Tough Shit, Mr. Berliner

 I woke up a bit after 1, and when I turned the radio on, eventually the story came around about a certain Mr. Berliner who was "senior business editor" at NPR, resigned after writing a nasty essay about NPR on another platform - this last a breach of the ethics agreement you have to follow when you become employed by NPR. 

The piece isn't fact-checked, NPR wasn't allowed to respond, and a lot of it is pure right-wing hyperbole. Berliner accuses NPR of "liberal bias". Hello you fucking idiot, it's NPR. What do you expect? That's what they do. They're the one media outlet, just about, that stands against the rest of 'em ranging from secretly wanting to be Der Sturmer, to actually being Der Sturmer. 

This is the same pattern, 1920s Germany or 2020s USA, the fascists will attack center/left media saying they're not being "fair" by not broadcasting *their* worldview. The most extreme case of this sort of thing was a few years ago when a school teacher somewhere in our Godforsaken flyover country was teaching Nazi ideology to be "fair" in teaching about the Holocaust. 

Mr. Berliner probably thinks we still have the "fairness doctrine" we had up into the early 80s or so. Media outlets were required to air both sides, and could be taken off the air if they did not do so. This fairness doctrine is considered to be the reason we were able to get anti-smoking education out there, and hence why we're not smoking like chimneys now. One the fairness doctrine was done away with, we got Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of that crap. 

I'm tapering off of wine, so I'm weaning myself on a mixture of wine, Coke Zero, and water. Out of 300ml of that, 50ml is wine. It doesn't taste as awful as it sounds, really. And I drank less wine last night, resulting in a weird dream and actually waking up earlier than I might have, and not having a bone-dry mouth. 

(One good thing about this recent wine-dependence: I was drinking a lot of coffee. Like, a LOT of coffee. Too much coffee, man. 4 cups a day, often more like 6. Getting on wine made me only want one cup when I get up, and I intend to keep it that way.)

And I did my taxes. Last night I'd printed out all the forms I needed, in duplicate because it's easier for me to write out two copies, one to keep and one to send to the IRS, then to take forms to Kinko's to photocopy. And I did some organizing off odd papers that were floating around in my "TAXES" box, so I feel better about the orderliness of things in there. 

There's really only a bit of tricky math. I'd say the best sequence is to do schedule C, profit and loss, then do the SE which is the self-employment tax, fill in things on schedules 1 and 2 because they're needed, then do the actual 1040 where some more tricky calculations are done, and then before you know it you're done. My actual "income tax" is something like $350. My self-employment tax is around $2700 though, because I'm paying into things like Medicare and Social Security. Things a regular employee would never even think about. They'd just do their taxes using a 1040EZ and get a refund. 

I'm a couple days late too, which I'll probably get a bill for, but it's still cheaper than paying a preparer by far. If I could find one. I just wrote out my check for $3300 or so and shrug and think, "Eh, it's only money!". 

Once I was done and had my tax papers and check all together in an envelope, I had time to vacuum and clean around here because Ken's been coming an hour or two earlier lately. I rode up to the post office and mailed it, then rode back to H Mart. It was about a quarter to 7 and I looked in the hot case to see if there was anything worth wandering around the store for 15 minutes to buy 2-for-1 or half price. There wasn't. 

So I went to Ono Hawaiian Barbecue or as I call it, Oh No! Hawaiian Barbecue. And spent just short of $20  on a kal bi plate. Interestingly, the card reader they had was an unfamiliar type to me, and the gal said to just tap it, so I held it against the little symbol and it worked. I said, "I didn't know my card could tap."

I took my food and rode home, stopping by the EMT training place where I picked up some useful zipper bags and a lot of OTC medications and alcohol wipes and such things, that I just shook out of their boxes into a Whole Foods cloth bag. I also got a bunch of the decongestant pills Ken and Suzy use, they're always happy to get those because they're expensive.