Another Eve is in the works, and this one awaits the hot rock possibility of a horrid immediate future. Foggy and correspondingly damp this early evening Sunday here in California’s Central Valley — hours away from a new year already acting almost like a fevered cartoon.
After a most-wonderful visit last week with family up on the North Coast, I’m now back home sitting with my laptop keyboard freaking out before me as I formulate my last blog post of 2023. And more power to it as reflected in the calendar’s rearview mirror (Keep In Mind: Shit Is Close Than They Appear!)

Yet there’s no unknowingly going about business:

But there was a helluva Morning After. https://t.co/woiok7dtIj

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) December 31, 2023

An adventure in horror, though, we all understand. First, Alyssa Farah Griffin, T-Rump’s former communications director, on the 2024 anticipation (the Guardian): ‘“Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly … We all witnessed him trying to steal a democratic election before and go into historic and unconstitutional lengths to do so. That just shows he’s willing to basically break every barrier to get into power and to stay into power … What scares me as much as him and his retribution is the almost cult-like following he has, the threats, the harassment, the death threats that you get when he targets you, is really horrifying and has no place in our American discourse.”‘

If T-Rump and GOPers take the election — we’re fucked in an even worse way (from The Washington Post):

Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of “global boiling,” as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, Nov. 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels.

Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records.

You can put a wrap on that humanity. No matter who’s who in the Republican fold, they all have a well-drawn ‘battle plan‘ to undo the US ability to combat climate change — horrid, miserable life for Earth until all life is burnt out into chaff. No shit. What do you think is the ultimate end of climate change? The planet eventually becomes uninhabitable. No shit!

Despite the ill wind, there’s fiction waiting in the next three/four hours:

Or a cry for happy memories:

And at month’s end:

Surprise shock and terror, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Agonizing Horse,’ found here.)