"Not a promise anybody can make..."

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UFOs and train derailments and more mass shootings. Yesterday the sky was eye-squintingly blue and temps nearly reached 70. It almost seemed wrong. I went for a walk to clear my head, and ended up filling it with more things I could not reconcile.

I'm not sure what the military has been shooting down. I don't think they know what they've been shooting down either. Which seems to be the very definition of a UFO, but maybe that's just me. It's flying. It's an object. And not knowing what it is makes it "unidentified". I get that the acronym itself is like a mating call for the stupids, but sometimes you just gotta call it like you see it, no? I mean...it's either little green men, or China is fucking with us. The former you can salt away in Area 51. The latter? US defense folks might have some serious 'plaining to do. I mean....I can track my kid's exact location via my cell phone. Surely the Pentagon has access to steeper technology than I do?

These things are being shot down with $400,000 missiles (which don't always hit the target....one of the shots "missed"....which is comforting, eh?) from $150 million F-22 stealth fighters. It's not exactly like we're skeet shooting over the Great Lakes. Is this gonna turn into a regular occurance? A nation that already owes China over $1 trillion dollars is gonna start feeling fucking stupid really fast picking up this tab. If it is China of course.

The last thing Biden needs right now is a fresh conspiracy theory to spark the loons. Which of course is what he walked himself right into by waiting days to say something. And then saying dumb shit. The latest from the White House is that the 3....er.....things....shot down over the Great Lakes were likely "benign.....harmless" objects. Even though the government "doesn't know what they are", they can say that they are not at all related to the Chinese spy balloon shot down a week earlier, which is the sort of Orwellian double-speak that needs to be read off the teleprompter with extreme care so the person reading doesn't roll his own eyes.

Just a curious timing coincidence and all that. Nothing to see here. Go back to searching for the Loch Ness Monster and Arizona gubernatorial votes.

Ok, but shooting down harmless objects with missiles.....isn't that like me trying to kill the fly in my bedroom by burning the house down? Look, I get it. The initial China thing made everybody a little twitchy. But now releasing backyard balloons at a birthday party is gonna activate the "Top Guns"? Is there no longer such a thing as a "proportional response"?

Nobody believes anything our government says because they are really bad liars. I kept saying to myself "Jesus....if they actually come out and say 'they were weather balloons'....and just today Biden held a presser in which he claimed they were possibly....weather balloons. The national weather service launches nearly 200 weather balloons EVERY DAY. What made these 3 so special?

We really need to stop making weather balloons that look like alien spacecraft.

The only thing I am sure of right now is that they were not weather balloons. Weather balloons do not trigger fucking NORAD. And I'm pretty sure they are not aliens because aliens, in every movie I’ve ever seen, are smarter and way more advanced than we are. Why in the world would aliens choose to visit a planet that produced Kari Lake and Mike Lindell? Did they lose a bet in another galaxy?

As for the toxic train derailment in Ohio, the EPA is currently stepping over dead animals to tell the residents that it's completely safe to move back into their homes as long as they don't drink the water anymore. Hey, if you can't trust the EPA, who can you trust? Somehow their regulations (or lack thereof) allowed a train with multiple cars containing hazardous substances to be labeled non-hazardous, and I'd hate to be the bureaucrat who signed off on that one. It's also said that the severity of the accident was likely increased by the lack of Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes, which were mandated by the Obama administration, a directive that was rescinded by the Trump administration because it was mandated by the Obama administration.

Having these brakes of course costs the rail companies money, but considering the lawsuits on the horizon for the Norfolk Southern Railway, that money may look like something out of the petty cash drawer in comparison. The company promised to answer questions at a town hall meeting, and then failed to show up, a PR move comparable to running one their fucking trains off the tracks. I don’t know who runs these places, but it sure ain’t the best and the brightest.

And so much for all that.

The latest mass shooting happened at Michigan State University. On the eve of the 5 year anniversary of the Parkland massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A man with a slew of mental problems and a previous weapons charge was able to legally purchase yet more guns because of course he was. Some of the MSU students sheltering in place during the shooting had sheltered in place a year earlier as high school seniors at Oxford High School, only 80 miles away. They lost 4 classmates that day. This time, they lost 3 more.

What exactly can we say to these kids? What fresh set of lies can we tell them? How can we promise that something is going to be done to stop these things from happening again? At Sandy Hook 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 were massacred at close range. Their bodies needed to be put back together to be identified. And nothing changed. There is no gun control debate in this country anymore. Once we were ok with slaughtered children, the debate ended.

I mean…..Obama cried over these things. In front of the world. Surely better than Trump shrugging and then dry humping the flag at an NRA convention. But once you disregard the optics, each man ultimately did the same thing. Nothing.

I’ll say it again. Once we were ok with dead children, the debate ended.

All that’s left is the tweeted “thoughts and prayers” and the grandstanding for the cable network per diems. You’re on your own, kids. You’re the price of doing business.

Maybe these kids at MSU will graduate without again having to hide under desks and text "I love you" to their Moms and Dads.....but even that's not a promise anybody can make.

In a bit...

--tf