Animal Crossing is a far cry from my earlier gaming experiences from Quake, Doom, and other FPS games. There is no running around and fragging characters (although I sure have wanted to on occasion). Instead, it’s a very non-violent deliberately slow-paced game with way too much dialog that repeats itself. In spite of that I’ve managed to build all the rooms possible in my house and I paid for the storage extension for my house, so I can store all the crap that comes raining down from balloons that float over the island.

I’ve managed to play all the seasons so far, starting with Halloween, through Thanksgiving, and into Christmas. Except it’s not called Christmas, it’s called Toy Day. No mention of Christmas. I guess this is Nintendo’s War on Christmas. Whatever.

It sure looks like the commercial side of Christmas. For example I was able to buy a Santa suit.

My island even has a Christmas tree with ornaments and I can stand around with some of my zombie characters and “sing” Christmas carols.

I even participated in delivering gifts for Jingles the black-nosed reindeer, and as a reward I was gifted this sleigh with presents you see me sitting on. By the way, note the ice bar with some sort of beverage to the right. If Animal Crossing is a kid’s game, then why are we creating adult ‘toys’?

How could it be Christmas without the trashy ornamentation we have here in America? One of my rewards in-game was DIY instructions for building these lighted snowflakes you see my avatar standing between. I liked them so much I built two.

I’ve also learned to build ‘perfect’ Snow Boys. You can see me standing with three of them, created on three consecutive days. I use the high-as-my-ear method for the head before pushing it up on the body (see here https://animalcrossingworld.com/guides/new-horizons/how-to-build-a-perfect-snowman-snowboy-every-time/ for different methods). Every time you create a ‘perfect’ SnowBoy you get a season-specific DIY recipe and a large snowflake. Then every following day after creation, when you visit, you get another large snowflake. The SnowBoys do melt over time, so after three days the SnowBoys are gone, meaning you can only get three large snowflakes before the SnowBoys go away. Or at least that’s been my experience.

Game Observations

• It takes a very long time to do anything. Whether a short task or a long task, a lot of time is wasted in exposition from the characters. I find Isabella to be particularly annoying, but at least she on shows up once when you first open the game up for the day.
• I have an intense dislike of nearly all the visiting creatures. Savanah (who sells rugs), the creature who sells turnips, the creature who catches bugs, the creature who fishes, the seagull who keeps washing up on my beaches, the owl sister of the museum manager… the list goes on. I deal with the regular inhabitants, and that’s enough. All others I ignore.
• The lone visitor I tolerate is Redd the Art Dealer. Every time he shows up I go check Polygon’s list of paintings and statuary ( https://www.polygon.com/animal-crossing-new-horizons-switch-acnh-guide/2020/4/23/21231433/redd-jolly-museum-art-fake-real-forgeries-list-complete-painting-statue ) before I make a purchase. I purchased a copy of the Mona Lisa early on which turned out to be fake. I couldn’t sell it or gift it. I finally went to an island and left it there. I tolerate Redd because I’m slowly stocking my museum’s art section.
• There’s also the creature that sells seedlings. I occasionally purchase plants to place around my island.
• Every once in a while one of the island’s inhabitants starts running towards me, yelling my avatar’s name, to get my attention. It was OK for a while, but I got tired of new emotions or new nicknames. What broke the came’s back so-to-speak was when I was beating on a rock getting out bells, and one of them ran right up to me while I was hammering away. Needless to say pressing ‘A’ when the character was slow enough completely stopped me from hammering the rock and missing a lot of bells. Since then I just run away from any of the characters who start yelling my name.
• My island’s rankings. Right now it’s four stars out of five. I’m not going to push to get five out of five, especially if it means I cut down all my trees (Isabella keeps complaining how the trees make the island look too rural; good).

One in-game hook that keeps me coming back every morning are the bell trees. I find 1,000 bells buried in the ground. I dig them up, then put a 10,000 bell bag back in the hole. Three days later if I come back I have a bell tree with three 10,000 bell bags on it. And this happens every morning. Which means I need to keep coming back to get my steady 20,000 bells of in-game money (remember I seeded with a 10,000 bell bag, and doing this continuously means dropping 10,000 bells in another hole). I also dig up all my fossils, have them certified, and then sell them at Nook Corner. That’s usually another 10,000 to 15,000 bells. It builds up quickly.

I’m now building the in-game swag and sending it around to my two daughters who also play this game. I sure can’t use more than one of any item.

I’m to the point where I’m about ready to walk away indefinitely. It’s been a nice distraction during the pandemic, but I don’t know I would have ever played this game without the pandemic. I’m glad I played the seasonal parts of Animal Crossing, but at this point I think I’m done.

I don’t know how blunter to make the case, but blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Using it to make voting software more secure is a joke. A very bad joke. If you won’t take my word for it, try this formal paper on for size.

“Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting” — https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

The impetus for this came from an email letter called “Crypto-Gram” published by Bruce Schneier. I strongly recommend you sign up for it here: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/

From NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/12/15/946686152/electoral-college-has-spoken-mcconnell-belatedly-congratulates-biden-on-win

Don’t kid yourself. Moscow Mitch finally admitted the obvious because he had no other choice. Moscow Mitch and his fellow Republican cronies have reached the conclusion  that Trump needs to be eased out before Trump so damages the Republican party that it takes a very long time to repair. Trump has outlived his usefulness to them.

This doesn’t mean all is rainbows and unicorns for the Democrats. In Georgia there’s still the two senate runoff votes on 5 January that will decide control of the Senate. Further into the future it would appear that the current Republican party, regardless of their current state, have dominance in many state houses across the country. That’s going to be a high wall to climb in upcoming redistricting as well as future House and Senate races. So don’t believe all the stories and opinions about how poor off the Republican party is. They are political survivors who know what they need to do to hang onto power and feel absolutely no compunction with doing whatever it takes.

This was taken from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/15/gerrymandering-republicans-map-charts-states

As Democrats we’ve got our work cut out for us. That’s why I keep harping about the Democrats cleaning up their act. If the Democrats are really about helping people, then start helping people instead of spewing feel-good platitudes about helping people. The Republicans have cynical platitudes down to a science, such that they keep snookering voters into electing them back into office election after election. The Democrats meanwhile keep wondering around in a state of shock over why they keep getting beat like a drum.

And Florida

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The best:

• Biden officially won 302 electoral votes today, without drama. Just as he was supposed to when he won the popular vote on 3 November. Trump, meanwhile, has lost over 50 attempted lawsuits trying to overturn the democratically elected Biden. That’s not happening in any court, including the Supreme Court, simply because it’s wrong and the Trump legal [sic] team is so incredibly incompetent in practicing law, and not recognizing they have no real evidence; insane conspiracy theories are considered here-say and not admissible as evidence. I learned that watching Perry Mason.
• We’ve finally got a coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer. There are others waiting in the wings, equally efficacious, but we have the Pfizer vaccine going out right now.
• Attorney General Barr resigned today, within minutes of the final electoral college tally.

The worst:

• Trump and his ignorant millions still insist the election was stolen from him. The Republican party is now a cult of Trump, where the ultimate loyalty litmus test is believing Trump’s assertion he was somehow cheated out of a second term. Instead of the reality that enough Americans had had enough and voted in record numbers to turn him out. His narcissism won’t allow him to see how many more hate him than grovel at his feet.
• In spite of the vaccine the infection rate and the death rate still continue to climb, and will reach unheard of numbers before enough vaccine gets out to bring down the rates of infection. American could easily see one million covid19 deaths by late spring 2021.
• While Attorney General, Barr spent two years corrupting the Department of Justice into into Trump’s gang of shyster lawyers. Many good men and women who put country over politics were driven out. The fact that Barr found no evidence of the election fraud Trump so desperately believes is cold comfort to all the other ruin and destruction Barr leaves in his wake.

I have kept my mouth shut as much as possible during all of this, if for no other reason than it would do absolutely no good. Except every once in a while, such as right now. Biden won, and won, and won, and keeps on winning. So much winning! Winning that I’m not tired of.

All eyes are now on the Georgia senate races, that will decide, for two years, if Republicans retain control of the Senate.

The Democratic party is going to have to work very, very hard to clean up its act(s) across the nation and get their shit straight.Why? Because the Republican part is evil, odious, and still has considerable power to rain mischief across this great nation. The Democratic party is going to have to toughen up to fight those bastards off, for the good of the Democratic Party, and the good of the nation.

The cult of Republicanism is anti-democratic to an astounding degree, and will remain so as long as they choose to follow their current path. The Republicans enabled Trump’s election, his four years as president, and will continue to enable Trump’s political mischief. This country needs a strong conservative voice and a party to bring conservative patriots together for the good of this nation. But the Republican party is no longer that party.

The Rival has served for decades, going back to when my adult children were children.

I literally compared the two by holding one in each hand. The Rival is a lot heavier compared to the Cuisinart. It’s built like a tank. The Rival’s plastic is thicker, there’s more of it, and every non-plastic part on it is thick metal. The Cuisinart by comparison is plastic on plastic and a lot lighter. The handle on top is plastic where the Rival’s is chromed steel. The Rival still works, after a fashion. It’s that it’s taking two turns of the can to fully open it. I’m hoping the Cuisinart works for at least half as long as the Rival it’s replacing. It should. Canned food is now coming with tops that open. Only a very few items come in cans that require an electric can opener. In the mean time I’ll put the Rival out on the garage and see if I can clean it up and replace some parts, and then give it to someone who needs a working one. Or just hang on to it in case the Cuisinart doesn’t hold up as well.

The Washington Post was extremely conservative when it called the winner in each state. It was the last to call Arizona for Biden, and now, it’s finally called Georgia, giving Biden 306 electoral votes, the same number Trump got in 2016. And Trump called that a landslide. Furthermore, Biden also has won the popular vote by over 5.3 million votes.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps trying to launch lawsuits to change this, and they keep failing. Just like Trump. Today a group of Magats showed up in Washington to support the man they so admire. Needless to say it was a rabble of noisy white trash. Just the kind that would vote for Trump.

Biden won. Period. No exceptions. Nobody is trying to steal this election except the GOP.

Here are some captures of the headlines that pretty much sum up how I currently feel.

If you’re curious about the headline, it’s from Gerald Ford when he was sworn in as President after Nixon resigned. You can read Ford’s entire speech here: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740001.asp . I thought it appropriate, considering that we haven’t had a Republican president this bad since Nixon.

And of course, our current child in chief is throwing a Twitter and Facebook temper tantrum, proclaiming he won this election “by a lot.”
No Donny-boy, you did not. You really tried to cheat by getting your base to slam the polling stations on election day, and they trying to shut down the counting of all mail-in ballots that you knew were heavily Democratic. The only way you know to win is by cheating. It didn’t work this time. Oh, and by grossly mis-managing what you, as president, should have managed properly.

So here we are, still waiting. It should be noted that Biden is ahead of Trump by 3.5 million popular votes. By comparison, in 2016 Hillary beat Donald by 2.9 million votes. And since we’re talking about popular vote statistics, Trump 2020 is beating Hillary by about 3 million, but Biden 2020 is beating Hillary by over 6 million and counting. That sounds wonderful, but it’s been noted that Florida alone had 6 million voters who did not vote in 2016. Imagine how Florida might have turned out if all those voters had gone to the polls. That one item alone underscores to me that the Democratic Party is its own worst enemy, not the Republicans.

Some random facts gleaned so far:

• A surprising number of Black men voted for Trump, the highest ever. Black women supported Biden at the same levels as Clinton in 2016 and Obama in 2008 and 2012: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-men-drifted-democrats-toward-trump-record-numbers-polls-show-n1246447
• And interesting analysis of Latino voting in south Florida, Texas, and Arizona shows a diverse, some might say fragmented, group of voters. Needless to say the Democrats did poorly with Latinos in Florida and Texas, better elsewhere including Arizona. I can’t provide a link, but an editorial stated that what pulled in many Latinos in south Florida was how Trump treated Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela. That is Trump used strong-man tactics that did nothing to fix the issues, but made him appear strong, and thus appealed to many of the Latino voters who have emigrated from those countries and, I believe I read, would accept revenge via Trump’s treatment of those countries if they couldn’t get a proper solution.
• For whatever reason, the economy was the top concern of voters, followed by the pandemic. Never realizing that the economy is shit because of how the pandemic has been so grossly mis-managed by the Trump administration.
• That about half the voters in this country are still incredibly selfish, racist, misogynistic, and just down right stupid in voting for Trump. We have some real issues in this country, and the Democrats are going to have to really work to address them. And that doesn’t mean trips to the Hamptons (I’m looking at you, Hillary) when things get stressful.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the pandemic still rages on. Here’s today’s statistics.

I kept away from the news for the better part of today (except for this morning, of course). It wasn’t going to do any good doom scrolling through all the news waiting for final results. I got this around 8pm Orlando time, and when I checked right before writing this post, the numbers hadn’t changed. Biden needs just six more electoral college votes to win the Presidency. It’s been a nail-biter the entire way. I’ve been voting since I was old enough in 1972, and I’ve never seen one drag out like this. But then I’ve never seen a party as dishonest as the Republican party is today trying to cheat another four years.

In case you’re curious, I grew up in a Republican household in Atlanta, listening to William F. Buckley every Sunday on my local PBS station with my dad. I voted for Nixon in 1972, Ford in 1976, and Reagan in 1980. It was during the first Regan administration that I came to see how corrupt an administration could get, far more than Nixon. Trump is no different than Reagan was in that respect. I tried to vote for a Democrat in 1984 by voting for Walter Mondale, but Reagan won every state except Minnesota. Everyone talks about Biden picking a female vice president running mate, but Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro for his running mate in 1984. It’s taken us 36 years to pick another woman VP running mate.

Trump is railing against the voting, as usual, and his lawyer minions are filing lawsuits to derail the counting. This is after he declared victory. Right, Frumpy-boy, right.

Everyone is calling Biden the winner, and I’m just going along with what they call. Time to put myself to bed and see what tomorrow brings.

So here I am, my head down, refusing to “doom read” the news, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and I checked the numbers via The Washington Post. And the Post greeted me with the possibility that the election would end with with both Biden and Trump tied in the electoral college. Hells bells.

If this holds, then you’d think the tie-breaker would be the popular vote, in which Biden leads comfortably. But the Republicans will challenge this every step of the way in order to cheat their way in.

What bothers me is North Carolina. For the longest period North Carolina was leaning heavily towards Biden. Now it shows leaning Trump, but they’re still counting outstanding votes. I hope it swings back to Biden the way Virginia did. For the longest time last night, Virginia was headed to the Trump side, until I woke up this morning and discovered it was Biden’s.

But I refuse to hope for anything. Once again I let myself hope based on the forecasting of the pollsters, and once again, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. No more, they’re fired.

Finally, who the hell voted for Trump? After four years and a pandemic and all his lies, you re-elected an impeached president? What kind of sick, moral rot do we have in this country?

What in God’s name is wrong with us?

This is the front of my home in Orlando. Yes, I am indeed a Democrat, if that hasn’t become obvious already. I’m showing this right now in part because I’m amazed the signs are still there. In the past in this neighborhood whenever I put up any signs for any Democratic candidates, those signs were either stolen in short order or else vandalized and left in place. This year, up to this point in time, those signs have been up all of October.

Does this mean I believe Biden will win Florida? I have no idea. I tried believing in the prognosticators back in 2016, and we all know how that worked out. This time around I’ve donated time and money to get out the vote, in spite of the pandemic. I’m hopeful, but I’m not taking anything for granted. And neither, it would seem, is anybody else. A number of states have set records for early voting. For example, in Florida, at least 9 million have voted early so far, surpassing the 6+ million that voted early in 2016. But for shear chutzpa, Texas has surpassed Florida with nearly 10 million early voters, 108 percent of the total vote count in 2016. Watching what happens in Texas is going to be interesting…

I’m frozen in the moment, waiting for today to pass, then for tomorrow to come and all voters get a chance to cast their votes, followed by waiting for the results. Nothing else matters at the moment. I have no idea who will win this election year; trying to predict an outcome is a fool’s game we lost horribly in 2016. All I can say is I hope for the best, but I fear for the worst.

Vote! Vote! Vote!

I’m getting ready to vote in Florida. I’ve got my ballot marked, and ready to place it entirely in it’s Secret Sleeve, which will then go into the Special Envelope. It arrived last week, and is part of my wife and I’s setting up so that we get our ballots mailed to us until 2022. That will cover us until the 2022 midterms, which I suspect are going to be even more energetic and important than the 2018 midterms.

I would have dropped it off today at a local early voting location, but Florida shortened the early voting time from three weeks to two weeks, just one of many voter suppression acts, both big and small. My wife and I can’t drop our votes off until Monday, 19 October, at the earliest.

Why drop it off? Why not mail it back? Because the Postal Service is being actively sabotaged by Trump and his minions to make vote by mail as difficult as possible. One of the side effects of this is the slowdown in the receipt of medications and other important mail. Dropping off our completed votes is a hybrid solution to ease the burden on the post office. So our process is to ask for the ballot early enough so it comes as early in the voting cycle as possible, then fill it out as soon as possible after it’s received, finally dropping it off by hand at a local early voting station which happens to be located just five minutes from where I live. We did this for the local primary and it worked out just fine.

Also, I voted a straight Democratic ticket where I could. There are a number of amendments on this ballot which required careful research before I voted one way or another.

I’m not taking anything for granted any longer. I’m not believing the polls, even if they say Biden is ahead by double digits everywhere. I’m focused on voting for Biden and all Democrats, and in getting others motivated to at least vote, and hopefully, to persuade them to vote Biden and Democrat in general.

I’m “locked and loaded” with the most powerful weapon against Trump, a vote against him and all his minions. I can’t wait to turn it in.

The last time I wrote about the pandemic was back in late July, when the U.S. COVID-19 death toll stood at 144,000. That was terrible enough that I stopped doing any kind of notional tracking of it on this blog. Until today. And the deaths keep ticking up. There is some speculation that the number of dead will double again to 400,000 by the end of the year (see https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/us-covid-19-deaths-just-topped-200000/ ).

There’s nothing left to say or add that hasn’t already been said.

There’s nothing I can add to what has been written by far better authors over the past 24 hours. I personally feel a tremendous loss at her passing.

What a year 2020 has been, and it’s only September.

When you’re sheltering in place, it takes some creativity to come up with ways to cope. One of my coping mechanisms is the collection of cats that have built up over the past few months. Right now I have five cats, three more than I originally intended to have. I originally started with the Gingersnaps, the two brothers, who were both born in the same litter in 2015. They’ll both turn five years old this October. I’ve certainly written about Bo and Luke (a.k.a. the Gingersnaps) over the past five years in this blog. It was a quiet relationship with just the two boys, and so it would have remained for the foreseeable future

But back in April of this year, my wife read a story in Love Meow about The Runaways Animal Rescue over on the west coast of Florida, just north of Tampa. They’d rescued a mother and her litter of four newborns (who were born on St. Patrick’s Day, no less). What really made all five special is that momma and kittens were polydactyls. My wife sent an email to the young woman who runs The Runaways about the kittens, and before I knew it, we’d been selected as the #1 future forever home for two of the kittens, if that’s what we wanted. After all, two more cats? Two more mouths to feed, to care fore, two more litter boxes to keep clean? On top of that, how would the boys react?

So we finally brought the girls in and set them up in the cat nursery, which was our middle bedroom in the house. For several weeks we kept them in there with the door closed, going in constantly to feed and water them and clean out their litter box, as well as spending time playing with them. We then set up our ‘cat cage’ in the middle of the house, a large wheeled ferret cage where we could put the girls in and let the rest of the animal household see and smell and hear and in general grow used to them. The girls  knew they were safe, especially resting on some of the ledges in the center of the cage. After two more weeks of that, we finally opened the cat nursery up and let the girls out to roam at will inside the house. We never had a single problem out of anybody. As for the boys, it was Bo who decided to look after them. More often than not I’ll find him grooming the girls, and the girls sit there with their eyes closed until he’s finished. So much for worrying…

And Momma Makes Three

By the time we’d picked up the kittens at nine weeks, we’d also come to know (vicariously) their mom, Joan Jett. All four of Joan’s kittens had been placed, and she was the only one left looking for her final home. So we waited, and waited, looking to see who, and when, she was adopted. But she never was.

As the weeks went by we grew more concerned until I finally said, we need to go get Joan. And so we did. We picked her up in early August and brought her home to the cat nursery. By then, the little girls were out and about, and momma could spend time alone getting acclimated to her new digs. After two weeks of getting acclimated, Joan started to venture out of the room more and more each day. Now she’s fully integrated in with the other four. I’ve had people ask if Joan recognizes her kittens. I don’t believe so, but then, there’s no strife within the group either. Everybody is chill. Joan has picked her favorite spots to nap and watch around the house, just like the other four. The spot on the back of the sofa above is unique to her.

And so here I am with five cats. Any problems so far? Not the kind I anticipated, and nothing worth mentioning. They all love their dad (me), with Zoë in particular wanting to come up into my lap and just stare up at me. My wife she has a real bad case of daddy admiration, but give her time, and she’ll grow out of it. They give out all sorts of sweet affection to me and my wife, and they are a hoot to watch as they play with their toys and each other. I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter group of cats. When things get really crazy in the outside world, I turn inward to the five (and the two dogs, Ruby and Annie) and let their sweetness wash all the bitterness from the outside world away.

Momma Joan and her Kittens: The Very Early Days

It’s still hard to shelter in place. It’s still hard to remember to take your mask with you when you get out and go into a store. It’s getting harder to remember that back in January I had just retired and I’d made all these plans to just toodle around Florida with my wife and look at what we’d never seemed to have time to see before I retired.

On a broader scale, it’s hard to forget that once upon a time we had multiple book stores (Bookstop, Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Noble) that were filled to the brim with so many titles. Around 2000 every store had multiple shelves packed with technical books on computers, computer languages, and operating systems. They even carried one to two shelves just for Linux. O’Reilly’s books dominated, and there were many different publishers. Now there’s only a shadow of Barnes & Noble, and I have to hunt for what’s called the Technical section, buried off to one side. There’s hardly anything of note any longer. Even the ubiquitous Windows books (the OS, Office, etc) are almost gone. The problem there is the fluidity of the subject matter. By the time a book is published it’s already obsolete, as the subject, especially if it’s a language, has advanced with major new features that either aren’t documented, changed what’s been documented, or made documented features in the print version obsolete. And of course when you get into the book, you’re going to find errata, which means time to find and fix and publish, always to some obscure web page managed by the author(s).

Even my alternate favorite, science fiction, ain’t what it used to be. I’m 66, soon to be 67, and I’ve been reading science fiction since I was old enough to read. My first book was Isaac Asimov’s “Pebble in the Sky”, first published in 1950, a copy of which my dad gave me ten years later when I was seven. That started a life-long reading habit, especially in science fiction, and which still carries me today. Except I’m a lot more picky these days. I surely haven’t read everything, but I’ve read enough, and I’ve seen nearly all characters, tropes, and plots in many variations over the decades. For me, nothing will ever come close to the original Foundation Trilogy in scope or excitement, but hey, that’s me I guess.

And I certainly don’t need dystopian reading. All I have to do is look at the world-wide coronavirus pandemic, especially our handling of it, or the sadistic racism of many police departments around the US, and now it seems, around the world. But for sheer horror all I have to do is look at this year burning on the west coast of the US. I thought what Australia when through last year was horrific enough. But global warming has pushed the west into a fire season the likes it’s never seen before, complete with hell-red skies.

It’s still hard, but I will get through this, and when we come out the other side in January, Trump will be gone. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we’re going to have to really get busy and repair the tremendous damage done over the last four years by the Trump Administration. There’s the old saying “You can’t fix stupid”, but we’re going to have to fix what stupid has royally fucked up. We have no choice.

I watched the Democratic National Convention two weeks ago, and then last week I read some of the summaries of the Republican National Convention. I refused to watch the propaganda fest with Trump because I can’t stand the man, nor any of his mewling sycophants. Instead, I read various reports and summaries from sources I’ve come to trust (more or less) over the past four years, and even longer in a number of instances. I damn sure didn’t get my intel from either Twitter nor Facebook. As for news web sites, I’ve cut out quite a few since 2016, most notably Huffpost, Slate, and Salon.

And I’m pretty much done with Michael Moore. Michael Moore got lucky and predicted Trump’s surprising upset in 2016. Since then he’s taken himself so seriously, ignoring all the predictions he’s gotten wrong about Trump, such as Trump would either get impeached or resign before four years. Trump did get impeached, but it went nowhere in the Senate, so you might give that to Moore, except Moore argued in November 2016 Trump would leave like Nixon did. Except, after four years, Trump’s still around, worse than ever, and emboldened by the fact it appears nothing can stop him. So when Moore now predicts that Trump may win again in 2020 like he did in 2016, I find I’ve had more than enough of him. If Moore really wants to help Biden and Harris, then he needs to work to support them, rather than stand around predicting more gloom and doom, go to those areas where he believes more work needs to be done in support of the Democratic nominees and help the effort. Otherwise Moore can kindly shut the fuck up.

I’ve been more than ready for this since the last presidential election in 2016. As they say down here in the South, it’s time to root, hog, or die.