Bad Democrat

I’m not sure how the United States would determine who is a citizen if it weren’t for birthright citizenship. If you are born and raised in the US, could your citizenship all of a sudden be up for review due to birthright citizenship ending? What if they chose me? My ancestors came from Russia and Poland in the early 1900s. It would be unprecedented, unclear, and horrifying to revoke my citizenship, not to mention a terrible mistake. Why am I even bringing it up? Because I don’t get it. I don’t know what gives me a leg up over a Hispanic person who was born here.

We are all familiar with the story of the college dropout who does something inventive and original in spite of the suppression of the normal path. But not everyone who does that is acting in good faith. When that is the case, it’s the story that leads us to neglect the bottom-line product and maybe four or five reservations we had about Elizabeth Holmes, that we overwrote because we wanted the story to be there. It’s a good thing we have that–it’s a sign we have hope and optimism. But we repeatedly overwrote our honest reactions to things about her and her company that were not adding up. We don’t want to live there again.

A Russian oil tanker arrived in Cuba yesterday, carrying a humanitarian shipment of 100,000 crude barrels of oil. Cuba hasn’t had access to oil for months because of regime change in Venezuela. Trump told his press corpse that he thought it was fine.

What I wanted to say about that is that it’s righteous that we’re doing regime change in Venezuela, as well as in Iran, and that’s because of the terror threats that live there. I feel this way because the US military backed it in the first place, because there were attacks on drug boats on the left side of Venezuela (and not just the right, and for better or for worse just the right side of a narrow entity is what we’re used to seeing on a map), and because Iran has been intent on building nuclear weapons for decades and for some reason we don’t believe it’s so they can not use them. That’s what I believe. And the politicians carrying on about the costs of war are overcoming that serious feeling of danger.

The last time I ate McDonald’s for breakfast, there was a bone in my food and I haven’t been able to bring myself to order it again. I really enjoyed their breakfasts and now I don’t have it anymore. I’m wondering why fast food I like gets corrupted if I order it enough. I’m upset to not have McDonald’s breakfasts? And I’m trying to turn it into a post.

We have a Mel’s Diner in Santa Monica, and a Randy’s Donuts. They originated in other parts of LA, but located here in recent years. I’m not crazy about the vibe of saying Mel’s Diner and Randy’s Donuts in the same paragraph, but I wanted to note that there are national chains and there are “local treasures” and in Los Angeles, the local treasures get emphasized even though I think we would like to be more in the way of national chains more like the rest of the country. It’s a little bit annoying the other way.

I don’t know how scary it is to drive a motor vehicle at the airport (I one time got a job doing maintenance on American Airlines planes at O’Hare, but I ended up not taking it), but I am feeling like it is extremely scary to be told “go” and to not really be able to look both ways because of how intense the runway is and to just trust the air traffic controller.

I don’t want to talk about Iran; I…do? Want to talk about Iran? And what an interesting war it’s been. We have been disabling their ability to stock nuclear weapons but we didn’t say so until it was over. We did a lot of other high-minded things that we did not understand, but do now (I think we do at least). And we are disabling the lifetime careers of people who posed serious threats to us as a nation. That’s good.

There’s now a 5-day pause on strikes to Iranian power plants. I don’t know what I would do if my power source could be taken out by a foreign government for years (unless they have a back-up plan), but I know one thing: you can’t be a terrorist to the United States of America.

It was interesting to hear that Israel’s goals in Iran were laid out differently–or were different–than the US’s goals in Iran. The US would be concerned with leadership structure, we would think, but Gabbard said it isn’t listed and that it was Israel’s chief concern. We are concerned about…uranium? Other terroristic awards and achievements? We are not concerned about their leadership structure. That is very interesting.