The "Weird Sh*t" Chronicles
Three-Points Shots visits the Twilight Zone, only to find out it's just a normal day in the new Trump Administration.
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But first, your moment of Zen … The Galactic Highway in Far West Texas. FM 170, the River Road, between Terlingua and Lajitas. Photographed October 4th by Mark Cunningham.
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Quote of the Day: “That was some weird shit.”
‒ Former President George W. Bush, after listening to Donald Trump’s first inaugural address, January 20, 2017.
A friend of mine has been encouraging me to try a small dose of mushrooms to see how I tolerate the hallucinogenic experience. I finally relented, and Tuesday night took some ‘shrooms. I was tripping that night and all the next day.
He’d warned me that the psychedelic trip would build upon my life experience, on things I knew. I would not, for instance, dream of being chased through the Australian Outback by cannibal aborigines, since that was not part of my experience.
He was right, because I ended up hallucinating about politics, which as you know has been my life’s passion. And, damn, was I hallucinating! My visions were sometimes cloudy, sometimes crystal clear, but they were uniformly horrifying.
I saw a dark, forbidding sky off to the east. Gunmetal clouds rolled down off the mountains and a thick, oily fog crept through the valley. In my dream state, I knew that the creepy fog was a sexual predator, and it would become the Attorney General.
Then a new vision emerged. A woman stood alone in a field of waist-deep Bermuda grass . People raced across the field and whispered secrets, important secrets, in her ear. Then a red bear approached her. The woman was not afraid of the bear and told it all the secrets she’d learned.
Images came and went, fading and resolving themselves. Suddenly, Max Headroom appeared on a Jumbotron above a broad field of carnage, the likes of which I had never seen. Bomb craters, houses blown apart, buildings reduced to rubble. Women weeping and children crying. On the Jumbotron, Max Headroom tried to sound authoritative, but the scope of the tragedy below belittled his efforts to appear serious.
These and other nightmares passed through my hallucinating mind. I finally woke up, feverish and wrung out by my experience. As my head cleared, I gave thanks that it had only been a nightmare.
… wait, what?? That was real!?? Give me the cannibal aborigines instead!
1. John Cornyn Dodges a Bullet. The Rest of Us, Not So Lucky.
I wrote the other day about the contest to become the next Majority Leader of the Senate, and how Donald Trump had insisted on a precondition for his support: willingness to allow recess appointments, which short-circuits the Senate’s constitutional advice and consent role. Texas’s Senator from Central Casting, John Cornyn, was among the contenders, but lost out to Senator John Thune of … hell, I don’t know; one of the Dakotas. News stories about the secret vote suggested that Thune was elevated because he might – just maybe – push back when the Orange Mad King makes an unreasonable demand; say, for instance, appointing a bomb-throwing f*ckboi from Florida to be Attorney General of these United States.
But Trump is an expert at reducing once-proud men and women to abject sycophancy, viz., Ted Cruz; viz., Elise Stefanik, whose appointment simultaneously embodies Trump’s contempt for the United Nations and for her. John Thune will bend the knee, as he must, and his colleagues who elected him for his “independence” and “institutional integrity” will avert their eyes as he grovels.
Cornyn, meanwhile, should count his blessings and enjoy what’s left of his political career. Ken Paxton, with whom he shares a mutual loathing, is making noises about challenging him in 2026. Perhaps he could be like former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who transformed his senatorial irrelevance into a modest movie career.
2. This Is Some Weird Sh*t, Part Deux
I don’t trust former president George W. Bush’s judgment at all, but he hit the nail on the head when he described Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address as “some weird shit.”
I wonder what Bush 43 thought of yesterday’s astounding appointments of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, which overshadowed Tuesday’s equally astonishing appointment of Fox News pretty boy Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.
Gaetz is a joke whose colleagues loathe him. Gabbard is the darling of the Russian intelligence services who regularly regurgitates their talking points. Hegseth is a former National Guardsman who found fame and fortune as a shill for Donald Trump on Fox News. In a normal political world, none of these people would be a serious candidate for a job in a new administration, much less for some of the most powerful positions in the government.
We see the immutable law again: Trump. Corrupts. Everything.
3. Here’s An Onion-worthy Headline: The Onion Buys Infowars
In these dark days, it’s good to have a little humor and, even more, an “arc of the moral universe” story to sustain us. And so, I leave you with this:
Alex Jones' media empire has been sold at auction, and the winner is The Onion. No Joke.
The satirical news outlet bought Infowars' parent company, Free Speech Systems, backed by a group of Connecticut families. Jones said on today's show that security has notified him he needs to vacate the premises this morning. …
"The Connecticut families agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion's bid, enabling its success," according to their lawyers.
"Our clients knew that true accountability meant an end to Infowars and an end to Jones' ability to spread lies, pain and fear at scale," said Chris Mattei, attorney for the Connecticut plaintiffs.
We’re not rid of Alex Jones, cockroach that he is. But he will spend the rest of his life working for the Sandy Hook families; the judgment against him is for $1.5 billion and those families intend to hoover up every dollar he makes. So, if you see this guy begging on the road, give him $5 and tell him, “It’s for the Sandy Hook families.”
This weekend, your humble correspondent will work with many others on a Chihuahuan Desert version of a barn-raising. The storied French Co. Grocer in Marathon is building a new home, almost from the ground up. The School of Constructive Arts has fabricated 15,000 bricks made of compressed earth. Under their supervision, we will lay some of the blocks, passing them from volunteer to volunteer. I will report on it over the weekend.
(The façade of the new French Co. Grocer, and the new slab poured to expand its footprint.)
(Several pallets of the compressed earth blocks, which have been curing for a month.)
The Twilight Zone. That's quite funny, but also true.
Enjoy your writing, thanks and keep it up.
a part of me so wishes to lose myself in some project much like your French Co. Grocer, a very fine project indeed…i will continue to encourage my small fall/winter garden, enjoy my hen cornelia’s enthusiasm in finding insects and worms, and most likely continue to read way too much that troubles me…reading this was a good thing, the night photo of our milky way sublime. consciousness soothing. may we all get through this without an abundance of horror and keep a sense of community. if it all can be one way, well, then, it can certainly become another way.