Wow. The World Cup celebrations in Argentina have been marvelous and ridiculous at the same time. They make any major championship celebration in the states look like a small family gathering in the park. It isn’t just one city– it’s a whole country. In the immediate aftermath, there couldn’t have been many people left at home.

The sea of humanity pouring into the streets and onto highways, the raw emotion, the spontaneity, central squares teeming with revelers, shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could see in any direction—whooping it up, climbing utility poles, waving flags, jumping up and down, shooting fireworks, spraying all manner of liquid refreshment. Pure nirvana, unadulterated relief and joy. I’m happy for the people of Argentina, who need something to celebrate, and for Lionel Messi and his teammates.

They didn’t even schedule a parade for some future date (Correction: they did schedule a parade, for Tuesday the 20th, but plans were changed because the crowd in Buenos Aires was too big and unmanageable to keep the team on an open-air bus. So they were put in helicoptors and did a flyover instead!) Looks like it happened right after they got back from Qatar. Everybody’s gonna need to sleep for three days, at least.

I imagine they’re just getting started, though.

The Dead Sea is dying.

It’s always been the Dead Sea because of its hyper salinity, which translates to an untenable environment for supporting aquatic life. But climate change and unsustainable demand on the Jordan River are apparently hastening its demise.

Like similarly unsustainable demand on the Colorado River, plans are at least in the talking stages in hopes of addressing this Middle Eastern situation, but it remains to be seen if that means anything. One can predict struggles in arriving at any solutions or sense of direction, in part because of the crazy dynamics in that part of the world, but also because there will be the usual opinions, some heated and irrational and selfish and accusatory, etc. It’s another case of seeing the writing on the wall and simply doing nothing about it until any solution becomes a daunting task, as in bigger and more disruptive and expensive than it needed to be.

No one takes the blame, no one takes the lead until late in the game. There are just stakeholders and ignorance and a refusal to believe that things are as bad as they are. Exacerbated by a stunning distrust of a scientific community that tries to be the canary in the coal mine, we have a recipe for gravely consequential inertia.

According to Thomas Friedman, a two-state solution is dying– Israel, the West Bank, an uneasy peace that most days seems only a hair’s breadth from exploding into bloody conflict. One might think the people on both sides are exhausted, stressed out by the need for constant vigilance, always wondering if today will be the day when everything goes to hell.

Needing a head on a swivel, always being on guard, a hesitancy to trust, feeling like you’re living on perpetually contested land with a target on your back. How can anyone enjoy even a few moments of real peace?

What a way to live.

NFTs. Non-fungible tokens. Virtual reality at its finest, or silliest, or most appropriately deceptive. Reality isn’t good enough, so really smart people create something that seems like reality but really isn’t. They’ll claim it’s really much more than that, that monetary value can really be attached to it, but it looks like many really beg to differ with that claim.

Except Donald Trump. He’s late to the party with his series of… superhero NFTs? The deep end can always get deeper for Donald. Just when you think there’s no depth left to which to sink, he proves us wrong. Again.

Ninety-nine bucks for one superhero “card.” And the buyer doesn’t even get to pick the one they want. It’s getting difficult to conceive of the desperation here. And the mindset– why the hell he’s doing such a sad and pathetic thing in the first place.

He was President of the United States. Many people voted for him.

He was President of the United States!

How can there be anyone who doesn’t think it wise to make sure such a statement remains forever spoken in the past tense?

It makes sense that Lee Harvey Oswald had a better chance of doing what he did if he kept his plans to himself. Then again, a plot to assassinate the POTUS sounds like something that might have involved certain systemic communication, and failures. And more than one person.

The latest CNN reporting on this revealed that another trove of papers has been or will be released, bringing the total of de-classified documents to around 95% of what exists. It’s the remaining 5% that will keep the conspiracy theorists up at night, and maybe this is as it should be. I don’t consider myself a conspiracy junkie, but an event of this magnitude and consequence deserves every bit of scrutiny it’s been getting for almost 60 years now.

What’s likely to be in that remaining 5%, and why not release all of it? Besides protecting “CIA sources, methods, … and tradecraft,” this might just be a lengthy battle of attrition—eventually, no one will be alive that was either involved or simply remembers where they were that day. But like other chapters in our history, there might be some bloodhounds intent on picking up a scent and not letting things rest.

What is it that keeps us hoping for more of a story than what appears to be the case? Maybe it’s a lingering feeling that no investigation of such a momentous event could escape a certain subterfuge and some amount of CYA.

Trump has a growing DeSantis problem? Wow. From inane to insidious. From dumbass to scary dumbass.

Trump is awful, but DeSantis is awful with a brain. He doesn’t see anything amiss with creating a Public Health Integrity Committee or hiring a quack as the state’s Surgeon General. He gets lauded for his all freedom all the time Covid policy. He’s a friggin’ star, apparently.

The return to relative sanity has been nice, but it seems it may not last much longer. Darth Vader is knocking on the door.

Is the root of all our troubles simply the matter of perspective? Let’s unpack that a bit.

It goes to darker places where irrational hatred and blinding selfishness rule the day. Dysfunctional upbringings, inherited bigotry, delusions of grandeur, ostentatious lifestyles not easily forfeited, the intoxicating effects of power. Entitlement, philosophies of governance tied to a lack of faith in humanity, alongside the illusion of destiny actually being a thing.

Demon destiny. It bites us more often than not. And sometimes God even ordains it, which is perhaps the greatest delusion: the human capacity for believing God is on their side. Or that God doesn’t exist.

Either way, someone loses. 

The mask rule has returned at our doctor’s office. There’s a nasty 3-fer spreading currently—Covid, RSV, and the flu—and it seems these are in no hurry to go away. Dr. Fauci and other actual experts are right, as they often are—Covid isn’t over. Many may know this, even if they’d rather not admit it. Our resistance is down, and there are plenty of opportunistic maladies seeking out hosts.

I was getting used to going about without a mask, even though I still carry one pretty much wherever I go. It won’t be much of a bother to put it back on.  

Morality police. Sounds funny and pathetic and a bit Orwellian. Among the best arguments for a clear separation of church and state, or whatever they’d prefer to label it in places like Iran or Afghanistan or elsewhere.

In Iran, the price is being paid for stepping out, even as, if reports are accurate, the first people to be publicly executed were violent offenders who allegedly attacked and killed police.

Women cannot not wear their hijabs. Imagine women in this country being told they have to cover their heads. Imagine, in general, such restrictions on personal expression. And the sad irony is that such abhorrent efforts are carried out in a deeply patriarchal atmosphere. Men making decisions for women, perhaps not unlike what’s happening in this country with regard to abortion.

I know there’s a place for good order, but not regarding something that has adiaphora written all over it.

I recently came across a meme that evoked a visceral reaction coming from a place of feeling like enough is enough.

To summarize, it contained a wordy, rambling, paranoid, cliched rant about how we’re all just victims of and slaves to corporate power and malfeasance, about how “things really are in America” that sounded like what I imagine a Q-Anon manifesto would sound like, complete with a superimposed image of some Army or Marine vet looking all menacing and angry, as if to add a certain gravitas and legitimacy to the vial of bile that was contained therein.

I’m really tired of hearing people parrot these streams of consciousness, tired of reading these pessimistic takes on “what’s really going on…” It wreaks of brain washing, and hints strongly at the spread of an insidious poison through a whole subset of angry, disenchanted men and women who apparently are ready to bear arms and create havoc in the name of fixing a problem. Like their hero, Donald Trump, they have no plan. It’s just violence in the name of slaying some boogeyman (a changing complexion?) and hastening what in their minds passes as “restoration.”

I have no doubt that some of these people are ex-military personnel who may very well feel like they’ve been treated like pawns by the rich and powerful– by people who aren’t listening, who have never gotten their hands dirty or stood anywhere near a battlefield.

Still, their worldview has soured. They are convinced that America is really a giant sham, a real mess, and the only solution is a fresh start ushered in with violence and chaos.

No, thank you.