When You're Done doing Cartwheels about Biden winning Pennsylvania and the Elector Count....

One-third of California voters supported Donald Trump.

Remember what kind of people they are:

• They came in reacting to substance abuse in their midst, reacting like they were in denial then.
• They left power in denial to a life-threatening illness.

This not hallmark of people with whom one could negotiate or govern. Their nihilism shows that they have been thoroughly saturated by the oligarchs' program of reducing a citizens' understanding if and a belief in government as both a verb and noun. They scorn commonwealth. Their program is Every Man for Himself now and for the foreseeable future. 

Villainizing them is one thing. For those unlike them who miss that they are a continuing danger to any state in North America that they may be a national of is folly.

The day is filled with a romance for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. When they get to work, the results of their election will be different. Any implied promise that a Biden Administration that is imagined today will meet with an opposition by a Congress that is indifferent at best.

Biden is the better man for the short term. Once the pandemic has been stopped, we'll be reminded that a 40+% deplorable electorate is adverse to good things: healthcare, education, housing, human and civil rights. People who scorn civic engagement and replace it with puerile taunting can't be shamed to negotiate in good faith often, if ever.

Hope that you enjoyed that cold shower.

Message for A Second Term

Organizing has ground to a halt in this pandemic. Whatever we might have done to show up and talk to people to support an independent California that we might have normally done before the pandemic is just too risky for me and probably you, too, today. What I see that there is to do is to plan for the future. My campaign for election as chapter coordinator for nine Southern California counties is based on putting together a plan to find technical assistance in building up our contact management system.

We need to be able to prospect through thousands of contacts

There are roughly 39 million people in California. If the California National Party is to get a checkbox on voter registration forms, the state law mandates that we would need 60,000 people to register. To do that, we need a way to work remotely to gather names with contact information. We'll probably need about 100,000 contacts to sift through to register. We can count on the partisan duopoly, more likely Democrats than Republicans, to disallow and/or deny registrations in the office of the Secretary of State and probably any registrar of voters office in every county. The party won't be able to fight every denial so we will have to expand our goal to exceed the threshold significantly.

For the sake of illustration, let's say that the California National Party sets up a program where we have one CNP activist with the goal of 5 registrants.  You can pick either 12,000 to 20,000 people who read e-mails or URLs in text messages and will show up, say, at every 3rd event near them. We need something to manage people at that scale. We have it, but it's not working right to manage phone banking (a very 20th Century concept) or to be able to manage people who respond to a text message.

I don't believe that the California National Party has a sufficient infrastructure to create our own narrative for either California subordinate to the USA (as it is now) or the California independence movement. Again, our contact management system must be repaired and expanded to drive our own content to news media.

Because of that problem, I am writing a manual to seek out technical assistance - either an intern or volunteer covering much of the following:

• definition of the problems with our contact management and e-commerce system
• the functions that need repair and management by a person with technical expertise
• the substance and duration of the relationship between the technical person and the party
• the plan for developing the party's technical infrastructure

Again, none of this will happen on the streets. I picked this not only because the work can be done remotely, over the Internet but also because it is something that I have seen novel political movements neglect for well over a decade. While our contact management application is not groupware, it is more essential than a collaboration package for political organizing.

With your support, I will prepare us for a time to meet for California and gather for our interests, to come up with plans for our neighbors to work towards being free of country indifferent to our needs.

Joe Biden is the best you could get for POTUS during this pandemic

My wife and I are in high-risk categories for people to be infected by the novel Coronavirus. My in-laws are more immunocompromised than I am. We did a run-through of one of us (me) infecting everyone else in the house with the flu in February. I was tested - it wasn't COVID-19 but it worried us all enough for my wife, a nurse, to take me then my mother-in-law to the E.R. I was laid out for most of a week. My in-laws were laid out for a week-and-a-half. la My wife rarely misses work for sickness - she missed two days. About 6 - 8 weeks after recovering, I tested for COVID-19 antibodies: I had none. Others recounted on social media about contracting a strain of influenza that was nastier than anything that they had before in February. One other friend who had that flu, got laid out pretty badly by it also tested negative. I feel like that flu in February - March was a bullet whizzing past my head. 

I freely admit that I could seem self-involved about my concerns about contracting Coronavirus, but I know others will be threatened by it, too. The nihilism of those who deny the lethality of the virus defies description. It's changed my priorities. I haven't gone out to protest the killing of George Floyd because of it. Last weekend my wife and I took my octogenarian mom out for dinner to Pacific Beach. We were surrounded by young people everywhere who wouldn't be bothered to wear a mask; I won't be going back until after the pandemic. Everyone in our house has a gun to their heads: I don't think the vaccination for this Coronavirus won't be ready until Fall 2021 at the earliest, sorry Oxford. The next POTUS would have been sworn in 9 months before. 

It impacts what I see for voters in the U.S.A., whose choices for POTUS are:

1. An old man who has most likely assaulted women (no one is debating that), shows no capacity for the nuances of science and would continue to put profit ahead of saving people from a pandemic.
2. Another old man has a mediocre/unremarkable record on women's rights (Anita Hill's testimony). He has built up the penal industrial complex. To his credit, he has demonstrated the capacity of understanding complex concepts. This Number Two might trade some integrities to save more people: he'll know what the best thing to do would be but is conditioned to look at legislation that 60 - 70% of what is needed as golden.

Will Donald Trump dither with that time until a vaccine is ready? He most certainly has dithered with the time since the pandemic began. Trump has not used the War Powers act to produce and stockpile sufficient PPE. His Health and Human Services Administration has not protected nursing homes. You can fill most of the large stadiums in the U.S. with all who have died from the disease today (those numbers may be undercounted). Donald Trump and his cult following are a threat to my life until the region around San Diego reaches herd immunity to this novel Coronavirus.

I'm writing this for everyone who I know in person and from social media who are like me dissatisfied with the office of POTUS and/or the nation governed by it. They have all kinds of reasons for being #NeverBiden. I understand those reasons and they would be more valid if there weren't a pandemic. Think about it: would Joe Biden as POTUS handle the pandemic better if not screw up less than Trump would in a second term? Biden would almost assuredly get the federal government to do its best to make sure that a vaccine for this novel Coronavirus gets to us and the people around us.  With Biden, there would be a bottom to how bad the United States could be. Without Biden, I believe that me, my family, BIPOC, the poor, uninsured and essential workers would be much more vulnerable.

Cheap Talk about California as a "Nation/State".

Plenty of allies for California Independence got excited by an opinion piece published in Bloomberg. It annoys me because it not true: California will remain an ATM for federal and any other election of any office as long as California is one of the U.S.

Don't take my word for it - look it up on the FEC's website. You can look up any committee with Trump or Mitch McConnell's name on it on that site and search for donations from California. You'll find millions have come from Californians that effectively suppressed and deprived their neighbors. I find them to be wonderful protest targets....that would be down the line.

So yeah, Newsom would be all in for giving money to a Doug Jones or a Connor Lamb because they are both on the same bench while neither Jones nor Lamb would do anything to return a deported parent to work here to support minor children or to make sure a DREAMer would be able to stay in the only community that she knows.

Where are the facts about A.B. 5?

A.B. 5 (Gonzalez) has shaken up a lot of freelance workers, disrupted their income streams and the ways that they have made a living. Writers who I know (of) have been negatively impacted by the legislation, publishers of news enterprises have had that they have had to change staffing practices because of it. It was created because of freelance laborers in the gig economy, specifically, those who contracted with transportation network corporations - predominantly Lyft and Uber - have been subjected to drastic decreases in their income after those two corporations.

On occasion, I have driven both Lyft and Uber. It's like any other job: if you put the time and the effort in, you get something out of it. I have been a supporter of A.B. 5 all along. I still support the law. I find Uber and Postmates' opposition to the law a prime example of amoral capitalism. I worked for Postmates one evening: their driver application is designed to confuse and startle drivers into accepting deliveries. All three companies take much more than half of either of the mark up to food delivered or one fare. None give a driver clear terms on what the break down of what payment would be for any offer of a fare or delivery before a driver can choose to accept or reject the work. All must have agents in Sacramento, there is no way that they could have missed the author announcing the legislation on social media; yet none of them tried to negotiate a law that they could work with.

Currently, the law is a work in progress. Omitting a challenge by plebiscite, I suspect that there will be plenty of tweaks to it at least throughout the current legislative session.

The law passed last autumn. I have heard from freelance journalists and writers, they have lost work because of this. The stories are real, but still, they are anecdotes. I ask for facts about the results of the legislation; I got silence instead:

The problem that anyone who opposes A.B.5 has is that few lack the capacity to not end up in the same pot with the neo-fascist ideologues who attack the bill's author because of their bigotry. There are a lot of people on social media who attack anything that Gonzalez does, from anything substantial to the most trivial. Those who do have good faith arguments against A.B. 5 have chosen to remain silent rather than be cast alongside those who blurt with no respect for themself or others (sic). Then I engage with people who are as rational about the legislation as those who oppose vaccinating children. As you can see, it didn't go well. These graduates from the Rupert Murdoch School of Civil Discourse aren't helping to fix A.B. 5 - they are more interested in burning it or Lorena Gonzalez or liberal governance down. That obscures the genuine flaws of the dominant half of the Partisan Duopoly in California.

The best example of that comes from the top: Governor Newsom didn't make an effort to separate homeless Californians from the mentally ill or substance-abusing Californians in his State of The State Speech today. Prop. 63 of 2004 does need to be put into effect, but those who need those services should be distinguished from those who were victims of laissez-faire government and capitalism. California Democrats won't tell the truth about their constituents' greed, misinformed paradigms or poor character - they just aren't willing to rock the boat in a way that will do any more than treat the symptoms of homelessness.

When there are meaningful statistics about the effects that A.B. 5 has had on gig workers or independent contractors,  Californians can have a meaningful discussion about the law. Only if that data makes it above the din made by ideologues and those who muddy up civil discourse, California will know if the law works for them.