Flipping coins

Gov: Chiang
Lt Gov: Gharabiklou
SoS: Padilla
Controller: Yee
Treasurer: Ma
AG: Becerra
Ins: Lara
BoE: Turner

Senator: De Leon
Rep: Bass
SS: Mitchell
Ass: Piquado

Judges
Sauceda
Michel
Escalante
Hancock
Mackey
Armendariz
Gibbons
Schreiner
Diamond
Gilbertson
Duron

Schools: Thurmond

Assessor: Prang
Sheriff:McDonnell

Prop 68: $4B bond for parks and environment. Lean yes. It's only a wafer-thin bond measure, and has a $725M carve out to create parks in neighborhoods with few parks. On the minus side, it *is* a bond, and the state already spends about $5B annually on 'natural resources' of the type covered under this prop, so it's not that big a funding boost long-term.

Prop 69: requires transportation taxes to be spent on transportation projects. Lean no. Although it seems 'fair,' a lot of our problems in CA is that the legislature's hands are tied on so many things. There is less room for flexibility on spending where the spending is needed.

Prop 70: requires 2/3 vote to spend money in the cap-and-trade fund. No. I don't really see the reasoning. If it was going into a rainy-day fund that could be used flexibly (see above) that would be one thing, but the fund can only be spent on GHG mitigation type activities, and I don't see why the current majority vote spending rules are inadequate.

Prop 71: Props take effect 5 days after the SecState certifies the election results (as opposed to retroactive to day after election). Yes, I guess. To the extent that this may minimize confusion statewide about issues that may hang in the balance before official results are due, I can see how this will help. On the minus side, if some of your rights are restored by the ballot, you will have to wait. On the plus side, if some of your rights are taken away, you have a few days to consider what to do. 

Prop 72: Allows people to do something good for everyone without being penalized. Yes.

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

 The Master and Margarita  is considered by some critics "to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, as well as the foremost of Soviet satires."

This does not speak well of Soviet satires, and I would like to leave a flaming bag of poo on the doorstep of 'some critics'.

This came up as a selection in the Resistance Book Club, but sadly there is more meat for discussion in Bulgakov's Wikipedia page than the novel. The censorship he faced in life, and the fact that the novel circulated in samizdat and was only published years after the author's death, have much more to do with authoritarianism than the book itself.

To be sure, one element of the book is that a novel about Pontius Pilate is suppressed by the Soviet literary establishment for being too religious, but that's about an end of the criticism of the Soviet state (per se) other than some small-time humor about bribes, cliques and the chicanery required to land a decent apartment in Moscow.

Bits of the Pilate novel are also interpolated into The Master and Margarita, and are in fact the best written parts of it, since the remainder is a mostly tedious slapstick farce of Satan and his minions visiting Moscow and wreaking havoc. The historical scenes are a serious and sympathetic literary take on Pilate, grounded in the gospel narrative, but adding to it dramatically.

A highpoint of the modern era story is a Satanic Ball, because who can argue with that?

It's possible I chose a poor translation. Well, no, it's not possible, it's certain. I'm just not very sure that my opinion would have risen much with a better translation. I'm gonna pull my Hipness Through Erudition card, and note that when Pontius Pilate is described as a 'rider', what was meant was that he was of an equestrian family.

Favorite 'joke': one of the demons takes the form of a huge black tomcat, walking about on his hindlegs. He gets on a Moscow streetcar. The other locals might not have objected to this so much, had he not attempted to pay for his passage. Rimsky-shot.