So This is How Liberty Dies...

Credit to George Lucas

As I've said before, I usually try not to post about politics in this blog, but given the state of affairs in the United States right now, and being an American living through the collapse of our democracy, I feel compelled to say something.

First, and let me make this very clear, our current, unelected, president is Elon Musk. Mr. Trump gave him control of the entire government with his "DOGE" (Department of Government Efficiency) squad. This squad is comprised of individuals at or under the age of 25, whose jobs are to "root out efficiency problems."

This means giving the squad, who do not even have basic clearances (let alone the high-level clearances required for) access to highly confidential information, such as Medicaid and Medicare recipients and the payment systems used to cover these pay cycles, stopping food programs like SNAP for low-income families and Meals on Wheels which delivers meals to house-bound senior citizens, firing nonpartisan federal employees and their contractors, and, most egregiously, giving access to the highly private social security numbers of Americans.

These DOGE bros (there is not a single woman or person of color on this little goon squad), at the direction of "President Musk," are literally gutting our financial systems, systems that have been in place since just after the founding of our nation. (Founder and creator of our government financial and banking systems, original Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton is rolling in his grave.)

This is all a hostile takeover by the literal richest man in the entire world, who could personally fund jobs for everyone who are being, or have already been, fired, and not even feel a financial dent in his bank accounts. President Musk, in the name of "government efficiency," is rooting out anyone who is "not loyal" to Mr. Trump or President Musk.

Why am I calling Elon Musk president? It's because he has been given free reign of our financial institutions and the green light on working with agencies such as ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) to deliver on Mr. Trump's promise of deporting (non-White) immigrants to concentration camps such as Guantanamo Bay, known for its long history of human rights abuses, including extreme forms of torture for "terrorists," which include the "very criminal, drug smuggling, raping, and murdering US citizens" immigrant terrorists. Again, immigrants of color.

This hybrid Musk/Trump administration has no intention of deporting White people. This is partly why Mr. Trump wants so badly to annex Canada and Greenland. It would significantly increase the number of White people within the United States. First is deporting immigrants of color, then it will be deporting US Americans of color, then reintroducing miscegenation laws (making it illegal to marry someone outside of your own race/color), which directly affects me as my partner, a natural US citizen, is Brown, not White. As I mentioned in The Passport Saga, I made sure we both renewed our passports last year, just in case the unthinkable happened, which it did.

The other reason the Musk/Trump administration wants to annex Canada and Greenland is that they are rich in natural resources, such as crude oil and natural gas. One of the first things this administration did was to reverse all of Biden's clean energy mandates, going with a "drill, baby, drill" and a "burn, baby, burn" mentality. We, as a nation, are one of the two biggest polluters on the planet, and this administration is working hard to make sure we stay that way.

Because the Congressional House of Representatives is majority Republican, and there are "Trumpers" in the Senate, Democrats are facing near-unsurmountable difficulties to pass legislation that will actually help the American people, while the Republican majority fully backs the Trump administration. Even those who are opposed to Musk's takeover of the US government do not speak out against it. Elon Musk is acting president of the US while Trump signs the executive orders put in front of him (without reading them) and golfs.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Republican voters who are angry about Musk gaining control of the entire government, especially as he is not a natural American citizen, which is a requirement in our Constitution for anyone elected to the role of president. So while "President" Trump goes golfing, he gives Musk, an unelected, unqualified, sycophantic non-American, free reign to do whatever the hell he wants to.

Going back to Congress for a moment, Mr. Trump is selecting wholly unqualified individuals to head incredibly important agencies, such as the Department of Education (I'll touch on that in a moment), and the Department of Health and Human Services.

This second one affects anyone with mental health issues. The (shockingly) confirmed by Congress, individual, Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has it out for mental health medications, specifically banning them. This Mother Jones post goes into detail on RFK, Jr.'s sweeping plan for "studying" and "banning" certain medications. For those of you who would rather skip the post, here are the highlights:

Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.

But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”

So... as the article states, ADHD, autism, depression, and, generally, mood disorders are on the "assess the prevalence of and threat posed by" medication chopping block that are incredibly necessary for those of us with any of the above conditions.

I cannot stress this enough. For anyone with any form of mental health issues that require medication, you will be affected by this. Having severe ADHD and Bipolar II Disorder, I will be catastrophically affected by this. I need these medications in order to function as a person. Without my mood stabilizer, depression, and ADHD medications, I won't even be able to get out of bed most days, let alone hold down a job, or even just function on a daily basis.

And the "mental health rehabilitation" farms he's proposing are absolutely ridiculous. Farming your own, pre-chosen, "healthy foods" is not going to help those with Neurodivergent issues, and will in fact make it worse for them.

These "rehabilitation farms" are just another word for eradicating the "unwanted" from society. This entire situation with the US government turns more and more into 1939-1941 Nazi Germany. Disabled people? Euthanize them. Mental health issues or cognitive birth defects? Euthanize them. They are "a drain on society," meaning the Nazi government no longer wanted to pay for "defectives," or allow them to procreate.

Speaking of Nazi Germany, the Department of Education is being gutted. Mr. Trump wants to change the Pledge of Allegiance from "I pledge my allegiance to the flag, and the United States of America..." to "I pledge my allegiance to President Trump, and the United States of America..." He wants only White history taught, erasing slavery, internment camps, wars fought that the US didn't win, and the basic history of America in general.

Why? Because this administration doesn't want "White children made to feel guilty" in their history classes. He also doesn't want the Holocaust covered either, or the rise of Nazi Germany. These atrocities were not committed on US soil, but the Nazi playbook is absolutely in play, step by step, in this "Project 2025" administration. Why do we not want Nazi/Holocaust history taught? Simple. This administration doesn't want you to know what they're really up to, especially the early purging of people of color (Romanians are an apt example). What happened to these people once Hitler had control of the government? Why concentration camps of course.

There was an awakening in the early to mid 1930s, where LGBTQIA folks were coming out and being allowed to be themselves, without so much fear of reprisal. What happened to these people? Concentration and death camps.

Sound familiar? We already have at least one straight-up literal concentration camp (Guantanamo Bay), and the holding cells for immigrants waiting for asylum hearings are on par with concentration camps. The human rights violations in these facilities, which are on American soil, are every bit as atrocious as what the Nazi's did.

And touching on that subject, there are some pretty bleak examples of past US administrations and what they allowed to happen on US soil. During Pres. Andrew Jackson's administration, we have the Trail of Tears, which was the displacement of native peoples to designated areas within the United States. On this forced march across the country, Native Americans died by the thousands.

Sounds like forcing a population of "undesirable people" into ghettos? Absolutely correct.

During WWII, the US also had Japanese Internment Camps because "we [were] at war with Japan." Over 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced into these American concentration camps, again rife with civil and human rights violations, again just like the German ghettos used to "house" Jewish people before sending them to concentration or death camps.

Did the US actually have death camps? Technically, no, but the conditions in which Japanese Americans were forced to live might as well have been. Just as in the German ghettos, disease was rampant due to overcrowded facilities, with little to no medical care given, and no thought to the fact that these Japanese Americans were Americans, let alone human beings.

When leadership "others" people, Jewish people in Germany, dark-skinned immigrants here, they set the example that these people are subhuman, which is to say, lower than human, or not human at all. Do civil and human rights apply to them? No. Why would they? "They're not really human beings, so there's no point in treating them as such."

What do dictators do? They quash the press (calling it "alternative news/facts") as we've seen done with the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which are now towing the fascist line. They strip people of their rights and freedoms, they silence citizens who speak out against their regime, and they hostilely take over the systems of finance and government. Our new fascist regime is terrifying for all Americans.

These are dark, scary days for all Americans.

The Passport Saga

This tale is not actually a saga. It was in my head, before I started the process.

I wrote a while back that I knew exactly where my cat-pee-covered passport was.

My partner and I decided to renew our passports (under a democratic administration because my partner is POC, born in Guam, and most republicans and U.S. border patrol don't even know what/where Guam is, let alone that it is a U.S. territory**). He IS, in all legality, a U.S. citizen. Since the last administration made a point of revoking "sketchy" (re: Muslim/brown people's) passports and deporting those people back to "their countries of origin," even if those people had no memory of or affiliation with that country in their lives, we knew we didn't want to wait for a new administration to say Guam doesn't count and send him back to his country of origin, which he has never been to, with a language he doesn't speak/understand.

Back to the saga:

My passport was 20 years expired, and his was closer to 40 years. I went to the government passport site and went to fill out the paperwork with my expired passport. Lo and behold, what was not in my safe box? That's right, the passport. Absolutely no clue what I did with it. Naturally, that set off an ADHD panic attack, where I started tearing around my home looking high and low, in logical and nonsensical places alike, and having no luck whatsoever. (At least I had my birth certificate in there...)

So I did the only thing I could do: go back to the site and report in the application that it was both damaged (cat pee) and lost, and no, I did not report when it was damaged or lost because I had no idea regarding either thing.

I filled out my passport application, and there was a section asking if damaged/lost, did you report it? No, because I'm an idiot. Was your passport issued more than 15 years ago? Yes! Some luck at last. I print out my application and my partners, and realize that his form would not allow my first name to be entered. It read: Last Name, nothing. (It was especially perplexing because I had no issues entering his full name on mine.) Was this going to be a problem at the application office? Probably, but there was nothing we could do.

I scheduled the appointment, which had a week wait time, for a Friday afternoon. (Early work dismissal, yay!) The government passport site said expect 60-85 minutes for processing (since it was the both of us). So we get to our 2:00pm appointment at 1:55ish, so approximately five minutes early. We didn't even get a chance to sit down to wait; the passport official called us right back.

We filled out some additional paperwork; she had us write in the incompletable fields (or errors, like misspelling my mother's maiden name), took my photo, and had us both out the door at 2:20pm with the comment: "Expect delivery in 6-12 weeks."

That is not an insignificant amount of time, between a month and a half and three months. But we didn't have a timetable to get anywhere yet.

Three (3) weeks later, we both had passports in hand. (Also, first time ever I had a government photo that didn't make me look like crap! Huzzah!) So now here with are, with passport cards to travel in countries with shared borders (Canada and Mexico), and actual book passports to travel beyond North America.

So the saga that I had made it out to be actually took only 10 minutes to fill out the application online, 25 minutes in the application office, and 3 weeks to receive them. This was by far the fastest, easiest, most direct government process I have ever experienced. (I was expecting it to be like the hell that is the Department of Motor Vehicles.)

Now we are sitting here with our passports, with nowhere to actually go, but secure in the fact that my partner will not be deported.

** My partner went to Canada once, when just birth certificates were needed for border travel. The Canadian BP said, "Guam, you're good to go," so into Canada he went. On the return trip, the U.S. BP looked at his birth certificate and said, "What is Guam? That's not a state." Canadian BP had to explain it to U.S. BP, who eventually let him through. U.S. Border Patrol needs to know what and where U.S. territories are located and that they do, in fact, make one a U.S. citizen.

Oops... I Did It Again

In my last post, I covered the issues of impulse buying, retail therapy, and the need for a financial advisor and/or buddy. Everything I said was true and applies to everyone, especially ADHDers, and in particular, me.

My spouse, SIL, and I went to a convention this past weekend. There was only one vendor I wanted to stop at and pick up a couple of things. The seller makes geeky leggings, loungers, joggers, shorts, skirts, and more. I planned on getting one item, a pair of loungers in a Sailor Moon print. They did not have the one I wanted in stock, so I looked at other items. I literally bought something/s from them every single day. I now have three skirts and two loungers that I'm in love with. But... I am also now broke. Again.

Granted, saving up for things like conventions is a good thing to do, which I actually did. I just didn't expect to end up spending quite as much as I did. I justified it with, "What they have, they have; once they're gone, you're screwed," so I got what I really loved and to hell with it.

Except that I now have to pay down my credit card again. It's something I can do, it just leaves me a bit on the penny-pinching side of things for a few weeks.

So even when you have a financial advisor/buddy, sometimes you're going to screw up and go nuts. The trick to this is to acknowledge that you did the thing (spending too much), analyze why you did the thing (impulse-shopping, mental health, justification), and come up with a strategy that keeps you from doing the thing again. My partner and I typically run $100+ purchases by each other, and smaller ones if they're cumulative.

Part of my issue this past weekend was that the items I got were $40 or less a piece, I just got several over the course of several days, and didn't add it up until the deed was done. The other part was that the shop did not put out same patterns every day. Saturday had slightly different inventory than Friday, same on Sunday. So I found something new to get each day, having not seen it before. And while $40 isn't terrible, when you multiply it by nine, it turns into a lot, and definitely over my allowed con budget.

Do I regret anything? Yes, and no. I regret not doing mental/calculator math while I was in purchase-mode. I pretty much lost all self-restraint (again, because they are popular and sell out fast). That justification does not make it any better though. I had a budget and I should have stuck with it. So yes, I regret overspending. I did not do Future-Me any favors.

But also no, because I got some really cute things to wear, the skirts I can wear at the office, so in that sense, I don't feel as bad.

What's surprising, though very nice, is that my self-disgust hasn't reared its ugly head. I don't hate myself for overspending, not like I used to. I'm not in full on panic mode because I do still have a savings buffer, so the sky is not falling. I am not unappreciative of this feeling, it's just... odd. I've never really felt this before, this sense of "okay-ness" of having overspent; in the past, it's always been a "Holy shit, I effed this up, how am I going to feed myself the next two weeks?" situation.

I guess my point with all of this is that having my financial buddy (spouse) really IS helping me. I may have overspent, but not to the point of financial straits. I will recover by my next paycheck, which will go directly into savings. And in the meantime, if I need anything, I'll run it by him first.