Clear-blue skies and plenty of sunshine this late-afternoon Monday here in California’s Central Valley — the beautiful outside is way-tempered by chilled-ass wind bursts, which conspired with mid-50s temps to create in real-time/real-life the first ‘cold-as-shit‘ day of the year.
In my view, anyway, a seasonal quick adjustment from fried-heat of a seemingly never-ending summer to a really, really way-short, though, extreme-pleasant autumn and now the arrival of the shitty foreshadowing of winter.

Earlier this morning, my daily walk with Leroy (my daughter’s Basset Hound/Greyhound mix) was a sunny, raw experience. We both are getting well-along in years — Leroy is already well-beyond 12, and I turn 76 in a couple of weeks — and the cold-snapping breezes in the shade were not enjoyable at all. Leroy didn’t seem to mind, though.

However, it’s all a baby-bitch weather whine to actual way-bad news-shit going on everywhere all at once.
This is my first post in nearly two weeks, the day after the election (here), and my confession of such deep sadness and anxiety-riddled with depression about the future that post could well be my actual last. I’ve felt like shit. In a short space of time, the real world became sort of a dream-like sequence at the inception of a nightmare—a place where I didn’t have the emotional cajones to keep writing about it.
The whiplash, snap-around election the day before made me realize I wasn’t as mentally stout as in ages past — this time held dark, ominous, and catastrophic possibilities that weirdly had already been placed in obvious public statements over and over and over by the T-Rump and his ass-kissing MAGA shit. We’re now in a prolonged bubble of bad, bad shit that’s only going to get worse well before it gets any better.

Every day I performed my daily news scroll, reading and reading a shitload of media break-downs/analyses/reviews/what-the-fuck-ever of what happened in the election. Kamala Harris ran a good campaign but T-Rump got the votes from people who are suckers for disinformation and people who cast ballots ‘against‘ their own selves. How the shit can T-Rump Muslim voters, Hispanic/Latino voters, and Black voters cry about what’s about to happen to their situations — T-Rump already told you! How crazy is that?

Now here it is nearly two weeks later and after the T-Rump has nominated some really, really bad assholes to work for his administration, and just today, the T-Rump sounded approval for using the US military to help carry out his (Stephen Miller’s contract player) outlandish, horrific mass deportation of undocumented migrants. Only through a respite until Jan.20, 2025, can we be sane.

Seemingly, during this past couple of weeks I pursued a shitload of political/election material, as I already noted, and one of the best came this past Saturday — a telling interview with longtime/noted political analyst/forecaster Allan Lichtman at the Guardian.
Lichtman had correctly predicted the winner of nine out of the last 10 US presidential elections, starting in 1980, accurately forecasting Ronald Reagan’s win over Jimmy Carter (Lichtman’s only loser was with the unprecedentedly-tainted Bush/Gore episode in 2000).
Until now and that horrid T-Rump nightmare-coming-true a couple of weeks ago:

Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.
“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”

[…]

Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”

That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.

Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.

“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”

After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.

“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”

Although a card-carrying Joe Biden/Democrat, Lichtman correctly boils down the two political parties: ‘ “Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”‘
Merrick Garland, who Lichtman has personally known 60 years, embodies the big ‘D’ weak-kneed ambiance:

“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].

“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”

Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.

“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”

And ahead a black hole:

Two-week-forever nightmare, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: Salvador Dalí’s “The Burning Giraffe” [1937], oil on panel, and found here.)