Sometimes the contrast is striking, even comical. I’m sitting here thinking about how to clean the kitchen, mowing the lawn, maybe buying a good de-thatching rake. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is making threats toward us and, for all I know, contemplating world domination, or at least how to destroy America. What an evil-eyed gnat.

How does he occupy his day? Does he care about the people he governs, or is it more about the perks and the power?

He must always be watching his back.

Good for the Texas Democrats—boycotting and denying a quorum for a session of the state legislature that would have voted on the latest restrictive voting regulations. Probably postponing the inevitable, but it’s a visible gesture and great big fuck you to all who obviously aren’t above trying anything that makes it harder for minorities to vote. It’s so blatant, reactive, and un-American. Well, it is American but something many have hoped would have disappeared by now.

Instead of self-evaluation and maybe even evolution, the Republicans are choosing to “stand their ground,” preserve their “principles,” play politics, buy the lie about an election being stolen from their Supreme Leader.

Basically, they’re just trying to hold on to power, however that can be accomplished.

I seem unable to write without a tinge of cynicism and skepticism. I’m just another uncreative critic who can’t find happiness. A glass-half-empty guy who looks for something to gripe about. Geez.

Confusion on the mask issue? Not really a surprise. People don’t know if they can trust each other? Again, not really a surprise. It’s like there can be no baseline of knowledge upon which we all agree, especially as this applies to respecting the virus and its knack for showing up when we for some unknown reason think it shouldn’t be around. Enough of us have never really respected the virus. There’s respect for the doomsayers and crackpot theorists, but not for the doctors and researchers and scientists who actually know something useful.

Is Louis DeJoy for real? Is he still doing Trump’s dirty work, right under our noses? Is there a method to his madness, a wisdom that we’re just not seeing? From all appearances, it seems this is not the case.

Why does Marjorie Taylor Greene warrant a platform? Comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust? Sure, she’s a “newsmaker” of sorts. But should she even be worthy of coverage? Why waste the time and energy following her around? Her demeanor shouts ugliness. She’s angry and ignorant, maybe vindictive. A real irritant, a true right-wing nut job. Determined to make noise despite, or because of, being relieved of certain duties. So of course, she’ll get coverage one way or another. We have to put up with a lot because of free speech. I’m not sure this is the brand of free speech all our soldiers have died to protect. Or maybe it is. Free is free, I guess. Which is OK, as long as we have the option of disagreeing with it and either tuning it out or making it stop.

The more I watch my networks of choice, the more I realize that the 24-hour news cycle is somehow unsustainable and even unnecessary. There’s a need to fill airtime and say something, anything, often over and over again, until a topic is treated in depth by multiple pundits and experts and finally beaten to death. What strikes me the past couple of days is how my anchors and hosts of choice are really running with the developments in the Trump civil and criminal cases. Coverage from every angle, seemingly willing the outcomes into existence, hoping against hope that this time Trump gets what’s coming to him. And the whole time, over on the fox, a totally different message is being distributed, with just as much passion and conviction and loudness.

News media are all aflutter with the “bombshell” revelation that the former civil investigation of the Trump “empire” has morphed into a criminal investigation.

Stop the presses, apparently.

Does anyone really think that any of this is going to go anywhere? Give me one reason—ONE reason—why this is at all significant. Colbert and others recognize the futility in getting our hopes up.  The bum will blame everyone else around him, and nothing will happen.

Trump is the true Teflon Man, though I’d be more than happy to eat my words.

Ghost guns? Brilliant.

What took so long to come up with a method of manufacturing untraceable weaponry that often enough ends up in the hands of people who want to use it to render bodily harm? Just brilliant.

Your Second Amendment rights in action, America. We should all be proud.

It’s an addiction worse than any other.

The longer I languish in this job (see my very first post), the more jaded I’ve become.

I suppose if one drills through the layers, there is a core of decency born of religious belief, a positive influence that comes to bear in the lives of believers. Maybe this is what guides some of those who get featured in the good news segments on the nightly news.

What’s been weighing on me is the darker side that gets covered earlier in a broadcast. The Taliban bombs a school and kills scores of innocent girls who just wanted an education. Jews and Palestinians live in perpetual tension, on a tinder box that appears to have been ignited, again. And Christian politicians in this country peddle and preach a brand of conservative swill that informs platforms while often landing like fingernails on a chalkboard.

It’s a variation on “You can’t handle the truth!” No one really knowing what the truth is, yet thinking they all have a corner on it. It’s more whatever serves an agenda, born of convenience and laziness and misinterpretation. It is useful mainly as it feeds other beliefs and tendencies and presents at least the illusion of control.

When it comes to religion, we should leave things at invitation and call it a day, find peace with shaking the dust off and moving on. Because conversion is a bridge too far. You can’t tell people what to believe. You can’t blow people up and then expect true devotion and respect. You can’t legislate morality and expect people to fall in line. There must be room to take it or leave it.

Separation of church and state is one of the best ideas the founding fathers had. Religion can be a stick of dynamite in the hands of idiots who’ve had too much to drink.

We’re feeling pretty cocky about covid. Like we’re kicking its ass, finally. School officials are talking bravely about full re-openings in the fall. Families are getting their first hugs in over a year. Ball parks and other venues are on the verge of filling all the seats again. All this and more, even though a relatively high percentage of people still refuse to get their shot(s), and enough of the rest of the world has hardly begun the vaccination effort.

The trouble is that the blind spot is the same as it has always been—”it’s all about me,” in a corporate sort of way. As long as we here in America are moving toward herd immunity, that’s all that matters. Except that’s not true, and we should know that by now.

We as citizens of earth have to be in this together, or it will be a planetary game of whack-a-mole for the foreseeable future.

I don’t consider Gov. Tom Wolf a tyrant, a usurper of power, or somehow evil. Yes, he’s a politician, in that he has run for public office, bought TV ad time with the express purpose of trying to get people to vote for him, and often has to weigh his words when speaking to the public. A public which includes a vocal percentage beholden to MAGA and Fox News, The Big Lie, and Vaccines Are Not To Be Trusted.

There has been way too much ink spilled over Gov. Wolf’s handling of the Covid crisis. Overreactive, partisan dissatisfaction and a convenient 20-20 hindsight that places him in the crosshairs because he “overreached,” dared to make tough decisions about curtailing activity and movement because hardly anyone alive had ever been through a pandemic before.

He’s been doing his job, listening to people who truly know more than the average person on the street who’s just repeating what they hear from Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or the unexamined empty-headed blather on Fox and Friends about “losing our freedom.”

Wolf is making decisions based on something other than baseless opinions and theories and insidious group think. He has had a thankless job ever since he took office, but especially since Covid came calling. He’s done what he’s had to do, some of which he may do differently the next time.

And there will be a next time, sooner than later, if we are left exposed to Covid variants or some new pathogen because of some irrational fear of a magnificent weapon against disease- vaccination- that has contributed significantly to a doubling of our lifespan over the last 300 years.

What is happening to us? What do we do with all the crap being flung at us every day?

There were over 400 shootings just over the weekend in this country. We can blame it on covid fatigue, job insecurity and the attendant stress, mental illness, all of the above and more. But those aren’t legitimate excuses, right? There are no legitimate excuses for firing a weapon out of anger and frustration and killing and maiming people with it.

War is a different, though somehow related topic.

This seems a symptom of societal sickness, a symptom of systemic neglect and skewed priorities. What are we being told when one’s only solution when angry and frustrated is to shoot somebody? This is unsustainable madness.

But how do we slow this down, or stop it?  Divine intervention might be our only hope. Nothing short of that is going to help us. Because we as a gun-loving, gun-toting nation appear unwilling to address the elephant in the room. We apparently are incapable of interpreting the writing on the wall, hearing the collective cry for help, or entertaining the possibility that maybe there are just too many guns.

We shouldn’t be used to this, yet it seems like we are. We’re ok with the perpetual Wild West.

The news out of Afghanistan is gut-wrenching, though not unexpected. “National interest” leaves the snake-bitten country without the watch dog, the buffer between hope and chaos.

What kind of God would sanction ghastly violence against school children—young girls—who are just trying to learn and grow?

The Taliban is a scourge. A fanatical, ignorant, misogynistic, misguided, archaic, hateful relic, a burden on humanity. They should have a banner unfurled from the backs of their machine gun-toting pick-ups that reads, “Welcome to the 13th Century.”