Taxation without Representation

Good day, globally connected reader, and hopefully it hasn't escaped your attention that something important happens on the 3rd of November this year. That's the date of the presidential election, and it's the most important election in decades, possibly ever. This week saw the starting pistol fired officially on the election race, with the Democratic National Convention.

Now, they say that politics is show business for ugly people. I'm sure the DNC was highly unusual this year due to the pandemic, but it did seem to be more Michael Ball than Michael Foot. The broadcast TV networks cover it non-stop for several hours a night, and the convention itself is a set of opportunities for the great and the good of the Democratic party to line up and say how wonderful Joe Biden is. The over-exposure means that everything is incredibly dilute, with no real discussion of policy or issues. Next week, it's the turn of the Republicans, which I suspect will have the coherency of Steve Ballmer at his very finest.

Biden's running mate is our region's very own Kamala Harris. Harris is originally from Oakland, just across the Bay here, and given that Biden, at 77, may well not serve two full terms, she could quite possibly be the first female president of this country. It's about time.

So what else is going on here? Oh, not much really, you know... there's an active pandemic which this country is handling incredibly badly, the post office is being run by a Trump supporter that thinks it's OK to remove mail boxes despite postal votes being something of a necessity in these conditions, and significant parts of California are literally on fire. How this particular book of the Old Testament ends I'm not entirely sure.

An Endangered Species

So about those fires. I should emphasise we're pretty safe here - we live in the middle of a town, quite a long way from anything which might realistically burn. If we were in danger here then so would be most of the peninsula. The nearest fire to us is over the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains, 30-40 miles away.

Of course, it's always dry in the summer here, and that naturally leads to wildfires sometimes. However, last weekend we had a large thunderstorm, with a lot of lightning, and it even rained a bit. This is highly unusual here - it normally doesn't rain from March until November - and the lightning started some fairly significant fires. They're burning in Big Basin redwood state park, which we visited on holiday here a few years ago, and have spread down the coast almost all the way to Santa Cruz. My colleague who we met there a couple of weeks back is under threat of evacuation and described her car as "covered in ash". You could say it's serious.

Here we just had a single day where the air was pretty smokey, but otherwise we don't have too many problems.

So, what's your preferred fate: the killer virus, the wildfires, or the crazy populist dictator president? Pick your poison! I'm sure one day we'll fondly look back on 2020 and laugh...