The third try was the charm - a new water heater and a new toilet were installed in the unsellable condo in Vinings today!
I didn't retire because I wanted places to be at 9:00 am in the next county over, but you gotta do what you gotta do, and in this case perseverance paid off.
Probably the lowest priority item in my "To Do" list, but at least it's something. Next up - new roof on the house.
As if living a new post-career life wasn't enough of a challenge, then the coronavirus pandemic came along with all of its the social distancing, hygiene requirements, and anxieties. And then after eight months of that, a tree falls on my house, destroys my roof, and I can't get contractors to come by to so much as even give me a quote.
My refuge in all of this has been meditation drinking masturbation video games. I finished playing Detroit: Become Human (highly recommended) and started on the oddly titled Disco Elysium, which I didn't enjoy (too much text reading and long, pointless conversations). I quit Disco before finishing the game as playing felt more like a chore than a diversion, and this Thanksgiving weekend, I've started playing Red Dead Redemption 2. It's a good game, at least so far, and one thing I really like is the very satisfying sense of escapism derived from just mounting a horse and riding across the Wild West open-world environment. Don't even need a task or a mission, although there are plenty of both in the game, just ride around and enjoy the scenery. The game is a very good horse-riding simulator.
Now that the long Thanksgiving weekend is finally coming to a close, I should have better luck with contractors next week. Hopefully, I can get something done before Christmas. If not, I can just keep riding my favorite mare (I've named her "Twitchy") through the Rockies.
And I don't want to explain why. Not that I don't want you to know, dear reader, but I know that if I retell the whole story of why I'm annoyed right now, it will just annoy me further. Suffice it to say it involves the cumulative frustration of trying to get a quote on my roof repairs from unresponsive contractors while simultaneously trying to get what should have been some relatively simple and straight-forward plumbing work done on the condo. Suffice it to say that despite my efforts all of this week, I'm no further along on either front than I was at the end of last week, and now the holidays are here. Oh, that and it's raining today, hard, for the first time since the tree fell on my house back in October.
All I want for Christmas is a new roof over my head, and a new water heater and toilet at the condo.
I'm not sure what her point was. I'm sure that 99.8% of people who run red lights survive - sometimes there's not even a collision, and other times, both parties can walk away from the collision. Should we do away with traffic signals, or at least enforcement of traffic laws?
Also, she's wrong. To date, a distressing 12,400,000 Americans and counting have contracted the covids. Computer modelling by the University of Washington indicates there may be a total of 20 million cases by the time Joe Biden takes office in late January. As of this evening, 257,117 of the infected have died.
Quick math - 257,117 divided by 12,400,000 equals 0.0207, or 2.1%.
2.1% of Americans who've contracted the covids have died. 97.1%, not 99.8%, survived.
Still, 97.1% doesn't sound too bad. But consider this, those survivors continue to shed the virus and infect other people, so the total number of infections will increase, as will the total number of deaths. Many survivors have reported lingering respiratory issues even after they test negative for the virus, and since it's still so new, a "novel" coronavirus, we still don't know all of the long-term effects. And finally, over a quarter million dead Americans from the disease is something to be taken more seriously than a rounding error in some actuarial calculation.
But the worst part is it's largely preventable. We know how to limit it's spread - social isolation, strict quarantine and contact tracing for positive cases, wearing face masks in public, washing hands, etc. Pleases where this was done (e.g., New Zealand, several American states before they gave up on the effort) saw complete to partial abatement of the virus. No one has to suffer, no one had to die. You just need to act like an adult and wear a face mask and try to avoid sharing air with other people until the vaccine arrives.
Over 12 million cases in the U.S. to date, and nearing 200,000 new cases a day. Over a quarter million deaths to date, and nearing 2,000 deaths per day. 3,700 people out of 100,000 (3.7%, or roughly one for every 27 citizens) have been infected so far in the United States.
And these maskless idiots decide Friday was a good night to pack a Fort Lauderdale sports bar.
Karma: the direct consequence of our actions. We deserve the sickness we get.
For about a decade now, I've been observing my two pet cats.
The problem with observing our pets, especially for those of us without training in behavioral biology, is that we tend to anthropomorphize them and to assume that we humans are the center of their feline universe. To be sure, we're an important component of it, but their world is not necessarily anthropocentric.
A lot of big words. What I've observed is that although they do recognize their names - as well as the name of the other cat - their minds work in a language-free manner so that although when one hears the word "Eliot," while he knows that it's a reference to him, he does not think "That's me." He just knows that I've made a sound particular to him and not the other cat or, for that matter, the toaster, the sofa, or the sound of rainfall in the evening.
Imagine what it's like to think without words, without mental symbols to represent things and actions. Cats are very attuned to sounds - they have truly remarkable hearing - and they've learned that the sound of the pantry door opening around, oh, 7:00 pm means that dinner is about to be served. They've also learned that when I make the noise that goes "eat," it means that I'm probably going to go to the pantry to get their food. But they don't assign that particular "eat" sound to the specific action of them consuming their dinner, or to my mental intention of preparing their meal. It's just a sound they tend to hear before dinner and they've come to associate with part of the mealtime ritual. Think of it this way - we don't think of the sound of a car engine starting up as an articulated intention of driving somewhere - it's merely the sound of an internal combustion engine. Same with that "eat" sound that I make or the squeak of the pantry door. They're both just sounds that they've come to associate with the early onset of the evening meal.
So to go a little deeper, since they don't have language or any other mental symbols for the things in the world or of specific actions, they don't have a way to re-telling themselves stories of past events. There was that night the scary sounds of thunder were outside, and that very scary night the tree came crashing down on my roof, but they have no means of re-creating those events in their minds. They haven't forgotten it, necessarily, but it isn't a memory that can be recalled and studied in their minds.
So without language, without a way of separating the universe into discretely identifiable objects, and without stories or any kind of personal history, they really don't have a sense of "self." Chicken-or-the-egg: do they not have a sense of self because they don't have a personal historical narrative, or do they not have a personal historical narrative because there's no "self" to have that experience? To apply the question to ourselves, what are we apart from the stories we tell ourselves?
Cats are like human infants before self-awareness and ego consciousness develop. They can learn by repetition and with enough time they realize that certain sounds, including my words, tend to precede certain actions, like feeding or petting, but they don't have a sense of personal history, a narrative that goes, "I was once a feral cat sleeping on random porches until a kind human let me into his house." Or even, "two nights ago, there were a lot of scary sounds, but it seems calmer tonight."
They do experience hunger and fear, they enjoy affection, a meal, and a sunny spot in the afternoon, and they even experience an occasional sense of jealousy or unfairness "The other cat is getting a treat but I am not," although of course it is not articulated like that in their minds.
It's hard for me to even imagine what the feline experience must be like, to feel, to emote, and even to dream (I've heard them vocalizing in their sleep and seen them moving their legs while unconscious, so I know they dream) without words, without mental models, without a personal history, and without ego awareness.
The lesson here is that for us humans, our sense of self-identity, the ego, our very so-called "soul," is but a mental construct that arises from a language-enabled mind that recalls experiences and sensations and melds them into a personal history, a narrative, and then identifies the constant presence in that narrative as "I." Language, as William S. Burroughs famously noted, is a virus from outer space.
New rule: Every time Joe Biden wins a recount in Georgia, he should get 16 more Electoral College votes.
Has anybody ever had a run of more consecutive embarrassing moments than Rudy Giuliani in the past month? First, he gets caught on camera reaching down his pants during an interview in the new Borat movie.
Then he holds a news conference at The Four Seasons. Except it's the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Company, conveniently located between a crematorium and a sex shop.
And then finally, at another press conference, he starts sweating so profusely that his hair dye starts running down his face.
Good times. Thanks for the LOLs, Rudy.
Remember when Donald Trump was seriously proposing that he should be added to Mount Rushmore?
Remember when he was expecting a Nobel Peace Prize?
Remember when he was expecting a second term?
All of that is pretty funny, especially in retrospective, but I also remember when a quarter-million Americans, now dead from the covids, were alive.
I remember when America was internationally respected, even envied, as a great bastion of freedom and liberty.
I remember when an American passport allowed you to travel the world and not merely identify you as a high-risk subject needing quarantine.
It's one thing not to concede an election. Okay, he's an asshole - we've always known that. But not allowing security briefings to the incoming President, not including him in the Coronavirus Task Force planning (such as it is) on how we're going to get a much-needed vaccine distributed to the American people, is another thing. It puts all our lives in danger. It's reckless and irresponsible. It's not the act of a sane man ("I'm a very stable genius") - it's the desperate acting out of a malignant narcissist who's going to make everyone suffer over his pain of rejection.
If, in his derangement and delusion, our so-called "president" is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution should be invoked and the powers be transferred to the vice president until January's inauguration.
Oy, what a day! First off, before getting into anything else, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) needs to stay the hell out of Georgia. The news was abuzz this morning that Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported that he had been contacted by Graham, twice, with suggestions that Raffi toss out the ballots of entire counties if signature irregularities could be detected in a sufficient number of them. Aides to the Secretary were also on the call and corroborated his testimony. Graham's suggestion is nothing short of voter suppression and as he's doing it solely for his own party's advantage, it's seditious, too.
Graham is what's called a beta male. Like in dog packs, there are alpha leaders and then there are beta followers, males that are genetically programmed to follow the alpha leader. For years, Graham's alpha leader was Sen. John McCain, but with McCain's failing health and then death Graham switched over to being a beta to our so-called "president." As a beta, Graham is out interfering with election results in other states so he can run back to his alpha leader and present his act of fealty ("Look what I did for you, daddy!").
The Savannah River is a 300-mile-long waterway that separates Georgia from South Carolina. Lindsey Graham needs to keep his lily-livered beta self on the east side of that river and not let the sunset catch his ass on the river's western banks. Lindsey Graham, stay the hell out of Georgia!
But that was just this morning's news, not my actual life. Today, the settlement from my insurance claim regarding the tree that fell on my house finally arrived in my bank account, and now that we finally have a scope of work and budget established, I called my preferred contractor to begin the contracting process. So now I'm waiting on the estimator to arrive.
Meanwhile, knowing that I'm going to be tied up with home repairs for a while, I started some upgrades on the Vinings condo first to get it ready for the market. I met a plumber at the condo today to replace the water heater and fix a leaky toilet. It turns out the utility closet is too narrow for today's standard hot-water heaters, so he has to order a specialty unit to fit in the tight space. And the 1987 toilet no longer has replacement parts available to stop the leak, so we need to order a new toilet, too. Good times.
Back home, the news was still carrying on about Graham, who defended his actions in Georgia by saying he had also been in touch with Secretaries of State in Arizona, Nevada, and other states too with the same suggestion. Saying you committed a crime multiple times doesn't make it any better, Lindsey. It just makes it organized crime, enforceable by the RICO Act.
You'll love it in prison, Lindsey. Lots of alpha males there for you to follow around.
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| Daily Reported New Cases In Georgia (Source: NY Times, Nov. 15, 2020) |
As a result, the 1918-1919 death graph more resembles the 2020 new case graph, as in Georgia's above, than the death graph.
Both graphs suggest that the deadliest time of the pandemic is right now, the winter months, which is otherwise flu season anyway and people spend more time indoors trading non-ventilated air and infecting each other.
I attribute the first, April peak in the current Georgia graph to the initial outbreak, and its decline to the shelter-in-place orders eventually issued in most states and municipalities. I attribute the second, July peak to the re-opening of the economy and "pandemic fatigue" when people just stopped social distancing, as well as to protests, rallies, and other super-spreader events, with the decline caused by a general awareness of the results of the protests, rallies, and other super-spreader events, and voluntary social distancing and more attention to hygiene (hand-washing) and wearing of face masks. I attribute the current and still-rising peak to school re-openings (secondary and colleges) and the start of winter weather and indoor activities.
This current peak probably won't decline until enough vaccinations occur to develop an immunity.
On many levels, Detroit may be one of the best game I've ever played. On the other hand, it also provided one of my worst experiences in four years of PC gaming.
What was so good about it? For one, incredible, ultra-realistic, cinematic quality visuals. Rendering human faces is one thing that many video games can't seem to accomplish well, but this game has highly believable faces that can accurately express the subtlest of emotions. Which brings me to the second good thing - the quality of the acting. On top of the totally convincing CGI faces, the voice acting was superb. And the writing brought it all together - without a good script, all those finely rendered faces and good voice acting would have been squandered.
SPOILERS AHEAD: I don't think most of my readers, few that they are, are computer gamers, but if you are and are considering playing Detroit: Become Human, STOP READING NOW! I'm about to ruin the experience for you. But it's not a spoiler to say up front that the game basically follows three different characters, all androids physically indistinguishable from humans, who become sentient, Westworld-style. The three characters all have separate story lines that eventually, toward the end of the game, intertwine, largely based on decisions and choices the player makes earlier in the game.
What it is not is an open-world role-playing game. The story sticks to a very precise script and there are few if any superfluous side missions to bog down the narrative just to pad the playing hours (the game can be completed in a brief 12-15 hours). It's not a combat game - the characters don't collect and upgrade weapons. In fact, there is no in-game crafting at all.
What it is is an immersive, cinematic experience, three compelling stories that don't exactly merge but do interweave toward the end. Playing the game is like binge-watching an excellent, 12-episode television series, but one that can change based on your in-game choices and actions.
In short, you start to really care about the characters. The game is emotionally manipulative, pulling you in with the feels and showing you the psychological vulnerabilities and emotions of the characters. This was especially true, at least for me, in the story of a young nanny droid and the human child she bonds with as they escape first an abusive father and then an intolerant society. "I'll never leave you," Kara, the nanny, reassures Alice, the vulnerable child, and even though it sounds corny when I write it here, in the game, just like in a movie, with the acting and the background music and all the other dramatic devices used, it's quite affecting. You really want them to escape safely and to bond and be together, even though one isn't biologically human.
Last Wednesday, I started playing the game and quickly became thoroughly engrossed. Each story line was interesting and emotionally resonant, and I really cared about the characters. I avoided reading any online walkthroughs or tips on how to get the best possible ending, just as you should stop reading right now if you're going to play the game (last SPOILER warning). So imagine my reaction, when due to a selection I made during one action sequence, Kara and Alice get captured by a Detroit SWAT team and sent to a "recycling center," an obvious analogue to the Third Reich's concentration/death camps. When the SWAT team burst through the doors and the game prompted me to either press 1 for "run" or 2 to "play dead," I chose what I thought would be the hero's route and pressed 1, but Kara was immediately caught, handcuffed, and separated from Alice.
And here's where I got really mad at the game and feel that for all its strengths it was also one of the worst games I've ever played. Over many long minutes and with an excruciating level of detail, Kara searches the "recycling center" for Alice and finally finds and consoles her, only to be systematically bullied and humiliated by their human captors. "I'm scared," little Alice says, and "I don't like it here," and Kara keeps trying to comfort her, saying "It's all going to be okay." But they're stripped down, struck with rifle stocks, and generally dehumanized (even though Kara isn't biologically "human"). I kept looking for some in-game route to sneak out and escape but nothing succeeded for me, and then I was expecting some sort of last-minute, here-comes-the-cavalry rescue from another story line, but that didn't happen either. Finally, out of options, the two are executed, but not off-screen or in a fade-to-black, leave-it-to-the-imagination style - the "camera" follows them into the gas chamber, lets you see the gas fill the room, the two cough and struggle, and then finally collapse before the final fade.
YOU BASTARDS! They killed Kara! They made me care about and sympathize with the two, and then made me watch them die in the cruelest and most explicit way possible, all because I chose 1 ("flee") rather than 2 ("play dead") during an action sequence. Who does that? YOU MONSTERS! They even cut away to a shot of the two bodies laying in a landfill with dozens of other victims around them. Will Kara suddenly reboot and rescue Alice? No, they dead, and it sucked.
I still played through to the end of the game after that, hoping for some redeeming event, but I felt slightly nauseous and unsettled and didn't really enjoy the game very much after that. I didn't feel any satisfaction or sense of completion at the end of the game, and frankly, was disappointed that I had wasted a dozen hours being first manipulated and then brutalized for caring.
So today, I went back to fix things. I didn't want that sequence to be my final, lasting impression of the game. I opened it back up at that earlier action sequence (sort of like selecting a scene in a DVD), and played dead rather than flee. It worked, and Kara and Alice escaped the raid alive. That unlocked several other sequences I missed on my first playthrough, since those two characters were not then in the script. The suspense was terrific, as now I knew exactly what would happen if they were caught again. But even then, once they finally made it to their final destination, Alice, the child, passed away peacefully in her sleep due to other wounds she incurred, leaving Kara alone and devastated in their new homeland.
While that didn't suck as much as the extermination-camp ending before, it still wasn't the emotional catharsis I needed to absolve all my feelings. So I played the last chapter through again, a third time, carefully avoiding the situation wherein Alice got injured, and finally was successful in achieving the "happy" ending with Kara and Alice and their protector friend Luther all safe and happy and alive in their new homeland at the end of the game. All the other major characters made it to the end with their own happy endings as well, so all was good.
TL/DR: Detroit: Become Human is one of the best games I've ever played, one of the most artistic and well written and best produced. It's totally engrossing and emotionally riveting, and it's a testament to the game how strongly I reacted to that death scene, but good gosh, was it really necessary to engage in that level of Holocaust porn to punish a player for fleeing instead of playing dead? How were we supposed to know? Anyhow, if you want a very different kind of game from the usual level-based, open-world RPG overstuffed with pointless side quests and forgettable NPCs, you may want to give Detroit a shot. Just be sure to pick "Play Dead" when prompted!
As a quick reminder, now that most of the smoke has finally cleared from the November 3 general election, Republicans have won 50 of the 100 seats in the Senate to the Democrats' 48. Only two seats remain open, and they're both here in Georgia. If the Democrats win both, the Senate will be tied and Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris will have the tie-breaker vote. If the Republicans win either one of the two seats, they will have the Senate majority, and Moscow Mitch McConnell will continue to be the majority leader and effectively strangle any legislation Biden and the House of Representatives propose. It will be four more years of the congressional stalemate and legislative gridlock we've been experiencing for a decade now. It will be four more years of bitter partisanship.
I'm not optimistic about the Democrats' chances. Both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are fine men and good candidates, but despite the fact that Georgia finally flipped blue and elected Joe Biden over you-know-who in the presidential race, it's still a pretty red state with a solid Republican majority. Biden got the lead because you-know-who is such a rotten, deplorable candidate that a sufficient number of Georgia Republicans just couldn't get themselves to vote for him, despite their party affiliation. They voted against the incumbent, not for his challenger's policies and legislative agenda.
In one race, Awful Kelley Loeffler is running against the Rev. Raphael Warnock. The wealthy Loeffler is the very picture of vested interests and corruption, the personification of what was supposed to have been drained from the swamp. The Rev. Warnock is a humble and direct man of the people, and the head preacher of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s old job. Based on personalities alone, it should be no contest and Warnock got the most votes in the general election. But Republican votes were split by a contentious race between Awful Loeffler and the clownish Doug Collins, who combined got 46% of the vote compared to Warnock's 33%. Assuming that most people who voted for Collins will vote for Loeffler in the run-off election, you can see the gap that Warnock has in front of him.
In the other race, Jon Ossoff is running against Republican incumbent David Purdue. Purdue has his own ethics and corruption issues to deal with, but he's nowhere near as cartoonish a villain as Awful Loeffler. Purdue managed to get 49.7% of the vote, just short of the 50% he needed to win outright, while Ossoff got 48%. In order to win, Ossoff needs some combination of the following three things to happen:
We all have our heroes. One of mine passed away today.
Impermanence is swift; life-and-death is the great matter. What was here yesterday is gone today. We should never let this thought fall far from our minds.
I'm still recovering from Zeta. The tree that fell on my house is gone now and I've got a lot of tarp up on the roof, but I'm still waiting on Allstate to decide how much damage is covered and how much isn't, and thus how much money they'll be paying. I don't want to start the repair process until I know how much is on my dime and how much on theirs, so there's still big gaping holes under the tarp on the roof and gutters hanging off the house at odd angles, so I'm pretty vulnerable to rain damage. Fortunately, the weather's been dry since Zeta left the state (good riddance!) but rain is forecast for next week as Eta passes by.
This episode has been a good test, a living laboratory, for comparing Zen practice to Stoic philosophy. The stress of the situation, the daunting amount of work ahead of me, the heartbreak of seeing my house so damaged sometimes feels like more than I can bear. What comforts can these two ideologies offer me?
Zen would say that if the current situation causes me suffering (anxiety, depression, fear, anger), then my practice just isn't deep enough yet and that I should meditate more until I can accept the situation with equanimity. That's not helpful here and now - I might be able to accept some similar disaster in the future if I stick with my practice, but meanwhile, I'm just sort of deficient if it bothers me, so the suffering is my fault. Not very helpful.
Stoicism asks me what I can do about the situation, and if there's something that can be done to go ahead and do it. If there's nothing that can be done right now, can I accept the situation as it is? If yes, then what's to worry about? If not, then go ahead and suffer, but know that I am suffering because that's what I'm choosing to do. In fact, if I want, I can choose to use this setback to practice how much I can tolerate, to strengthen my endurance muscles so to speak. Much more helpful, and of immediate usefulness.
I call my personal practice "contemplative stoicism," combining what I've learned from Zen with my own ideas on what Stoic philosophy has to say (who knows, I could be completely wrong, but if it works for me what's the harm of misinterpreting Epictetus?). Examine my mind and question myself as the Stoics taught, but also practice meditation as a means of keeping my practice focused. It's been working for me, more or less, for over a year now, and it's kept me from freaking out over the situation up over my head.
We'll see how well it works when Eta's rains arrive in Atlanta.
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| Today's doggo is presidential |
Did you ever turn on a football game at the exact moment that your quarterback is throwing a touchdown pass? If you're watching today's Georgia-Florida game, the chances of that happening are pretty good - the score was 38-21 at halftime (Florida leading, ugh), and it seems that one side or the other is constantly scoring a touchdown.
This morning, after scrolling my phone all morning like I've been doing incessantly since Election Day on Tuesday, I turned on MSNBC to see when we could expect any new results. As soon as I did, I saw the anchor people appear on the screen and then almost immediately, the "Breaking News" graphic. Now, that in and of itself hasn't meant much lately - "Breaking News" could be that some county commissioner somewhere in Nevada is announcing a press conference for later in the day, or someone found a bin with 16 uncounted provisional ballots in a mail truck somewhere in Pittsburgh. But this "Breaking News" turns out to have been more significant - it announced that Joseph Biden has officially been projected to have won the election, and will be the next President of the United States.
I'll be honest with you, he wasn't my candidate. He wasn't even in my early season Top 10. But I'll take it - in fact, I'm thrilled, primarily because that means soon there will be no more Donald Trump. Also, it's impossible, at least for me, to hate Joe Biden, although I recognize that there are plenty of Republicans and conservatives who will manage that particular feat.
The tv hosts at that hour, "Morning" Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, seemed unprepared to address the gravity of the situation as they vamped and improvised for time until the cutaways to the network's "big hitters" (Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, that lady who used to work for Georgie Bush), and for some reason Scarborough decided to fill the time with a gruesome and explicit account of a brain surgery Biden underwent years ago ("blood was soon spurting all over the inside of his skull," etc.). Why, Morning Joe? After eight years as Obama's vice-president, that's the first thing your mind comes up with to fill the air time? What's wrong with you?
Anyway, it was more that gratifying to watch the tube as spontaneous celebrations broke out across the country, including one large one in Washington, DC right in front of the White House. It was fun to watch folks get some snarky and mean jabs in at Trump on Facebook and Reddit, and even to throw some fuel on that fire myself ("Sorry, I like incumbents who don't lose re-election").
The next months will be trying and contentious as Trump, who has said he is not conceding, slowly learns to accept the fact that he's been fired by the very country of which he thought he was the boss. His cult will react angrily and in the most obnoxious ways possible, and I wouldn't put it past them to resort to violence. And here in Georgia, we have two critically important Senate races yet to resolve.
But it's all over but the bruising. Trump has finally been defeated and will no longer be our so-called "president." Tough times and many struggles are ahead, but that thought is rendered so much more palatable knowing that Trump will no longer be a relevant part of those challenges.
So anyway, congratulations and welcome aboard, President-Elect Smokin' Joe Biden. Please let me know how I can be of assistance, sir.
We did it - we flipped Georgia.
Actually, that may not be totally accurate. Georgia has probably already been a "blue state" for many years now, at least more center or left-of-center than conservative, but a combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering has effectively silenced the true will of the people for at least a decade now. The state is younger, less white, and more progressive than its representation would lead you to believe.
Georgia politicians have had literally centuries of experience overruling the majority. There has been something resembling the current system of voter suppression and gerrymandering going back to the 1950s, a century of Jim Crow laws before that going back to the end of slavery in the 1860s, and then, of course, slavery itself going all the way back to 1619.
Depending which state races are called when - in addition to Georgia, the races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina are all still officially "too close to call" - Georgia may or may not be the state to put Biden over the 270 Electoral votes he needs. Doesn't matter, as long as he gets there, but it would feel good if Georgia were the state to carry him across the transom.
But wait, there's more - Georgia has two Senate races this year, and both of them are heading to run-off elections (Georgia law requires the winning candidate to get over 50% of the vote, and with third-party candidates on the ballots this year, no one passed the 50% threshold). The Senate is currently tied at 48 Republicans and 48 Democrats, and if Georgia's two Democratic candidates win (which admittedly is a long shot), that would be 50 Democratic Senators. Then, even if the two remaining out-of-state races go to the Republicans, the Senate would at worst be tied at 50 each, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaker votes.
So, the real story here is that if things go well, former "red state" Georgia has not only flipped blue, but it may be the state to give the presidency to Joe Biden nd control of the Senate to the Democrats. Wouldn't that be something?
This year's presidential election feels like some sort of boss fight. On Election Night, we go through the whole emotional roller coaster of watching the returns on tv, staying up until the West Coast results come in, and despite all our victories, the boss still survives. The battle continues into the next day. Victory in Wisconsin. Victory in Michigan. Nice, but the boss still isn't finished off yet. Nevada is saying they won't have final results until late afternoon Thursday, Rocky Mountain time. Pennsylvania is waiting for something to arrive in the mail. Georgia is teetering on the brink of flipping to blue for the first time in decades..
It's more than my nerves can endure. As Robert Reich tweeted, I'm nauseously optimistic we'll win this one, but good gosh what a nerve-wracking process.
One good thing about a boss fight - when the boss finally does die, it's usually with a satisfying explosion and a lot of gore. Looking forward to that part.
As you probably already know, there's an election going on today in the United States. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows what's going to happen. There are way too many freak factors and rogue variables in this equation to venture anything other than a wild guess.
Here's one scenario: the Democrats hold onto the House and take control of the Senate, but by one means or another, Trump retains the presidency. If that were to happen, Congress should immediately just impeach him again, but this time the Senate could do what they failed to do last time and go ahead and elect to remove him from office. We'd then have a President Pence, which would be a different sort of evil. But "Evil is evil," so the House should impeach him too - doesn't matter what the charges are, this isn't about justice or fairness or anything but is just an exercise in raw power, just like the Republicans would do if given the chance and like Moscow Mitch and the rotund Billy Barr have been doing for the past several years. The Democratic-controlled Senate then votes to oust Pence and presto, change-o, Nancy Pelosi is our new President. You're welcome, America.
But in all serious, for the soul of our nation, I sincerely hope that an awakened America votes the orange clown out of office by a landslide of historical proportions, and he's last seen on a private jet high-tailing it out of the country to Russia. Imagine how much better this nation, the world, would be without his pompous ass in it.
(Back to real-time blogging without post-dating.)
How nice to wake up in an electrically illuminated and heated home (it's actually gas heat, but the thermostat and controls run on electric power). One benefit of the tree crisis of the past three days - at least I wasn't thinking about the upcoming election, our so-called "president," or politics in general. It's only two more days until Election Day - I can take two days of "politics" or whatever you want to call this current campaign after three days off.
Another silver lining: I don't have to worry about that tree any more. For 16 years now, ever since I moved into this house in 2004, I worried about that tree during every major storm. I imagined its trajectory, where it might hit the house, where I would want or not want to be in the event of its falling. It was right outside my bedroom, so many a dark and stormy night was spent sleeping on the sofa in the den, as far from the anticipated impact zone as possible. In fact, I was sitting right there on that sofa when it finally did fall.
But now it's done and over - the tree fell, I survived, and the house took a lot of damage but didn't collapse and is still functional. The good news is that it can't fall again. It's over. Sure, there are other trees and other threats, but that was the one big bad boy that had literally kept me up nights. It lasted through so many previous storms and events I was beginning to think it would last forever, but like all things that go up, it finally came back down.
I went over to the unsellable condo in Vinings today are retrieved the food I had moved to its refrigerator and went shopping to replace the spoiled food that I had to throw out. And sometime while I was out and about, cable and internet access were restored, so that I'm now finally able to post this from home, and I get to watch Sunday-night TV (Fargo and whatever HBO's got on tonight).
Today's November 1, the first of the month, and normally on the first I go online and pay off a bunch of bills. This month, they're going to have to wait a day - I've been through a lot the past few days and owe myself a little down time and some rest and relaxation, so I'm going to kick back, pour myself a glass of wine and watch some tv, and take care of the bills tomorrow. They can afford to wait a day.
A glimpse of the week ahead: tomorrow, the tree company returns to finish the job and haul off the wood they removed from the roof on Friday. Tuesday, a roofing contractor is coming by to tidy up the hanging gutters and errant woodwork and wrap the remaining exposed gaps in the roof from rain and small animals. Thursday, the Allstate adjustor comes by to start whatever process the insurance company has in mind.
And I guess there will be an election somewhere in there, potentially accompanied by riots, insurrection, and the start of a new civil war..
Good times!
