Post-Apocalypse Post

I may or may not post more on the just-completed US federal election in the future, but here on the day after I want to write a few things that occurred to me today or in the course of the campaign.

1. Mainstream Media. A couple of months ago, just after Harris magically became the Democratic nominee, I was sitting in my living room writing a blog post, as I do. I was also listening to the CBC’s Tempo program, in which CBC plays classical music from 9am to noon. Tempo also features a four-minute newscast at the top of each hour. CBC thought a good use of some of that four minutes was to inform me every hour that Taylor Swift had endorsed Kamala Harris for president. My tax dollars at work.

2. Charlatans. Every US Presidential election season, shallow media outlets like the New York Times and NPR drag out historian Alan Lichtman, proclaiming him as ‘The Prophet of Presidential Elections’. If you want to know why this moniker is balderdash, you can read statistician Andrew Gelman’s blog articles about it here and here. One can hope that Lichtman won’t get the usual media coverage in four years, given he predicted a Harris win this time – but I would not bet on it.

3. Snowflakes. In the run-up to said election, it appears that the School of Public Policy at Georgetown University felt that their students were so stressed by this looming election that special services had to be set up for them. You can read about it all here, but to give you the idea, here’s a brief quote from the article, written by Free Press (No, not the London one) columnist Frannie Block:

Here’s the agenda (and no, you can’t make this up):

10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care

11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Legos Station

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits

1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises

2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies

4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring

5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation

I wanted to ask Clevenger [the school’s director of student engagement’] why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails.

I am very much looking forward to reading about what Georgetown are doing for their students now to help them deal with an election win by The Anti-Christ. Stay tuned for updates.

4. Apocalypse. To finish up, I quote here a paragraph from the article by Andrew Coyne that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail. I plan to save the entire article for future reference, but I am posting this much here so we can all revisit Andrew’s predictions in a few months.

“There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.”

Yikes. Gotta find my Lego set.