On the couch - Eliot Weinberger in LRB:

“Don was so confident of his party’s eternal rule that he allowed Don Jr and Tucker Carlson to persuade him to anoint, without any vetting, a successor who would embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling book excoriating poor white people for being lazy and not as self-motivated as himself, then became the disciple of the über-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who believes that ‘freedom and democracy’ are not ‘compatible’, that it was a mistake for women to be given the right to vote, and that the future lies in colonies in space and on the oceans, free from government repression. Thiel hired Vance for a few years as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, then gave him $15 million to run for the Senate in Ohio.”

(…)

“Vance said he doesn’t ‘really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another’. Attacked by white supremacists for being married to an Indian (and having a son named Vivek), he said: ‘Obviously, she’s not a white person ... but I just, I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.’ (Usha Vance was, until a few weeks before the campaign, a corporate litigator.) He appears to wear eyeliner. A totally false story that the young JD had a predilection for sex with his couch went viral because it didn’t seem all that unlikely.”

(…)

“At the presidential debate – the first time Trump and Harris had ever met, as he refused to attend Biden’s inauguration – Trump was hunched over and permanently fixed in his famous scowl (modelled, he has said, on Winston Churchill). He was, once again, the Messenger of Doom: ‘Our country is being lost, we’re a failing nation.’ The prisons of the world are empty because they have sent all the criminals across our border. Doctors in blue states are performing abortions after the baby is born. World War Three is imminent. ‘People can’t go out and buy cereal or bacon or eggs or anything else. The people of our country are absolutely dying.’ And, as usual, there were the delusions of grandeur. Had he been president, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine, Hamas would never have attacked Israel, but he can end both wars overnight. He even provided a character reference: ‘Viktor Orbán ...said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.’”

(…)

“At the time of writing, the polls indicate the race is in a dead heat. It seems incredible that almost half the country still supports Trump, despite the felony convictions, the porn stars, the blatant graft, the endless lies, the allegations of assault and rape, the 6 January insurrection, the continuing refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, the classified documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, the vows to prosecute all his many enemies, including journalists, and to fire everyone in the government bureaucracy who is not loyal to him, the claims to dictatorial power.”

Read the article here.

The electorate is incredible, people are sometimes, what did we expect? And once again, half of the country doesn’t support Trump despite porn stars and felon convictions but because porn starts and felon convictions. If you despise politicians and politics you will embrace graft, the convictions and the endless lies, which might sound like the truth.
There’s a good piece of advice in this article, if you don’t want to look old surround yourself with people who are even older.

The obsession with pets remains interesting. I guess too many people prefer pets to humans.