Yeah…but we’ll get to Forrest in a couple minutes.

We’re not doing much these days…as you probably saw the COVID case rate in FL is going up and I really have to question some things the governor’s office says down here but that’s in the Forrest section. Anyways…we’re mostly staying home the past couple of weeks until things start to die down again…and we’re really tired of it raining almost every afternoon and of the heat and humidity…but that’s just SW FL in the summer time. We got lucky last summer and had much less rain and heat/humidity but this summer has been much more typical weather for down here.

We’ve had 2 storms pass us by…Fred just sort of skated by as a tropical storm off shore and was really a non issue here before heading inland north and wet of us. Ida on the other hand…again passed well off shore here but we did get some pretty good rain from it…3 inches or so and some 20 to 30 knot winds but it was also pretty much a non event for us. Not so up in New Orleans…it’s getting there this evening and despite being told to get out of town most of the idiots are still there. Hopefully the dikes and pumping stations will handle things better than with Katrina…which coincidentally was 16 years ago today. Henri on the other hand stayed over in the Atlantic and went up to the northeast.

OK…

You probably recognize the quote from the movie Forrest Gump…or to say it another way “You can’t fix stupid” as comedian Ron White said but that saying’s been around a long longer. Anyways…there’s quite a bunch of stupidity gathered from the news the past couple of weeks…and the tendency seems to not respect political party lines as both of them are up to it.

First…there’s the mask/no mask mandate or not…and the vaccine mandate or not…and I think its safe to say that the current brouhaha over it has blame on both political parties. Yes…there are stupid people on the right who refuse to get the vaccine or wear a mask…but the left then gets on their high horse about those ignorant Republicans and then things go all to hell pretty quickly as folks get defensive on both sides. Frankly…the idea that there’s a secret tracking nano thing in the vaccine or that it doesn’t work or that the virus is fake…well, those people just ain’t thinking right. Instead of trying to educate them and convince the doubters that their fears are nonsense with science and that it really isn’t a control/freedom thing…the insults start. Case in point…up at Ole Miss university the football team members, staff, and coaches are 100% vaccinated as of earlier this week…they got to the 80% or so range and then had individual meetings with the 20% to ask questions, help them understand, and use persuasion instead of insults. Turns out that most of the unvaccinated were mostly just too lazy to go and get the shots so the team brought in folks and handled it at practice.

Then there’s the mixed messages you get from both sides. The left has been using “My body my choice” for decades to justify abortion and when the unvaccinated uses it for not getting one they’re pilloried in the media with statements like “abortion doesn’t hurt anybody and your non vaccinated status does”…completely ignoring the fact that (no matter your opinion on the morality of abortion, that’s too hard to figure out here) an abortion is certainly unhealthy for the fetus.  On the other hand…anti abortion folk are adamantly against the same argument when the abortion proponents use it but happy to use it when convenient for them.

Speaking of mixed messages…I keep wondering how come one side is all gung ho for vaccine passport IDs but adamantly against voter ID…and the other side is likewise gung ho and adamantly against but in the opposite order.

We’ve got state governors mandating masks/vaccines or not, mandating that local mask/vaccine mandates are illegal. I think that doing either of those on a national or state level is too broad of a brush…there are places where having a mandate for either makes sense…and then again there are places where the case rate is such that it doesn’t make sense. Such decisions should be left to the local level of government (if government at all)…personally I would rather that school districts, businesses, organizations, and whatever make their own decision and people going those places need to respect the decisions the individual organizations make.

I could rally rant on and on with the stupidity just in this area…but there’s lots more of it to pass along.

Out in the PRC on the left coast…there was a move afoot to declare math racist and change how it was taught in the schools. The changes sought included saying that getting the right answer was not important and that math needed to be taught using peaceful protests as teaching aids and scenarios. Seems to me that getting the right answer is the whole point of math education…but what do I know. I think this one got nipped in the bud but a quick google didn’t reveal any final decision on it. According to the WSJ…the proposed framework says that “addressing student mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy”, that “requiring them to show their work is discriminatory”, and “grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter” is not required. Also included…”The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false” and “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’” Nuts I say.

But it’s not just math that’s racist…it’s rocks too. 

Up at the University of Wisconsin…there is this 70 ton rock about the size of a pickup truck named Chamberlin Rock. This rock has been removed from the Madison WS campus who view the rock as a symbol of racism. The rock’s crime…it was referred to with a racially derogatory name in a single instance in 1925 in the Wisconsin State Journal. Yep…a single instance…even through university historians were unable to find any other instance of this rock being referred to in a racial slur manner the rock has been summarily removed in the search for a “more inclusive campus”.

You probably read about the march on Washington DC yesterday demanding an end to voter suppression…and about the wicked attempts by the Texas legislature to pass Jim Crow 2.0 laws…as well as about the heroic stand of the Democrats in the Texas legislature who left the state to deny a quorum. Yep…they essentially used a filibuster like technique to avoid passing legislation…and then went to DC to demand that the US Senate abolish the filibuster.

And the laws they’re so vehemently against in both TX and GA? Well…they merely restore the voting rules that existed prior to the 2020 election. Yes…with the pandemic going on the rules needed to be relaxed but both states laws are just taking things bad to the way they were before 2020. Specifically…the Texas law bans 24 hour voting and bans drive in voting unless you’re disabled…exactly as existed prior to 2020. According to the WSJ again…in the single county containing Austin that actually implemented 24 hour voting…something less than 1,000 people actually voted between the hours of midnight and 7:00AM…and the vote turnout in the county was in the 1.something million votes cast…so it doesn’t seem like 24 hour voting is really needed. And the kicker…the new laws in Texas and Georgia are *still* less restrictive than the voting laws in the President’s home state of Delaware or in Connecticut and Massachusetts…but you don’t see the progressives kicking up a fuss about those states.

Out in Missouri…the legislature passed some legislation that basically says the state will not enforce federal gun laws…naturally the Department of Justice immediately announced that these laws were unconstitutional. Funny though…last time I checked the DoJ wasn’t the arbiter of what is constitutional or not…and the same DoJ said not a single word when the PRC said that they would not enforce federal immigration laws and declared themselves a sanctuary.

Oh yeah…there’s hypocrisy too. Representatives Talib and Pressley are co-sponsors of a bill to cancel rent for the remainder of the pandemic. However…on both of their financial disclosure forms filed recently they reported significant amounts of rental income they received from property they own…gee, I wonder if they gave their tenants a break on the rent they were owed. Apparently not as the figure ranges both reported were the same in 2020 as in 2019.

Some hypocrisy from the White House as well. As you probably saw earlier in the summer, the CDCs eviction moratorium ended up at the SCOTUS and was upheld in early July because it was ending at the end of July anyway…but the decision specifically noted that absent authorization from Congress any new moratorium would be illegal. Not to be deterred…the White House and CDC announced a “targeted moratorium” (their words) that covered over 90% of the country. At the time it was announced, the President admitted on television that it would not stand up to legal challenge…but that he was doing it anyway so that they could give more of the funds out before the courts acted. Now I’m sure that previous Presidents have gamed the courts before…but publicly admitting it is a new level of hypocrisy.

And finally…out in Orange County in the PRC…a public school teacher removed the US flag from her classroom because it “made her uncomfortable”. The school she teaches at has announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance during third period and she told her students that they could stand or not and recite the Pledge or not…and when the students asked which way they should face during the Pledge since no US flag was in the room…she pointed to the gay pride flag she chooses to display instead of he district mandated US flag and said face that one. The school district is “investigating” whatever that means…but how does this woman still have a job?

And finally…I wonder what our governor down here in Florida is thinking. He’s against both mask mandates and vaccine mandates and has issued executive orders saying that no local versions of the same have any effect. Personally…I think he’s making a mistake but that’s not really the stupidity here. The stupidity arises from his announcement this week. The University of Florida announced that they wouldn’t be enforcing a vaccine mandate or negative test mandate for attendance at games on campus this fall…because in their legal opinion the university does not have the authority to do so. The governor announced that they certainly have the authority to require either proof of vaccination (despite his earlier executive order) or a negative test for admission. The stupidity arises when he told them (a) they can required vaccination even through his order says they can’t…and (b) I don’t understand why he’s ok with a negative test mandate but not a mask/vaccine mandate…seems like he would have been against the negative test mandate as well…I really don’t understand his thinking.

OK…on to interesting things found on the net. Sorry…no wildlife since we ain’t seen any.

The Hamptons up in NY were obviously hit hard by Hurricane Henri.

This is a map of all the potentially hazardous asteroids that might affect the earth…defined as being more than 140 meters in size and passing within 7.5 million kilometers (about 20 earth to moon distances) of the planet. Seriously…we’re eventually going to get smacked by something but at least none of the known ones will hit us for at least 100 years. Don’t get too excited about that…we’ve had several reasonably close passes…including one that was 30something meters in size that passed within 25,000 mile of us…in the past year or so. That one was actually not discovered until *after* it had passed us. Scary. The earth orbit is the bright white circle and the largest circle is the orbit of Jupiter.

After the President’s miserably incompetent performance during the Afghanistan withdrawal the past couple of weeks…this seems apropos.

This guy is in serious trouble…or as Neil used to say in the Navy…deep kimchi.

And finally…

and

Cyas.