uboat53

[uboat53]

#Repost @gogreensavegreen

You might be more than one. You might be different ones at different times. 🫶🏽🫶🏽 you might not be one of these. There are more roles 💪🏽 but this is an amazing intro.

You can’t just like the idea and envision yourself in one of these roles you have to figure out how to be about it ♥️🫶🏽

Via @deiloh & @fablefulart

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Cudjo Lewis, the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the U.S. 

https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1525373347

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Well, that was fast, I didn't expect to have to add anything to this prediction in just a few days. Looks like Trump is trying to destroy the Post Office as well, which, if he's successful, would also kick in about mid-summer. I'm sure that'll go well in a e-commerce heavy economy.

Well, we're almost 30 days into the new Trump administration, so now seems a good time to make some predictions. Making predictions is a great way to check myself, seeing if I've screwed up something major or if I'm on the right track. That said, I'm really hoping these predictions don't come to pass. As much as I'd love to Trump taken down a few pegs, living through this doesn't sound fun. So… here we go…

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

I'm calling it now, there will be one. The current budget resolution expires on March 14th which means that Congress needs to pass and the President needs to sign a new budget resolution before midnight on that date otherwise every non-essential piece of the government shuts down.

Normally this would be pretty simple, Republicans, as the majority party in both houses of Congress and in control of the Presidency, would just pass a budget resolution and call it good, but the margins in the House in particular and the lack of coherency in the party means that they can't do this. There are hard-right Republicans who will not vote for any budget that the mainstream conservatives would agree to and, when they can only afford to lose 2-3 Republican votes, there's no budget they can put together that wouldn't lose far more than that on either side of the party. That means they need Democratic votes to pass anything.

Normally that wouldn't be too bad either, Democrats did this several times during the first Trump administration and also in the last two years when Republicans held the House during the Biden administration. The problem is that, with Elon Musk's flurry of questionably legal actions over the last several weeks, Democrats have very little (if any) faith that whatever budget they pass will actually be enacted, so I think it's extremely likely they refuse to pass any bill that doesn't include some pretty strong language against what the president is currently doing.

I have a hard time seeing him signing such a bill, so that's likely to leave an impasse, to put it lightly. The question is how long it lasts and how it ends. As for that, I'll have to predict that later.

GENERAL CHAOS

The thing about most of the things the government does is that you can get by without them for a little while, but eventually you come up to the point where they're actually pretty critical. If meat inspections don't happen for a week or two, the odds of a disaster happening are pretty small, but if meat inspections never resume, a disastrous outbreak is pretty much inevitable.

We're already seeing chaos in air travel after significant cuts to the FAA which was already struggling to keep things together. The odds are pretty good that, over the next several months, we're probably going to see major issues with VA care, food safety, universities, farming subsidies, and any number of the thousands of other things the government does on a daily basis that keep our economy functioning.

HIGHER PRICES

There's the tariffs, of course, but there's also the massive immigration crackdown. You did know that illegal immigrants harvest a huge amount of our produce, right? And process a ton of the meat we eat? And build a lot of our houses? Yeah, those are all things that they do but now they're either being shipped out of the country or too scared to show up to work in case they get arrested and shipped out of the country.

So yeah, just about any manufactured good you might buy relies on some number of imported parts, and the tariffs mean we'll pay more for all of those, but the immigration raids are likely to also have an effect on increasing the price of food and housing as well. Ultimately, nearly everything that we buy in some way depends on some sort of foreign connection, even if it's hidden well enough that you somehow think it's American made.

This has already started, by the way, the inflation rate for January ticked up past 3% again after being below that number since last summer. It's likely that will continue unless something changes.

RACIAL AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Let's face it, a lot of crazy people on the far right think that Trump is on their side and Trump himself tends to get more violent in his rhetoric when he feels like he's on the back foot, so it's a good bet that some of those people are going to start to think that now is a good time to do violent things. This one is fairly easy to predict because it's exactly what happened in Trump's first term, culminating in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Don't let the mobs and mass demonstrations fool, you, though, most of the violence is going to happen at the level of person to person. Racist white guys with guns are going to be all over this country shooting at women and minorities because they believe that they can trigger a mass movement to bring about their racist fantasies or even just get a sense of petty revenge. Like I said, I feel pretty confident about this one, it's already happened once and I don't see anything that might have changed to make it go better this time.

THE DEBT CEILING

Yeah, Trump intervened last year, making a lot of noise about repealing the debt ceiling entirely, but all that actually passed was an extension of the debt ceiling. It's not clear exactly when the U.S. Treasury will reach that ceiling, but it seems likely that it'll happen sometime between mid-March and this summer, at which point either Congress will have raised/waived the ceiling or the United States will default on its debts for the first time in history.

I literally don't have words to say how bad this would be. Lots of ink has been spilled listing all of the likely and possible consequences of such an act and it's likely to be even worse than that since there's probably a whole ton of things we haven't been able to predict about something that's never happened before.

THE TIMING

Let's talk about timing because this is where it gets interesting. The government shutdown is going to happen in March, but it's likely that it'll drag out into late spring or even summer because neither side sees a good reason to give in. The general chaos is already starting, but it's likely that it'll reach the level of being impossible to ignore by late spring or summer. Prices are rising, but that usually takes a few months to really kick in meaning that it'll probably reach a fever pitch in the public consciousness by late spring or summer. The debt ceiling will be reached by this summer at the latest. Political violence, again, is the kind of thing that picks up speed over time meaning that we'll probably see it really breaking out in, you guess it, late spring and summer.

Yeah, this summer's going to be interesting, and it has a lot to do with how Trump and his team do politics.

You see, a normal politician tries to understand what the effects of their policies would be, how they would play out, and try to time them so that they reach their maximum advantage around the time they need to run for re-election (or when their successors will be running). Trump, on the other hand, doesn't really have a sense of timing. He lives very much in the "now" and largely seems to do whatever seems best to him in the moment without much thought to future consequences.

We saw this with Covid when, in April of 2020, he insisted that everything be opened up immediately because he didn't want to be unpopular. But wouldn't it have been a better move to be a little unpopular in April, get Covid under control, and then be more popular in the fall, when the actual election was, as the guy who took care of the problem? He seemed to be unable to grasp that his popularity in April meant very little and, instead of setting things up to work out for him in the fall, he just did what felt good in the moment which obviously cost him when it actually mattered.

In much the same way, starting out his second term with a whirlwind barrage of questionably legal actions designed to tear apart much of the government has destroyed any goodwill he may have had. It probably would have been much smarter to start congenially, get a budget and an increase to the debt ceiling out of the way, THEN do whatever else they had planned. But that's not how they think or how they approach issues, so instead we're looking at a whirlwind of problems that are all going to come to head at roughly the same time.

And, look, there is at least a little bit of strategy here, though not much. The strategy is simple, do whatever they want until things start to collapse, then rely on the other side to bail you out because the consequences of not doing so are so bad.

So yeah, we're in for a rough summer and, if Trump and his people have miscalculated Democrat's willingness to bend and bail him out of his own mess, it could get a lot worse for a lot longer.

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[uboat53]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[uboat53]

The great thing about having friends and acquaintances across a variety of professions is to really hammer home as much as possible the fact there is literally zero correlation between the amount someone actually works, the amount they contribute to society, and how much they make in a year.

[uboat53]

I generally do not do any "pure emotion" posts, has to be emotion with an analytical point or an interesting take. I used to work in the international aid industry, "EA style", I know many of the people who would do the hard work of that role. Medical care, food aid, agricultural support, the works. It is ludicrously impactful work by almost-universally amazingly kind-hearted people. Sometimes those programs close down. That doesn't make the funders making those decisions evil - you can't do everything, politics is real, budget constraints are important. Even if apathy is driving your decision we are not all heroes, you don't owe someone fiscal aid in the deep way you owe someone peace and honor. Tragedy is organic to a world of complexity, it does not require malice to be manifested.

Anyway the top of the current admin are monsters through and through whose sins are unforgiveable by God and will rot in the hell that doesn't exist but I would will into existence if I could just for them.

Back to the regular posting now that that is out of my system.

[uboat53]

The judge who brought up intersex people to point out how inaccurate and wrong the Trump EO is? She was appointed by…

[uboat53]

There are many criticisms of the system to be had, but some of what people are complaining about now isn't The System, it's simply the result of voters choosing to put evil people into power. Like, yeah, this is what happens when voters line up to make the "we love hurting people and rolling back civil rights" party in charge of the federal government. The cartoon villains get cabinet appointments because the evil party has a majority in the Senate, because voters freely and willingly gave them that majority. This is why you vote against the evil party—because they do very bad things when they have enough power!

It's different from something like 2016, where the Electoral College did sincerely override the will of the people. But this time? No, it's just that too many people showed up for the evil party and not enough people showed up for the left-of-center opposition party. Elections have consequences and no system can prevent bad things from happening when enough voters choose to put proudly horrible people into power. Yes, a lot of this really does come down to voting for the better party. When enough people vote for the better party, good things happen. When enough people vote for the evil party, really bad things happen. The fact that this post may inspire much pants-shitting on this site is part of why we're here.

[uboat53]

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

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Not sure if I've told this story here before, but once upon a time, I didn't really get the point of most protests happening my area because I viewed them as "preaching to your own echo chamber" in a lot of cases. Ex: I saw people do a climate march through a very liberal university campus within a very liberal city, and I was just like "Okay, everyone here agrees with you. This place has crazy aggressive sustainability goals. What is the point of this?"

Then when Roe fell, there were a lot of protests outside the courthouses in cities near me, and though those city courthouses do serve the surrounding rural areas as well, the cities themselves are all rather progressive and left-leaning, so once again I was like "Okay, what is the point of this?" but I went anyway just for the experience. We stood on a street corner with our signs. Most people driving by honked in agreement with us. A few people yelled "abortion is murder" at us out their car windows, and we yelled back "abortion is healthcare!" Cool, okay, still didn't get the point because it's not like we were changing any minds or there in large numbers (we were no threat to any power structures), and the city already largely agreed with us.

But then we got another SUV that pulled up and yelled "abortion is murder!" at us (both husband and wife this time). Looked in the back seat, and they were traveling with their daughter who was maybe 13ish. She locked eyes with me, gave me the most serious look I've ever received, and gave us a thumbs up just above the window ledge so that her family couldn't see.

And that's the day I learned that protests are not always about threatening entrenched power structures but letting people in isolated ideological bubbles know that there are other perspectives and that if they share them, they're not alone.

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you know that phenomenon where vaccines are so effective that people forget how scary the original disease was? I think Americans are like this about government

[uboat53]

GBBO: “A s’more is basically just an Italian merengue sandwiched between two ganache-covered digestives”

Americans:

[uboat53]

So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine. And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved. Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will. This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage. Enter USAID. Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry. [...] And in the end it was a huge damn success. With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured. Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan. And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%. Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East. (If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table. Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines. I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.) Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago. It fell completely flat. Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance. In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.

Good to have a USAID story that is between "saving orphans" and "overthrowing governments"

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Hey look, we have a natural test to see if you should keep using your chosen news source.

Here's what happened, today the DOGE group put out their so-called "wall of receipts". Basically it's a web site where they list all of the spending they claim to have cut in the last few weeks they've been in operation.

The thing is, though, it's absurdly bad. They use the worst possible methods of accounting for costs that anyone who's worked in contracting for a day and a half knows are wrong and, to use one of the worst cases as an example, they even claim $8 billion in savings from cancelling a contract whose maximum value was $8 million.

So here's the test: Did your news source accurately cover this?

This is an easy story, a freshman reporter can report all of the things that were wrong with this in a few hours and seasoned reporters were on it pretty much immediately. If your chosen news source either has an incorrect story up about how much money DOGE has saved or if they haven't covered it at all, it's probably time to think about switching to a new news source that can at least cover the most basic of news stories accurately.

[uboat53]

Well, we're almost 30 days into the new Trump administration, so now seems a good time to make some predictions. Making predictions is a great way to check myself, seeing if I've screwed up something major or if I'm on the right track. That said, I'm really hoping these predictions don't come to pass. As much as I'd love to Trump taken down a few pegs, living through this doesn't sound fun. So… here we go…

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

I'm calling it now, there will be one. The current budget resolution expires on March 14th which means that Congress needs to pass and the President needs to sign a new budget resolution before midnight on that date otherwise every non-essential piece of the government shuts down.

Normally this would be pretty simple, Republicans, as the majority party in both houses of Congress and in control of the Presidency, would just pass a budget resolution and call it good, but the margins in the House in particular and the lack of coherency in the party means that they can't do this. There are hard-right Republicans who will not vote for any budget that the mainstream conservatives would agree to and, when they can only afford to lose 2-3 Republican votes, there's no budget they can put together that wouldn't lose far more than that on either side of the party. That means they need Democratic votes to pass anything.

Normally that wouldn't be too bad either, Democrats did this several times during the first Trump administration and also in the last two years when Republicans held the House during the Biden administration. The problem is that, with Elon Musk's flurry of questionably legal actions over the last several weeks, Democrats have very little (if any) faith that whatever budget they pass will actually be enacted, so I think it's extremely likely they refuse to pass any bill that doesn't include some pretty strong language against what the president is currently doing.

I have a hard time seeing him signing such a bill, so that's likely to leave an impasse, to put it lightly. The question is how long it lasts and how it ends. As for that, I'll have to predict that later.

GENERAL CHAOS

The thing about most of the things the government does is that you can get by without them for a little while, but eventually you come up to the point where they're actually pretty critical. If meat inspections don't happen for a week or two, the odds of a disaster happening are pretty small, but if meat inspections never resume, a disastrous outbreak is pretty much inevitable.

We're already seeing chaos in air travel after significant cuts to the FAA which was already struggling to keep things together. The odds are pretty good that, over the next several months, we're probably going to see major issues with VA care, food safety, universities, farming subsidies, and any number of the thousands of other things the government does on a daily basis that keep our economy functioning.

HIGHER PRICES

There's the tariffs, of course, but there's also the massive immigration crackdown. You did know that illegal immigrants harvest a huge amount of our produce, right? And process a ton of the meat we eat? And build a lot of our houses? Yeah, those are all things that they do but now they're either being shipped out of the country or too scared to show up to work in case they get arrested and shipped out of the country.

So yeah, just about any manufactured good you might buy relies on some number of imported parts, and the tariffs mean we'll pay more for all of those, but the immigration raids are likely to also have an effect on increasing the price of food and housing as well. Ultimately, nearly everything that we buy in some way depends on some sort of foreign connection, even if it's hidden well enough that you somehow think it's American made.

This has already started, by the way, the inflation rate for January ticked up past 3% again after being below that number since last summer. It's likely that will continue unless something changes.

RACIAL AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Let's face it, a lot of crazy people on the far right think that Trump is on their side and Trump himself tends to get more violent in his rhetoric when he feels like he's on the back foot, so it's a good bet that some of those people are going to start to think that now is a good time to do violent things. This one is fairly easy to predict because it's exactly what happened in Trump's first term, culminating in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Don't let the mobs and mass demonstrations fool, you, though, most of the violence is going to happen at the level of person to person. Racist white guys with guns are going to be all over this country shooting at women and minorities because they believe that they can trigger a mass movement to bring about their racist fantasies or even just get a sense of petty revenge. Like I said, I feel pretty confident about this one, it's already happened once and I don't see anything that might have changed to make it go better this time.

THE DEBT CEILING

Yeah, Trump intervened last year, making a lot of noise about repealing the debt ceiling entirely, but all that actually passed was an extension of the debt ceiling. It's not clear exactly when the U.S. Treasury will reach that ceiling, but it seems likely that it'll happen sometime between mid-March and this summer, at which point either Congress will have raised/waived the ceiling or the United States will default on its debts for the first time in history.

I literally don't have words to say how bad this would be. Lots of ink has been spilled listing all of the likely and possible consequences of such an act and it's likely to be even worse than that since there's probably a whole ton of things we haven't been able to predict about something that's never happened before.

THE TIMING

Let's talk about timing because this is where it gets interesting. The government shutdown is going to happen in March, but it's likely that it'll drag out into late spring or even summer because neither side sees a good reason to give in. The general chaos is already starting, but it's likely that it'll reach the level of being impossible to ignore by late spring or summer. Prices are rising, but that usually takes a few months to really kick in meaning that it'll probably reach a fever pitch in the public consciousness by late spring or summer. The debt ceiling will be reached by this summer at the latest. Political violence, again, is the kind of thing that picks up speed over time meaning that we'll probably see it really breaking out in, you guess it, late spring and summer.

Yeah, this summer's going to be interesting, and it has a lot to do with how Trump and his team do politics.

You see, a normal politician tries to understand what the effects of their policies would be, how they would play out, and try to time them so that they reach their maximum advantage around the time they need to run for re-election (or when their successors will be running). Trump, on the other hand, doesn't really have a sense of timing. He lives very much in the "now" and largely seems to do whatever seems best to him in the moment without much thought to future consequences.

We saw this with Covid when, in April of 2020, he insisted that everything be opened up immediately because he didn't want to be unpopular. But wouldn't it have been a better move to be a little unpopular in April, get Covid under control, and then be more popular in the fall, when the actual election was, as the guy who took care of the problem? He seemed to be unable to grasp that his popularity in April meant very little and, instead of setting things up to work out for him in the fall, he just did what felt good in the moment which obviously cost him when it actually mattered.

In much the same way, starting out his second term with a whirlwind barrage of questionably legal actions designed to tear apart much of the government has destroyed any goodwill he may have had. It probably would have been much smarter to start congenially, get a budget and an increase to the debt ceiling out of the way, THEN do whatever else they had planned. But that's not how they think or how they approach issues, so instead we're looking at a whirlwind of problems that are all going to come to head at roughly the same time.

And, look, there is at least a little bit of strategy here, though not much. The strategy is simple, do whatever they want until things start to collapse, then rely on the other side to bail you out because the consequences of not doing so are so bad.

So yeah, we're in for a rough summer and, if Trump and his people have miscalculated Democrat's willingness to bend and bail him out of his own mess, it could get a lot worse for a lot longer.

[uboat53]

Idk if it was you who promoted the 5 Calls app but the righteous vindication I felt after speaking to people at the offices of my dumb red state was euphoric. So thank you for that or just the gumption to get my socially anxious ass on the phone.

Aha, it was not me, but this does give me an excellent opportunity to yell about this tool to my followers. If you haven't heard about 5 Calls, hie ye to the below link and take a look:

Wanna call and/or righteously yell at your congresscritters but aren't sure who you should contact, what you should say, or what might be the most effective approach? Then 5 Calls is here for you. They provide easy-to-look-up contact information by district, scripts and lists of hot-button issues, support for first-time callers, and more. It is your one-stop-shop for Harassing Your Electeds In The Age of Trump 2.0, and I absolutely recommend that everyone go there and take a look and/or pick an issue and get a-callin'. So yes.

(And also: yay! I'm especially glad that you overcame that bitchass phone anxiety and got to yell at red-state Trumpist myrmidons in particular. That is always important and I'm very glad you did it.)