The Heir remembers how when Karl Hastie declined to impeach Cuomo, there was outrage coming from other members of the New York assembly, and Hastie compromised and said he was going to issue a report.  But the Heir hasn't heard about when that report is coming out, and if it already has, whether those assembly people dismayed by the declination may decide to file articles of impeachment on their own, to try to prevent Cuomo from running for public office again.  The Heir wishes they would, so that Bachelor Blue State isn't surrounded by sex offender friendly states like Pennsylvania is with respect to Cosby getting out of jail this past July.  The Heir sees Pennsylvania as having morally failed its residents, and hence has lowered credibility for the future any time the state makes a request or a move of some sort in the country.  Same thing for New York State, because otherwise the Heir will feel more sympathy for vigilantes making a move against rich and powerful criminals where the system has failed, even though he doesn't have to agree with all their methods.  He will feel more sympathy for the vigilantes and less respect for Cosby and Cuomo jurisdictions.  He wishes Antifa would assert itself more accordingly and not limit the targets of their ire to *only* fascist type influences.  This means that ordinary people being punished more than Cosby and Cuomo for lesser offenses the Heir sees as having a possible argument for having their case thrown out and the arrest and the offense wiped clean from their permanent record, particularly if it's something as little as an out tail light.  The Heir will never forget what happened in the two states until and unless they recant and express sincere contriteness and try to make amends.

We in the Bachelor just finished listening to Biden's remarks on the situation in Afghanistan, on our analog radio, as a kind of fireside chat. But the Heir wanted to hear Biden's responses to what the Heir sees as misreporting and misanalysis on the Taliban insurgency and their takeover of Afghanistan. Time will tell for the Heir whether Biden's remarks will necessarily make a whit of difference to a media campaign that the Heir sees as a kind of geometric proof. The Heir previously criticized, among other things, the media's portrayal of the insurgency as a spectator sport with guns and tanks. But it was entirely predictable to the Heir that the coverage would move to what is effectively an indictment of Biden himself. So here's the geometric proof the Heir's seeing: 1) Biden announces withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan; 2) The gains the Taliban made must be played up in tragic and horrifying terms; 3) Now that the Taliban have taken over Afghanistan, it must be Biden's fault because he withdrew troops. The Heir didn't hear Biden criticize this coverage, because the Heir's wondering whether Biden's playing the media just a little to stoically diplomatically, since they've been anti-Biden from the beginning. The Heir observed that when the ransomware attacks went on, the media did everything they could to make us look far more defenseless than we necessarily are, just so they can lay *that* one at Biden's feet. When the FBI successfully counter-hacked the ransomware people to get most of the ransom back from the hackers, the Heir observed that the media quickly moved to the next Presidential "crisis," and the Heir's never seen the media ever substantiate, and he's always seen them spin. That's the beauty of audio, that you can actually *hear* the words they're trying to use, without the distraction of visual that might make a person convinced of the media's case against Biden, as opposed to their stopping to think, well, wait a minute, isn't this biased and arbitrary? Let's stay tuned people, as the Heir witnesses what the media has to say for itself now that Biden's made his remarks.

One "background" news item the Heir hears on audio is regarding the conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Sure, it's obvious to the Heir that the media's trying to make the case as to why we should stay in there indefinitely, despite the popularity of ending military operations, but here's the way the Heir hears them portraying it.  They're making it look like it's The Good Guys Versus The Bad Guys.  Presumably, the good guys are Kabul, and the bad guys are the Taliban, and the conflict is nothing more than a spectator sport with guns.  The Heir hearkens back to a trust-funded BBC World Service that used to do thoughtful documentaries as to why such conflicts are far more nuanced and not as cut-and-dried.  So once the Heir gets back to DX'ing the shortwave bands, he wants to hear what he calls the VTLA, the Voice of Tradition for a Liberated Afghanistan, which would be a Taliban station directed at the US and Europe, as well as Southeast Asia, to make the case for a Taliban perspective.  Don't get the Heir wrong here.  We're talking about a brutal social group.  But he's also sure that the citizens in "Taliban territory" are not all that unwelcoming to the Taliban because they see Kabul as an oppressive corrupt influence.  The citizens the Heir surmises have to pay regular bribes to Kabul just to be able to get food and medicine, as well as regular electrical, water and sewer services.  We're talking about areas with very few economic opportunities.  Plus, the Heir's sure that the VTLA would have found out about the Heir's discontent with a personally corrupt society here in the US, and uses the examples the Heir has talked about in their regular broadcasts, to educate the Americans not only about how wrong they are about the Taliban, but how wrong they are about themselves.  And, ultimately, just plain wrong.

"These are the kinds of things to think about the next time you hear about the Taliban 'conflict' on audio."

The Heir's been reading the local paper, printed on *actual paper*, so that when he turns the pages, the paper makes a distinctive rustling sound.  He hasn't yet come across an item in the local paper that's caused him to rustle the paper with indignation.  But he did read that Bachelor Borough and surrounding towns in Bachelor Blue State have passed ordinances prohibiting pot stores and related businesses from opening up in those towns.  That's a sex shop law that the Heir for once can support, and it's answer he sees to that whole Let's Pot Everyone impulse that led up to pot getting legalized in the state.  The ordinances are acknowledgably tough laws, but the Heir doesn't see that as going far enough.  He's pretty sure there are towns that are not likely to make the August 21 deadline only because those towns only meet 2-3 times a week to introduce ordinances and vote on them.  So if Town X about 15 miles away passes an ordinance on the 25th, but it's the 21st, somehow that's not supposed to count?  The Heir's hoping there's a provision in the new pot law that allows towns that didn't make it by the deadline to petition for a 60 day extension in court, or to otherwise appeal a post-8/21 hegemony by the state.  To be sure, BBSC and some towns in that area have committed to allowing for pot shops and so forth, but again an 8/21 deadline the Heir sees as not allowing a town enough time to decide for themselves *and* make use of the new covid19 relief money that's come from Washington through BBSC.  They're divided between legislating on pot and legislating on making use of the relief money before it expires about maybe next April or so, on a use-it-or-lose-it-basis.  Also if a pot shop opens up right after 8/21 and yet the town hasn't had a chance to say no until about 8/25, they should at least have the ability the Heir supposes to say, no new shops after the one that just opened up eventually leaves the town in some manner.  All this he sees as gravely disappointing what he calls The Potters in their vision for BBS despite the fact that some 2 million voters voted against legalizing pot in the state, because that's at least one way BBS can reach out to those those voters who voted against it.  It wasn't a landslide by any means.

MeToo has come back in the form of Cuomo, so the Heir hopes that forces the progressives' decision to use the voting rights issue to effectively tell Cosby's survivors to go jump in the lake after Cosby was let out of jail to kind of give them pause about that decision.  What he generally sees the progressives doing is getting all hot and heavy on a given issue at one point in time, often making it existential, and then 6-12 months they're onto something else, making *that* item existential.  It may very well be that as survivors speak out on Cuomo, a fair number of Cosby survivors would do so as well.  The Heir sees it as in the progressives' best interests to *not* snub the Cosby survivors a second time *and* see about placing the decision the PASC made a month ago under official oversight for the public record.  The Heir understands about voting rights, he agrees and hopes for passage for the voting rights acts, and he opposes the voting restrictions that are coming out.  But he acknowledges that at least one limit to this talking point memo of Nothing Else Matters Unless Voting Rights Pass is how he interpreted that a month ago to mean that the Cosby survivors are somehow not supposed to get justice in light of Cosby getting out of jail, just because doing so is not as important as voting rights.  A lot of the hot heaviness I the Mentor noted above involves what the Heir sees as progressives looking for ways to make people write a blank check, so if you could do a geometric proof that says if A is true and B is true then C is outright *absolutely* true, that the Heir sees as the progressives exploiting logic.  You can agree with A and B, and still oppose the C of Nothing Else Matters if your sense of Principle drives you accordingly.  This we in the Bachelor see as the limits of logic and science and rationality that the progressives so claim to uphold.  Once the wrong conclusion rubs up against the need for principle, principle has to win out if we as a society are to combat society's personal corruption.