I’ve started to write something about the state of the union over the past couple of weeks, and haven’t been able to continue. I’m torn between despair and disbelief at the way things are, and every day seems to bring some new fresh hell. We’re beyond the point at which we can snicker and poke fun at the moron in chief – it just aint funny anymore. I don’t claim to be well versed in world history (I am an American, after all), but I think this is how things went with Hitler. At first he was just a joke, then a useful tool, and then all of a sudden, well, I guess we all know what happened next (even though most Americans still alive and kicking today – only some 558,000 of the 16 million or so US WWII vets were still alive in 2017 – had nothing to do with it, we still take credit for winning the war and all the things “we” had to sacrifice to keep the world safe for Truth, Justice, and the American Way). And now we seem to be on the same path (the hypothetical question of what would have happened if Hitler had gotten the atomic bomb is starting to seem a lot less hypothetical right about now).

As with anybody over the age of 40 or so, I grew up in the era of the Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Warsaw Pact. If you’d told me that some day we’d have a sitting president who would sing the praises of the leader of Russia, China, and North Korea while vilifying Canada and Western Europe, I’d have thought you were referring to the plot of the sequel to Dr. Strangelove. Yet, here we are, and I think we’re beyond the point where cleverly pointing out what an idiot Trump – and, by extension, his supporters and enablers – is amusing, let alone satisfying.

Using facts and logic to make these Trumpsters see the light is about as likely as facts changing the opinions the climate deniers, flat Earthers, or moon landing conspiracy theorists. And the really depressing fact is that this isn’t just some annoying but tiny fringe group of idiots parading around with “Keep the Government Away From My Social Security” signs. These are roughly half the people that actually bother to vote – at least in the way our system is set up. And a majority of the people who run all three branches of the Federal government. Oh, sure maybe – MAYBE – the Democrats will win a majority of seats in the Senate (which by no means equates to “control” – ever notice that Democrats need a filibuster-proof majority at the very least, while Republicans can ram through whatever they want – mostly – with just a simple majority?). We’ll see – I’m not particularly hopeful, but we’ll see.

But, anyway, in order to keep from throwing myself off the roof – which with my luck would just hurt and not even kill me – I’m trying not to obsess on all this. Fortunately I’m an old white guy so hopefully I can just hang on and run out the clock (though they’re probably gonna fuck up my retirement). Heaven help the younger folks and the brown people though.

So instead I’m doing a little housekeeping around here. Even though the time for this place to exist is probably pretty short (probably should have killed it a long time ago, really), I figured I ought to bring it up to code, so to speak. So, in order to comply with the GDPR (not that I need it here in the US where we don’t give a rat’s ass about privacy), I’ve added a privacy policy, for whatever that’s worth.

And because web browsers are about to start bitching about any websites that don’t use SSL, I’ve added that (I think I’ve got it all working, but let me know if you see something that aint right).

Now that that’s done, I guess I can go back to watching old British TV shows and past episodes of This Old House.