THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Is it bad that I feel that one or both of the people in this picture -- the only political ticket that has the best chance of handing the Cult of Trump a defeat -- will be killed in 2020 by a member of the Cult of Trump? For when the Cult of Trump is threatened with the possibility of dissolution via the electoral process, what do you think the individual cult members will do to keep the Cult of Trump a viable sustained entity? When Donald Trump knows that prison is his only likely outcome if he loses the Presidency in 2020, why wouldn't you expect that he would do anything to keep the Cult of Trump alive? After all, what did Jim Jones do when the forces of reality closed in on Jonestown? First off, I'm using "Cult of Trump" based on Michael Langone's work on the defining characteristics of cults , and there's no shortage of valid and reliable evidence to illustrate that what we're currently experience is rule by the Cult of Trump. In no particular ...

When I lived outside of Roscommon as a kid in the early '80s, on the dusty dirt road known as Pere Cheney Road -- named for the 1800's lumber town, long since abandoned -- there was such a thing as television. Our TV set, antennas perched atop a plastic proxy for solid wood, had CBS and PBS in strong signals on VHF, along with intermittent contact with NBC, as well as ABC on UHF. In other words, the stories that television brought into my life were scarce and precious. And as banal as they often were, I longed for the days when I could have more. Well, those days are here, and holy shit. When I look back at the "television" I watched in 2019, from network fare to premium channel content to streaming chunks, my first big takeaway is "be careful what you wish for." As a consumer resigned to dip into lands of make-believe while the climate crisis revs its global engines, there's just not enough hours in the day to watch everything that might resonate. ...