A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Here is a free article from the New York Time about why the Canadian government believes that America is serious about annexing Canada.

I have talked to a number of Americans about this, and most of them have replied that Trump is not serious about this, is just trolling, and we're playing into his hands if we take it seriously. There seems to be a big disjunct between what the President of America is saying and doing, what the Canadian government believes is happening, what Canadian citizens believe is happening, and what the American public believes is happening.

Please read at least the article I linked above before you comment on this post.

Here are some more links, if you're interested.

Mother Jones asks around

Advice from a Canadian on how not to be an American asshole. (I personally think there is some utility in using the trappings of American patriotism to discuss issues with certain Americans, that point has now been stated, let's not spend the whole discussion on it.)

Similarly, how Americans can use language.

Once again, please read at least the first article before commenting.

Also, here and in general, please keep in mind that anything you communicate in an electronic medium could be read by the US government and potentially used against you. This goes not only for public posts like this one, but for locked posts, emails, and phone calls. I am absolutely serious about this. If mere dissent becomes illegal we're all fucked anyway, but just in general, do not even fantasize about anything that is illegal now.

For the record, should I be murdered with a gun as is the fate of so many in America, I would like my death to be politicized immediately. Further, I would like the most graphic possible photos of my mutilated corpse to be publicized, made into flyers, and used to leaflet-bomb the homes of appropriate politicians and supreme court justices.

On the principle that the results you get are the results you want, I think there's a reason other than profit for the people encouraging the unhindered proliferation of guns in the US, and the more lethal and crowd-killing, the better. It's to terrorize people out of public gatherings and prevent the freedom of assembly.

All non-violent political change stems from public assembly; protests and demonstrations may be effective or not, depending on circumstances, but you cannot enact nonviolent political change when people cannot gather. So getting people scared to go out in public in groups is a great way to prevent political change.

It also has side benefits: destroying public education by making people afraid to send their kids to school and making it hard for kids to learn when their brainpower is getting sucked up by fear, funneling more and more money away from anything that benefits actual humans and toward the police (who won't stop the shootings, so that part won't be a problem), and of course creating more of a market for guns from people who think they need one to defend themselves, and so the circle of murder generates profit generates murder continues.

ETA: Jayland Walker drives while black and runs from cops; they shoot him 60 times. Robert Crimo murders 6 people, wounds 40, and runs from cops; they arrest him unarmed. Can't imagine white's different about them.

Screamed at a Don’t Tread On Me flag waving gun nut, "TAKE THAT SNAKE AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR AAAAAAAAASSSSS!!!!!!"

Once again, California is having a strange and stupid election. If you're a California voter, or if you're not but are aware of this situation, I would like your opinion on an element of the vote to recall Governor Gavin Newsom.

To catch up anyone who isn't aware of this idiotic situation, our governor Gavin Newsom pissed off basically everyone this last year for a multitude of reasons I won't bore you with. (Me included. I voted for him and regretted it.) However, on a scale of US governors, he's not that bad. Honestly we could do a lot worse. And we might be about to do a lot worse.

Republicans launched a recall effort in an attempt to replace him with a Republican. This succeeded, and we're going to have a special election on September 14 to determine whether or not we'll vote him out. Here is where things get really weird.

There are two questions on the ballot. One is "Should Governor Newsom be recalled? Yes/No."

This part is straightforward. I'm voting "No, do not recall him." So should you, no matter how much you dislike him. We'll have a chance to vote for someone better (please God) in the regular governor election in 2022.

The next question is "If Governor Newsom is recalled, who should replace him?" Then there's a list of candidates. You can leave this part blank or vote for one of them, regardless of how you voted on the first question.

Here comes the fucking insane part. If Newsom is recalled, whoever gets the most votes on the second question becomes governor. So if 51% of Californians vote to recall Newsom, and the candidate with the most votes only gets, say, 18% of their total votes because the votes were spread out among the other candidates or most people didn't vote for another candidate at all, Mr. 18% is now governor of California.

WHAT THE FUCK, CALIFORNIA??? WHY CAN'T THE RECALL BE ITS OWN VOTE, AND THEN HOLD ANOTHER ELECTION IF AND ONLY IF HE LOSES?

The other candidates doing best in polls are Republican Larry Elder, a Trumpist radical right-wing radio host, and Kevin Paffrath, the only Democrat getting any traction at all, a landlord vlogger with with no political experience.

Republicans are unsurprisingly very excited about voting in this election. Democrats are unsurprisingly not. Lots of people don't understand how this election works, because it's so fucking bizarre. Newsom is polling badly and may well be replaced by one of these jokers.

My question is this. Like I said, I'm voting no. But should I leave the second question blank, or should I hold my nose and vote for Paffrath on the basis that he's less bad than Elder?

Newsom and the CA Democratic Party is advising everyone to leave the question blank. But since the questions are independent of each other, what's the advantage of doing so?

ETA: via AP: Cox has sought to gain attention by campaigning with a 1,000-pound Kodiak bear, which he said represented the need for “beastly” changes in the state.

As you have probably heard, the US Post Office has been sabotaged by Trump appointee Louis DeJoy. What you may not be aware of is exactly how bad the damage is.

I recently had a box of perishable pastries mailed to me from one section of Los Angeles to another. When they arrived, the postmark showed that they had been sent Priority 1-Day mail on July 22. They arrived on August 9 - almost three weeks later.

Earlier, I had a box of refrigerated medication sent Priority 1-Day mail. It was stuck in transit for nine days. Like the pastries, it was ruined by the time of arrival.

Those are the most egregious examples, but since DeJoy took over, my mail has generally been unreliable and sometimes doesn't arrive at all.

Many states in America will throw out ballots that arrive late, even if they were postmarked on Election Day. Trump has already stated that he intends the election to be decided by the end of the day of Election Day, regardless of how many mail-in ballots have not been counted. He's also already stated that he considers mail-in ballots to be often fraudulent and invalid.

If you intend to vote by mail and your state has ballot drop-off boxes, don't mail your ballot. Put it in a drop-off box. Mailed-in ballots are liable to arrive weeks late or never.

I'm cutting this for c&p-ing some news articles behind paywalls. Nothing graphic described. Two medium-length articles explaining some of what went wrong and why, plus some highly dubious-sounding justifications from city officials. Plus commentary by me. Please chime in with thoughts or further info, if you've found any.

To be clear: I think some people probably would have died in Paradise even under perfect emergency management. That was a horrific fire that moved incredibly fast. But it should been a person or two who fell through the cracks the way people do - an isolated person who got missed, someone who ran back to fetch something, etc. It should not have been, as is looking likely, over a hundred.

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Since I'd driven all the way down to Norwalk, I decided to stick around for the training and tour, out of curiosity. The facility and employees for processing and counting votes was extremely impressive. They have multiple mechanisms to count and verify votes, ensure their Scantrons are reading votes accurately, etc. Everyone working there seemed serious, dedicated, and competent, insofar as a non-expert could tell. If there were any shenanigans going on, I don't think they were going on there.

The standing rule turned out to not be an actual rule (and was never mentioned by anyone at the registrar - it was told to me by the person from the campaign I was working on). The actual issue is that the area we were supposed to be observing was crowded and busy, and if we wanted to be close enough to see the screens of the people working, we had to be in the aisle behind them. Putting a chair in the middle of the aisle would block it, while a standing person could just step aside. As it turned out, so many people had showed up that we were verging on blocking the aisles anyway, so the supervisors limited us to six per aisle. Which meant I couldn't get into the aisle anyway. (That's also why people couldn't move around much - it was at maximum capacity).

So I just sat down in a chair beside the aisle, and nobody said a thing. However, I wasn't doing anything particularly useful there, so I eventually took off and suggested to the campaign guy that he put me on ballot chasing instead. He took down my number, but I have heard nothing and after the snippy message I sent as soon as I arrived and discovered the situation, I don't expect to.

So, I actually don't think there were any shenanigans, and if I'd told any of the people actually working there about my situation, I'm sure they would have found a place where I could sit and generally observe, or showed me areas where it was fine to walk around. But I don't think they were obliged to accommodate specific requests by specific campaigns that conflicted with existing rules like not blocking the aisles. I lay this completely on the campaign, which should have notified us of the physical requirements so if we had a problem with it, we could've done something else. I'm also baffled by why they had so many people put on observation that it was literally maxed out, when presumably they had an unlimited number of ballots to be chased.

That was not how I'd have chosen to spend my day, but I did leave with a new respect for how Los Angeles runs voting and vote counting. Also glad I chose to work with the Katie Hill campaign rather than the Gil Cisneros campaign.

In case anyone was wondering. I am in one of the most wildfire-proof parts of LA - no brush or forests anywhere near me. I do have an evac plan in place though. Just in case.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can google "Woolsey Fire" and "Camp Fire." (There's also a third fire which forced the LA Zoo to evacuate some parrots and lemurs, but it seems less serious.) All three of these blew up yesterday. All of Malibu and 3/4 of Thousand Oaks has been evacuated. I can't stress too much how huge that is - those are both large areas, not small towns. Paradise, a small town, was completely destroyed.

The majority of the people who were present or lost someone at the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks the day before yesterday had to flee for their lives the next day for a completely unrelated reason. Unrelated, that is, except in the sense that both the regular mass shootings and the scope/frequency of fires are directly caused by political choices and are currently things our government is hellbent on making worse.

Apocalyptic photo of smoke over Malibu

Trump's response to 11 dead (and counting), thousands of homes destroyed, and a quarter of a million people evacuated was to blame California and threaten to withhold federal funding. FUUUUUUUUCK HIM.

A couple nights ago I attended a meeting of the city council on whether to declare my city, Culver City, a sanctuary city. It was already acting as one, but the measure made it actual law.

Culver City is its own city within LA county, with its own police force; I live on the dividing line, which means that if I observe a crime being committed on my side of the street I call Culver City police, but if it's across the street it's a matter for LAPD. Culver City police is the police force I volunteer with. It practices neighborhood policing, in which police are assigned to a specific neighborhood for years and sometimes permanently, so they can get to know who lives there and what's normal and what isn't. They also believe in de-escalating situations rather than charging in with guns blazing, and I have seen this in action. No organization is perfect... but they're really good.

One of my neighbors emailed me to inform me of the sanctuary city vote, and so I showed up. I live in a fourplex, and found at the meeting that all four apartments in my building had at least one representative at the meeting: a 100% building turn-out! I'm in the first row in the black jacket. The guy on my right is my downstairs neighbor.

It was my first city council meeting. There was a huge turn-out consisting of hundreds of Culver City residents and eight or ten non-resident paid Trump agitators. The Trump agitators were next to me, against the wall.

Because of the huge turn-out, the council had other matters go first. I was charmed by the multiple Farmer's Market vendors who spoke to urge the council to re-hire a guy named Emanuel who had been running the market for nine years, all eloquently praising him, often mentioning "despite his youth." When they were done, Emanuel himself spoke. He mentioned being 29, so he started when he was 20! Impressive. He was voted in. I was also intrigued by the several vendors who made references to the previous manager leaving under what were apparently mysterious circumstances ("Emanuel took over after [I forget his name] left... for whatever reason," and "Since [Whover] went... wherever he went," etc).

Then we moved on to the main matter. 79 people spoke, at two minutes each. All but one of the actual Culver City residents were in favor of the sanctuary city resolution, which is pretty amazingly unified. It was cool to hear everyone's stories - immigrants, descendants of Holocaust survivors, lawyers making lawyerly suggestions, teenagers, pastors, veterans, and a hilarious number of parents of exactly two children, many of them attending the same high school. (Culver City has the fourth most diverse school population in America - 25% African-American, Asian American, Latino/a, and White.)

The Trump agitators loudly booed and cat-called Every. Single. Speaker. This despite the council members repeatedly telling them not to. A high school student from an immigrant family made a very moving speech, and started crying when he spoke about his family's struggles; the Trump agitators loudly mocked him. At that, the entire audience got up and gave the student a standing ovation.

The agitators' speeches were clearly meant for some audience other than their actual one; Trumpers on youtube, I think. They threatened and insulted the council members and audience, yelled, "Sessions is coming for you!" invoked strange Biblical conspiracy theories, and said, "They're gonna rape your women!" and "They're gonna kill you all!" Culver City is extremely liberal and this did not go over well.

The meeting started at 7:00 PM, and ended at a quarter to 1:00 AM. By around 11:00, the heckling and booing was getting pretty old. A Muslim speaker who was calling for peace and brotherhood got called a murderer and terrorist. At that point, I snapped, "SHUT UP!" and a council member had the loudest yeller evicted. When he was allowed back in about half an hour later, he brandished and set off a taser. He was then escorted out by the cops and not allowed back in.

The remaining agitators got bored and left before the actual vote. The council members spent about an hour debating the actual provisions of the measure, with input from the chief of police and the city attorney. In the end, the measure passed 3-1 (the dissenter also voted for sanctuary, but as a symbolic measure only without specific provisions), with one provision stricken (providing funds for immigrants' legal defense) and a few others reworded. Victory!

The whole thing got me interested in city politics, which I haven't been involved in previously in that sense. It was also nice to do something as a part of my community, after mostly living under a rock for the last two years.

This is a really bittersweet election-- Obama won, but so did the loathesome, cruel, discriminatory Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage in California. The legal status of thousands of married couples is now completely up in the air.

My hope is that the next four years will either let more Californians meet the married gay couples in their midst and see that they're not that scary after all, or, as is more likely, that the legal battle to divorce married couples against their will is going to be so mean and hateful that it will end up convincing those same Californians that it's wrong to force couples to divorce and also wrong to refuse them the right to marry. One way or another, I can't imagine not having a "reverse Proposition 8" proposal on the ballot four years from now. And I hope we've gained four years' worth of feelings of compassion and justice.