And I’m also going to get to see Samantha Fish play this year.

It’s shaping up to be a good one for music.

Now if I can just see Christine and the Queens. Somehow.

Interviewed today the first female System Administrator candidate I’ve come across in many a long year.

She was pretty good; we’re gonna hire her. Cool.

Going to see Ani DiFranco in concert in a week and a half.

Was a Christmas present to my partner, but I’ve also wanted to see her for years and have never gotten the chance.

Being surrounded by at least somewhat-more-feminist people will be nice.

Holy hell, let’s watch Molly Tuttle play guitar.

She makes that look so easy and I know it’s absolutely not.

Thinking again about the European refugee crisis, it always seems that when society is forced to make a choice between the welfare of women and the promotion of some ideology, the advance of neoliberalism or any societal trade-off, that it is always women who are the sacrificial pawn.

In many ways that makes those who so easily forsake the rights, hopes and dreams of women to other aims and other causes just as morally deficient as the refugees and their children (and children’s children) doing the harassing and assaulting and making people feel and be unsafe in their home cities.*

This culpability is also true in the case of the ACA and many other modern “deals” where women were the sacrifice gambit that allowed the compromise to proceed.

The refugees are easy to blame. And I do blame them. But it’s not their fault they were displaced by climate change and war, or that some political leader allowed them to be embedded in a culture that they are unsuited for and deleterious to.

And I blame them for making life noticeably worse for people I know and like, and making those people desire to become refugees themselves.

But to be fair — and to be rational — wider social and political happenings must be examined — for instance, why would Merkel allow this to happen? Why would so many other political leaders? It’s not charity or for the good of their nations — we are long past that time in history.

Only in understanding this can you properly apportion the blame.

The refugees, the women already present in the countries being destroyed and most men are just game pieces in some larger pursuit. Understand this or you understand nothing.

The refugees and the harm they are doing to their host societies is the point, not some side effect.

*For instance, the US bombing everyone to freedom is another example of this.