I must admit to somewhat addictive behavior when it comes to the TV news. More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself tuning in to see what insane and horrible thing has happened now. But I can’t actually watch it for very long, because, you know, insane and horrible.

So then I end up looking for other things to watch. Fortunately it’s basketball season now, and the Warriors look pretty good. I’ll throw on a football game if people on my Sports and Booze chat are talking about it. And this week I even watched a little baseball — a World Series game in which I became interested, then very interested, and suddenly not interested anymore when it dragged on into the, like, 13th inning. (It ended up going 18, by which time I had long since departed for dreamland.)

This being Halloween week, there have been a lot of seasonally appropriate movies on, so at times I’ve found myself flipping back and forth between the news and, say, Little Shop of Horrors, House of Wax , or The Thing. And what I’ve discovered is that there is no movie, however scary, that does not come across as light relief in comparison to the real things happening in the US of A in 2025.

Is it hysterical of me to say that the Fourth Reich has arrived? That we now have a secret police operating with impunity across the country, teargassing and terrorizing the populace? And that it’s only going to get worse, as the big budget increase recently given ICE kicks in, and That Fucking Guy follows through on his threats to invoke the insurrection act and send the military to our cities? They are sending federal monitors to oversee our election on Tuesday; why do that if you don’t intend to find fraud, whether it’s there or not, and try to overturn any unwanted result?

I don’t mean to be a bummer. I think — I hope — I pray that when push comes to shove, people don’t want this and won’t tolerate it. Unfortunately we’ve handed an enormous amount of power to evil people who won’t readily give it up.

Oh, and also:

https://newrepublic.com/post/202453/donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-testing-china-russia

Boo!