State Department has been increasingly convinced that the key unit of government is the city, not the state

That's interesting. My city is ~30k people and doesn't even have a newspaper, it's hard to think of it as politically important at all, but, if I am honest, one of the reasons I haven't been as involved with local government stuff as I might have been is because there is this thread of conservatism (small c deliberate, I mean an unwillingness to change) in the loudest voices that the socially responsible thing to do would be to counter rather than avoid. I'm willing to make attending city council meetings a priority, at least. That's definitely something I can do.

November Project

Also interesting!

City/state makes sense to me, because a region can only get so big before you start losing a sense of community with the people on the other side of the political entity. I don't know how you can efficiently get rural areas to identify with a city state. I'm going to need to see how Renaissance Italy handled their farm lands.

I think the way to get rural areas to identify with the local city-state is through sports.

I think the way to get rural areas to identify with the local city-state is through sports

That is an excellent idea. How many small Texas regions are tied together with local football?

Folks looking for progressive places to donate might also think about EMILY's List.

The big winner was apathy.

I am in such a bad place right now that I wonder if the half that don't even bother to vote aren't smarter than me. The idea of going through your days, weeks, and years only concerned about your job and your manicure sounds pretty appealing. What good has it done for me to care, be informed, fight for what I believed was the right side. My news blackout has been pretty effective. Self care of not getting more upset by following the news is working for now. It likely won't last, because of the whole old dog new tricks thing. Not sure how long I will be in this weary state. Sorry.

I get my first paycheck next week and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to start making donations. I wish I could donate all at once and keep recurring donations but it's not practical.

So I'm going to make a list (maybe a tracker in the bullet journal, I'm trying to keep) and start donating to a different organization each month. It may only be $10 but it's something.

I have mostly organized my CDs, classical and opera and everything else. Maria Callas is now filling my apartment. Ah, La Davina.

I'm tempted to switch my 401k over from mutual funds to a cash account to avoid having it wiped out again by falling stock prices, but then again I'm not at all confident of the continued value of the dollar either...

I had been planning to increase my contribution to my 401k, but now I'm considering reducing it.

Disadvantage to falling stock prices is your 401k looks smaller. It is a deeply uncomfortable feeling. The advantage to falling stock prices is that your monthly contributions buy more shares so that when prices go back up, your funds increase all the more. Depending on how close to retiring a person is, there are differing strategies for dealing. I'm at least twenty years out, so I'm hanging on to the hope that the market doesn't tank so badly that it utterly ceases to exist, and that when it is time for me to retire I will be able to time my cash-out on an upswing. More strategy than that, I do not have.