A couple of Trump supporters showed up to vote at Nevada's Republican caucus dressed in their KKK sheets and hoods. Yesterday (February 24^th) the Iowa House passed a series of gun rights bills allowing children of any age to handle guns. Today the owner of an insurance agency in Georgia is requiring all of his employees to be armed.

Sane people all over the country are wondering, “Can someone please derail the crazy train this shitshow arrived on?”

Last December Larry Wilmore of The Nightly Show said, "This isn't funny anymore ... it's just stupid." Well … it's 2016 and we're waaaaaaay past stupid. This is seriously crazy now.

But this isn't about Trumpenstein or the daily gun slaughter.

Billionaires and FoxNews created the tea-bagger wing of the Republican Party and the Republican Elite seem surprised that the mindless rabble they've inculcated for twenty years with distilled bullshit … are choosing bullshit candidates. What the Republican Elite forgot, or didn't know in the first place, was once they created a party that gave permission to embrace racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, their minions would vote for the candidate who best embodied those attributes.

Duh.

And as has been said many times before, if politicians did nothing to pass sane gun control laws after twenty 6 and 7 year old kids were ripped to pieces by a semi-automatic rifle fire in their elementary school, then it was excruciatingly clear there would be no meaningful gun control in the United States. Ever. Do you want to keep your kids safe from the gun madness that infects your city, state, and country? Fuck You.

Those of us of certain age remember well the Reagan Democrats, mostly white guys with union cards who thought Reagan would be better at running the economy in their best interest. He'd cut their taxes, crack down on Welfare Queens, bring back the good old days, all that.   

Today we've got the liberal establishment that wants the good old days of the Clinton Administration back and would prefer that those pesky Progressives stop rocking the boat. There are Republicans circling in the water after all. (Be afraid, be very afraid)

It's hard for them to actually criticize Progressive goals, it's always what they say they want for everyone, but like Reagan Democrats they seem to only want these things for themselves and just choose to believe that things can't be changed. They keep trying to knock down the standard bearer but that turned out to be harder than they thought, so mostly they've been concentrating on disparaging his supporters for refusing to listen to them and saying mean things.

A note to Mike Malloy at MikeMalloy.com:

I noticed during the 2015/2016 television season that characters could say … shit, along with the shit-esque variations: Bull and horse. Oh … and asshole. You can say those on TV now. But I'll be dead and stuffed into an urn on the mantle long before anyone can say fuck on AM radio.

I've sent you about 180 “moments” over the last ten years and not once have I been able to write precisely what I meant to say. But you know exactly what I'm talking about. You've spent your entire career skating along the edge of what the Federal Communications Commission will allow on the air.

Fuckers.

And so we must use … euphemisms … in order to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in “indecency” fines.

From my dictionary:

Euphemism: Noun. The substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt.

It is indescribably frustrating, when facing the wreckage the Republican party has wrought since Reagan affably strolled into office, to substitute mild, indirect, or vague expressions for … the truth. I hate euphemisms. The only reason I've used them in the past was to keep elderly relatives from ramping up their blood pressure in faux outrage and then stroking out. And, of course, to avoid the fines.

Our conversations became infantilized. Years and years ago, my then wife upbraided me for “my language” I used around our daughter. So I … watched my language. Months of studiously avoiding “bad” words finally became a habit. I “talked good.”

I was in a meeting with an idiot who was rationalizing the gutting of my budget. “You did so well last time,” he said, “Let's see what you can do with half the budget.”

I stood up enraged and called him … a poop-head.

We looked at each other in stunned silence. Then he started to laugh. I had to leave the office because there was no way to recover after calling someone … a poop-head.

The story of our combative, snake-oiled times:  There are antidotes, and there are antidotes.

Well, we also have vaccines to help us skirt -- or brace for -- the worst of what the world can chuck at us.  There are all sorts of ways to avoid focus on one thing and pull attention onto another, as flashy magicians, petty pick-pockets, and pokerfaced charlatans all know.

But there are always ingenious methods to pull us back from permanently swallowing The Really Big Lies, too:  truth serum, hypnotic therapy, anti-psychotic medications, cult deprogramming methodologies, and so on.  Sometimes, even logic comes bubbling up to the surface in the drowning and airless front lines of public thought and reason, but not often.

Usually, we ask fire to fight fire, and ramp up to meet the lathering blather of the moment.  But, really, we are free to choose our own weapons in any exchange of ideas, or in any attempt to highlight the utter nonsense of arguments presented to us as reasoned and reasonable notions.

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• Yes:  The arrow chosen from the quiver depends on the nature of the foe, as well as the nature of the archer.  The nature of tool selection also depends upon the archer being somewhat conscious:   Back-fires seldom start themselves in helpful spots, no more than games of pin-the-tail-on-the-non-denominational-animal help locate murderers.
• Circumstances hardly ever favor long-term extremes of any kind.  (That all things in moderation quote you may have been fed along the path of life is not only a preface to healthy living precepts by our founders -- it's a principle of the universe, and is supported by that noticeable bulge in the bell curve of nearly any measure.)

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It may be the early Egyptians built the pyramids not with blocks, tackles, or roller logs, or even long-speculated minerals with anti-gravity properties.  They could have been hupped together by really, really strong coffee.

Although I admit the anti-gravity thing would be a nice touch, and would also help keep this season's ant parade from finding my triple-espresso mocha-supremo extra-grande within six seconds of touchdown of my free, attached, limited-edition, celebrity-signature model hand-truck-beverage-holder, up to the computer station, where it gets strapped in like tanks of liquid oxygen near the thruster ports.

Sometimes, you ride the caffeine rocket, and other times, it rides you. And, if you are interested in almost everything in Life, then it's sheer suicide to light the fuse without an onboard gyroscope and working directional fins.  (I speak from experience here.)

Anyhow, this is also how I started my morning's idle musing, pondering the concept of the role models being provided in our times, and then I wound up reading about a study of resilience in humans, then another about a test to indicate fragility and frailness...

... then, thinking back to that other article again, as I have been off and on, about the previous decades being about the celebrity of Production versus the celebrity of Consumption which we have now...

It's been a heckuva week or so for Science lately:  Watching as black holes merged, observing gravitational ripples and waves, proving correct more of Einstein's theories...

That was just for openers.  We also learned that electrons in the metal graphene can behave like a liquid -- a real first -- and that the explanation for the Yellowstone supervolcano may need to be revised.

Plus, it also looks like Earth might have been formed by the collision of two early bodies -- and, for good measure,  hundreds more galaxies have been discovered playing peekaboo behind our own Milky Way.

There have been major scientific downsides recently as well:

• An Indian man is believed to be the first person killed by a meteorite;
• The European Space Agency says after 60 hours of operation after a jarring landing,  it's now bidding farewell to its Philae comet lander after no response; and
• An Alaska woman says her 6-year-old Happy Meal refuses to decompose.