What's the weather like where you are?

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Charmion
Date: 16 Feb 21 - 09:30 AM

I just had a look at the weather radar plot for southwestern Ontario, and Stratford is right spung in the middle of the leading end of a snow system stretching all the way to Pelee Island in Lake Erie.

This is why I paid Nick's Snowblowing a big hunk of change back in November. Best money I've spent in a long time.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Feb 21 - 08:59 AM

Sounds nippy in Texas. The oilmen seem to have conspired to freeze up the wind turbines.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Feb 21 - 06:43 AM

Heheh. Speaking of smearing ashes, get this from the Guardian website:

A Catholic priest in Ireland is providing takeaway ashes in plastic sauce containers so parishioners can honour Ash Wednesday despite coronavirus restrictions.

A Centra shop in Clonmany, county Donegal, has helped Fr Brian Brady to pack and distribute ashes in 200 containers usually used for dips and sauces.

Parishioners have snapped up the containers so they can administer their own ashes by placing them in the form of a cross on their foreheads tomorrow. The ritual signifies repentance and marks the first day of Lent, a six-week period of penitence before Easter.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Feb 21 - 04:12 AM

On this day in 1961 there was a partial eclipse of the sun in the morning. It was Ash Wednesday and we were herded off to church for that service in which the priest smeared greasy muck on your forehead with his thumb. The sky was cloudy and we didn't see the eclipse. From inside the church we could see the sun coming out, but by the time the service had finished and we were released the eclipse was over. I've harboured bitterness about that for exactly 60 years. I'm thinking that it may have sown the early seeds of my atheism...

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 15 Feb 21 - 03:06 AM

The Pentlands (the hills immediately south of Edinburgh) currently have a severe, danger-to-life avalanche warning. Never heard of that anywhere near here before.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 14 Feb 21 - 06:21 PM

Dreading another heavy snowfall in a few days' time.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: The Sandman
Date: 12 Feb 21 - 04:02 PM

in west cork it is wet 4 degrees mild

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Charmion's brother Andrew
Date: 12 Feb 21 - 03:00 PM

In Eastern Ontario, it's sunny and cold, even for here, what with a high of -15C for the day (with a wind chill of -23) and a low after sun-up tomorrow of -22C. There is little snow cover, and that does not bode well for the forests in the late spring. Unless we get more snow, they'll be tinder dry in May. This lack of snow cover plays merry hob with the military training cycle (the impact areas will be too dry even for high explosive) and the farmers' preparations for planting (they will not be allowed to burn slash and plough it under).

Still, the bright sun warms the heart, if nothing else, and it will not set until close to 1730. I can smell cycling weather in the offing, so I am on my way to my local bike shop to get my gravel bike out of hawk after its annual overhaul.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 12 Feb 21 - 10:45 AM

We also had a big wildfire, on Dartmoor. We've had a wet winter but the last week in the Westcountry has been bone dry with a strong (and vicious) east wind. The bracken and heather from last year is tinder-dry, so it doesn't take much to get it going, and gorse burns well too.

Braemar holds the record for the coldest recorded temperature in the U.K., -27.2C, achieved twice, once in 1895 and once in 1982. The reason for the very cold nights is that the location is in a frost pocket, which means it's surrounded by hills down which cold air from high up sinks into the valley where the village is. Scottish glens are often frost pocket candidates. There are several notable ones in England, at Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, at Benson in Oxfordshire and at Shawbury in Shropshire. To get a really cold night in a frost pocket you need little or no wind, a clear night and, preferably, snow on the ground. It helps if there's a stagnating mass of cold air over the country, which occasionally happens in winter anticyclones centred over Scandinavia or Eastern Europe.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Charmion
Date: 12 Feb 21 - 09:41 AM

And there I was, under the delusion that the Western Isles were always wet in winter. Wildfire in February -- amazing.

Cold and grey in southwestern Ontario, with a bit of wind chill and yet more snow in the forecast. Utterly normal. Perfect for staying home with a book.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 12 Feb 21 - 07:56 AM

Scotland last night:

Coldest for 25 years in Braemar
Kilometre-wide fire in Benbecula and extreme fire hazard warning for the whole west coast of the country

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 02 Feb 21 - 04:41 PM

Western Massachusetts got ever so much snow.
It took a day and a half, pretty much, to finish falling.
At least it was no blizzard, no high winds --
just snow that would not quit falling.

I don't know how much.
In the parking lot, there was at least twelve inches
on top of my car.
The trouble was not on top of my car, but
behind the rear wheels, backing out of the space.
The lot had, thank heavens, been plowed --
it was just a question of getting out of the snowed-in space
and onto the plowed pavement. Needed to shovel first.
The snow was wetter, and heavier, than it looked.
Not heart-attack shovelling.

It's quite the winter wonderland here visually.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 01 Feb 21 - 11:54 AM

It came today.
Still lovely, but I hear everything melting...

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 31 Jan 21 - 11:19 AM

Its probably buried, look for an orange plastic sleeve.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 31 Jan 21 - 11:13 AM

Just snow. Lovely. No ice, no Sunday paper...

Subject: RE: What's the conspiracy like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 31 Jan 21 - 07:22 AM

I "heard" that white supremists are going to paint Everything White today in protest. So far "they" are right.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 30 Jan 21 - 02:57 PM

Depends on your car, no?

It is supposed to snowstorm tomorrow. But I am betting freezing rain. I have soup supplies...

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 27 Jan 21 - 08:40 PM

In Buffalo NY it would only take an hour to go from zero to six foot high snow drifts.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 26 Jan 21 - 02:07 PM

Snowing, that's what it's like.
The sort that falls gently and blankets everything.
Not, thanks be, a blizzard, not this time.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 25 Jan 21 - 09:48 PM

Mrrzy, If its covered in the weather forecast its weather whether its a solar storm, gamma ray burst or tsunamis a half mile high.
They all have one thing in common.
They come in waves
like gravity
or electrons.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jan 21 - 07:51 PM

I don't live in southern Colorado,
but a close friend does, and they have gone for months
in drought conditions.

A few days ago they FINALLY got some snow.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 23 Jan 21 - 09:43 PM

Mrrzy, I think the insurance companies
refer to the things on your list
as
"acts of God" or something ...

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Jan 21 - 09:39 AM

dust in the wind

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 21 - 04:08 PM

Lightning coming and going where Earth meets space

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 03 Jan 21 - 04:30 PM

It did not hit 65 but was niiiiice.

I have a question: I think of weather as a term for, specifically, *atmospheric* phenomena. However, lately, I am seeing other planetary phenomena included. Are earthquakes weather? Tsunamis? Forest fires?

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 02 Jan 21 - 09:53 AM

Gonna be 65F today.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 31 Dec 20 - 02:45 PM

Thoroughly depressing, that's what it's like:
gray, no sunshine, rainy, raw.
And if it goes below freezing
when the approaching storm gets here,
then we have ice to deal with,
Oh Joy, Oh Rapture.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 28 Dec 20 - 05:53 PM

above freezing, however chilly and raw

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Dec 20 - 08:58 AM

But relax https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-we-having-so-many-earthquakes-has-naturally-occurring-earthquake-activity-been?qt-news_science

Floods are more likely

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 25 Dec 20 - 10:59 PM

Big weather is on the move.
Hawaii, South America, the Carribean, and Indonesia is on the move.
https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/earthquake/news/116472/World-Earthquake-Report-for-Wednesday-16-December-2020.html

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Elmore
Date: 25 Dec 20 - 09:29 PM

A white Christmas in the mountains of North Georgia; a couple of inches last night.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 24 Dec 20 - 03:51 PM

Stormy, only it's a rainy, windy, too-warm-for-Christmas storm,
with a threat of localized flooding,
not just from the downpour, but also from thawing snow and ice.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 22 Dec 20 - 12:47 PM

It's winter, all right, but
we're going through one of those
mild-for-winter,
warm-enough-to-melt some ice,
overcast, raw humid chilly periods.
The evenings are even going to be mild this week,
and the forecast for Christmas Day is grey, warm, and wet,
of all things.
The extended forecast for the week of New Year's, however,
is clear and at-or-below-freezing, a different sort of winter weather.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: JennieG
Date: 20 Dec 20 - 08:07 PM

It is raining. The rain is predicted to increase during the day (currently just after noon) and into tomorrow; our forecast is for lots and lots of rain with possible flooding.

It has also cooled down, which considering the heatwave a few weeks ago is quite a pleasant change.

Santa may have to bring his umbrella when he visits Oz this year.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: leeneia
Date: 20 Dec 20 - 02:17 PM

It's probably not good, because it's global warming, but I just stepped out in bare feet to shake out a dust mop, and the porch floor was warm underfoot. In December, it should be somewhere between 40 and 20 out.

The sky is blue and clear, and the DH hopes to photograph Saturn and Jupiter tonight.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Ebbie
Date: 19 Dec 20 - 02:48 PM

We were supposed to be practically hip-deep in snow by now but it warmed up and light rain is penetrating the snow we do have.

However, the ravens like it. They are swooping in the air currents, sometimes right past my window.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 18 Dec 20 - 10:01 PM

you all right, Mary?

kitties jumped on your computer keyboard?

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: mg
Date: 18 Dec 20 - 09:51 PM

On Washington USA coast. Very windy but little rain. Prob in f kitties F

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 16 Dec 20 - 11:19 AM

Charlottesville is not quite under the Noreaster descending upon the megalopolis. We have ice falling. It's gonna be nasty.

But meanwhile it is a grand winter's day. Hot drinks, soup, space heaters. Love having such luxuries. Thinking of those that don't.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Ebbie
Date: 15 Dec 20 - 03:41 PM

Donuel, your first essay is well crafted. Scary but well crafted. Suggestion: Start a separate thread so that those who wish to will read it. Posting it on a weather thread is an intrusion, an annoyance, guaranteeing it won't be read and it will be resented.

The weather here is mild, although it snowed lightly all day yesterday. Today it is blue skies and crisp air. However, snow is forecast for all next week.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 15 Dec 20 - 02:33 PM

Where I am, we are in between snowstorms,
with the worse of the two still to come.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Dec 20 - 07:47 AM

I stash important ideas here where it doesn't matter.
Besides the weather now covers mass fires, pandemic numbers and earthquakes. The spread of civilization ending big lies should certainly be considered an emerging threat although it is man made.

Big lies have a lifetime of almost 2 generations. If you heard of the hollow Earth theory, it came from the 3rd Reich. They believed that a race of giants lived 18,000 ft underground. It was part of their supernatural theology they used to help people denounce religion and follow a Germany first faith steepe in ancient lore and 'history'.
They actually burroed deep into the earth and installed a cable car to access the giants. The hollow Earth advocates clung to this fiction with the help of a supposed diary entry at the North Pole unil the early 1970s.
So will trumpism sputter along for another hundred years.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 13 Dec 20 - 02:58 PM

Erm.
I don't see what some of the posts before this one
have to do with a thread about current weather.
Anyhow.

Here the weather is deceptive,
as it is too mild for the season:
well above freezing with calm winds and bright sunshine.

I just got back my most reliable winter coat from the cleaners,
and I'm taking extra good care with that coat,
because in a few days the weather will become more seasonal,
and that coat will be very much needed.

Also looking into the purchase of a pair of footwear from the brand
Icebug.

Anybody else heard of / tried out a pair of Icebugs?
Some of them have SPIKES in them to get traction
on icy pavements.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 01:17 PM

Chapter 2
upon request

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 01:14 PM

From ancient Rome to the current Internet age, this sweeping history of ideas explores how different epochs wrestled with the issue of truth and lies. From the ancient Greeks and Romans to the modern era, how have people determined what is true? How have those with power and influence sought to control the narrative? Are we living in a post-truth era, or is that notion simply the latest attempt to control the narrative?
The relationship between truth and power is the key theme. Moving through major historical periods, I will focuses on notable people and events, from well-known leaders like Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler to lesser-known individuals like Procopius and Savonarola. There are distinct parallels in history to current events. Julius Caesar's publication of his Gallic Wars and Civil Wars was an early exercise in political spin not unlike what we see today. During the English Civil War and the Enlightenment, pamphleteering coupled with the new power of the printing press challenged the status quo, as online and social media does in our time. And "fake news" was already being used by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in nineteenth-century Europe and by the "yellow journalism" of American newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer near the turn of the twentieth century.The author concludes optimistically, noting that we are debating and discussing truth more fiercely today than in any previous era. The determination to arrive at the truth, despite the manipulations of the powerful, bodes well for the future of democracy. Now there is Facebook. There are psychoneurological factors all people need to understandand to fight the cancer of our minds and souls.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 12:58 PM

The Art of the Lie
Chapter One.

The lie is an ancient art and knows no boundry or horizon. Some of its modern subsidaries are the virus, the malware, the con, the simplist crime and the largest world coup imaginable.
Like erosion it is simply a matter of numbers and time. You have already had the passing thought that you are immune but you are not.
It has been said the devil's greatest trick is making you believe he doesn't exist.

Of course your participation in the lie, whatever that may be, is the verb to the lie's noun. You have probably asked why has the greatest liar had such 'huge' success. However you answered the question, I am sure was to your satisfaction but you are probably wrong. ...

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 11:30 AM

Spoke too soon. 70s again today.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Donuel
Date: 11 Dec 20 - 10:26 AM

The weather is cold, lies and shadows that have been and will be deadly, foolish and insane. She saw shadows. She always had. She was spiritual, not Christian—she’d left that behind when she’d left Waco, in her early 20s. She got into Wicca, “super witchy,” says a friend. “She was fun, happy, a little wild. Just a normal girl.” I’ll call her Evelyn, because she’s in a sense a hostage now, a captive of her beliefs. There are Evelyns everywhere. This Evelyn was in Austin. She worked when she could, sometimes she danced, stripped. She had a boyfriend who took care of her. She’d never had much luck holding on to a job. She’d bounce back and forth between her family in Waco and her friends in the city, right to left, red to blue. She was bright—a good listener, says one friend, a liberal lawyer whom Evelyn called “freedom fighter.” She was gullible, says another friend, the one who introduced Evelyn to QAnon not long into the pandemic, “for shits and giggles.”

Which is how Evelyn came to believe that the shadows she’d seen within Wicca as the nuances of life were actually the satanic forces that Q—thought by devotees to be a government insider “dropping” cryptic clues via chat forums about Donald Trump’s decades-old plan to destroy the deep state—believes control the Democratic Party. She “followed the white rabbit,” as QAnon believers put it, she “went down the rabbit hole.” She came to believe that the darkness to which she’d always been sensitive was not part of the light but at war with it. That the shadows had become flesh and that the flesh had become politics and that the love of Trump she’d embraced because she loved her family, abandoning her once-liberal views, required the hatred of his enemies: the “cabal.” Child-sacrificing Democratic elites, a monstrous network not just of pedophiles but of cannibals, harvesters of children’s adrenal glands (all the better to stay youthful), for an evil concoction one part Botox and two parts blood libel, the old idea that Jews make matzo from the blood of Christian babies.

Do I need to say none of this is true? I do. But the delusion is every bit as dangerous as if it were.

On the morning of August 12, Evelyn decided it was time to #SaveTheChildren, as the hashtag that’s been co-opted by Q puts it. She got into her ancient little red two-door Pontiac Fiero. She’d been drinking—she’d later test at twice the limit—but that didn’t slow her down. She’d been awake for days, researching. That’s what QAnon followers call their hours committed to YouTube videos and podcasts and deep study. The algorithms fed her. She fed the algorithms, making memes for Twitter and Instagram. She’d text her findings to her friends. One tried to warn her: “You’re being us

“I’m seeing things,” she answered.

“Three a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.,” says the friend who now regrets introducing Evelyn to QAnon. Evelyn didn’t realize her friend thought it was funny. Her friend didn’t know Evelyn was taking it so seriously. “One hundred percent,” says the friend now, “like the Bible, like it was gold.” When she realized what was happening, the friend tried to talk Evelyn down. “Go to sleep,” she begged. “I can’t,” Evelyn said. “I’m not sleeping till Trump does.” Like Q, she believed her president was working tirelessly to prepare for the Storm, the salvation of democracy via the executions of the cabalists, all of them.

At 9:22 that morning, Evelyn found one. It was obvious—the cabalist was driving a white van, the kind used by kidnappers in movies. Also the kind used by caterers in real life. The caterer had her young daughter with her. Evelyn jumped out at a light and began screaming. The caterer hit the gas. Evelyn got back in her Fiero and returned to the prowl. Soon she saw another shadow. A young Latinx woman driving a Dodge Caravan. Evelyn veered into the middle turning lane so she could try to force the Caravan over. The driver—a 19-year-old on her way to register for classes at community college—tried to turn into a police station. Evelyn rammed the Caravan. The student saw a cop in a parking lot. She squealed in, honking. “She kept ramming into me,” says the student. Eight times, she thinks, maybe more. “Half my body went numb.”

Had Evelyn not crashed into a concrete pylon, she might have committed murder. And if she’d done that, she might be as infamous as Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Kenosha killer whose original defense attorney declared that Rittenhouse had fired the first shot of the “Second American Revolution.” Instead Evelyn is just a woman who went too far—or, from the point of view of QAnon, not far enough. That she might have spiraled into some different sort of chaos had Trump and Q not been there to feed her delusion shouldn’t make us feel safe. Because Trump is there, and he sees shadows too.

There are no turning points when the world is spinning out of control, so the Trump interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that aired August 31—displaced by the time you read this by a dozen more distractions and disasters—did not so much mark a new low as erase altogether the meaning of pre-Trump terms such as “new low.” Now there is only the abyss. We’re all in it together, and Trump is down here too. Which is why it’s worth pausing, as we rush toward November and the certain violence that will follow any outcome, to consider Trump’s words to Ingraham.

“Biden,” he says, slumped in a chair, “Biden is, I don’t even like to mention Biden”—(fact check: he does)—“because he’s not controlling anything.” This is Trump boilerplate—he’s been calling Biden a puppet since at least last fall.


Ingraham attempts to normalize. The media of which Trump approves doesn’t just parrot his words, it launders them. Ingraham asks who’s “pulling the strings.” She proposes “Obama’s people,” which is triple-ply: simultaneously a plausible suggestion of continuity; a racist dog whistle; and a bone for QAnon, followers of which know that “Obama’s people” means “pedophiliac cannibals.” It’s the kind of yes, and message that’d usually elicit a smirk from Trump, an insult comic at heart.

Not this time. He tilts forward, his hands uncharacteristically clasped between his knees, and breaks eye contact, glancing away. His voice gathers texture. “People that you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows, people—”

“Dark shadows,” says Ingraham. “What is that?” It’s not a question, it’s a redirect.

“No,” Trump says, as if he knows how he sounds. “People that you haven’t heard of,” he repeats. In the past when Trump spoke of Biden’s puppeteers, he wanted you to think you knew whom he meant. “Reasonable” Republicans understood it was Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer—just as many Democrats say Mitch McConnell controls Trump. Racists heard him calling out AOC and the Squad, impertinent women of color. And the deeper read was George Soros, maybe the Rothschilds.

But something different is happening with Ingraham. He’s not insinuating that she knows whom he’s talking about—he’s insisting she doesn’t. It’s none of the usual suspects. Nobody and everybody, nameless and everywhere. When he glances away it’s as if only he can see them, an intimate moment not between Trump and Ingraham, but between Trump and his own mind. We’re witnessing a man cross a lin

Not one of transgression—to him, such borders mean nothing—but of belief. “There are people that are on the streets,” he says. “There are people that are controlling the streets.” The “invisible enemy” he’s spoken of before, the one QAnon calls Hillary Clinton or James Comey or John Podesta. But this foe has no name.

He speaks of an airplane “in a certain city,” one full of “thugs” in “dark uniforms.” Indistinguishable; like a virus. This happened, he says, then: “They’re on a plane.” Present tense. “This is all happening.” Right now. It has the dream logic of a nursery rhyme. On the streets, in the air, dark shadows everywhere.

What Trump is describing is no more nor less exotic than the popular evangelical concept of spiritual war, the conflict thought to be raging always, around us and within, between believers and “principalities” and “powers,” according to Ephesians, or demons, in the contemporary vernacular. QAnon has translated the concept from King James into Trumpish, but Trump is no more reading Q “drops” than undead John-John, JFK Jr., is writing them. For once there’s nothing contrived about Trump’s answer. He’s not saying what he thinks MAGA wants to hear. Dark shadows is in fact the wrong answer, as Ingraham tries to signal. But he can’t hear her.

IF YOU LOVE TRUMP, YOU’RE RECEIVING THE SIGNAL. IF YOU FEAR HIM, FEAR HE’LL NEVER REALLY BE GONE, YOU’RE HEARING IT TOO.

Trump used to flirt with and feed morsels to evangelicalism’s spiritual warriors and the rabbit-holers of Q. That’s when they were distinct constituencies, the Christians and the crazies. Lately they’ve been merging, the theology of Q infecting evangelicalism, the organization of the Christian right incarnating Q’s digital power. Together they’re his base; his hope; and now, maybe, his identity. He’s no longer a con artist. Now he’s his own mark, like an email scammer who clicks on his own malware. He isn’t selling a dream, he’s dreaming it. The difference between him and his believers is that he has the power to make the dream real, for them, for him, for us. To summon into being the “American carnage” he nightmared at his inauguration, the cities he said were desolate now set ablaze; the killers in the street recast as heroes, with paramilitary backup; fear a daily given; the plague risen up from legend to fill the land with ghosts. This was his dream. Now we are all nightmaring it together.

When press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked to explain Trump’s defense of QAnon, she insisted neither she nor the president knew a thing about it. But at the close of the interview, apropos of nothing, she said, “There’s a lot of children in this country who have died on the streets of Democrat cities. We’re focused on capturing criminals.” What was she talking about? Maybe she meant gun violence in Chicago, a favorite Trump topic, or the blond girls he describes falling prey to human “animals.” But I heard Q. I heard #SaveTheChildren. Was she signaling, I wondered? A very Q question.

I thought of a Q podcast, Praying Medic, to which I’d started listening. “This information is real, distractions are necessary,” says the Medic, explaining the need for Q’s cryptic constructions. So real it demands the poetry of myth, not the dull prose of politics. “Double meanings,” like loop-the-loops, kairos—sacred time—disguised as chronos, “ticktock,” as QAnon says. Consider the third of November, a date seemingly promised by Q in October 2017 to deliver indictments against the cabal, around which “public riots” (versus the private kind?) would be organized in an attempt to prevent their arrests. November 3, 2017, came and went sans perp walk or broken windows.

But who knows which November 3 Q meant, asks the Medic. I see the answer before he says it—there are riots now, and November is coming! Ticktock. I thought of Rittenhouse’s first shot, and his lawyer’s “Second American Revolution,” and the plastic bag his supporters claimed was a Molotov cocktail; and of Michael Reinoehl, the Portland protester who said his kill shot “felt like the beginning of a war.” I thought of “retribution,” Trump’s term for the police killing of Reinoehl. “That’s the way it has to be,” he explained. Tit-tat, ticktock. I thought of Michael R. Caputo, the Trump aide who on Facebook warned of Bidenaut hit squads and called for supporters to stock ammunition and also spoke of shadows: “Shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.”And of Trump, always Trump. Masked, pawing at the window of his airtight limousine outside Walter Reed, driven by Secret Service agents in pale gowns. Unmasked, on the White House portico, breathing disease, visibly gasping. He tells us he feels better than he has in 20 years. The drugs, I thought, the steroids. But what if it’s true? What if he is growing stronger? Not electorally—more unbound? Walking deeper into his own shadow, drawing us after?

I shook it off; insane. But what about McEnany? I started listening to another Q podcast, this one a debunking, QAnon Anonymous. Its hosts also heard echoes in McEnany’s words. It was on this podcast that I learned of the woman I’m calling Evelyn. When I called one of the hosts, an artist named Julian Feeld, to ask how he’d found her, he said a listener had seen the attack in the local Waco news.

The report mentioned nothing about QAnon. But the listener wondered if there was more. Feeld didn’t wonder, he knew. He knew because he’s been listening even longer. In his voice I hear what sounds like pleasure, a kind of frightened delight in piecing together the puzzle of QAnon’s shattered mind. The Praying Medic sounds like this too, a mix of amiable and urgent that’s at odds with the history of conspiracy-mongering. Neither man grabs you by the lapels, demanding you listen. They don’t have to. So many of us already are. If you love Trump, you’re receiving the signal. If you fear him, fear he’ll never really be gone now no matter the outcome, that he’s a chronic condition or maybe a terminal one, then you’re hearing it to

“Blood makes noise,” declares a speaker at a #SaveTheChildren rally in Los Angeles that Feeld attended and recorded, a gathering of the unexpected: white hipsters, Black men, Latin x women, mothers concerned for their children. The speaker says the blood of the children is spilled by the cabal into the earth, where it’s soaked up by the roots of trees—she doesn’t need to mention Thomas Jefferson, the tree of liberty, for patriots to hear the echo—which then grow fruit, which “we” eat. “Their blood is now inside us!” she crows, as if this is a victory. The crowd cheers. “And we cry out with”—can you hear it?—“the voice of the children!”

This is the nightmare: We are the children and the cannibals. The victims and the killers, the innocence and the revenge. Do I need to say that none of this is true? Yes. We are none of us innocent, none of us martyrs. Such words are for faith, and democracy is a practice. Each of our real martyrs are defiled by claims of drinking the blood of infants and pedophilia, people like MLK, Obama, RHG...

Never mind the friends of Trump like Epstein.
Nevermind the Qman behind the right wing think tank curtain.
If this was a Horror movie you would change the channel, but its real.

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 09 Dec 20 - 05:14 PM

FINALLY cold here in Charlottesville. 2 days ago, t-shirt weather. Yesterday, snow. Today, chilly, windy, just lovely. Aah. Down comforter, space heater, soup, hot chocalate...

Subject: RE: What's the weather like where you are?
From: keberoxu
Date: 08 Dec 20 - 09:47 PM

cold cold COOOOOOOLD