It "feels like" we're screwed
The first movie I can remember seeing in a theater is Goldfinger and that came out in 1964 so I would have been 11 years old and I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered.
I still want an Aston Martin with machine guns and an ejection seat and I loved all those gadgets Q would give James Bond and somehow Q knew James would need an exploding fountain pen or a belt buckle that contained a flamethrower to make it through his latest escapade and I’ve often thought that if James Bond had been handed a cell phone in 1964 we would have thought having a device you carried in your tuxedo pocket that could take pictures and record sounds and give you an answer when you typed in “Evil Genius Mountain Top Lairs near me” was the coolest thing ever.
My cell phone is amazing and can do any number of fantastic things with the possible exception of making a phone call.
And one of the amazing non-phone call things my phone does is tell me the actual temperature, followed by a second temperature labeled “feels like.”
Which is worth knowing because when you live in the Midwest, humidity can make 82 “feel like” 95 and in winter wind chill can make 32 “feel like” 21 and I’ve noticed here in California with pretty much zero humidity the actual temperature and the “feels like” temperature are usually exactly the same number which might sound like a good deal compared to the Midwest, but when it’s a billion fucking degrees outside, for some reason I don’t find it all that comforting when my phone says that it also “feels like” a billion fucking degrees outside.
When someone out here tells me: “It’s hot, but it’s a dry heat.”
I usually reply: “So’s a microwave.”
I also think the people that made my cell phone could have been just a little more creative and then my phone might say the actual temperature is 95, but “feels like you’re wearing a wet electric blanket set on high” or “feels like you’re breathing hot tapioca” and if anyone from Samsung reads this, give me a call and I’ll supply you a list of “feels like” descriptions, assuming the phone I bought from you doesn’t drop the call because right now if I want to hear somebody clearly, I need to fly a kite with a key on the string during a thunderstorm and hope it gets hit by lightning.
Anyway…
According to the Kansas City Star, for the first time ever it was 104 in Britain and most British homes don’t have air conditioning so I’m guessing it “feels like” time to immigrate.
If you thought climate change (the Artist Formerly Known as global warming) was something our kids and grandkids would have to deal with, wake up and smell the Gatorade because it’s here right now this minute and as the cartoon at the top of this post indicates, despite Joe Biden’s promise to do something to stop climate change, I don’t like his chances.
“Feels like” time to start thinking about a different Democratic candidate.
Feel free to have any opinion you like about him (like I could stop you if I wanted to) but during the early days of the pandemic when people like Donald Trump were speculating that maybe you could solve the problem by mainlining Clorox, I thought Anthony Fauci was a voice or reason and told us some uncomfortable truths which a lot of people really didn’t want to hear, so they attacked him and his credibility and if you Google “did Anthony Fauci have stock in vaccine companies” you’ll be lead to a list of fact-check articles saying that social media claim was bullshit and here’s one of them:
I did not go to Vietnam – missed it by a year or two – but I did get a draft lottery number which will make you start paying close attention to foreign policy and also because the older guys I knew who went to Vietnam and came back, said don’t go if you don’t have to; things are pretty screwed up over there.
Plus, my father served in World War II and I watched every one of those John Wayne movies, all of which made me interested in combat and who survives and who doesn’t, so I read about it and it seems once people start shooting at each other and adrenaline is squirting out their ears, people often make bad decisions or freeze and make no decisions at all.
Google “friendly fire” statistics (which is getting attacked by the people on your side) and you might come across an article on encyclopedia.com which says this:
“In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, there were 615 American casualties; 23 percent of the personnel (35 killed and 72 wounded) and 77 percent of the combat vehicle losses were attributable to friendly fire.”
And this:
“Earlier, in July 1943, nervous American naval and ground troops Gela, Sicily, fired on aircraft carrying paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division and caused 319 casualties (88 dead, 162 wounded, and 69 missing) plus 80 aircraft destroyed or badly damaged. In the Pacific, a month later, 15–16 August, 28 Americans and Canadians were killed and 55 wounded during the invasion of Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. There were no enemy troops on the island; all of the casualties were from friendly fire.”
So if you can kill 28 of your own people without facing an enemy, it seems like mistakes happen a lot more often than those John Wayne movies led me to believe. If you want to read the article for yourself, here’s the link:
Which gets us to the Uvalde police and their failure to act quickly because they were confused about who was in charge and whether the shooter was still shooting and all those people were trained for the situation, but still made mistakes, so I don’t like the odds of a bunch of barely-trained elementary school teachers making good decisions and suddenly turning into Dirty Harry under pressure.
And, yes, I’m well aware that an armed bystander stopped a shooter in a mall recently and here’s a New York Times article that answers the question “Who Stops a Bad Guy with a Gun?” and in 433 shooting attacks, an armed bystander shot the shooter 22 times and in 10 of those cases the armed bystander was a security guard or an off-duty policeman, so just regular-old citizens packing heat stopped a mass shooter 12 out of 433 times (which is .0277136259 percent of the time) and in one of those incidents the police showed up and shot the armed citizen, thinking he was the mass shooter.
Turns out mistakes happen (who knew) and throw guns into the mix and those mistakes can be fatal.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/22/us/shootings-police-response-uvalde-buffalo.html
OK, that’s it for today because I’ve got to check my cell phone and find out of it “feels like” a good idea to go outside.
I've never been to California myself. Hope you're having a good visit. Come back safely to us ... so you too can roast to death in the hell that is a Kansas summer. 😜
To think that I'm actually considering moving back to KC. My mental faculties are obviously failing.