Weather Report: January in November
Man, it was cold this morning! Pale blue skyThe Lady in Red on the flatscreen claimed the current cold wave would make things seem to be the depth of Winter for a few days before it passes. The duty Scribe at the circle- well, it actually isn’t a circle and no one wanted to drag a comfortable stone up to the service elevator at Big Pink and down the hall to the new Bunk House. The Chairman is financing the relocation to keep us on staff while he rearranges some of his logistics. What is behind all the commotion? Word has leaked that he has seen the “Camp LeJeune” water legal commercials, and heard the news that the Navy’s Red Hill water storage on Oahu will get the same treatment. As soon as the necessary legislation is passed, we are confident we have careers in suing the Government to the end of Time, or at least our lives.
So, the difficult part of that path is waiting around to get the right people in Congress to support our billion dollar grift. That will take time, so we will stock with the old routine. Other developments cry out for attention.
Apparently some people actually won their elections last week. They decided this morning to reveal the results of some of them. It is official now: The Red party apparently took a minor majority in the House of Representatives. Now some of the deals can be talked about in public. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has an awkward moment now. Remember, she is 82 now, the daughter of a Maryland politician who moved from one coast to the other one. It is said that since she will turn her seat on California over to her daughter and spend her remaining time comforting her husband. Unquestionably, that is the story of this morning on this week. But there were two others.
The first is that the war in Ukraine is using things called “munitions.” Russia fired 96 cruise missiles at infrastructure targets to ensure Ukraine lacks energy for winter.
The Ukrainians announced they had shot down 82 of them, a wildly improbable interception rate, since they announced the identity of the 18 targets that were hit. That really wasn’t the point though. One of the reasons Mr. Putin sent his conscripts across the Dnepr River was NATO’s expansion east in the period after the end of the Cold War. In the big missile attack, a rocket fell in the territory of NATO-member Poland, killing two farmers.
Tragic news, and we feel sorrow as fellow civilians. But under some of the language in the NATO treaty, here is what the immediate first reports indicated: “Russians kill two Poles. NATO’s Article 5 states this: “An attack on one is an attack on all.”
It was weird to hear that, first time in thirty years. Yet according to the rules, we could have been tugged directly into a war in progress without stopping for lunch. Thankfully, the matter was handed over to the Public Affairs Departments of government and reliable media. They stopped the war by blaming the Polish deaths on the Ukrainians. The war crime was thus brushed off and relegated to the back of the war news as something sad but insignificant and not worth ending civilization about.
Then there is the matter of American politics. A Republican majority in the House has implications. The major power they will have is money and investigation. Neither of those are new in Washington, and it feels like there has been nothing but those two items on the menu for years. And if you understand what happened with this “FTX Crypto Billions!!!!” thing, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line. The latest word we heard about that was that slush payments that big are at the bottom of whatever it is that has been going on for a while.
More about that as it unfolds. It took us more than a week to count most/some of the ballots in the recent election, so bear with us.
More on all that as it comes! We will start counting pretty soon!
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