The Weather and the Rest of It

There’s plenty of important news afoot today, as always, but around here and in much of the rest of the American heartland the big story is the weather. It’s wet, chilly, and bringing down catastrophic thunderstorms and hailstorms and tornados and flooding rains from the Texas panhandle to Lake Michigan.

So far our beloved hometown of Wichita has been spared the worst of it, but it’s been bad enough that we’ve lately been keeping a nervous eye on the sky and the Nexrad radar and the seven-day forecasts at wunderground.com, none of which are saying anything hopeful. Nearby communities are largely underwater, friends of ours in the outlying areas have been stranded in farm homes that are suddenly islands, and on Tuesday some very fine Kansas towns not so very far to the north of us were threatened by tornados that largely preempted our afternoon “Jeopardy!” viewing.

We’re also keeping a nervous eye on the confluence of the Little Arkansas and Arkansas Rivers that border our home in Wichita’s fashionable Riverside neighborhood, as well as the canal that runs along the overpass Canal Route through the middle of town and the Big Ditch that was dug in over on the west side, and although they’re all far higher than usual they seem safe enough for now, but the seven-day forecast calls for at least another week of heavy rains and chances of severe thunderstorms, so that’s something to worry about.

There’s plenty else to worry about in the rest of the news, as always, but one of the benefits of a harsh prairie upbringing is a certain soothing stoicism. Things can only get so bad, we’ve noticed, and despite our instinctive fearsome awe of God’s nature our prairie Protestant nature is assured by God’s promises of grace that everything will more or less work out in the end.

In the meantime, we’re obliged here on Earth to deal with both nature and human nature and the resulting problems as best we can. It’s a damnably tough job, but here’s hoping at least the weather will better. We’ve  confirmed that amazing Holzhauer guy won yet another huge payday on “Jeopardy!,” the feud between the executive and legislative branches continues to grind out in the judicial branch, the Kansas weather is always uncertain, and that some things can be counted on.

— Bud Norman

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The News on a Cold and Snowy Kansas Night

Kansas was cold and snowy on Tuesday, not to mention the ongoing official national state of emergency, so we hunkered down at home and read up on the latest news. None of it, alas, was the least bit warming.

We read all the way to the end of a very lengthy New York Times account of President Donald Trump’s long efforts to thwart the various investigations in his businesses and campaign and transition team and inaugural committee and administration, and found it all too believable. There’s bound to be something in such a long story that will eventually will require a correction, but the general gist of it, that Trump doesn’t like anybody asking questions he’d rather not answer, and is willing to resort to ruthless and arguably constitutional methods to stop it, by now seems undeniably true.

Over at The Washington Post there was a story that speculated Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats will be the next defenestrated administration official, and we hated to hear that. Coats was a longtime Senator from Indiana who served on the Senate’s intelligence committee, a former ambassador to Germany, and is widely considered one of the last of the wise old foreign policy hands who tried to restrain the Trump’s worst gut instincts. He’s joined with the rest of the intelligence community in publicly disagreeing with Trump’s dubious claims about North Korea and Iran and the Islamic State and the threat at America’s southern border, and Trump clearly does not like his advisors disagreeing with him, so the Post’s speculation seemed plausible enough.

None of which was quite so depressing as the damned weather, or a certain sense that there’s nothing to be done about any of it.

What the Trump critics call “obstruction of justice” the Trump apologists call “fighting back,” and even if that Times story had run as long as the history books that will eventually be written it wouldn’t have changed anybody’s mind. Trump fans don’t want answers to those pesky questions anymore than Trump does, and they also share the president’s preference for his set of facts about North Korea and Iran and the Islamic State and the threat at America’s southern border. Trump’s critics and more noisome administration officials seem to have more factual facts on their side, but lately that doesn’t seem to make much difference.

On the other hand the stock markets were slightly up, and local forecasts call for above-freezing highs temperatures in the coming days, and the sports pages had reports from baseball’s spring training. Spring always eventually arrives, and although that usually brings tornados and other severe weather to this part of our great country we’re always happy to see it.

The truth always eventually arrives, too, and we expect that despite the best efforts of Trump and his apologists we will someday read the results of all those various pesky investigations in lengthy news stories and even longer history books. Our guess is it will be the equivalent of a Kansas tornado on the great plains of American history, but that’s what it takes to get the lazy hazy crazy days of summer around here, and there’s nothing we can do about that.

— Bud Norman

‘Twas the Monday After Christmas

Christmas is entirely over, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are still a few dreary business days away, the weather has taken an awful turn, and suddenly spring seems far, far away. That’s pretty much the news, so far as we can tell from our usually busy sources, and after a long drive back from our kinfolks’ home in south Texas we’re too worn out to formulate any of those big think pieces that are supposed to fill these slow news days.

Although it’s only of more or less purely personal interest we will note that the long drive up and down that hellish stretch of I-35 was well worth the intermittent traffic jams and blemished scenery and grueling distance. We caught up with both the paternal and maternal sides of the family, who are all fine company, and with the cutest and most polite children, and it sure beat another plastic pouch of microwaved turkey and a round at Kirby’s Beer Store. We can also recommend that if you’re heading north from San Antonio the big bypass around Austin has unblemished Hill Country scenery blasting by at 85 miles per hour with no traffic jams and is well worth the extra few miles and few bucks of toll.

There was some driving rain along the way, and a few freakish winter tornados just a couple of counties to the east as we crawled through the Dallas-Fort Worth sprawl, but we’re sure the Paris climate accord will solve that sort of thing soon enough. Somehow we heard that former Sen. Jim Webb might for president as an independent, which raises all sorts of interesting possibilities, but this is now time to sort out what those might be. The stock markets re-open tomorrow, which might yield something, but in the meantime the president is enjoying another swank Hawaiian vacation and the Congress is off doing God only knows what, the college football games haven’t yet gotten underway, and there’s no reason not to stop writing right now and enjoy another bowl of our famously red-hot chili.

— Bud Norman

Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On

Another earthquake rattled our old house today, and we still haven’t quite become accustomed to it. It only lasted a few seconds, and doesn’t seem to have done any noticeable damage around here, and residents of Los Angeles and Tokyo and Teheran and other earthquake-prone places probably wouldn’t have thought it worth mentioning, but during our first half-century here on the once-solid plains this sort of thing was unheard of, and even after the last few years of earthquakes becoming a rather regular occurrence it’s still a topic of local conversation.

Before the local old media could provide official confirmation that an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale had emanated toward us from the not far away small town of Crescent, Oklahoma, we were happily assured that weren’t going crazy by all the alarmed posts on our Facebook page. Folks of various degrees of familiarity spread across the entire city were describing the same unsettling phenomena we experienced, with most of them sounding even more rattled that we had been, and of course more than a few them were assuming that all the “fracking” going on down in Oklahoma was to blame.

We remain agnostic about the theory, as we have to admit that the earthquakes didn’t start around here until the “fracking” did, while at the same time we can’t help noticing that earthquakes are happening in all sorts of unlikely places where no “fracking” is going on and that “fracking” is going on in places that aren’t experiencing earthquakes. Most of the scientists who presumably know more than us about these sorts of things are admirably frank that they don’t know what’s going on either, and we rather like having the local convenience stores selling gasoline for $2.41 a gallon, and would be quite annoyed by paying $4 a gallon for Iranian oil and still experiencing an occasional earthquake if the theory is wrong, so we aren’t jumping to any conclusions. Still, we can understand the temptation to believe that there’s something we can do.

One of those Facebook friends from the local university was angrily demanding that these earthquakes be immediately stopped, just as his preferred presidential candidate vowed to stop the rise of the oceans, and if it were truly that simple we’d probably go along as well. Few things in life are so simple, however, and if more of them were we’d also be demanding an end to the tornados and hail storms and droughts and floods and miserably cold winter nights and swelteringly hot summer days that are the more traditional banes of Kansas life. The tornados and hail storms have lately been unusually and quite pleasantly uncommon around here, despite the dire predictions of our university-affiliated friend’s preferred presidential candidate, and last winter was no colder than usual and this summer has been only as hot as our lifetime’s average, with no recent floods but enough rain to bring an unmistakable end to the most recent drought, and the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye and the bumper wheat crops have helped with the state’s budgetary woes. A lifetime on the prairie has left us in awe of nature’s power and skeptical of mankind’s, so we can’t quell a certain suspicion that the former has more to do with these occasional rumblings of the earth than the latter, and we’ll patiently await the conclusions of those scientists who supposedly know more about this stuff than we do. In the meantime we’ll be checking the basement for cracks and perusing the news for about the more consequential earthquakes that seem to keep happing elsewhere, and hope that our brother in southern California doesn’t fall into the Pacific Ocean as has long been predicted, and continue to worry about the national debt and the nuclear bomb that the Iranians are building with their oil revenues and the rise of Donald Trump and the greater possibility of a Hillary Clinton and all of the other disasters that can only be blamed on mankind.

— Bud Norman

A Not-So-Fond Farewell to 2013

Another year now comes to a close, and we bid good riddance to it.

We are not alone in this glum assessment of 2013, judging by the results of a year-end poll conducted by The Economist and something called YouGov. A full 54 percent of the respondents called the year “bad,” another 15 percent described it as “very bad,” and we presume the rest must have fallen madly in love or won the lottery or just weren’t paying attention. Except for the soon-to-pop stock market bubble, it’s hard to think of any positive developments that have occurred over the past 12 months.

Looking over another poll from The Christian Science Monitor regarding the ten biggest stories of the year, we find floods in Colorado, tornados in Oklahoma, terrorism in Massachusetts, Edward Snowden’s revelations of widespread snooping on the American public by the National Security Agency, the demise of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the disastrous debut of the billion-dollar Obamacare web site. The only feel-good stories to make the cut were the escape of those young women in Ohio who had been held captive in a basement for years by a sex fiend, George Zimmerman’s escape from a politically correct lynch mob, the defeat of gun control legislation in Congress, and the brief partial-shutdown of the United States’ government, which somehow topped the list, but we suppose that only the first of these made liberals feel good, and conservatives can only console themselves with knowledge of the disasters that didn’t happen.

Perhaps conservatives can also take some consolation in knowing that the public at long last seems fed up with it all, and seem to be wising up about who’s to blame. The more strident sorts of liberals will persist in blaming the floods and tornados on George W. Bush and his diabolical climate change machine, and the minority of Americans who want to jettison the Second Amendment and the right to self-defense can rightly resent the right for thwarting their schemes, but it will prove hard for the press to pin the rest of it on Republicans. The Defense of Marriage Act was signed by that notorious homophobe Bill Clinton, the NSA was greatly empowered by the Bush-era Patriot Act but didn’t start poring over your phone records until the next administration, the House Republicans accepted the partial shutdown of the government but didn’t attempt to make it as painful as possible for national park visitors or nostalgic World War II veterans, and only an intellectual could believe the increasingly obvious catastrophe that is Obamacare was caused by a Republican party which didn’t cast one single congressional vote for the damned thing.

This was also the year that a majority of Americans expressed disapproval of President Barack Obama, despite the continuing efforts by the news and entertainment media to bolster his popularity, and the year that a Louisiana duck-call entrepreneur got away with expressing unsanctioned opinions regarding sexuality, despite the outrage of all the right people, and the year that the gun-grabbers lost another round, despite the perfect emotional atmosphere after another horrific school shooting, and the year that some climate change advocates got stuck in the Antarctic ice, which is simply too perfect, so it could have been worse. The economy sputtered along well enough for the more enthusiastic media to proclaim good times, but record numbers of Americans are still out work and most of those who have seen gains know that fracking and free-market resilience deserve more credit than government “investments” and hyper-regulation. If the Republicans regard it as a bad year because they weren’t able to thwart more Democratic initiatives, they can at least take comfort it was a worse year for the Democrats because the failures of those schemes became apparent.

The Republicans could easily blow it, of course, but 2013 hast at least set up the possibility of a successful 2014. One can safely assume the year’s top stories will include floods and tornados, as have happened every year even before George W. Bush’s diabolical climate change machine, and there will be inspiring human interest stories and homosexual stories and stories about the government snatching ever more power, but unless the terrorists get extremely lucky while the NSA is looking into some Tea Party group’s phone records it also seems likely that more Obamacare outrages and the travails of an over-taxed and over-regulated economy will be big stories, as will the results of a feckless foreign policy, while its hard to see how the Republicans can be faulted for offering futile resistance.

Here’s hoping we make the best of it, because a few more years like 2013 will be hard to bear.

— Bud Norman