Near mid-day Friday here in California’s Central Valley, and finally a day not so blistering hot — we saw a week of triple-digit temperatures, topping out yesterday at 105-degrees. As of right now ‘just‘ 80, supposedly heading later this afternoon to a high of 95, though, I don’t seen it getting there. A crater-drop in 24 hours,
Already a sense the coming summer to be a scorcher.

Despite the pix to the left, no backyard blogging this week — shot taken early in the morning Tuesday, but it became too hot, even under a canopy. Air surrounding a temperature of 100+ is amazingly heavy as shit, which distorts colors, which makes scenery appear to float. I’m an old guy so shit like that happens, okay?
Leroy, too, is old, and in the early cool lounges easily at my work-station after we’d gotten back from our Tuesday walk.

No blogging at all, in fact, for this week. And it wasn’t just the heat.

Sometimes the news can nearly paralyze me by its shear weight, especially in dealing with the T-Rump, and more so in a freakin’ pandemic. Beyond not only a shitty-horrible person on his own, the T-Rump is the way-worse president in US history, and could be one of the way-worse people who ever lived.
In blinding, glaring light of the coronavirus, the T-Rump has truly proved way-dangerous — today The Rude Pundit didn’t pull words in a must-read essay on the T-Rump’s horror show, in sum:

The President is the enemy of the American people.
He’s not just a buffoon or a loser or an idiot.
I’ve used the word before, but it becomes clearer and clearer all the time.
He’s evil.
He’s actively, intently evil.
Yes, the cruelty is still the point.
But the impulse behind the cruelty isn’t merely the will to power.
It’s actually evil.

I don’t use that word lightly.
Donald Trump doesn’t see people as individual human beings, he doesn’t want to lead the nation, and he sure doesn’t care who lives or dies, as long as he lives.
He sees the world as divided into for him and against him. Only the former deserve to exist, and he’s doing everything he can to make sure the latter don’t.

I don’t know what other word you’d use.

Combine that word with ‘chaos‘ and you’d be closer to reality. In the midst of a pandemic, now there’s unrest in the streets as the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has supercharged the air across the country, making life’s overall shit worse. Then to make matters worse, T-Rump made it worse.
And even still, today in the above-said midst-of-a-pandemic, which has now killed 100,000-plus people here in the US, 365,000 worldwide (most in just more than two months), the T-Rump announced the US will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization, creating disaster upon a disaster: ‘Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association, assailed Trump’s announcement Friday as “senseless” with “significant, harmful repercussions.”‘
Correct, and cruelty the point.

Pull a stunt like that while the entire planet is seeking a medical resolution to a catastrophic virus, and is nowhere under control, is a horrible, lethal monstrosity of epic proportions, exactly the point, again. And it was a stunt, although the T-Rump needs all the distraction he can get away from the sick and dying, any move to cause needless suffering is always okay.

One hardcore piece of our current element is one we don’t want to ponder — from The Washington Post Wednesday afternoon: ‘There’s a good chance the coronavirus will never go away. Even after a vaccine is discovered and deployed, the coronavirus will likely remain for decades to come, circulating among the world’s population.‘

Erik Loomis at LGM noted what’s the future in this:

What makes this all the more horrifying is that the U.S. has totally wasted the time it could have had to set up the best set of public health options possible.
The red states are just reopening like crazy and the blue states are now following, though in my view, generally in a more or less responsible way.
We’ve talked about a second wave in the fall, but it may well not be nearly that far away in states such as Texas and Georgia and Wisconsin.
So what happens then?

There aren’t easy answers to any of this.
I’m part of my union’s executive committee and just managing all of this for one college campus is a mindblowing task with enormous numbers of issues that all interconnect.
There are no easy answers.
At all.
Not for higher ed, not for K-12, not for child care facilities, not for nursing homes, the states or the cities or anything else.

So how are people planning to live for years with this virus in our lives?

Answer? There’s not one right now. Who-the-fuck knows..?

One COVID-19 example of the domino effect (h/t Susie):

As weekly jobless claims skyrocket past 30 million in just a matter of weeks, a new study from the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago offers a sobering assessment of the extent of permanent damage to the job market. — @pdacosta https://t.co/Su34BclVqm

— Bruno #StayHome Navarro (@Bruno_J_Navarro) May 27, 2020

So with all this shit, and way-more just piling up by the hour (I’m a news junkie on speed), I got to the point my brain couldn’t slow down enough in order to use a keyboard and write something, anything. As I stated above, I started this post early Tuesday and it never got off the ground — I’d just sit, stare at the laptop screen for a bit, then maybe surf the InterWebs for awhile, or continue re-watching ‘Star Trek: Voyager‘ (I think the best of the original TV show offshoots), or just scroll through Reddit‘s Pics category, or maybe continuing Diane Mott Davidson’s “The Cereal Murders” paperback, or…

Or…