If you live in California, you can now demand that Big Data about you be deleted. It won’t be instant, it takes several months, but it will happen.

Here’s the Mercury News article about it but it may be behind a paywall, so here’s the state’s site for doing so. You have to be a resident of California. To quote the first bit from the Merc:

“More than 300,000 Californians have demanded that hundreds of data brokers erase information about their locations, finances, health and personal lives as the state’s first-in-the-nation Delete Act”

You can register every device, your car, entering every name anyone might have info on you by, the works. Some things by law must be retained–those will be retained. The rest–poof! AI may not use it. Selling, say, your location or social security number will be outlawed if you say so.

Gavin Newsom signed that law and has been lobbying Congress to pass it nationwide.

But there is the information to take to your own representatives in Congress. Let them show who they really think they work for. Many of them have a particular incentive right now to pay attention to their voters.

Platner did the right thing and he’s out in time for Maine voters to choose someone else–Monday was the deadline for a special election to be called. May the best future Senator win.

Mitch McConnell, per the reporter who had been listening to the police scanner, had paramedics arriving seven minutes after they were called for an unconscious man in cardiac arrest, with McConnell taken to the hospital from that address.

The Republicans in Kentucky changed the law two years ago to where the governor could no longer appoint a successor to a Senator from his own party as previously required but rather that there would be a special election called. Let the voters decide. Honor democracy. Sounds good.

Except that that special election could not be held closer than 56 days to the general election, and short of that, Kentucky would just have to go with only one Senator till the next general election.

Their party spent big bucks defeating Rep. Thomas Massie in his run for Senate because he’d thwarted Trump and championed the cause of opening the Epstein files, pushing the bill to do so till he won. He lost his primary–but they want to make sure he stays out and is not the incumbent, however briefly. Voters do tend to love their incumbents. Just ask Mitch.

Oh wait you can’t.

So they’re pretending they’re talking to McConnell from his hospital bed and that he’s recovering nicely and that deadline against calling the special election is coming right up. You know that he’s suddenly going to take a turn for the worse, no, worst, but only when it’s convenient for what they want.

The video of a CNN reporter demanding one of them call McConnell right now, live on the air, and let the audience hear his voice to prove he’s alive–and the immediate backtracking and squirming and blustering and flustering and refusing to do so–said it all.

If Mitch McConnell is indeed brain dead–and seven minutes of cardiac arrest in a sick, old man before medical help arrived means he is–then every one of those men lying about it is committing outright election fraud.

We have this 14th Amendment for them (among other things.) We just have to use it.

Governor Beshear sent a letter to McConnell at his hospital room asking for an official response from him on his condition, as fellow representatives of the good people of Kentucky. Well played.

And another repeat.

I got a note from both the Australian post office and the sender to let me know my new Rios was in the US now so that I can finish the Big Sur afghan.

Meantime, 15″ on this one in one week is fast but our post office would really have to mess up for me to finish it before that gets here.

I know, don’t tempt them.

I woke up this morning with visions of how I was going to knit my rocks. I’m almost to the right place to start them.

I have no idea which one I’ll finish first. I’ll just have to wait to see that new yarn, put it together with this to have a good look at everything, and then let them be the boss of me.

The San Jose City Council is discussing whether to put ranked choice voting up to their voters in November. Their stated reason is that it would save the costs of special elections.

We need ranked choice across the state and if you ask me, across the country. If saving money motivates them to let us tell them that yes we do want it and what have you all been waiting for, hey, whatever works.

–

Peregrine video: a fledge, a rescue at about 8:18, a close-up to the camera.

Drying…

And some sorting and considering happened. Dragons only get to hoard gold–I’ve got all these other colors, too.

I do need to add some of the right greens before I start. Today was a five-errand day between us and I simply ran out of time to get to a LYS, and Friday is May Day, consumers’ one-day strike across the country. I believe in supporting local yarn stores, but any interaction with any big corporation including any credit card transaction is right out.

I think I can find something around here to do to hold me till Saturday.

One of the great things President Biden did was to roll out a pilot program for greatly simplifying doing taxes, with the intention of its being applicable to everyone in short order. There was no reason to extract the extra millions of hours out of us that we could be putting to our own uses.

I guess we’ll have to wait till the next Democrat wins the office.

I am not happy with Turbo Tax right now, but, looking at all the utter indecipherables on the forms it printed out, it could be worse.

I realized about five minutes in that I’d forgotten my phone, but then they had asked that no pictures be taken of faces and it’s kind of hard to take one of a crowd without doing that so it’s just as well.

Notable signs: the Statue of Liberty saying, I said, Your huddled masses, not your hooded asses!

No Epsteinization! Open the files!

Near a dentist’s office: No Truth Decay!

The organizers had said to line up on the west side of what the Spanish conquistadors had named The Royal Road, a fitting spot for a No Kings rally. Seven miles long from town to town to town. Don’t take up business parking lots; they need their customers to survive. Here are the public places for it. Share a ride, take a ride share, we can make this work.

That they did.

At this rally, for the first time, they said one could drive alongside cheering the protesters on and that that counted, too. That was all I needed; I signed up.

I really fervently wanted to be on that sidewalk holding a sign of my own but UV-reactive lupus and reality said that I’d like to stick around to vote for my grandchildren’s futures. So I grabbed my red Norwegian/Minnesotan Resist hat and set off.

I figured out real quick that people couldn’t all tell from there just what kind of red hat that was–details like a braid going to a tassel get lost at windshield distance. I snatched it off. It was too important to risk messing the experience up for even a single person.

Two, and often all three southbound lanes were packed with cars honking and waving. The northbound lanes seemed actually less than the usual traffic: people had other things to do today. As one could see.

It took me an hour, waving and saying thank you.

But what is important is that time after time, eyes meeting eyes, protester to protester however we came to the moment, it felt surprisingly sacred.

The way voting day does.

I was not expecting to be in tears.

We were bearing witness–together!–to our reclaiming our right to the rule of law. To due process. To honoring the Constitution. To the separation of powers. Honoring the immigrant who is abiding by the law. Amen and amen and amen.

So glad the organizers thought to include even people like me in a way I could feel an active part of it.

I blocked the preferred escape route of the desert rabbit–I put a planting pot saucer in its path–and haven’t seen it since. Instead, a California ground squirrel showed up the next day to graze the low-lying broadleafs.

Never google them. They nest in large colonies, and if they don’t have one, two of them will make one, fast. They destroy your trees, they dig under your house in intricate tunnels, they eat everything and they will brave going up your fruit trees and its tree squirrels if that’s what it takes.

But I just see the one, and it’s chunky and cuddly-looking and pretty. But I think I’ll invite the rabbit back.

Turns out that in the Bay Area, ground squirrels have recently been documented hunting and eating voles. When the vole population explodes so do their attacks on them. Did you have ground squirrels on your apex predator list? They are if you’re a vole.

Meantime, in my brother’s very gerrymandered district (he lived an hour away from it when he moved there), two white Republican men and a Black man who’s a Democrat were running. And we’re talking Georgia.

That Democrat got the most votes in today’s special election. Honey, we are getting there.

And now I can’t wait for Spring for my tree to show what it can be now.

Meantime, in Minnesota, in response to ICE beating US citizens on their own properties without provocation nor warrant nor legal right to trespass (“But you have an accent.” “You have an accent too!”) the people have figured out a new way to inform their neighbors when ICE is on their street: set off their car alarms via their key fobs.

This is after one of their agents threatened a young child that he’d put a bullet in her head for protesting with her mom. Putting a woman in her place: start’em young. And after one threw a flash-bang at a car with children, injuring a six month old. A baby.

Republicans have a chance to redeem a little of their names for history if they at long last impeach and convict the pedophile-in-chief and end this siege. Do it now.

Because anyone who doesn’t, you don’t have to worry we’ll find out your name is in the Epstein files: you’re already making it clear.

The town paper says about 500 people showed up at that plaza last night. On less than 24 hours’ notice. Yay!

The phone rang tonight. It was our new House Rep offering a conference call to his constituents. Ask his staff to put you in the queue (so it isn’t bedlam), then when you’re on you ask him your question and we all get to hear how the guy responds on his feet. He started off by honoring the Hatch Act and made a point of not politicking, not advocating, just truthfully answering questions to the best of his ability.

People dropped in and out of the call as it went on and there were some repetitions.

Several asked, how do we get 47 out of there? The frank answer was, we can’t right now. He didn’t say Ro Khanna and I… that would be politicking… Just, We don’t have the votes. And then he told what measures he’s voted for, what bills he’s helped with, bills that would put limits and stops (to things that are illegal and unConstitutional and we all knew it.)

So, Congress. Who else wants to be able to be proud to tell their future grandkids what they did during this time in this country when it so needed their help?

Eight more rows of seed stitch to go.

It was past time to decide what the next baby blanket is going to be because there’s another baby due about the same time and I need to get to it.

When you can make anything at all, how do you narrow it down to a single idea?

(Say the obvious all together with me now: Ravelry!)

Under Patterns, search: baby blanket.

Fifteen thousand six hundred fifteen matches.

I got through fifty pages of results, and I definitely got some inspiration and no I still don’t know what I’m going to make, but it left me wanting to ask–waving a sweeping arm out there–why? Why was there an elephant pattern on just about every page for the first thirty or so, till they finally started to peter out? Two rhinos, one giraffe, (hey, giraffes are a big thing with babies too!) and elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant.

Scroll…scroll… You know you’re getting into the category of only one or two people besides the artist have actually made this one when the raccoons start showing up. (Nods to self, Bought that one awhile ago, maybe I finally will.)

I mean, I get the metaphor: babies are tiny yet before you can begin to comprehend it they’re all grown up and probably towering over you, and certainly over their original sizes. Yes babies and elephant motifs are a longstanding thing.

But I’d be an a** not to consider how it might be interpreted in today’s political climate.

I look forward to the day when things can be normal again and a cute baby blanket is just a cute baby blanket and can comfortably look like anything it wants.

Thankgsiving travel: a millionaire with a real answer to the required FAA cutbacks. Wow. Who knew that even that was designed to favor the oligarchs?

Edited to add Abigail Disney’s text in case the link doesn’t work:

“Private planes make up nearly 12% of all flights. Instead of grounding 10% of commercial flights at 40 major U.S. airports, why doesn’t the DOT ground 100% of private flights instead?

So good luck traveling in the coming days, unless you can afford to charter a plane! Because yet again, the Trump admin is prioritizing the interests of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.”

Writing this while awaiting our election results to start to post.

The doorbell rang this afternoon: a young woman doing some last minute canvassing for Proposition 50.

She was too young to remember the days when voters fervently wanted this stupid gerrymandering to be over with and, after years of trying, got a proposition on the ballot that neither party much wanted that set up an independent redistricting commission. Its members were required to be balanced between the parties.

But we did it and it passed. The districts finally made sense. We don’t have seats like what Georgia did, where Marjorie Taylor-Greene was certainly going to lose her first re-election bid so their legislature ran a rope down the cliff to swing it around in a town an hour south.

Today Schwarzenegger was claiming credit for that commission. No, sir. We did that.

So you would think Prop 50 would fail–but what is often skipped over in the national press is that this wasn’t imposed on us: the voters were being asked if the voters wanted to temporarily suspend our commission and adopt a map specifically in direct answer to Texas’s non-Census-year attempt to wipe out Democrat-held seats there. Right there in the official Voter’s Guide, the why of this, and what that new temporary map would be.  We got to choose the districts. Come the next Census, we would go back to our commission, or before, if we said so. We decide.

Texas having put a literal bounty on the heads of women fleeing its draconian laws, making no exceptions even for molar (turning into cancer instead of a fetus) or ectopic, there is no way we’re going to have them rule over us on a national level.

We already voted, I told the woman, but the smile on my face matched the hope in hers and I added, Absolutely, we voted for it, and thank you for doing this!

We had two other things on the ballot: the tax assessor’s office that was surprisingly important and a 5/8 cent sales tax to cover the Federal cutoffs to the hospitals to keep the smaller ones open and the larger ones fully functional.

I don’t like it much, he said last night as he filled in the Yes circle.

I don’t either, I said as I filled in mine, But we have to take care of the poor among us.

That was a given for both of us.

Now to go hit refresh on those California and local results… Sixteen minutes after the polls closed and they’ve already called it: 50 passed!

I couldn’t do a thing about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House so I scrubbed and cleaned and made my own better today. And then read up some more on the candidates on the ballot.

The guy who’s been the property tax assessor for 30 years finally retired at 84, triggering a special election.

Do we vote for the “only I can fix it” firebrand with no relevant background nor expertise but lots and lots of glossy fliers in the mail? For County Assessor. Since when is that such a big expensive race.

Oh wait.

Or the experienced lawyer who knows this subject inside and out and took the second in command job when the old guy was fading, who then had a man promoted over her as “acting commissioner” who’s running too now while she’s the one actually running the 250-person office and updating the systems per the local reporters. She’s taken on the big tech companies who’ve been snapping up buildings in a big land race between themselves and then fighting their property assessments by suing over billions of dollars at the same time that Proposition 13 from the 1970’s has already shifted most of that tax burden off corporations and onto homeowners. And now the richest companies in the country want to pay less. She’s on it.

Just where does all the money for all those glossy fliers for one person coming from nowhere who knows nothing about the job come from?

We have to pay attention to the local races.

Curious. This Supreme Court just in effect nullified its own Citizens United ruling.

Because it ruled in a shadow docket case, meaning one for which there were no hearings, was not aired publicly, with a decision that does not even have their names signed to it to hold themselves accountable to the public–that the president can decide to withhold funds that Congress had decided on a bipartisan basis to spend.

In this case, on foreign aid.

One of my high school friends was laid off from her USAID job months ago and she could tell you many a story about just how effective a peacemaker we were in the world in helping people learn to farm and feed each other better and in establishing public schools where there had been none. She saw it. She lived it. We were perceived as Good Samaritans. The Anya apricots that I go on and on about how intensely flavored and juicy they are? That’s how that original seed ended up here: a farmer from California working on behalf of the State Department befriended people along the Silk Road, who offered him their best to show the world what they had and that not everything there was about war. The good that’s done when individuals help individuals across cultures and backgrounds goes both ways and USAID, with little publicity or public knowledge, is how it happens.

And every year for decades, Congress has voted from both sides to sustain those efforts.

Power of the purse? Separation of powers? Constitution? Voting as a representative of one’s constituents on the matter? Pffft, who needs that. Wiped away with the swipe of an anonymous pen.The president controls all. And you know the only thing this one cares about money is how much of it goes to him.

So, since they can pay for nothing and do nothing now no matter how they vote, why would anyone donate to the campaign of any member of Congress again? (Or at least, of those who are going along with this.)

Besides, there are so many of them. Why bother when there are only six to have to deal with on the Court who have shown that they can be bought off.