Welp, we made it.
As is tradition, I was asleep by about 10pm and missed all of the drunken frivolity and fireworks.
Today is a day off, so after my breakfast and morning walk I’ll start in on the great yearly password reset.
I’m not exactly a super political person, but given current events a lot of this entry will probably be somewhat political in nature. Just a head’s up…
The second “COVID stimulus” check arrived in my bank account this morning…
For a couple of weeks now the folks in D.C. have been arguing over how much everyone should get as an attempt to ‘help them out’ because of COVID, and I guess they settled on $600.
It was hard to say how much the stimulus check would be until it showed up, as the “Covid Aid Bill” responsible for these payments was part of something like 5500 pages of spending for everything else congress could possibly think of, as usual. And everyone in congress got about two hours to review said 5500 pages before having to vote on it. Also as usual.
For an example of what goes on in the thousands of pages beyond the first ten: “Of the funds appropriated under title III of the Act that are made available for assistance for Pakistan, not less than $15,000,000 shall be made available for democracy programs and not less than $10,000,000 shall be made available for gender programs.”
Yep. $10 million. Of your money. For gender programs. In Pakistan.
Then there’s funds for a “Resource Study of the Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot.” That riot occurred in 1908 by the way.
Typical stuff for Congress; find something We The People need, and then tack on a few thousand pages of pet projects, lobbyist ideas, donor suggestions, or whatever else they can dream up knowing we’ll pay for it because we need the first ten pages and we don’t really have a choice…
It’s basically a hostage situation.
Anyway, these stimulus payments inversely scale with how much you make, and I make too much to really get anything out of them. With this one I’ll get a ‘free’ lunch at Taco Bell, for example.
I suppose that’s okay in the long run, and the trillions of dollars are, in theory, going to those who really need it. I know this isn’t the case and everyone but me is gaming the system in some way — but I like the illusion of compassion so don’t ruin it for me.
For the first time in forever, I’m not doing new year’s resolutions this year… Things are just too up-in-the-air in the world and I don’t want to be obligated to a resolution that becomes nigh impossible because of events beyond my control.
And let’s face it, everything is beyond my control at this point… We don’t even know who the president is yet because of the circus surrounding the vote…
On that, the thing I really just don’t get is if nothing bad happened and nothing is amiss — why the fight to prevent anyone from proving it? We are constantly told that nothing unusual happened during the election (disregarding the mathematical anomalies, weird video footage of people doing sketchy things while no one was looking, polling places actively preventing observation, and suspect ballot printing), but as soon as anyone with enough clout to force them to prove it tries to prove it, it heads to the courts.
It’s like if someone says they aced a math exam without using a calculator, but as soon as someone else asks to see the grade or to see their work, that person is sued and taken to court in order to not have to show anything.
Just seems suspect I guess.
Anyway, because of 2020, and most likely 2021, I’m adding two years to my ten-year plan. Again, circumstances beyond my control pretty much halted me for an entire year. And I’m sure it’s going to take me some time to extract the pandemic wrench from my life plans even if things get back to ‘normal’ in Q1 ’21.