Friday, September 3, 2021

What a week, man. It’s been pleasantly green around here and I am just not inclined to do this. That is, dig into the week’s news and try to understand it so I can explain it. So let’s get to it. The world’s not going to wait on me and I have nothing better to do anyway.

Ida seems to be out of position and can’t really kick our teeth in anymore. It has been noteworthy, if just because it stomped some form of a mudhole wherever it went. It rained so much in New York City that the subways and basement apartments/businesses are flooding. Most of New Orleans is still out of power and much of Louisiana is having to deal with all the roads still blocked. The death count is 49 last I heard and I’ve no doubt that number will rise sharply before the night’s through. It’s going to take a little bit to figure out what washed where, believe that.

Several states are still under emergency warnings and President Joe Biden’s visited the Louisiana area, as presidents do, and stared meaningfully at the mess while people gave him several earfuls, all of it legit. The material damage, the environmental damage, the psychological damage, etc. is going to be a serious one. It’d be a drag already even if the rest of the world’s a mess. We really don’t have time.

I mentioned this the other day, but the September 1 deadline for getting everyone out of Afghanistan who wants to leave has come and gone. The polls have remained pretty solid throughout: everyone was for it but feels it’s right for the wrong reason or wasn’t perfect. In any event, something like 120,000 refugees, several thousand non-military American citizens, and all the soldiers that were supposed to leave. Call it a draw and maybe be thankful it wasn’t worse. The Taliban that’s in power now is bringing a different game than the Taliban of twenty years ago, but hey, so are we. This is unfamiliar land, pilgrims, and yet some fools fail to recognize.

Texas passed a mess of weird bills earlier in the week and still no one has seen fit to comment that they number six-hundred and sixty-six. We should enjoy humorous coincidences, I think. One issue is an almost complete ban on abortion past the sixth week of pregnancy that’s being called a de facto end of Roe vs. Wade. Even worse, it sets up a bounty system that encourages regular citizens to snitch on folks who helped someone get an abortion, whether they know it or not. All in Texas, which eliminated any sort of requirement regulating the average dipstick walk around strapped. Again, Biden has said something about it, and while he is against it, I doubt he’ll get much done. What can he do?

And all this is going on while we’re still knee-deep in a deadly pandemic caused by a virus we only vaguely understand exacerbated by a not-insignificant percentage of the population refuses to act right. Worse, a not-insignificant portion of that group is completely unhooked from reality and is this far from bombing places where you get vaccinations. It’s actually pretty amazing how little they’re budging on this, they have gone full root-hog-or-die. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to survive.

So that’s the first few days of September, in this 2,021st foul year of our Lord, friends and neighbors, and we have to deal with it. I don’t know what to tell you beyond that. Enjoy your weekend.

Oh, yeah. The West is still on fire.