It figures. I make light of the over-the-top media attention and coverage of the latest winter storm, and it turns out to be a real monster with heavy, blowing snow, a serious plunge in temps, over a million without power, multiple fatalities, scores of accidents and just an all-around mess.

I wasn’t making light of the storm or the consequences—I was reacting to what the Weather Channel and the rest do every time there’s a whiff of bad weather. They run around with their hair on fire and turn it into a media event in hopes of sustaining and bolstering viewership.

On another note, the zero tolerance Covid policy in China may have been unpopular, but now it looks like an easing of restrictions is leading to a huge uptick in cases—estimates approaching 250 million, 18% of the population. The thinking is that since people were isolating, there was no natural immunity being built up, and now people are vulnerable.

What about vaccines? I know they have their own and apparently they’re not as effective as Pfizer and Moderna. So, why don’t they buy doses of these for their people? Too proud? Not a good look politically? Still a supply issue?

And… Alex Ovechkin took over the second spot all time in goals scored, behind only Wayne Gretsky. Ovi is an iron man.

I just ordered a copy of the January 6 report. I need to read through it. I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump and I’m interested in an accounting of how he tried to get away with his latest and boldest caper.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, the reality of Trump’s misdeeds and a recounting of the hearings was laid out in review. I was reminded, for the 807th time, that what unfolded on January 6 was not a series of unrelated events. It was, rather, a concerted effort to interfere with the results of what was, over and over again, revealed to be a free and fair election with next to negligible reasons to question any result.

The simple and astonishing fact remains that Donald Trump didn’t want to be seen as a loser, so he looked for favors, employed all the tools of his particular pre-POTUS “trade” to try to finagle an outcome that made him look like a winner. The fact that what he did was incriminating and seditious mattered not at all to him. Nor does any of this matter to those who continue to support him.

After the hearings and the resultant criminal referrals, along with the lackluster results of the 2022 midterm elections due in part to a negative “Trump effect,” Trump’s approval rating lost less than a point and still hovers around 40 percent. Forty percent of Republican voters are still with him, despite everything!

Meaning the assault is likely to continue.

Another bomb cyclone! Holy cow, everyone! Batten down the hatches, build a storm shelter, raid the grocery stores, stock up on essentials, inventory your pets and children, get your affairs in order! Because Elliot is coming! And it’s gonna be bad! Worse than Diaz! Why, it’s another in a continuing series of Storms of the Century! Oh, the humanity!

!!!

Mr. Zelensky predictably received the hero’s welcome in Washington yesterday. If he got one standing ovation in his address to Congress, he got 10 or 20. He wants more of our military hardware, and I’m sure he’ll get what he wants, or at least most of it. He promised that it will be used responsibly, which has a hilarious ring to it.

What are we to take away from this bold move? We know it got a rise out of Putin, who threatened/boasted Russian troops marching on the streets of D.C. Yikes and holy shit.

Does anyone like where this seems to be heading? I know there’s always bluster and threats and assurances, but this has escalation written all over it. It’s happening before our eyes. Putin is getting what he’s always wanted, somehow. One often has the feeling with him that everything is unfolding the way he planned it, even as news reports make it sound like he’s misjudged things and has been backed into a corner.

Dulled and blunted and dismissed. This will be the Republican response to the criminal referrals from the January 6 Committee. Witch hunt, much ado about nothing, a liberal fever dream, blah, blah, blah. Back and forth they’ll continue to go, the Right with a long memory for supposed wrongs perpetrated by the Dems, chomping at the bit for their chance to get even, i.e. just make a mockery of governance as the majority in the House.

The Committee has done stellar work, leaving a damning mountain of evidence for public consumption, if the public wants to make the effort to actually read about this. At least there will be a record. It remains to be seen if the Justice Department will take the unprecedented next step of indicting Trump and Eastman. Whether they do or don’t, someone is gonna be pissed.

If there is such a thing as justice, though, it needs to be served– in a heaping helping to someone who took up space in the Oval Office for four years, who claimed to be POTUS but had no idea what that meant.

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.