Speed of light

Four nor'easters, three government shutdowns (probably), a mad bomber loose in Texas, another school shooting, and a Secretary of State shit-canned on the shit can.  It's been quite a month.

Stephen Hawking died last week, having lived fifty years longer than anyone expected.  He gave full props to Britain's much-maligned National Health Service.  I don't pretend to begin to understand his work and its implications, but I hear it was pretty important, as was his living example to people who think they know what others' "quality of life" amounts to.  Thank you, Dr. Hawking, and thank you to those who kept him going all these years.

Drug problem solved!  Inspired by the Duterte success, Trump proposes to kill all the drug dealers (by legal means, of course, probably) and prevent further addiction through...advertising.  Very very great PSAs telling the kids how bad drugs are.  Donzo gets all his "information" from television, and he assumes everyone else does, too.  No doubt there will be exceptions for pushers like the Sackler family, billionaire dealers in OxyContin, which kills more Americans every year than cocaine.  Unlike marijuana, the obsession of Three-fifths of a Man Sessions, Oxy really is a gateway drug -- to cheap and potent heroin.  But they give money to museums, which is more than MS-13 does.

The Stormy Daniels farce continues to play out, with the cooperation of 60 Minutes and every known media outlet.  Don't you think Trump is delighted at this distraction from treason, money-laundering and all his other activities?  Cheating on a Slovenian business girl is not a capital crime, even in Slovenia.  Best $130,000 he ever got somebody else to pay for him.  To paraphrase Mencken, nobody ever went broke overestimating the prurience of the American people.

Over 100,000 Americans in Puerto Rico still lack electricity, and who knows what else.

Jim Carrey's frighteningly life-like painting of Sarah Hockeypuck Sanders roils the Intertubes like nothing since the great Kathy Griffin assassination attempt of 2017.  (She was really interrogated by the Secret Service.  Over a photograph.)  Come on, Jim, do Jared Kushner.  He already makes me think of Dorian Gray.

John Bolton would probably have an important government job, but his mustache is one of the many things Trump fears.  So at least there's that.  Some state legislator in Alabama opposes arming teachers because most of them are women and, you know, too nervous and flighty to be trusted with weapons.  So at least there's that.  (Just let it go, Senator Duckworth.)

Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel are so awful, even Rand Paul has promised to filibuster against their confirmation as Secretary of State and CIA Director, respectively.  We'll see.  Paul hasn't been precisely a tower of rectitude in the past.

John McEntee, Trump's "body man" (think Charlie on The West Wing, but with a gambling problem), was hustled out of the White House two weeks ago before he could even put on his coat.  He is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for "serious financial crimes."  Nevertheless, he has been promised a job on the 2020 campaign, which began in November 2016.  Everyone pulled into Trump's gravitational field winds up corrupt, even the guy who holds the door for him.  Expect a White House groundskeeper to be caught burying stiffs in the Rose Garden.

Five bombs have exploded in Texas (four in Austin, one near San Antonio), but Hockeypuck Sanders assures us there is "no link to terrorism."  So the police can stop questioning Muslims, if they were.

Why I do not do social media, part 87:  Cambridge Analytica.

What else?  Oh, yes.