The Mandelbear's Musings

I had a lot of trouble getting out of bed this morning. I finally managed it, after well over an hour of drifting. Admittedly most of that time was spent with a cat in my lap, but since I'd already dislodged Desti to take a bio-break and then gone back to bed, it makes a rather poor excuse. It's been happening more and more often lately -- I'd debated titling this post "Sleepless in Seattle", but that was before running into an article about The Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats's the "Second Coming". It also refers to Fintan O’Toole's “Yeats Test” -- “The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.”

Inability to get out of bed is a symptom of depression that I haven't had until quite recently. (As opposed to being unable to get to sleep, or get back to sleep, which has been a problem for decades.) Bad news has been difficult to avoid or to ignore, lately. I suppose it counts as situational depression if the country you live in is being taken over by Nazis. Or should I be calling it chronic stress?

I was going to provide links (under a cut tag), but I think I can put those into another post, or let them wait until Sunday's done since post. It's not as if the situation will go away between now and then.

So meanwhile, have a poem:

The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -- William Butler Yeats, 1919

And a song: Richard & Mimi Fariña : Children Of Darkness -- I think I'll leave the lyrics for Saturday, though you'll find them at the link as well.

I wish that poem and that song were not as relevant now as they were when they were written. Sorry.

I'm maxed out on outrage again. This is getting to be my normal state these days.

CONTENT WARNING: abortion rights. If you think this might be triggery, click here, skip to the end, and move on. If you don't know what the US Supreme (kangaroo) Court did yesterday, please come out from under your rock.

This is the third time I've posted Cat Faber's song "Underground Rail" under Songs for Saturday. (The other two were in 2012 and 2019.) I'd like to stop, but it doesn't look as though that's going to be an option.

a little space, because I'm not going to cut-tag this:

[mp3] -- From Cat Faber's 2007 CD, I Promised Eli (Songbook [PDF])

[ogg] [mp3] -- From Lookingglass Folk's concert at Conflikt, 2012.

Notes & Links

== filk-related @ Songs for Saturday: Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt in Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012 @ I Promised Eli Underground Rail [mp3] Songbook [PDF] @ mdlbear | Songs for Saturday: Underground Rail 2012/02/26 @ mdlbear | Songs for Saturday: Underground Rail Reprise 2019/05/18 == general @ Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion -- AP as expected @ Digital Security and Privacy Tips for Those Involved in Abortion Access | EFF @ Elevated Access (acelightning73) " volunteer pilots transport passengers at no cost to access the healthcare they need " @ Abortion funds: Everything you need to know @ The abortion pill: What is it and how to access it - Public Good News @ underground_rail | American women buying abortion pills from Third World countries

a little space



end of post.

Today I am grateful...

• Because I am, at least for now, still living in a democratic republic. Yesterday that was in doubt. Two weeks from now I expect to be living in a Democratic republic, at least for two more years.
• For the results of the Georgia runoff elections, giving the Democrats control of the Senate. It's tenuous, but I'll take what I can get.
• For vaccines. Special callout for mRNA.
• For The Downsizers, who have been organizing and packing up Mom's apartment. (I mentioned them three Thursdays ago as well. They're still being awesome.)

Somehow Dump Trump AND!!!, made by Julie Matthaei (another former resident of the activist co-op Columbae House), didn't make it into a Songs for Saturday post, but it was posted here, the day before the election, under the river tag.

Anyway, last week Julie produced a sequel: Dumped Trump AND!!!. She also wrote an article about the creation process: Dump Trump AND!!! Singing Across the Generation Gap for a 21st-Century Revolution (which also explains how "AND" got into the title).

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8575 words in 22 posts this month (average 389/post)
     92 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

I'm clean out of ideas for a s4s post, so this will have to do instead. Next week's Songs for Saturday will be in my concert at OR-eCon. The set list is still unsettled, and I have not been practicing nearly as much as I should; I'm planning to stick to songs I know well. That's not so hard, since I haven't written any new ones for over a year.

Between Biden's win and L's departure, I was a lot less stressed and anxious yesterday than at any time in months. Maybe years. But it's temporary: I don't think all the damage Trump has done will be repaired in my lifetime. Some of it will never be repaired. And there will be more damage between now and Biden's inauguration. I don't have a whole lot of hope.

Here is some useful information for people planning to vote in the upcoming (US) election.

• How To Vote In The 2020 Election | FiveThirtyEight -- The rules for mail-in voting, listed by state.
• mithriltabby | Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, November 3, 2020 -- Recommendations for Santa Clara County, CA.
• Marianne's Politiblog -- recommendations for Island County, WA, plus some incredibly useful information about how to check you registration status (https://weiapplets.sos.wa.gov/MyVote/#/login) and when to vote: as soon as you can:

  Vote THE SECOND you can. Do not wait even a day. By voting, it frees up GOTV (that's Get Out The Vote) efforts to focus on people who might otherwise not vote, as opposed to people who will vote, eventually. In Washington, voter rolls are updated daily, and campaigns can see within a day or two if you've been credited with casting a ballot, and then stop wasting time and money contacting you, trying to turn out your vote.

VOTE!

10 things you need to know to stop a coup | Waging Nonviolence (via twistedchick via minoanmiss).

US election: Trump won't commit to peaceful transfer of power - BBC News

High order bits, from yesterday:

• How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air” | Vanity Fair
• " Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert. "
• solarbird | Today's News (2020/8/1): I don't know why I'm doing this anymore (includes much of the above article)
• siderea | The Darkest Timeline [Coronavirus2020, pols, US, p/a/s, Patreon]
• " There are a lot of Americans who really do think that there's a whole lot of their fellow Americans who really do deserve to die, or, at least, they wish would die and like to imagine would make the world, or at least America, a better place if they would just die already. "

Not surprised. Go read it. I'll wait. Then see mood.

There were a few good things this week. Got the TV installed; watched Pirates of Penzance with Colleen; did some programming. I don't think it matters.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Yesterday I posted a link to this disturbing article[1], which describes the US as Modernity's first failed state. It provoked responses from both left and right, and led me to research just what constitutes a failed state[2].

It turns out that there's a way of measuring degree of failure[3], called theFragile States Index[4]. At first glance, the US looks pretty good: with a score of 36.7, it currently ranks 154th out of 178. Currently. Here's what the Fund for Peace, which maintains the index, has to say about that:

The United States has experienced significant political upheaval recently, and as a result has ranked as the fourth most-worsened country for 2018. Despite a remarkably strong economy, this economic success has been largely outweighed by social and political instability. However, we must be careful not to misunderstand the longer-term nature of this trend. Though some critics will likely be tempted to associate the worsening situation in the United States with the ascendance of President Trump, and what can generously be described as his Administration’s divisive leadership and rhetoric, the reality is that the pressures facing the United States run far deeper. Many “inside the Beltway” in Washington have long complained of a growing extremism in American society and politics, with an increasingly disenfranchised (if not vanishing) political center. The FSI demonstrates that this is no illusion – it is definitely happening. Indeed, on the ten-year trend of the three Cohesion Indicators (including Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and Group Grievance), the United States is the most-worsened country in the world bar none, ahead of the likes of Libya, Bahrain, Mali, Syria, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. To be sure, the United States has nearly unparalleled capacity and resiliency, meaning that there is little risk that the country is about to fall into the abyss. Nevertheless, these findings should serve as a wake-up call to America’s political leaders (not to mention media influencers) that divisive policy-making and rhetoric that seeks to divide Americans for political gain can have very real consequences and can threaten the country’s long-term stability and prosperity. [5]

I have three things to add:

1. The United States may not be a "failed state" by this definition -- yet. But it has certainly failed a large number of its people.
2. The United States has also failed -- miserably -- to become a modern country. By many measures, it is far behind the rest of the developed world, and falling farther behind as its ruling elite continues to gain power.

The US is not a failed state, but it's failing. If the current trend keeps up, it will reach the "warning" level of 70 in less than 16 years.

References:

• [1] Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
• [2] Failed state - Wikipedia
• [3] FSI Methodology | Fragile States Index
• [4] Fragile States Index | The Fund for Peace
• [5] Fragile States Index 2018: Issues of Fragility Touch the World’s Richest and Most Developed Countries in 2018 | Fragile States Index

So. Trumped.

I suppose I'll get through the next four years somehow. But the possibilities range from disagreeable to agonizing to desperate. N tells me I'm stronger than I think. I hope she's right.

What the hell can I say? The Joy of Tech comic... National curl up in a Ball Day kind of says most of it. I'm still not uncurled.

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

( Notes & links, as usual )

A good week for Sanders supporters. Last Sunday we went to the Bernie Sanders rally at Key Arena, and yesterday was the Democratic caucuses. (There was another rally Friday evening that G and N went to, but I didn't.) As you probably know, Bernie won big in all three of Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii yesterday.

The rally was amazing. He's an electrifying speaker, with a message that resonates deeply with this old radical's values. We need him in the White House.

This was the first time I've been in a caucus, and despite the reference in Alice it wasn't dry at all. Mostly fun, with some boring bits and too much standing.

Inspired by the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course that our team's reading group is taking, I have branched out into Haskell and started to set up xmonad, the tiling window manager that rocks. The main reason for that is the way it handles multiple monitors, which looks like a great match for the way I use my work laptop, always switching between stand-alone at meetings, and plugged into multiple monitors on my desktop.

Still trying to wrap my head around monads and category theory in functional programming. Multiple Wikipedia dives on that one.

Not a good week. Nightmares and (almost entirely silent) meltdowns. Mostly panic over taxes and other money problems, though the fact that Curio isn't eating well doesn't help, nor does ongoing work stress, nor taxes.

On the other hand, I did (finally) go out and get the wood for the Maypole; it was a great deal more expensive than I expected, but... ok. Nobody has redwood, and nobody has cedar longer than 12'. N. suggested using a Christmas tree stand; that will probably work and has some distinct advantages. Like, not putting a hole in the lawn.

I wasted several hours yesterday and today booting up (or trying to) several different old computers, because my laptop is in poor shape. I'll take it in for service on Tuesday. Also wasted a lot of time and spoons fighting with the mac mini. MacOS is almost unusable as of Yosemite; they even turn off scrollbars by default! IDIOTS! Back to using the laptop today, because I decided to do a thorough backup before taking it in. So far it seems to be behaving itself.

Also wasted a great deal of time looking for tax info, which I was too careless and/or stupid to keep track of. That's looking to be another nightmare, what with selling the Starport.

At least the Honda has its mirror and is otherwise working pretty well; service came in well north of two grand, which is about what I expected. They didn't fix the bumper -- I'll probably have to go to a body shop for that. Unless I can fix it myself, which isn't impossible. I think all it's going to need is a few whacks with a deadblow hammer.

My mood hasn't been improved much by getting unfriended over a FB post. Wouldn't mind much except that I liked the person in question, but her posts have been getting more stridently conservative lately, and I'd been getting more and more uncomfortable reading them. My post was a re-share of the link she'd shared and agreed with, with my comment:

Re: Superintendent Stands Up In A Big Way For Principal Facing Atheist Backlash This has attracted a lot of highly predictable agreement from conservative Christians. Ask yourselves this -- would it still be ok if the principal had been quoting from the Koran? How about the Satanic Bible? Do you imagine, even for a moment, that he would still have his job in that case? Because what you would think about that is *exactly* what an atheist thinks about his bible quotes.

Well?

I'll admit that the second paragraph is a bit gratuitously confrontational, but I don't think it's out of line considering the article and the massively approving reactions it got from the original poster and her friends. *sigh*

Looks like I won't be going to Indiana for a while, either.

Links in the notes, as usual.

Y'know, I can't miss today's Songs for Saturday -- the combination of Woody's 100th birthday and Bastille Day is just too perfect.

Here's a link to NPR: At 100, Woody Guthrie Still Resonates. And here's the Wikipedia article on La Marseillaise.

Here is one of the only two surviving film clips of Woody performing: The Ranger's Command - 1945, and here's Woody singing This Land Is Your Land.

And here's Tear the fascist down "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we dont give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, thats all we wanted to do."

And here's La Marseillaise in my favorite scene in Casablanca.

It makes me angry that this is all still so relevant.

Finally posted my itinerary/tentative schedule for the next couple of months. And, as usual, didn't do all that much else. Well, there were some things accomplished. Including the phone interview with EDD, which I'd been worried about. It looks as though my pension won't affect my unimployment insurance, because Ricoh stopped paying into it in 2010.

I'm continuing to putter, and got a fair amount of book triage done in the office. Most were immediately snapped up by folks in the Wednesday crowd, which of course was the whole idea. The old turntable, too -- now that we've gotten rid of all our vinyl, we really don't need it. End of an era.

I called PODS and got a quote: about $3200 for a 16' pod. The move will be complicated by the fact that we want some of the stuff to go into N's garage; I'm thinking of PODS or some other container company for that. We'll see. Unfortunately moving.com doesn't seem to have any way to compare prices; I'll have to call them all separately. The salesdroid at PODS was rather pushy.

Link of the day, after a nod toward Richard Lugar's statement, is Rachel Held Evans | How to win a culture war and lose a generation. The money quote:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

Now, I'm part of that 91%; as an atheist and a Democrat I don't see a major shift away from religion as a bad thing. But if you do -- if you're one of the many progressive Christians I know are reading this -- you might want to do something about it.

When I was in college, the churches were hotbeds of radicalism, solidly on the left. They fed the poor, opposed the war in Vietnam, ... Where in Hell are they now?

Pretty good week so far, actually. A lot of my mindspace early in the week was taken up by a River post on telling your friends what they need to hear, which replaced a previous post with, let's just say, more heat and much less light.

But I mostly kept up the momentum from the latter half of last week, and got quite a lot done. In particular, I managed to get some music-related work done every day, three walks and a drive with Colleen, and a lot of small but important tasks at work. Breaking things down into tiny steps really seems to work for me, and while there aren't all that many items here tagged with "15min", there probably should have been.

Sunday's drive was glorious. We reversed our usual route and drove up I280 to 92, then south along the coast via Highway 1 to Santa Cruz, and back by way of 17. This gave us a better view of the ocean than usual, and we saw a gorgeous effect that I'd never seen before -- bits of sunlight streaming through gaps in the clouds and making bright patches far out on the ocean, made more visible by the contrast. Just... wow.

I made chicken soup with rice for dinner. From scratch, using the chicken bones I'd saved from Saturday's broccoli chicken. Yum.

Monday I finally put two and two together and realized that the fact that my (AT&T) cell phone signal at work had gone from unusable to 100% and the fact that a group from Apple had moved in next door might possibly be related. Ya think?

Tuesday morning I had a nice conversation with the YD -- every once in a while she gets up early. Later that evening, I worked on the blackout code for steve.savitzky.net, lookingglassfolk.com, tempered-glass.info, tres-qique.com, and pocketpoems.net, using code from SopaBlackout.org. (I understand that PIPA won't be brought to a cloture vote today as previously scheduled. The net can kick ass sometimes.)

Wednesday I woke up remembering a dream mostly about plumbing. No idea what that signifies. Thursday I finally got printing back online for the netbooks and the YD's laptop. The latter also required booting from the "startup repair" partition and waiting for an hour or so while it cranked away, fixing what appeared to be a corrupt filesystem. Pretty slick, actually. F12. It would be nice if the boot screen actually mentioned that feature, though.

Note to self: make a restore disk first thing when configuring a new Windows machine.

I don't know whether batching up my daily updates like this is a good idea or not, but I do seem to have a little more time on days when I forget. I thought briefly of doing a "Wednesday Wrap-up", but I'd forgotten by the time I got home. They say your memory is the second thing to go.

I've forgotten the first.

Quite a few links, on a wide range of topics. I'm going to signal-boost moon_fox's Character Art Jam, in part because I left a prompt there (and a tip).

I was originally going to post something entirely different today -- I wanted to post one of my own love songs. Maybe I'll save it for February. Because I started thinking about the internet censorship laws now being debated in the House, and what's going on in New York, Davis, Seattle, and, well, just about everywhere...

And in the car this morning I remembered Die Gedanken sind frei.

Since the days of the Carlsbad Decrees and the Age of Metternich Die Gedanken sind frei was a popular protest song against political repression and censorship, especially among the banned Burschenschaften student fraternities. In the aftermath of the 1848 German Revolution the song was proscribed.

OK, then.

Here's Die Gedanken sind frei, the rally song of the 1942-43 German anti-Nazi youth movement, the White Rose. And here's Pete Seeger's translated version from his 1966 album, Dangerous Songs!? (Lyrics here.)

And remember that if those bills pass, and the Great Firewall of China comes to the US, this could be the last song I'll post here.

So... a good day. Not much more than that, but solidly in the "good" area. Mostly, I spent the mid-to-late afternoon down at City Hall with the Occupy San Jose folks. Mostly standing around and talking to people. They have about half a dozen small tents set up, and it feels like a friendly group. They apparently have a good relationship with the police, so they're likely to be there for the long haul. I spent most of my time hanging out at the table they have set up near the tents, talking to Mark, who is apparently one of the leaders of the group.

I like this movement -- they're not aligning themselves with any political party (why alienate half your potential allies?), they're making their decisions by consensus, and they're pointing out that things are WRONG rather than immediately making demands or proposing "solutions".

The logo on their donation page is particularly cool.

There's also a loosely-affiliated Bank Transfer Day action: the idea is to transfer money out of banks and into credit unions, which are local and non-profit. I'm not really in a position to close my accounts at Union Bank (which isn't so bad, as banks go), but I'm going to move most of the money in the savings account over to my credit union (Alliance).

I also like their choice of day for it -- November 5^th.

Quite a few good links below in the notes. In addition to the inevitable Occupy... stuff, there's Eric Raymond's excellent Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark. Yes, I've installed Oneiric. I don't like it either; fortunately I can always keep using CTWM.

Hmm. I spent most of yesterday feeling tired; I don't think that an under-two-mile walk contributed much to that even if it was the first in over a week. Also, my eyes hurt. Probably need to get new glasses.

Turns out there's a Trader Joe's only a mile from work. Easy walk.

I filled up the van and it cost me as much as a monthly bus pass. On the other hand, with a 17-mile round trip it's almost exactly even, and that's only if I always take the van and not the Honda, which gets 50% better mileage. I'll revisit this calculation in mid-March when I qualify for a senior discount. Um... Right.

A minor triumph -- I did something minorly stupid (I forget what) and actually said "Silly bear!" to myself, instead of the more usual "Idiot bear!" I thought "idiot bear", briefly, but I didn't say it. That's big. Bigger than it sounds, maybe.

That segues nicely into the link of the day, the Charter for Compassion and this talk by Karen Armstrong at TED (courtesy of liralen. It makes a lot of sense, this idea that "The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves."

If more than a handful of religious people actually believed it, this would be a much different planet. Unfortunately, most religion right now appears to be in bed with politics, and when that happens you don't need to ask who's on top -- you know who's going to get screwed.

I'm a little surprised that I was able to come up with that last aphorism before going to bed last night and still remember it in the morning.

Baffled is more like it. Baffled, and biting my tongue. I mean, people carrying signs that say "The End Is Nigh" have been a cartoon staple for as long as I can remember, and presumably long before that. I guess the only reason I'm not making fun of them beyond the occasional wry comment is that I find other people embarrassing themselves acutely painful rather than funny.

How can anyone possibly believe that crap?

Just like every other time, some people have wrecked their lives, in the mistaken belief that tomorrow really wasn't coming. It's sad.

It's also rather horrifying, to realize that these are the kind of people who overwhelmingly vote Republican, or the equivalent in other countries. You'd think that blind acceptance of total nonsense was something that the conservatives are actively trying to encourage.

Oh. Right.

These are the kind of people who are going to go right back to wrecking the educational system, the health care system (what little there was of it), and the federal and state budgets so that the 500 richest people can keep getting richer, and the 500 biggest corporations can keep getting bigger. It's enough to make me wish they were right about Judgement Day.

OK, so maybe I'm not baffled. Or sad. Maybe I'm just angry.

Christianity, Social Justice and Politics - a well-researched rant against the Religious Right, with bible quotes. (From Ravan's Rants - New Post at Another Ravan Perch.)

Earlier this morning I was willing to believe that I was just a cynical old morning person who shouldn't be allowed to post about politics after dark. I don't think that now.

What disturbed me, and still disturbs me, about the Religious Right's apparent victory on Prop 8 is the signal it sends to them: that even in "liberal" California, they can get over half the electorate to vote with them if they just pour in enough hatred, fear, lies, and money. That over half of my fellow citizens really are religious bigots.

Over the course of a couple of months, the Religious Right turned support for eliminating the right of gays to marry from about 30% to over 50%.

If they'd lost, there would be some hope that their grip on power, on the Republican party, might be weakened. Now they know for certain that they can get control back if they can just tap into enough fear and hatred. That over 50% of the people still believe that it's ok to deny civil rights to gays. Black people won their civil rights because most of the churches in the country believed that they deserved them. Blacks and Latinos voted in favor of Prop 8.

The next couple of elections are going to be very ugly.

I would pray, to whatever gods there may be, to save us from their followers. But I don't believe that it would work.

Problems with e-voting machines were reported early on election day in several U.S. states, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, which are identified as battleground states where the outcome of the vote could tip the presidential race in favor of either Democratic Sen. Barack Obama or Republican Sen. John McCain.

According to voter reports on the ground and from watchdog organizations, there were problems with getting e-voting machines up and running in these key states and others, and in some cases the machines would crash during the voting process and had to be rebooted.

Pennsylvania and Virginia were among states Verified Voting, an advocacy group focused on improving voting systems, and other watchdog organizations said they would keep a close eye on for voting problems. Neither state had early voting before Nov. 4, nor do they require paper-trail backups with the touchscreen electronic-voting machines in place at polls.

Critics of e-voting say that without a paper trail, there's no way to audit the results of a touchscreen machine, often called DREs, or direct recording electronic machines.

All across my friends list there are people reporting huge lines at the polls, urging their friends to vote, expressing cautious hope. I particularly draw your attention to An Open Letter to the United States of America by telynor. Go vote.

I'm guardedly optimistic, as the phrase goes. The right of all couples to marry in California hangs by a thread. All across the country people are voting with machines that are easy targets for fraud. The election could easily have already been stolen, and the Supreme Court could well let them get away with it again. Even if Obama wins, the outgoing administration is, even now, shredding decades worth of regulations, and has hired a generation of right-wing civil servants who will take decades more to age out.

This mess is not going to be cleaned up in the next four years, and possibly not in my lifetime. Go vote anyway. It's important.