Wednesday wanderings – mid July, 2022

I need to do my walkabout in the morning as we expect more heat and thunderstorms. As evidence to me of climate change, the North Carolina climate seems a lot like Florida used to where I grew up. Daily thunderstorms following a hot day. Here are few thoughts as I wander.

I did learn this week the minor league baseball team in my hometown of Jacksonville is now called “Jax Jumbo Shrimp.” It doesn’t give off the competitive image that you want in a team name, does it? Put them on a slow boil, add a beer, and you will win every time against the Jumbo Shrimp. Some folks might like Old Bay seasoning, but the beer doesn’t smell as much in the house. In keeping with my inner George Carlin oxymoron are jumbo shrimp big shrimp or little jumbos?

Not that I am prescient, but I have been saying for well over a year that the former president’s political career is toast, it will just take some time for Republicans to realize it. Well, it has taken longer than I hoped, but more and more are realizing their demagogue has lied to them and still is. And, they are beginning to realize the ugly truth about the former president; he is the reason we had an insurrection against a branch of government. January 6 does not happen if someone else is president. Full stop. He invited, he incited and he refused to stop it, until he was forced to after way too many hours. There is a word for that – sedition.

The House Select committee testimony, under oath (which should mean something) by people who were involved in the seditious insurrection or who tried to talk the former president out of his furor over losing the election, is once again compelling. Of course, MAGA fans are told not to watch, but as former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said, these are Republicans testifying under oath – Republicans must watch. Rep. Liz Cheney, another Republican, said one witness has told the House Select committee the former president called the witness presumably to influence her testimony. Frankly, this is not a surprise as some of his sycophants have been doing the same with others.

With my last three posts on the environment, this week an article about Dupont’s forever chemicals in Wilmington, NC reared its ugly head. Here are the first two paragraphs:

“A deadly cancer has already taken 43-year-old Amy Nordberg away from her family, also of Wilmington. Nordberg died in January after a three-year battle with a vicious cancer that followed the development of multiple sclerosis. The cancer moved through her body faster than doctors expected, enveloping her colon and invading her bone marrow.

Kennedy and Nordberg are only two among many sick and dying people who live in the Cape Fear River basin of North Carolina, where environmental testing has found persistently high levels of different types of toxic compounds known collectively as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.”

This stuff is real and it is here to stay. It is the chemical in Teflon. They are not called “forever chemicals” for nothing. And, in court Dupont settled individual court cases and a class action case because they knew of the danger and hid it. And, you likely have some in your body if you used Teflon.

So, the moral to these stories, is go boil some water. This is how summer is feeling. You can cook jumbo shrimp in it. You can purify drinking water (to a degree) and you can get a sense of how more Republicans are starting to feel about the former president. Boiling mad. I did hear the former president is boiling mad about the testimony. He should because I am over a president who would “burn it all down” to avoid losing an election per his calmer, more rational niece Mary.