I have 22 Facebook friends. That is a smaller number than reported by any other of my Facebook friends. My Facebook “friend number” (the total number of friends of those friends of mine who share this information) is 5,156. My average friend has 213 friends. My most friendly friend has 1,336 friends and counting — his “friend number” is probably in the hundreds of thousands. I must be his most insignificant friend-number addend.
My network is small. I narrow-cast rather than broadcast. I am happy enough that you, yes you, are reading this sentence. You know who you are — you are one of my friends. Hopefully you have not tired of being part of this small, select group.
Tomorrow I am going to Ottawa for a three-day photography outing with several of my in-the-flesh friends whom I have not seen in a decade. I look forward to enjoying their company, and I hope to return with my eye refreshed and my artistic spirit rekindled, numbers be damned.
The little state I live in, North Carolina, has a Republican governor to go along with its gerrymandered Republican legislature. (Asheville lost its blue-dog Democrat congressman to the magic of redistricting.) So a flurry of laws that were once or sure to be vetoed by our former Democratic governor have now been signed into law by Republican Pat McCrory. As reported in the Asheville Citizen-Times, here are bills he recently signed:
“One new law blocks the state from expanding Medicaid to cover more lower-income people and from operating an online health care marketplace. The federal government will run the exchange instead. Another law ensures group homes and Alzheimer’s care units can access state funds to deal with Medicaid coverage changes. [Comment: There must be more to this than that — as worded, it sounds too good to be true.] There’s also legislation that will allow a live possum drop to continue on New Year’s Eve in Brasstown. Another increases penalties for protests at funerals.”
The Republican insiders who run the little state I live in decided to make their state-ment: it is now open season on progressive policies. They are determined to keep North Carolina from going red to purple to blue, although economics and demographics tilt against them. Custer’s last stand, if you will.