Usually, in putting together the couple of posts I do about every day, there’s always some seemingly-more interesting than the dozens of serious/important news items flashing across our screens 24/7, and one or two worthy of the time to build a page on it. Today felt like more than just one was blinking red in the InterWeb world.
Maybe a multi-story post, or whatever.

First, a bit playing off my post from this morning on California’s COVID reopening, how I was still pretty apprehensive about throwing-off masks (though, I’m fully vaxxed) and other pandemic rules easily, an unease with the shape-shiftig quality of the virus — so this afternoon there’s the raised-level of concern for a new strain, what the CDC now calls a “variant of concern” for America (h/t tweet BJ):

A dangerous Covid variant—delta variant—is on the rise and could lead to outbreaks in states with low vaccination rates. The variant 1st emerged in India— fueling a devastating outbreak—and will likely replace other variants now in circulation https://t.co/9EGIFmo8KF

— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) June 14, 2021

Just one sentence to fuel my virus/breathing paranoia: ‘Covid-19 cases have been declining over the past few months in the United States, but there’s concern that could change as the pace of vaccinations slows and the Delta variant spreads.‘

Anyway, here’s more food for the fire, in this case near-about literal fire, which is a massive heat wave already scorching the SW US, and expected to swamp us here in California’s Central Valley with triple-digit temperatures starting tomorrow (low-90s with a breeze right now this Tuesday afternoon), forecasts are for 104-degrees Wednesday with 110-113 for the end of the week.
Heat’s on for a shitload of people:

Records are being set across the West this week as hot temps set in! Remember to exercise caution by staying hydrated, wearing SPF, and limiting exertion outdoors.

Catch our coverage for your city's outlook! pic.twitter.com/yhNYsDmrdS

— The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) June 15, 2021

See ‘Fresno‘ on the map above — I’m sitting about an hour north, still swaddled in that dark-burgundy spot of an ‘Excessive Heat Watch” — overall regional view via The Washington Post this morning:

More than 40 million Americans are in the crosshairs of triple-digit heat this week, with some spots soaring over 120 degrees as records fall across the West.
The heat in many areas is dangerous, prompting excessive-heat warnings in seven states where temperatures will be hazardous to human health.

The heat also reinforces a devastating drought that continues to reshape the landscape of the West while bolstering worries of what lurks ahead in the fall come fire season.
More than half of the western United States is gripped by “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the two most severe categories.

Weather leading to another shitty-hard forest-fire season.

Meanwhile, no matter how you try, nowadays there’s just no getting away from the T-Rump, and this morning it’s reports there’s a kind of kerfuffle in the book-publishing world on putting together a deal with the orange-turd for maybe a memoir, or something, but how with someone who constantly lies — no one wants to touch his anti-literary ass with a 10-foot pole: ‘“[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” said one major figure in the book publishing industry, explaining their reluctance to publish Trump. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”‘

Yet books on/about the T-Rump are gold:

(Illustration found here).

T-Tump is way-too lazy to write — the process does take some actual thought, and some labor, too:

POLITICO reached out to top publishers and editors at the “Big Five” publishing houses — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon & Schuster — to see if they had heard anything about any such deals Trump had been offered.
None of the sources said they had heard about such potential book offers, and most said they wouldn’t touch a Trump project when he does start shopping a book around.

“It doesn’t matter what the upside on a Trump book deal is, the headaches the project would bring would far outweigh the potential in the eyes of a major publisher,” said Keith Urbahn, president and founding partner of Javelin, a literary and creative agency.
“Any editor bold enough to acquire the Trump memoir is looking at a fact-checking nightmare, an exodus of other authors, and a staff uprising in the unlikely event they strike a deal with the former president.”

However, ‘insider’ type T-Rump books sell real well, opposite the lies — books on the T-Rump:

Donald Trump is not a reader but to the publishing industry he is the gift that keeps on giving.
His time in the White House has yielded an avalanche of books with titles like Fear, Rage, Unhinged and Fire and Fury. Together, they paint a withering portrait of the 45th president.

Some crackle with the fury of scorned employees. Others are banquets of gossip by seasoned reporters, whether highbrow (Bob Woodward) or lowbrow (Michael Wolff).
One is by a member of Trump’s own family: Mary Trump who put her estranged uncle in the psychiatrist’s chair.

To anyone seeking to understand the presidency of Donald Trump, such books are a goldmine that offer startling insights into his character, personality and mental state.

All that’s cute and dandy, but is pure-frivolous compared to the real horror and long-lasting cruelty of the T-Rump — in his very essence he incites his “basket of deplorables” to acts of vile, shittiness:

Today, a cashier WAS KILLED because she asked someone to wear a mask.

This is the confluence of our country’s worst instincts – misinformation, firearms, & unbridled anger.https://t.co/Mk8JrJmwKi

— Megan Ranney MD MPH ? (@meganranney) June 15, 2021

All due to T-Rump lying, Republicans lying, the whole right flank just lying, spreading shit for people who have no feelings for their fellow man, which ultimately leads these assholes to do some hard-ass shit — in this case the ‘freedums’ of no-masks:

DeKalb County police said Laquitta Willis, 41, was the victim in Monday’s shooting at Big Bear grocery store inininced Decatur, just outside of Atlanta.
Willis was killed after an argument over a face mask, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.
The GBI said Victor Lee Tucker Jr., 30, of Palmetto, Georgia, entered the store shortly after 1 p.m. and “got into an argument with a cashier about his face mask” during checkout.

Tucker left the store without making a purchase but immediately returned, the GBI said.
He walked directly up to the cashier, later identified as Willis, pulled out a handgun and shot her, authorities said.

He then got into a shoot-out with a county sheriff’s deputy who was working security at the store. Both were wounded. Yet WTF!
A horrible incident about something that shouldn’t even be note-worthy, other than part of a pandemic routine. T-Rump has fostered an easy air of hatred, and violence — part of his system.
As if in coincidence, there was/is a most-excellent commentary by Thom Hartmann on certain foundations of cruel behavior in plain sight at Raw Story this morning, main point being T-Rump allows/makes-it-easy to be psychopathic — highights:

The FAA says there have been 2900 reports of air rage since the first of the year, and 2200 of those involved people becoming enraged over mask requirements.

And we’re not just seeing it on airplanes. Road rage is up, people challenging (and, yesterday, murdering) retail workers is up, even mass shootings are up right now.
…
But what concerns me beyond what may be a transient mask kerfuffle is that Trump didn’t just set the tone for defying authority or generally acting like an asshole.
The truly deadly thing he did, in and to our society, was to put down the psychopath marker and use it to call together his neurological tribe.

About 1-percent of Americans are psychopaths, although such people tend to be concentrated in some areas: as many as 12-percent of major corporate CEOs are believed to be psychopaths, and about 15-percent of people in prison.

A psychopath, for all practical purposes, believes that he’s quite literally the only “true human being” on planet Earth.

Everybody else is an actor of some sort, a prop, in the grand play of the psychopath’s life. Everybody else is here to make him happy and meet his needs, and he doesn’t have to worry about hurting them or not meeting their needs because they are not “real people” like he is.

The clinical terminology is that psychopaths “lack the ability to feel empathy.” Weirdly, this lack of empathy can make them more successful in big business and in criminal and prison environments.
…
Thus, Trump’s presidency has massively empowered the psychopaths among us. The people who, if their life had taken just a slightly different turn at some point, would today be a member of a prison gang or a CEO.
They recognize themselves in him and are empowered by him.

As president, Trump made being a psychopath fashionable, and his fellow psychopaths across the nation are having a huge coming-out party.

This is how Trump has unleashed a wave of newly-empowered psychopaths who are now rapidly rising up through Republican political and judicial ranks, pushing the non-psychopaths out of the way (as psychopaths are wont to do), and generally terrorizing the American public.

And again, here we are — enough for one day, and that’s just the cream of the shits…

(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman [La Femme qui pleure],’ found here)