No to war with Iran

|

No to war with Iran…💥

Part of being an adult is tolerating and working with awful people that really don’t deserve anything positive for their bad behavior. But often it’s beneficial to work with evil as the costs of addressing evil is often higher than ignoring it.

Iran is an obnoxious bear out in the Middle East that occasionally does terrible things but mostly is content to avoid significant conflict with the United States. The same is true with the United States – the cost of destabilizing the Middle East would be significant to the United States. The most obvious impacts to every day Americans would be greatly escalated energy prices and increased police presence in public places but its unlikely to limited to that. There would be an enormous financial cost to the federal budget, leading to cuts to domestic programs and both American and Iranian lives destroyed along with damaged infrastructure.

With our own country facing significant domestic needs, I believe that should be our focus. Middle Eastern stability is less important now than in decades past with strong United States oil production and no threat of communism any more, but we shouldn’t poke the bear of Iran and unnecessarily upset the balance of power in Iran.

While I didn’t attend today’s protest downtown on the war, I will continue to speak out and will attend future protests. ✊

Doing some cleaning downstairs, looking at my rusty fridge, I figured out I spend under 15% of my income a year on rent and utilities

|

Doing some cleaning downstairs, looking at my rusty fridge, I figured out I spend under 15% of my income a year on rent and utilities… 🏡

I can’t complain too much about that these days, but that’s because I still have the same run down apartment from when I first graduated 🎓 from college and I’ve made more money at work 💼 and rent increases have been fairly modest. Rent is about 14% of my income, utilities are low because I leave the heat low most of the year, don’t use air conditioning, don’t have a lot of electronics and all my light bulbs are energy efficient. 💡Granted maybe if you count my $500 a year smartphone bill that’s another half of percent 📱 but I refuse to have internet at home and take my bottles and cans to the recycling center ♻ myself rather than pay for trash pickup. 

It’s by no means my dream home – I don’t have a big backyard ⛲ or a gun range 🔫 or livestock out back 🐐 – but it’s decent enough and it’s on two bus lines 🚍 for easy commutes to work. And it’s allowing me to save for my off grid property and a secure retirement 👴 so I can enjoy better things in the future. 

How Did the Republican Party Get So Corrupt? – The Atlantic

|

How Did the Republican Party Get So Corrupt? – The Atlantic

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.