Inauguration Blues
Iron Mike Tyson and Vince Vaughn meet in the city of creamed spinach.
It is possible that the ceremony has already happened, on a sound-stage at an army base.
History is a terrible host.
I’ve never experienced horizontal turbulence. Twenty minutes before its scheduled landing at Washington Reagan airport, our plane is sliding from side to side like a teacup on a Ouija board spelling out the words You’re going to die. As instructed by the crew, I fold and stow my seatback table — an FAA-mandated precaution, its potential lifesaving value in the event of an actual crash I’ve yet to grasp — and buckle my seatbelt, which makes its fateful click. Then, so as to not alarm my fellow passengers who are surely concerned about not alarming me, I pray while pretending not to pray, silently, eyes open and head up. I’ve often heard experts say that turbulence, even at its most extreme, isn’t enough to bring down a modern jet, but I’ve also heard experts say that rattlesnake bites are far less dangerous than people think — experts who don’t know my friend who almost died from one, his …
Fire on the Hill
PREPARE FOR IMMEDIATE MANDATORY EVACUATION
Brigades of psychopathic real-estate schemers plan Soviet-style ‘15-minute cities’ by the sea with special pods for aliens while US Special Forces with infrared radar hunt looters in white Econoline vans
The Watch Duty app is available to anyone whose city is burning down from both Google Play and the Apple Store.
A few days ago, before the blaze began, the National Weather Service in Los Angeles warned us to “be prepared for strong winds and fire danger.” In preparation, LA Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley has pre-deployed firepersons and emergency vehicles across the city, at the ready by 8 AM; it is the morning of January 7th, the day historic Santa Ana winds are forecasted to blow. About two hours later, with the emergency equipment and personnel in place, a live camera from ALERTCalifornia, the UC San Diego wildfire and disaster monitoring program, spots smoke. This, they say, is the first sight of the “Palisades Fire” (what became possibly the most monetarily destructive fire in US history, one of many that broke out across LA County shortly after the New Year).
LA has hundreds of brushfires every year — the average is 618 per year, according to the LA County Fire Department — and normally these …
The Front Porch
Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy.
The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to …
