About Last Week…

So last week (hence the title – neat!) a place got a bit out of control and devolved into chaos.

It was a pretty interesting idea a few years ago, but now there are floods, fires, orgies, drugs, crime, massive amounts of money spent on nothing, and lots of techies getting involved in both figurative and literal circle jerks. And then people who had nothing to do with what happened had to clean up the mess.

And when people tried to leave it was a, um, challenge.

So – California or Burning Man?

Either way you are correct, particularly if a new law decriminalizing psychedelic drugs is signed by Gavin Newsom.

Like a very high percentage of stupid things blurching forth from the legislature these days, the idea came from Sen. Scott Weiner, a Democrat who is not only from San Francisco but is its embodiment in human form.

While you won’t be able to go chase the devil with special K or good old-fashioned blotter, you will be able to make mushroom smoothies (banana flavor with banana liqueur is the best recipe, or so I’m told) and legally eat the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle (oh, all right, the worm doesn’t make you trip but that entire bottle of mezcal should be enough, anyway.)

The new law is being justified as a way to be able to use psychedelics to help treat psychological disorders like PTSD and, to this point, studies have shown it may actually help.  LSD was used in this fashion for a time – Cary Grant had high praise for it for helping his therapy sessions.

But it would seem there could have been some sort of “prescription” carve out if that’s all that was intended by Weiner – a bit like medical marijuana cards.

Oh wait – considering how that idea went, I guess it really doesn’t matter.

Speaking of things that seem not to really matter, Democrats in the Legislature have taken another whack at election security, this time saying that you can’t count ballots by hand.  Because counting ballots by hand has not worked for the past few hundred years at all.

When it comes to elections, any move by any party to complicate the process is a bad, terrible thing to do as it intentionally creates a gray area in the process and gray areas are really convenient places to hide things.

Speaking of gray areas and elections, Nancy Pelosi has decided to run for her 347^th term in Congress.  While she – when sober – is far more “compos mentis” for her age than either President Biden or Sen. Feinstein, it is still getting to be a bit much. Of course, staying home with Paul may not be the safest idea, either so there’s that.

While no longer speaker and in the minority – making her vestigial to governance – she can still raise the heck out of money and never have to worry about spending it on her own campaigns. In fact, that has been a key part of her rise on her side of the aisle: the ability to hand out buckets of cash to people she likes and people she wants to (actually demands to) like her back.

Speaking of liking her back, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su actually covers both meanings of that phrase – liking her back, as in Senators actually voting to confirm her, or liking her back as in liking to see the back of her as many senators actually do.

But it seems she may be on to something that is not inherently awful.  She held a “roundtable” meeting (it was actually a big hollow rectangle…grr) with various AA and NHPI leaders.

What was said was irrelevant, but what people were called may actually be.  Sometime ago – five minutes or five years or whatever – it was decided that the acronym AAPI – Asian-American Pacific Islander – was to be used when referring to anyone whose family came from anywhere west of Catalina, east of Karachi, north of Sri Lanka, south of Sakhalin, and/or southeast-ish of Kazakhstan.

That has always seemed a bit, shall we say, over-reaching – over-reaching to the point of actually being kind of racist – “Hey, if you’re a different color and you live anywhere in that one-quarter of the earth over there somewhere you’re the same.”

So at the not-round table, Su used TWO terms to lump humans together into manageable chunks:  Asian American (that’s the AA referenced above, not the other AA or even AAA) and NHPI:  Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander.

Good for her, whittling down the stereotyping.  Now if she could just start seeing all humans as individuals and not as part of a race – or, more importantly to here, as a member of a union or not – she might show some signs of growth…

Naaahh…

Thanks for reading the Globe!!