal judges out of the judiciary. They need to protect Rosenstein and Mueller and the investigation into the corruption of our country's most sacred privilege before it's too late. It's their job as Americans and they're failing. If they want to be worthy adversaries with a different view on governmental oversight, that's great, but them being self-centered plutocrats whose only goals are to pad their pockets and to stay in power by any means possible is unamerican, unchristian, and unacceptable.

January has mostly slipped away. For me it's been routine. (Not so much for the wife.) I've back to work. I've been hiking on Saturdays, but nothing new and exciting. We managed to get our first Saturday game in since September, with a Microscope session to kick off our this year's Clockwork Campaign. I've been gaming on Wednesdys and Thursdays. I've mostly homebodied on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays because it's cold outside and K. has a broken foot. We ventured out one Sunday to get yogurt and write on campus, but found that Yogurtland went out of business in October.

And so life goes on.

But today I came up with a slightly more exciting day out that wasn't just a walk to Tilden or Orinda. I went up to San Pablo to have a delicious shrimp lunch at Popeyes, then I biked through San Pablo (and El Sobrante) and down San Pablo Dam Road to the San Pablo Reservoir.

Lots of San Pablo going on.

There was more excitement than I expected in El Sobrante. That's because protesters were out blowing whistles and holding signs that said, "No Richmond Methadone Clinics in El Sobrante." When I saw them as I biked through I said, "Yay!" And that made people perk up and smile. But those smiles didn't know what to do with themselves when I started chanting "Heroin Users Die! Heroin Users Die! No Sympathy for the Sick! Heroin Users Die!"

Which is pretty much what they were saying too, but were too cowardly to admit.

Now, I could understand if people didn't want a methadone clinic in their residential area. I wouldn't either. But this is a methadone clinic going into an ugly cement block building next to another cement block building across an overly-large, over-busy, overly-fast street from an endless row of dying strip malls. It's practically the definition of where a methadone clinic should go.

But what really pissed me off was the coded racism of the protest. They weren't just protesting a methadone clinic, they were explicitly protesting a *Richmond* methadone clinic. That's a city that is majority black and hispanic. And if there was any doubt about the coded racism, the blinding white pallor of the protestors made it obvious. El Sobrante is 60% white; the protest was about 96%.

I lost my cool by the time I hit the third or fourth group of protestors and one called out to me specifically. I told her, "F*** your lack of compassion."

El Sobrante is Trump's America.

Funny story: Richmond is a really weirdly shaped city. It totally encloses the town of San Pablo with a strip of land to the east that's just one or two hundred feet wide that runs from the Hilltop Mall area in the north to the Alvarado Park area in the south. The planned methadone clinic is in that strip of land, not in San Pablo (to the west), not in El Sobrante (to the east), but IN RICHMOND. In other words, they're keeping their dirty Richmond methadone clinic IN RICHMOND.

I parked my bike at the Eagle's Nest Trail between the San Pablo Reservoir and Tilden.

I walked into the Reservoir area, then northward. Theoretically I was following Old San Pablo Dam Trail but it disappeared as soon as I got into the Reservoir area. This is typical for EBMUD. Still, I walked what might or might not have been a proper trail right along the wasterside. It was a beautiful trail with trees all along and the Reservoir to my right.

I walked a bit more than a mile to get to the entrance to Kennedy Grove. I've been there a few times, but just at their picnic tables and greens. I did sit at a table for a while and write. But then I decided to explore a bit more of the park. It's not very large, but it does have several miles of trail. I did a big loop around the southernmost trails, about 3 miles total. It was more trail with lots of nice trees. It climbed a few hundred feet up a hill and gave me awesome views of the Reservoir and other lands that side of the hills.

I was amused that two different people on the trail asked me if I knew how much further the top was. I usually don't get that on the trails. But maybe Kennedy Grove attracts less experienced hikers.

Then it was back through the Reservoir to my bike then up to Orinda then back home via BART.

Plans for another hike: get up to Inspiration Point, take the the Inspiration Trail down to the Reservoir, walk north at the Reservoir to the Eagle's Nest Trail, then hike back up that. And that'll complete my trails at the Reservoir, since I'd previously gone south from Inspiration Point to Orinda and have now gone north from Eagle's Nest Trail to Kennedy Grove.

I have 649 days left on my EBMUD Trail pass.

(May Trump have fewer days left in his presidency.)

I was happy to do so much biking. I haven't been doing much of that lately, but in the last few days I've been overcome by the thoughts of open roads, of community floating by on either side (sadly, including racist protestors) and trails that go on forever. The trip from San Pablo to Orinda is definitely hard work at times. My Fitbit tells me that I got into the cardio zone for 65% of my ride from San Pablo to the Reservoir, then 75% of my ride from the Reservoir to Orinda. Good stuff! And tiring!

I guess I have two years to maximize my biking shape, because there just won't be as much biking exercise in Hawaii.

It is shameful that 48.5% of Alabamans voted for the child molester. It is shameful that Trump and the Republican party both fully supported him. They all put party ahead of country, ahead of values, ahead of morality, and ahead of their childrens' safety.

It is joyful that they lost anyway. Not only were they forced to reveal who they really were, in their heart of hearts, but they did so for NOTHING.

Sadly, it won't be soon enough to stop the Republicans' 1.5 trillion dollar giveaway to multimillionaires and malevolent megacorps. That boat has sailed, probably sailed when Trump was elected by 19.5% of the people of the United States. Our children will be raised in a dystopic plutocracy where they fight on the streets with shivs made from the bones of their siblings in the hope of obtaining enough food and water to survive for another day beneath the chokingly polluted orange and brown skies of an America whose coastlines are sinking beneath the waves, whose midlands are melting under a roasting sun.

But maybe we'll save Social Security and Medicare when they come for it next year, allowing us old fogies to enjoy this country's last hoorah, before the obscenely rich rocket into space, with their hookers and their blow (but not their pets; that's low class), lighting the way with the world's last dying embers while looking down upon American civilization.

As they always have.

San Francisco, Saturday: Right-wing neo-nazi enabler with permit for nazi-enabling rally decides at last minute to move his rally to some place he doesn't have a permit for. Unshockingly, city, which had prepared for right-wing violence at old location, doesn't allow last-minute move to new, unpermitted and unprotected location. Was there magic thinking that neo-nazis could find new rally location and counter-protesters couldn't? Do neo-nazis perhaps have rally telepathy? Or had neo-nazi enabling leader just realized they had almost no turn-out and wanted to be able to blame their failure on mean, mean city? Possibly, neo-nazis just couldn't find parking in city, especially not after last-minute move. Neo-nazi enabling leader then goes on run for day, ending up in Pacifica before finally returning to city for rally he called. There, he finds 20-25 depressed racists (or racist enablers) in Chrissy Fields. Meanwhile, thousands of counter protesters march the streets.

UC Berkeley, Saturday. UC Berkeley Police decide they might like to control crowds this time, rather than allow free reign to arsonists and anarchists, so they block off western crescent where Sunday's anti-hate rally is to be held. And then they go so far overboard that they literally become the fascists that the protesters are protesting against. They ban numerous extremely dangerous objects from the western crescent, like water bottles, backpacks, and liquids that aren't factory sealed. Because free speech can only be truly free when its practitioners are naked and thirsty. Berkeley residents initially respond using their favorite method: they write aggrieved letters to the editor from their home offices, looking out over their multi-million-dollar views. Not that they were going to the protest any way. Because it's not like a Safeway is being rebuilt or anything.

Berkeley Civic Center Park, Sunday. Today's bigotry-support rally is inexplicably labeled "Against Marxism", as if that's some sort of political force in the US. They might as well be protesting against Sufragettes. Maybe they're just trying to cosplay alongside the counter protesters, whose anti-Nazi protesting could be straight out of the 1940s.

Berkeley Skies, Sunday. The helicopters are buzzing the city by 10am. I imagine "reporters" perched in their vulture-mobiles salivating, hoping for the ratings-inducing violence they were denied in San Francisco yesterday. When asked, Berkeley rarely fails to produce a spectacle on command, full of drama and violence, signifying nothing. And the news vultures know it.

On the Ground in Berkeley, Sunday. I regret the fact that Kimberly, a week and a half into a sickness, isn't well enough to escape into San Francisco with me, as we'd planned, but I'll find somewhere else to go after lunch, lest the constant buzz of the vultures for 8 or so hours raise my stress to a breaking point.

Hills above Strawberry Canyon, Sunday. I bake my stress out in the blazing kiln of the East Bay Hills. As I hike higher and higher the antagonist thwip-thwipping of the helicopters soon becomes a dull roar, occasionally drowned out by the susurruss of Highway 24. I stop to write. I hike more. I ascend ever higher and as I drop behind a stutter ridge, the helicopter pollution fades away. The heat blazes to 90. The tension sweats down my back. I eventually decide to loop up to the Tilden Steam Trains and back, mainly because I can refill my water bottle there. I really need a second water bottle for some of these hikes.

UC Berkeley, Sunday. So how do real people react to the UC Berkeley police's extreme fascism? They just refuse to enater the barricaded western crescent. Duh. Absolutely no one could have predicted that having such huge restrictions that a normal persona couldn't enter the "free speech zone" would result in people not doing so. Congrats UC Police, you have 3,000 people roaming the streets, totally uncontrolled and uncontained. Thankfully, these are the anti-hate folks, who responsibly protest according to the SPLC guidelines: away from the racists (and their racist enablers). So the UCPD's incompetency won't cause problems.

Hills above Strawberry Canyon, Sunday. I descend down some of the trails burned by last month's fire. The hillsides are dusted with white, and the path is covered with rocks. It feels like a metaphor for Donald Trump. The fire promised change, but all it did was burn away necessary vegetation, causing rocks to tumble down, creating a rubble-strewn commons. But that's not it at all, because Trump lied about everything he was promising before the election and afterward. A better analogy would be if the fire claimed there was no greenery above Strawberry Canyon, and then burned it all down, and you realized that the best you could hope for is that the greenery would eventually grow back to be what it was before Trump sullied the White House.

Civic Center Park, Sunday. The bad protesters are out at the Civic Center Park . And, I don't mean the racists (and racist enablers) because only about twenty of them show up. I mean the so-called antifa, who are our black bloc anarchists under a more publicly acceptable name. The fact that they come masked and armed to demonstrations really says it all. Predictably, they break into the park, assault people, and generally seem to create a riot all on their own. Bad news organizations call them far-left because the so-called reporters are far too stupid to understand that political beliefs do not run along a single line. It's these anarchists who have been the criminal drag on all of our Bay Area protests for the last decade. And they turn out to be the only actual problems in Berkeley today too. And beating up the racists, perhaps even the maybe-racists, that's a bad look. It lets them act like martyrs as they post their tear-filled screeds from their mother's basement. It maybe even targets people guilty of nothing more than stupidity or enabling of racists, neither of which deserves physical assault. Fortunately, the anarchists are outnumbered by a factor of ten or more, so pretty soon everyone goes to Ohlone Park to hear a sermon, and the whole day anticlimaxes just like Saturday in San Francisco.

In My Head, Sunday. My first reaction to these two days of failed alt-reich demonstrations is that white nationalists are really awful organizers, and that explains a lot about the White House this year. But a more optimistic side of me hopes that we've hit an inflection point. That the neo-nazis were morons to out themselves so publicly in Charlottesville with their zieg heils and their swatstikas. A year too late, so my theory goes, the more righteous right-wingers have realized that they're aiding and abetting awful human beings, and have decided to stop. So every right-wing demonstration since Charlottesville has been attended by just tens of people. Some have decided to demonstrate online instead, as pathetic as that sounds. Is it true? Time will tell.

South Berkeley, Sunday. I descend from the hills. The helicopters are gone.

So let me get this straight.

(1) Ten months ago, FBI director Comey makes an unprecedented decision to politicize not charging Hilary Clinton for using a private email server by deriding her IT policies in a press conference, going against DoJ policy in doing so.

(2) For the next four months, Donnie Trump uses this press conference as the backbone of his campaign, saying that she's "Crooked Hilary" and we should lock her up.

(3) Russian hackers break into Democratic emails, posting them over next few months. Trump publicly encourages them to break into Hilary's emails too.

(4) Six months ago, Comey sends an unprecedented letter to Congress saying they were reopening investigations into Hillary based on what would turn out to be largely repetitive emails that Hilary had nothing to do with.

(5) Statisticians say Comey's letter probably decided the election. Trump is elected 45.

(6) When called before Congress, Comey reveals that he's been investigating Trump's connections to Russia too, for over a year. But he never felt the need to give press conference or send letters about that.

(7) Comey continues to lead investigation into Trump's Russian connections.

(8) A week ago, Justice Department is told to find an excuse to fire Comey.

(9) Meanwhile, Grand Jury summons go out related to Trump/Russian connections.

(10) Hours later, Comey is fired. Trump is shocked, shocked to find that screw-ups were going on in the Hillary investigations. Ten months ago. You know, with that press conference that Trump built his campaign on.

BUT HER EMAILS.

)*(#$)@(*#$)@.

There are more riots on the calendar today.

You see, it's all the fault of self-interested sociopath Ann Coulter. The idiots at some of the Republican clubs at campus thought she'd be a good invitee for a speech. Because inviting Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos turned out so well.

(To be clear, as far as I know, Ann Coulter isn't a Nazi like Milo. He wrote for white nationalist fronts before he was kicked out for talking up the benefits of child molestation. She just says whatever horrible thing comes to her mind in an attempt to stay in the spotlight and sell more books.)

But, the campus wouldn't give Coulter a place to give her speech, because they rightfully said they couldn't offer security. They finally were able to find a venue for a little later, May 2. She refused, and she kept everyone in suspense until the last moment about whether she'd be here today, even claiming for a while that she'd be talking in Sproul Plaza. This means that all of the right-wing warriors had already gassed up their rusted-out pick-up trucks and told their moms they wouldn't be in the basement for a few days.

Then, Coulter cowardly cancelled at the last moment. Result: right-wingers still coming this way. Helicopters circling overhead. Riots in the forecast. Coulter gets a new book deal.

One of the frustrations about living in Berkeley through these monthly riots (not an exaggeration: we had the Nazi here in February, then March 4th in March, then whatever the excuse was for the latest riots two weeks ago, now this), is seeing how badly the media gets it wrong. Even the local media at Berkeleyside.

The problem is that they keep calling the intolerant black-garbed fighters the "antifa" or even the "extreme left". The antifa is the name they've picked for themselves, but that doesn't mean we should accept their framing. Antifa has noble connotations, and they are anything but. And, they are most definitely not the extreme-left or the left of any sort. These are the same black-bloc anarchists who have been turning Berkeley and Oakland protests into riots for the last eight years. But the media is too lazy to do the research to understand that distinction. But these anarachists are not liberal, not progressive, not even conservative. They're the scumbags who want to tear down everything just because they love the destruction.

As for the "right" that's showing up at these demonstrations, I can't say for sure, but I suspect they're the same white nationalists and racists who were at the heart of Trump's rise to power.

So this isn't extreme right v. extreme left (as much as the media likes that framing). It's black-bloc anarchists versus white nationalists.

And I wish they'd all get the hell out of our town.

You want a much more Berkeley response to this BS? That would be Respect Berkeley who will "stand in nonviolent witness" to today's rioting.

Which sounds to me like what the Berkeley police are already doing.

Here's the hope: the anarchists can't make it to the riots because it's a weekday, and they're working their soul-sucking jobs, wearing their nametags that say, "Hello, My Name is Bob, How Can I Help You?"

The white nationalists will be standing around Civic Center Park, waving their Captain America trashcan lids, not understanding that only the cosmic-cube-warped Nazi Steve Rogers would love them. And wondering why they don't get to beat anyone up.

What if they threw a riot and no one came?

That's the Hope.

Today, I returned to Mt. Diablo. Or, rather, I trekked further south this time, had lunch in Rudgear Park, then headed up into the Diablo Foothills Regional Park.

The Rudgear Park was quite busy with people picnicking and walking and following their children riding in electric toy cars. I find that the more affluent an area is, the better used its parks are, and the Rudgear Estates area of Alamo seemed quite busy.

Yet when I got over to the regional park, the people mostly disappeared. I can kind of understand, because the paths in from the west were almost non-existent, just like out by Howe Homestead Park last week.

But from what I can see, people don't walk into these parks (as these western entrances allow). No, they drive in (going to other trailheads, deeper in).

Meanwhile, in Berkeley, pro-Trump and anti-fascist supporters are literally clashing.

Ironically, the police are siding with the fascists. At least philosophically. They've banning pocket knives and signs with poles from the protests.

Yes, Berkeley cops, those could be used as weapons to assault other people. But you haven't suddenly been anointed as the Minority Report police, tasked with preventing FutureCrime(tm).

No, you're supposed to be guarding our home and our rights. And, after long years of absolutely failing to guard our home town because of your cowardly fear of the aging hippies who might squawk if you hurt an anarchist who is breaking windows and burning businesses, now you've failed at protecting our rights too, in fact have preemptively taken them away.

Good job, you.

It appears that Trump has even normalized fascism in Berkeley.

Fortunately, just like Trump's fascism, our cop's fascism is probably illegal.

I do know about this, because I check in with my mail while resting on an uphill hike and get the local police alerts. But I read that the protest is confined to Civic Center Park, and so I opt not to call Kimberly, who I know is in North Berkeley, to suggest she come home by cutting through the campus.

Later, the protest does spill out onto the streets. No word if the police again idly stood by while peoples' lives and livelihoods were destroyed.

But Kimberly opted to cut through campus on her own.

(Though she was shaken by the third instance of Berkeley rioting in three and a half months, and hours of buzzing, hovering helicopters. I hate those things too.)

Things are much quieter out in the Diablo Foothills. I'm circling eastward.

Kimberly commented to me after my last trip this way that she remembers Mt. Diablo being pretty barren, and that's pretty true. There are trees here and there, but for the most part, you're not walking through trees: you're walking from one tree to the next, with barren grasslands around you.

Coming up on one of the several small, dirty ponds I pass over the course of the day, I notice a man talking to a woman. (Yeah, there's a few people now, as I get deeper into the park, and closer to one of those parking lots in the interior.) She explains she doesn't have a map, but gives him directions. He runs off, a dog trotting behind him.

As I circle the pond, he returns and heads off down another path.

And then a few minutes later he comes back from that direction and passes me again, this time heading the same direction I am.

He remarks that these paths are confusing, and I smile.

I tell him I have a map if he'd like to see it, but he says he has his phone.

And I think, "Yes, and it's working so well."

When we're coming up on Old Borges Raunch, I pass him, and it's because he's standing staring at his phone. Clearly lost once again.

I think he'll probably ask me to see that map now, but he never does.

Old Borges Ranch has some animals and a barn and about a half-dozen tractors on display, one with gear work wheels, and some other farm-y stuff.

I remember the farm-y stuff at Howe Homestead Park, and don't really understand this obsession with the area's farming heritage. Maybe it's just more recent there than it is here, on the other side of the hills.

Man-with-dog passes me again as I'm exiting the Ranch area. With a single path before him, for the moment, he seems a lot more confident.

Though he sure walks a lot for a runner.

Eventually he and the dog disappear, never to be seen again.

Soon, I make it out to Castle Rock, another regional park.

There's yet another entrance here, past an Equestrian Center. There are also piles of picnic areas, including one having a very loud DJ constantly announcing prizes for people from across the country.

I keep an eye out for precog psychics, rabid Saint Bernards, and dead bodies, but don't see any.

The prizes seem to be for runners competing in some sort of hill run.

I see the first of them about a quarter mile past the loudspeakers. A couple sitting there shout encouragingly to her that she's just a quarter mile or so from the end.

She says, "A quarter mile? No, it can't be!" And there's such hopeless despair in her voice that I can't really figure out how long she thinks a quarter mile is, but it seems really, really long.

A bit further on, I offer some encouragement to runners too. But I pointedly don't tell them distances.

I use weasel words like "close" and "almost there".

And as we get further and further from those loudspeakers, and as the runners look more and more tired and less and less fit, I stop doing that.

I'm astounding to discover that Castle Rock doesn't refer to a Maine town after all, but instead to huge rocky outcroppings that are rising up to the east of me.

They're utterly awesome. Beautiful and cool, and I want to hike up and around them, but not today because it's coming up on 2.30 pm, which is when I wanted to make sure I was circling back to my bike, abandoned out by Rudgear Park.

Which is just as well because Castle Rock is closed from February to July due to falcon nesting or something.

So I'll have to try and remember to head out there in fall after it cools down over the hills and before it starts raining.

(And I'll have to figure out how to get closer to Castle Rock with my bike, so I don't have to hike two or so hours to get there.)

Some of the paths I come back in are horrible. Totally, entirely destroyed by cows. I see one bicyclist trying to come up one of these paths, and even though most mountain bicyclists are determined to never show weakness in the face of adverse terrain, even he finally admits defeat and starts walking.

His bike still is going BUMP-BUMP-BUMP and looking like it's going to shake out of his hands.

Later I take one of my cutbacks to get back to where my own bike is. I'm, by the by, feeling increasingly smug about not bringing it into the park — especially when I find that Stonegate Trail is barely extant. And it's all muddy or dried hoof prints.

Bleh. But brief.

My favorite hiking of the day is actually after I leave the park proper.

I walked about a block through fancy-dancy houses, but then there was a path that cut back to where I started.

At first, it was another heavily overgrown path.

But then I got down to a creek bed and it became very pretty.

And then I turned a corner and there were beautiful and vibrant flowers in a variety of brilliant colors off to the side.

Totally, not the sort of thing you ever see on a hiking trail. But there was a house just about the flowers and it had some sprinklers to keep them alive.

A wonderful bit of joy at the end of about 10 miles of hard hiking.

On the way home I stopped at Trader Joe's to pick up some emergency supplies to offset the trauma back in Berkeley.

(1445 days left.)

After the election I spent a week or so freaking out about health-care, and what it meant for my future and our ability to move to Hawaii. I wasn't able to put it aside and not worry about it until I came to the conclusion that it was most likely that things would be OK in Hawaii because they had an HMSA before the ACA, and they'll probably have an HMSA after.

And then I pretty much tried to let go of the political fear, angst, and anger.

But Trump has made that impossible since his coronation. Every day there's been horrible stuff. I was right back stressing when I heard that he'd signed an executive order on day one determined to knock out the underpinnings of the ACA by telling the executive branch not to enforce it. And then there was of course the Muslim Ban. Lately the horribleness is almost farcical, like threatening to invade Mexico or hanging up on the Australian PM or signing an executive order to raise Nazi Stephen Bannon to godhood without knowing what he was doing. (He was reportedly angry about the last, but not enough to kick the Nazi to the curb.)

I dread looking at the news in the morning, but I don't know how not to, especially when this is stuff that's going to affect my life.

But I think I'm going to have to figure out how.

The last two weeks of work were very busy. I'd been so energetic and happy and working on projects for the first three weeks of the year, but then I had stress, stress, stress these last two weeks.

I initially diagnosed it as getting too much work in. And, there was a lot. For example I made four passes on a very technical white paper and I worked on some scripts and docs for Chris. All stuff that I hadn't been expecting. And I was trying to also get everything caught up and in good shape for my vacation.

But I think that was a misdiagnosis. The Trump evilness is what formed the foundation of my stress; an excess of jobs just built on it.

Last weekend I was supposed to start up my Burning Wheel game again, but I begged off because I was going out of my head with the thought of prepping and running it. Again, I misdiagnosed it as being solely work, but there's more going on.

Instead, last weekend ending up being quite relaxing. We'd had 4 or so days without rain, which has been a rarity this year, so I opted to hike up in the hills, which I haven't done to any great extent all year. It was a hike I've done before, though via a couple of variant trails: up Panoramic Hill, across the fire trails, along the skyline ridge trail, into Tilden, along the the ridge trails there, and then down, down, down until I get to a bus stop by Lake Anza.

It was a very pleasant walk because we've finally been hitting 60 degrees again. However, there was surprising amounts of damage from our recent storms. At least half-a-dozen big trees down, two of them blocking the trails. A couple of mud slides infringing upon the trail. Mostly non-muddy trails, except a few times were literal streams were running down the trail.

But great, relaxing, and badly needed.

Oh, and I didn't mention my other stressor of late: I've been having my ongoing annoying health issues again. They mostly had faded away during fall, but just before Christmas they picked back up again, and they've been quite annoying throughout January.

Dammit.

And quite bad this weekend in advance, of course, of our vacation.

I'm reluctant to visit doctors again, after the waste of time (and the pain) of way too many visits in 2016, trying (and failing) to figure this out.

But, I'll have new coverage in March with Kaiser (as an alternative to a $300! increase in insurance rates), so maybe when I do this year's physical, we'll talk.

But the doctors were so, so, so worthless in 2016 and so disruptive.

Calgon, take me away.

Last night certainly highlighted Kimberly's and my desire to move out of Berkeley, as we had rioters far too close to our house and downtown businesses smashed up for the nth time in the last few years.

Yes, there were serious reasons to protest. Yes, having a Neo-Nazi speak on campus was a really stupid idea, and something we shouldn't be doing with our resources. If he wants to speak, he can get a box to stand on and crazy-rant on Telegraph. But I think some of last night's problems highlight serious problems that I have with progressivism as it's been practiced in Berkeley, and that's yet another reason that I think I'm ready to see the backside of this town.

I identify as a progressive. I believe that fairness and justice should be the foundation of any civilized society. I'd happily say I'm a Social Justice Warrior (and I laugh that some people think that's a slur).

But ...

Berkeley's Progressive Problems

Over-Acceptance. (Or, if you prefer, A Blind Eye.)

I feel like a traitor saying it, but Berkeley is too accepting nowadays. It acts like acceptance is the highest good, that if we accept all, no bad can occur. It totally ignores the fact that some behaviors are anti-social, or otherwise unacceptable.

I actually used to think this was farcical. I saw it in parents that let their children run amok, that wouldn't discipline them or tell them no, because they didn't want to impair their child's individuality or creativity. Totally ignoring the fact that they're the parents and the children are the children and their job is to guide and shape, to move their children toward socially acceptable norms.

Meanwhile, we're so accepting that we're willing to let a Neo-Nazi use our public resources.

And we're so accepting that we're willing to let the Black Bloc riot afterward like they have at every demonstration for the last eight years. (The only notable exception: The Berkeley High demonstrations — the several times the kids have marched out of campus and demonstrated have been totally peaceable, so kudos to them.)

Which is a way of saying that over-acceptance was the root cause of these riots on either side.

And that's not the only way that it's eating away at our city. The homeless are the other big problem, and that's pretty much the same issue. The politicians are literally giving away our public spaces to them, our parks and our sidewalks. They're letting this minority of people take away the commons that should be used by the majority. Because to do otherwise wouldn't be accepting or Berkeley enough. Yes, I have sympathy, but keeping these people on the streets isn't the way to help them. It's just those broken ideas continuing to break our city.

Over-Purity. (Or, if you prefer, Dogma)

Here's another way of looking at the problem: purity. There's a certain faction of our local progressives (and they're unfortunately now the faction in charge of our city government) who seem to believe that it's their road or the high road. They have their fundamental beliefs about how progressivism should work, and if things don't work like that, they refuse compromises.

I suspect this is some of the basis of our police letting the Black Bloc do as they will, and our Mayor letting the homeless do as they will. For me, it broke my own connection to the ultra-progressives in our local government when my city councilman provided the vote that destroyed the possibility of a rapid transit bus line running down Telegraph, right near our house. Because it wasn't green enough, or some such nonsense.

I personally didn't care about the bus line, but it was presented with a plan that would have revamped the entirety of Telegraph, including a protected bike lane that would have run along its whole length. So now, every time I have a car come too close on Telegraph or I have to swerve into traffic because the bike lane ends, I thank my local city councilman, who puts me in danger on a weekly basis because the planned renovation of Telegraph wasn't progressive enough ... and so never happened.

Over-Compensation. (Or, if you prefer, Cowardice.)

This is probably a cause-and-effect thing, but increasingly people seem to over-compensate when dealing with progressivism in Berkeley. I think that's why the police haven't done hardly anything about the last several years of riots: they fear the backlash they'd get, and so just let the rioters run riot.

Personally, I think that non-lethal weapons have no place when people are just protesting, even if they're blocking streets or highways or causing inconvenience. But when those protests turn to riots, when the protesters are destroying property and even hurting people ... that's when the police should be stepping in. And they should be using non-lethal crowd control methods, even if it results in some of the protestors getting hurt.

Yes, there are so-called innocent protestors still out there, but when the protest becomes a riot, they are now giving cover to the rioters. They should be given the chance to disperse, and if they don't the police should disperse them by force.

If there's whining afterward or not.

Otherwise, the police just aren't doing their job.

(And I'm sure they're not the only ones overcompensating toward the loud minority in Berkeley.)

Over-Preservation. (Or, if you prefer, NIMBYism.)

And finally we come to my favorite pet peeve, NIMBYISM. Because the so-called progressives in Berkeley are so conservative that they don't want anything to change. Every new apartment, every new building, even the new bikeways get fought tooth-and-nail.

These people have weaponized the legal system to slow actual progress so much that a lot of builders are afraid to work in Berkeley. And if something is being worked on, expect it to take years and years to come to fruition. A decade isn't unknown.

It's literally the opposite of progressivism, but it's these same people that claim they're the big progressives.

The USA's Progressive Problems

I think there are some similar poisons in the progressive movement in the US as a whole.

I see some of the same purity, but I also think some things have gone too far.

The safe-spacing and trigger-warning in colleges has gone beyond providing a comfortable environment to the point where it's a new censorship, almost a new McCarthyism. And lets not even talk about micro-aggressions.

And I could say the same about some of depths of political correctness. Yes, Neil Gaiman is right that you can often just replace "political correctness" with "treating other people with respect". But I now look at the screams of cultural appropriation that come up anyone tries to pay homage to another culture, or I think about a white boy who was nearly assaulted a few years ago by a black woman for wearing dreadlocks, and I want to shout that it's gone too far. That's not treating other people with respect; in fact, it's the opposite.

Yes, I understand the strength and need for identity politics, yes I want to protected disadvantaged and minority groups. But I feel like we've gone so far down the rabbit hole that it's become the enemy.

Which is also to say that I understand why the Rust Belt can no longer vote for a democrat, even when the alternative was the literal Anti-Christ.

The problems with Berkeley have been bugging me for years.

The problems with national progressivism were a niggling worry for quite some time, but I finally put a finger on it after November's apocalyptic election.

And I'm still uncomfortable with it all because I feel like I'm being insufficiently empathetic. That it's traitorous to say that identity politics can become problematic when they go too far.

I remember that I felt similar things about affirmative action (and, yes, political correctness) back in high school, before I got out in the world, before I better saw and understood the bigger picture. So I worry that may be true again.

What do we want as progressives?

Progress?

A society where everyone is treated well?

A society where we can feel safe?

A society where our most vulnerable have the same protections as our least?

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

But I'm not convinced that accepting anti-social behavior, that requiring total acceptance of our goals, that giving in to these overweening desires, that holding on to the past without reason, that censoring what people say, or that protecting cultures over people will get us there.

Quite the contrary.

So we've got riots again in Berkeley. I came just a hairs-breath from getting caught up in them coming home tonight from Endgame. I BARTed in due to the possibility of rain and the annoyance of continuing health problems. I already knew there were riots going on when I was heading home, but the last I'd heard they were heading down Telegraph, which means toward Oakland.

No problem, I figured when I got off BART in Downtown Berkeley, I'll just keep an eye out for any splinters, but they should have been far away by then. I even grabbed myself dinner before going home. Which is about when I learned that a group of 150-200 rioters had headed down Durant and were now coming up Shattuck. Which means they were now directly between me and home.

Stellar!

Heading up Shattuck, sure enough beleaguered people coming from that direction reported a big demonstration, but said they were no longer on campus, so I headed up to Oxford, which fronts the campus ... and saw the whole demonstration streaming back onto campus. They'd apparently turned away from Shattuck, attacking the Bank of America and some of the restaurants on Center on the way. My guess is that they went after the Oasis Grill and Bongo Burger to protest the treatment of Muslims. (Those would both be Mediterranean or Mediterranean-influenced restaurants.)

Fortunately, I was able to skirt by the end of the rioting demonstration. Got a bottle thrown damned near me. Which seems to happen when I get near these things.

Got home safely.

I've gotten pretty sick of these demonstrations always turning to riots in Berkeley and Oakland, but I have to say, I understand this one.

The morons at the UC campus invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak. He's a lackey at Breitbart and a member of the so-called alt-right. That's AP style, by the way, to say "so-called" or something similar if you use the tag alt-right. That's because alt-right is just a bit of Big Brother doublespeak to obscure the fact the so-called alt-right are actually white supremacists and white nationalists.

So, if that got a little confusing: UC Berkeley invited a Neo-Nazi to speak.

Just in case you're confused on free speech: free speech means the government doesn't try to stop your speech, not that they give you a platform. And, it doesn't apply to hate speech. So UC Berkeley inviting Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos. That was stupid. They don't have to tolerate his intolerance.

And so I think people are pretty rightfully and righteously mad. But, I'm pissed that they're breaking things again. I'm pissed that they're terrorizing our town (and me and my wife). And I'm super pissed that they attacked some people misguided enough to support the Nazi.

But damn, UC Berkeley, don't give Nazis a platform. Don't normalize them. Don't act like they're a normal part of free discourse in the United States.

That's Donald Trump's job.

The tail of the riot that I saw was all young. Mostly in their 20s.

I just bit my tongue not to say, "Maybe you should have voted."

Current Mood: bitter

Yesterday, our United States government undertook the most evil action of my lifetime. The president banned anyone with a passport from seven Muslim countries from entering the country. The only action that comes close is Ronald Reagan's utter contempt for the AIDS epidemic, which resulted in thousands of deaths amid a vulnerable minority. This may not cause as much death (though it could), but it's certainly causing as much misery.

If Trump had just sought to stem new refugees, he would only have entered xenophobia into our codified Books of Federal Law. However, he went further than that. He showed a total contempt and disregard, at a positively sociopathic level, for anyone from this countries. It doesn't matter if they have H-1B work visas or green cards. It doesn't matter if they were on the path to citizenship. It doesn't matter if they have highly sought-after skills that were improving this country. If they happened to be out of the country when Trump signed this order, they've been barred from re-entry. And, this order was so sudden, and so shocking in its scope, that there was no real warning. People going out of the country to attend conferences, to visit relatives, or just to spend a few hours in nearby Canada or Mexico can't return. It doesn't matter that their jobs are here, their family are here, their wives, their husbands, their children are here. It doesn't matter that their apartments and all their worldly possessions are here. They're not coming back.

It's vile. It's evil. It's inhumane.

Even worse, Trump entered an exception into his executive order that prioritizes religious minorities from those countries who are being prosecuted. That's right, using weasel words and the most evil governmental action in this country since the internment of the Japanese, Trump is trying to discriminate against Muslims and discriminate for ... Christians. It shows breathtaking contempt for not just the separation of church and state, but our entire Constitution.

Oh, and there's another exception: Trump banned travel from seven Muslim nations, and somehow didn't manage to include any Muslim nations where he himself has business ties. To be precise, he omitted all the Muslim nations that actually supplied the 9/11 bombers, notably including Saudi Arabia (especially Saudi Arabia) and the United Arabs Emirate. I personally believe that his fear-mongering has absolutely zero basis in reality, and that if anything white nationalists and Nazis are more of a danger to this country than the predominantly peaceful religion of Islam. But, if you accept Trump's premise, then you also have to accept that he's decided that his business interests are more important than our country's safety.

I am disgusted by Trump's actions. I am horrified at the military and police filling our airports, taking innocent people off to indefinite detention. I am sickened that Americans are not being allowed to return to their homes because they don't yet have full citizenship and Trump has decided to discriminate against their countries of birth based solely on fear-mongering, not on reality.

This can not stand. Today, xenophobia, bigotry, and hatred rule our proud country. This is not the Home of the Free. This is not the Home of the Brave.

It's the Home of the Detained and the Cowardly.

Welcome to week four, and how is the new year going?

I must admit to a bit of existential dread about the new president. I mean, surely we've had pathological liars in the White House before, though none so obvious. But it's really the combination of that lying with a high level of incompetence and a certainty that he's right that's scary. It's like Dan Quayle rose up to power, but if he was also a narcissistic, self-centered man-child.

The existential dread is the big picture stuff, and I look at the headlines with fear every morning at what he's done today. I've actually had to sign off of a few progressive mailing lists, because what they were sending out was pure FUD that wasn't helping my mood.

But it's the specific stuff that's even scarier. I'm the most worried about health care. Are my costs going to double in the next decade as the CBO has predicted if the Republicans have their way? Am I going to be out of insurance? The damnedest thing is that I'm pretty healthy. I mean, if I had such horrible insurance that it only covered catastrophes, my life probably wouldn't change. I can't even imagine folks that's not true for.

I've lost two of my familial elders since the New Year, heck since the inauguration: Bob's dad (my step-grandfather) and my Aunt Peg.

I probably knew Bob the elder better. We drove down to Los Angeles a number of times when I was growing up, to spend time with Bob's family, and he was the patriarch of the house.

I probably knew August Peg less well, because she lived out in St. Louis, but she was one of the family members delighted to see me when I visited summers long gone.

And all the losses diminish us. It's a somber start to the year.

OK, perking up.

It looks like our recent roof work was successful, as the torrential downpour of the last week didn't cause new leaks. Yay. And they're going to come back in to stucco over the wounds where our water heater was removed last year, after one of our last house problems (sigh!), which will be another thing off our list-of-stressors and our list-of-things-that-must-be-done-before-we-leave-this-house.

Our recent bathroom work was more so-so. I'm hoping that the handyman fixed the leaking problem we had since last year by grouting over the bottom half of the tiles in our bathroom. Our wall has definitely stopped leaking, I'm less sure about under the house. But the grout is much darker than what's on the other half of the tiles. And it looks really grainy. And there was grit all over the tiles. Days later we've got the grit mostly off, and I'm hoping a sealant will make the stucco itself look smoother and better. But the variegated look of the top and bottom of our tile is annoying.

Speaking of rain, I'm well and sick it. It's greatly impacted my exercise over the last few months. I've been getting 50k or so steps a week instead of my goal of 70k and my more typical excess of more than that. Oh, that's been partly the cold too. Altogether it just hasn't been that nice going out on weekends or evenings or whatever.

I've been trying to figure out alternative ways to exercise, but the success has been somewhat limited.

But, yay, we're heading out of our drought.

The state water regulators, meanwhile, talked about extending our drought restrictions during one of the heaviest days of rain after days of rain. Because they have no sense of irony. Or too much sense of irony. But that's generally their modus operandi.

Work has been good since the new year. I feel like the week off helped me get my mojo back, so I've been bouncing around, putting finishing projects on various projects that have been long standing, and feeling good about it.

I'm getting a bit more weighed down this week, because various people all want my attention. I suppose that's to the good, but less bouncy.

So that's 2017 so far. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Trump is the ugly.

I first realized how broken America's healthcare system was around the time I turned 30. I was writing the checks for the premiums for Skotos' health insurance, and I was seeing the costs rise dramatically year by year. It was having a major impact on our bottom line as our fees literally doubled over the course of several years.

However, K's issues with health insurance were more notable. She applied for private insurance and she was denied due to pre-existing conditions. It was nothing of particular note at the time, just rare fainting and chalazions (eye styes), but the insurance industry had absolutely no incentive to offer insurance to someone who didn't appear to be in picture-perfect health, so they didn't. It was one of the worst examples I've ever seen of capitalism applied to basic human services, to the deficit of humanity.

We were able to get K. on Skotos' insurance, with fees paid out of our pocket. But if anything that amplified my impression of the core problem. I increasingly realized that our health care — our health assurance — depended on being employed with a company. It made ideas like freelancing and even moving very difficult, because either of those decisions could break our ties to our employer-based insurance system.

In other words, it was heathcare serfdom, locking me to the regular system of employment and making it difficult to go too far afield from the location of the company that I wanted to work with. Perhaps the tie was harder to see than those of serfs with their land in the Middle Ages, but it was there all the same.

America's healthcare serfdom ended on March 23, 2010. The Democratic Congress restored the right of mobility to the population by ending insurance companies' ability to reject applicants, to reject claims related to pre-existing conditions, or to charge more for high-risk patients. As is appropriate in a civilized country, Congress ensured that everyone would help each other, with the healthy supporting the sick. Using a complex system of payments and tax rebates, they also made it possible for everyone to get health insurance.

It made freelancing a real possibility, without living under the Damoclean sword of medical bankruptcy. It also fit with the modern idea of a distributed office, allowing employees spread across the United States to each access guaranteed health insurance in their own state.

Skotos changed over to health-insurance-exchange insurance a few years ago. Admittedly, it's far from perfect. The costs are too high and the networks are too narrow. But it wasn't horrible for relatively healthy people, and it made less-traditional business very possible. More importantly, it offered a way to cut the too-strong tie between employment and healthcare.

For the first time in nearly a decade I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Cost increases finally flattened out, and I no longer had to worry about what to do about medical insurance if a situation arose where my company or my employment would no longer qualify for an employee-backed health insurance.

Meanwhile a new idea fell together for K. and me personally: a move to Hawaii. It was May or June this year when we settled upon this as our intention, for a few years hence. And healthcare was never even a concern, because I knew I could just transition from a plan on the California exchange to a plan on the Hawaii exchange with little problem.

Enter November 8, 2016. Donald Trump won the presidency after running on a chaotic and varied platform that, among other things, promised to dismantle the AMA.

Twenty-two million Americans depend on it. It establishes right of movement, eliminates health serfdom. It opens up new possibilities and removes old anxieties. But it's been the irrational target of hatred for Republicans for six and a half years, so there's every indication it will be gone in a couple of months. Donald Trump's minions even updated their plans on the topic a few days after their unexpected win.

So where do we go from here?

Are we going to return to the bad old days when loss of a job could (eventually, after COBRA runs out) result in the loss of insurance? Will we, the people, once more be bound to our jobs as healthcare serfs?

Trump claims he's going to replace it, but the only specifics on his web site talk about HSAs, which I've always seen as a fancy way of saying, "I don't have insurance."

The ACA was the biggest social entitlement of my generation. It addressed the worst of the human needs not addressed by our then-current government.

If things are rolled back to March 22, 2010, it's going to be ... heartbreaking.

Frustratingly, this proposed repeal is built on lies and unsupported hyperbole that the Republicans are telling about the system. Donald Trump's web site claims that the ACA is unsuccessful due to "rapidly rising premiums and deductibles, narrow networks".

I'd certainly agree that the narrow networks are troublesome. Just last year I wrote about the unacceptable distance I had to go to find an urgent care system. They literally told me to go to Sacramento. I had similar issues with finding an allergist, and ultimately decided to just punt the problem by not dealing with the issue. That's a problem that needs to be fixed.

However the low level of premium increases from 2011-2017 have been a godsend when compared to the decade before. They literally made it possible for me to keep doing what I was doing, what I love, even if the resulting coverage wasn't what I would have liked.

But the worst lie may be the claim that the Republicans can keep the "good" parts of the ACA, like the protection for pre-existing conditions and the ability for young adults to stay on the parents' insurance. Because without that much-hated mandate and without a complex system of risk corridors that moves some monies to the insurance companies shouldering excessive risk due to sicker patients ... it all falls apart.

So maybe the Republicans don't actually kill the pre-existing condition protections which are what protect us from healthcare serfdom, but if they drop the elements that make it possible, the whole system falls apart. And then the ACA dies a slow, shuddering death over a decade instead of a transitional death in two years, as the Republicans proposed last year.

How does this affect us personally? It's hard to say, but it fills me with dread.

K. is no longer dependent on private insurance. She's managed to access Medicare. Mind you, Paul Ryan has been wanting to kill Medicare for years, and he's already stated it's at the top of his list come 2017. So, that's another potential disaster come inauguration day. But there's some indication that he might leave Medicare for current recipients, and if so, things might be OK for a time. And it'd be a foundation to rebuild Medicare after his voucher system crashes and burns.

Instead, my situation will be the trickier one this time. I find it unlikely that my current insurance carrier will want to dump me, because I'm pretty healthy and California itself has some decent protections for insurance costs. I also don't get any subsidies, so all I need is for the insurance company to keep treating me fairly.

But if the ACA is truly gone come 2017 (or 2019), our plans to move to Hawaii just got a lot harder, because I'd need to sign up with a new insurance carrier then. And I have high blood pressure, and that's a pre-existing condition.

It's probably a bit higher as of November 9, 2016.

1. Democrats Saying that Someone Else Would Have Won

I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, but here's the thing: you have no idea whether Bernie Sanders would have outperformed Hillary Clinton or whether Joe Biden would have or whoever. None. It's an impossible hypothesis to prove because there's insufficient data. We don't know how the states would have broken differently, we don't know how they would have performed in the debates, we don't know what dirty laundry would have come out. We don't know how the general voting population would have reacted to a self-avowed socialist or how they would have contrasted a pugilistic Democrat with Donald.

All we do know is that no one else who actually wanted to run was able to earn enough votes among Democrats to win, and that's not a good argument for being able to do so in the general population.

So, shut up and move forward.

2. People Saying that 538 Should Retire

The pollsters definitely have some 'splained to do because they sucked. The thing is, they weren't off by much at the national level. Final national averages had Hilary at +3% and Upshot is still saying +1.3%. A 2% polling difference is well within the realms of reasonable margin of error and well within the historical margin of error.

Where pollsters utterly failed is at state level polls.

Where aggregators utterly failed is in understanding that Clinton's coalition was inefficiently distributed across the states.

Oh wait, there's one site that didn't: 538. They talked about Clinton's electoral weakness many a time, and said it could easily cost her the election if things dropped to 2% or worse. And there's one site that was giving Donald a one-thirds chance of winning until the day before the election (when it dropped to one-quarter). That's 538 too.

But there are a lot of morons out there who don't seem to understand that a 1 in 3 or a 1 in 4 odd is actually pretty likely. That it means it should come up every three or four elections. And it did.

538 got it right all around.

Now Princeton Election Consortium, the Dailykos, and some other sites that had the odds in 90%+ range for most of the last weeks. They got some 'splaining to do too.

3. People Saying that the Majority of Americans Have Spoken

Yes, Trump won by the rules of the game that Trump and Clinton agreed to before the contest started. (Well, except for the fact that Trump secretly had the FBI and the Russian gov't working for him.)

But don't pretend he has a mandate. And definitely don't claim that the majority of Americans or even the majority of voters spoke.

Well, they did, but they said they wanted Hillary.

She absolutely won the national vote count. Current numbers say by about .2%, while Upshot's calculations say 1.3% when everything comes in.

In other words, Trump's vast mandate is 18% of the population, or a losing minority of about 47% of the vote.

4. Media Not Doing Their Job

The media pretty much made President Trump. Congratulations, take a bow. And it's because they've become entertainment, not the news. Which is a damned shame, because that's not why the gov't gives airwaves to networks. We do it because they promise to practice journalism, not the pablum they're doling out now.

But they treated Donald like entertainment, airing every irreverent breath he took during the primaries.

Then they balanced him with false equivalency, acting like he and Hilary (or any sane politician) were the same.

Then they whored after their ratings by describing a horse race even when there wasn't one.

Meanwhile they breathlessly did the work of the FBI and the Russian Government, making up stories about stolen emails, even though any one's emails could make them look bad, then horribly misreporting the FBI's claims about their investigation.

Real journalists would have put the truth above ratings. They would have investigated. They would have said it like it was. They wouldn't have been tricked en masse by criminals in our government and in the former Soviet Union.

There were moments of light in this year's media coverage, when the so-called journalists seemed to realize that their horrible malfeasance might elect an insane idiot to the White House. But they flickered out the next time some tainted raw meat was dangled in front of them, and all their supposed ethics and supposed competence went right out the window.

Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek is excepted from this diatribe. He seemed to be the only one doing his job, but no one cared. Also that guy who found the pussy tape (but not CBS who tried to hold it back).

5. Deplorables Acting Empowered

The worse thing about the Trump campaign is that it empowered the people that Clinton unartfully called deplorables. Let's be more clear and state who they are: KKK Members. Antisemites. True Bigots. Gamer-Taters. PUAs. Other Misogynists. Transophobes. Homophobes. Islamiphobes.

We've seen it spill out into classrooms and into communities and I'm truly, truly sick of it.

I'm hopeful that Donald will leave these deplorables at the altar now that he doesn't need their vote any more. Because that's his modus operandi. I think He is truly an Islamiphobe, that he was broken by 9/11. But I don't think he's most of those other things.

So I hope they'll wither away in the light of indifference now that he's had his way with them.

Profile

shannon_a

Erzo: Home Page

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Lettuce for Crossroads by branchandroot
Resources: P r o l o g u e

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 06:03 pm

Entries tagged with politics

The Wicked! Day

Jab, Stupid People, CostCo, Rest!

Stress Week; Happy Weekend

In Which Hawaii Panics & Berkeley Fails (or maybe vice-versa)

In Which I Write About the Disappointments of Closures, Politics, of Fire

In Which I Hike to Avoid the News

In Which Democracy Dies

In Which I See Protesters & Other Dammed Things

In Which I Celebrate the Pyrrhic Victory in Alabama

In Which Neo-Nazis Fail to Find the Bay Area for Two Days Running

In Which Despair for our Union

In Which I Prepare for More Riots

In Which I Return to Mt. Diablo

Two Weeks Since the Inauguration

Toxic Progressivism in Berkeley

More Riots, Thanks Donald Trump

We Have Become the Enemy

The New Year

Donald Trump & Healthcare Serfdom

5 Things I'm Already Sick Of