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Saw someone link a George Carlin routine about baseball and football, and I realized that probably people outside my hometown don't grow up listening to Andy Griffith's What It Was Was Football every year. Wooo Mayberry! ;)

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Quasar and Sirius

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I like to be alive and to be friends with you all! :)

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So actually earlier today, before seeing this post, I searched "Why do Americans want to be ruled by the worst of us?" Because yeah, that's the kind of stuff I search sometimes.

I found this article about a book:

We are expecting too much from democracy without really having to participate in it. We’ve become very entitled. We’ve become very self-centered. And we think that every inconvenience is a failure of democracy. We think that even the major things in our lives are a failure of democracy — if you lose your job, if a factory closes, if your health goes bad, somehow, everything has failed you. The idea that we are resilient adults who have agency and control our own destinies has become alien to multiple generations of Americans whose relationship with democracy is almost childlike. And when democracy doesn’t do everything we want it to do, we declare the whole thing a failure.

Seems relevant to this post.

I do think it's at least part of the problem, because if you spend any time online you can see things like this.

Do you ever read something and think, "That's what it is!"? I have been seeing this phenomenon playing out again and again and it just fits:

Or maybe the expectations of the global public have ceased to track with any realistic idea of government capacity. Contemplating the recent anti-incumbent turn, I have found myself returning to a conversation I had a while back with Ricardo Lagos, who was the president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. He told me that while in office, he had wooed a dissatisfied constituency by channeling substantial resources to a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Santiago, Chile’s capital. “We built a housing complex and made sure that public services like water, electricity, and health were available and reliable,” he told me. And yet, when election time rolled around, the voters of that neighborhood turned away from Lagos and supported the opposition. “I was flabbergasted,” he told me, “and decided to find out for myself what had happened. I met with a group of community leaders and was expressing my surprise and singling out the hundreds of houses we built when one of the neighbors told me, ‘Yes, Mr. President, we know what you did, but this is all about parking spaces. The houses are nice, but we don’t have any parking.’” Lagos was stunned. Public housing in Chile had never included such middle-class trappings as parking. But his constituents were getting wealthier, and as they did, their expectations ran ahead of his government’s ability to deliver. This problem is not Chile’s alone. In many countries, expectations rise faster than government capacity, governments look hapless, and the resulting public discontent makes the countries harder to govern. We can call this cycle the “Lagos paradox.” It has a long history, but I suspect that the geographical scope, social potency, and political impact of the Lagos paradox may have now assumed dimensions incomparable to any time in the past. Perhaps a global expectations gap has opened, destabilizing politics and giving rise to its toxic offspring, anti-politics.

If this is what's going on, we're fucked. Because I get my mind blown basically every day by what people blithely expect the government to be able to do and... yeah, they're not going to get all of that.

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I get cookies and chai for donating blood! :)

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I think I can comfortably say that I am the only person on the planet who has drawn a Wonderbread manatee.

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Titania in the spousal person’s lap.

The library lost power so he came home early today, right after I got home from donating blood. I was not aware of this.

I came out of the bathroom, heard a weird noise that he later said was him saying hello, saw him standing in the hallway, and screamed. : )

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Blood donation done!

I prepared well so it went quick and easy. :)