9. Widespread civil unrest and an apparent judicial coup in Poland.
10. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Czechia (including an attempted takeover of the Parliament building).
11. Widespread student protests in Greece.
12. Targeted student protests in Indonesia.
13. Localized violent protests in India.
14. An apparently fraudulent election in Brazil where the presumed presidential election winner was forced to flee the country under threat of arrest by his opponent.
15. The uncovering of a Color Revolution plot in the USA led by embittered former USAID employees and ex-military members.
That’s a lot to be happening all at once, don’t you think? And the USA is having midterm elections next week.
You know, if I was a conspiracy-minded type I might be connecting some dots here.
Accounts from someone on the firing line was it was a shoulder fired HE round that “Dolphined” after it left the tube and went astray. NOT artillery. This round hit a gas well which exploded and flattened the 3 Kill Houses that were full of troops which happened to be in close proximity of the well. Approx 300 troops inside and many waiting outside them. There is nothing but splinters left of them. This also started a major fire that was fed by high winds that swept through the main Bivouac site housing the majority of troops in the field. The amount of injured is staggering and the fatality count IS going to climb as they recover more victims. In my 20+ years in the Army, I have only heard of a dolphining round happening once from a shoulder fired rocket. Not sure what would cause this other than possibly a faulty propellent.
As yesterday’s story probably hinted at, I was a bit more reckless and prone to doing stupid things. As further proof, I point you to a post I first made back in 2012 about an incident that occurred back in 1991, where I used the same shotgun as yesterday’s story to confront some teens who claimed to be members of a street gang.
I am a lot more circumspect in my older years, but I also have to say that I still rarely back down from a fight. I’m pretty good at tilting at windmills like that. There have been times that trait of wanting to right wrongs and rescue damsels has cost me. I am glad my current wife moderates my wilder tendencies as much as she does. Even though she did get in my way while I was getting robbed in Las Vegas. We will retell that tale tomorrow.
Although we have already had our first cool front to bring Autumn into Florida, summer isn’t ready to give up just yet. The humidity today is brutal. When you go outside and take a breath, the air seems to have a thick consistency:
Look at that dew point! Of course it’s cloudy, and the sweat runs off you with nowhere to go. Cooler weather is supposed to arrive this week, and I for one will be happy to see it return.
When my kids were little, they wanted to eat chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for climbing onto the roof of the house and jumping off. My parents stopped me because they knew something that, as a child, I didn’t. I stopped my kids for the same reason. I could foresee the likely results of their actions, and used my own wisdom and experience to stop and discipline them. Had I simply said, “Don’t do that,” and walked away, I guarantee you my children would have eaten the cake anyhow. I would have jumped from the roof again as soon as my parents weren’t watching. Punishment is required to drive that point home.
It’s the same thing as a society. As adults, we have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves- children, for example. For that reason, we have laws preventing children from engaging in sexual intercourse with adults. The excuse pedophiles frequently give: “the child was a willing participant” is immaterial. There are consequences to the actions the child is engaging in, and they don’t yet have the maturity to fully understand those consequences, and therefore are incapable of making a fully informed decision of risk versus benefit.
Robert Heinlein stated this principle rather eloquently in his novel Starship Troopers:
duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail
How many times have we seen a story about a female (usually a teacher) who had sexual intercourse with a 15 or 16 year old boy, a child? If the teacher happens to be physically attractive, there is always some moron who will come around and say “There was no victim here. Had this woman wanted to sex me up, I would gladly have done so. Therefore, no harm, no foul. There was no victim here.”
However, let that exact situation occur and let the adult teacher be a fat, unattractive woman or a male PE teacher, and those cries disappear, replaced by calls to prosecute. Why? Those people are substituting their own desires to have sex with that teacher for adult responsibility and common sense.
Again, I will regale you with a story from my past. I was once part of a case where a woman was selling her children to adults for the purposes of sexual relations. So, are there victims here? Were the kids harmed? They split the money with their mother, so they probably wanted to, right? Of course not. That woman deserved to lose those kids, and the cops rightfully arrested that woman and her kids. Sometimes, parents don’t make wise decisions in raising their kids.
Our societal responsibility towards children is the reason why we don’t have children working in coal mines any longer. The child doesn’t know any better, so we as a society have put rules in place to protect them until they are old enough to assume that duty we all have as adults. If an adult wants to do any of the above: jump from the roof, have cake for dinner, work in a coal mine, or have sex with attractive teachers, they can do so, because they have the ability to understand the consequences of their choices and will have to live with the consequences.
So let’s apply that principle to the idea of children riding motorcycles. My post from the other day had me being told I sound like a “boomer.” First, I don’t see why so-called boomers and their ideas are automatically bad, except for the immature notion that because they are old, they are somehow out of touch. That is a poor argument and just makes you sound like a spoiled child who is never allowed to do anything because mom and dad just don’t understand that things are different nowadays, and your outdated ideas are stupid. That’s why you don’t believe in the Constitution because it was written by out of touch old men who owned slaves, and …
I was told how wrong I was because there was no victim to a child riding a motorcycle on a road. After all, he was just going down the street to fish. The story of “I ride my lawnmower 4 miles down the road all the time.” Does that mower go 50 miles per hour? Are you 11 years old, or are you an adult who is capable of deciding for yourself?
Then there are those who claim the kid was on the easement or the ditch next to the road. Here is a screengrab from the officer’s bodycam. Where is the ditch or easement?
All sorts of excuses. Let’s just stop enforcing any rules for children. After all, they can and should be permitted to have sex with adults if they want, have chocolate cake of they want, transition sexes if they want, well, you know, DO whatever they want. After all, children aren’t immature, they are just little adults.
Or you could just think to yourself what it would feel like to hold a dead child, or tell a parent that their child was killed when he got in an accident when he hit a car while riding that electric motorcycle at 50 mph.
Then we pass laws that say a child can’t ride vehicles that are designed for roadway use. In order to be considered off road only, it has to meet certain criteria. Some of those are the vehicle can’t be capable of speeds over 28 mph, and in the case of mopeds or electric bikes, they have to have pedals and a few other criteria:
Riders under 16 must have adult supervision
an approved safety-course certificate
wear an approved helmet, eye protection, and over-the-ankle boots.
In order for Cade’s vehicle to be considered legal for him to operate, Florida requires fully operable pedals, a motor of less than 750 watts, and compliance with one of the three e-bike classifications. The reported bike failed both the pedal and power requirements, so it did not receive the e-bike exemption from licensing and registration laws. §§316.003(23), 316.20655(2).
He was riding what the law considers to be a motorcycle on a public roadway. You might as well let him drive a Camaro. However, when that kid makes a driving error and smears himself all over the hood of someone’s F150, I imagine no one here will be saying, “Welp, shit happens. FAFO.”
The police, had they just “given him a warning” would have been wasting their breath. The kid would have rolled his eyes, waited until the cop was out of sight, and gone right back out on that motorcycle. Perhaps this was the case this time. Maybe a cop DID already warn him. Maybe not.
I will die on this hill: There are certain things that we cannot allow children to do. Driving on a motorcycle at 11 years old is one of them. I would even go a step further and say the parents should be arrested as well, for letting him buy and drive a motorcycle on a public roadway.
The next day, at the Gwinnett County (Georgia) courthouse, Lawrence was charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, public indecency and public intoxication.
The suspect explained he was passing a pumpkin patch on his way home from a drinking session when he decided to stop. “You know how a pumpkin is soft and squishy inside, and there was no one around for miles, or at least I thought there was no one around,” he stated.
Lawrence went on to say that he pulled over to the side of the road, picked out a pumpkin that he felt was appropriate to his purpose, cut a hole in it, and proceeded to satisfy his pressing need. “Guess I was really into it, y’know?” he commented with evident embarrassment.
In the process of doing the deed, Lawrence failed to notice an approaching sheriff’s car and was unaware of his audience until Deputy Brenda Taylor approached him. “It was an unusual situation, that’s for sure,” said Deputy Taylor. “I walked up to Lawrence and he’s just humping away at this pumpkin.”
Deputy Taylor went on to describe what happened when she approached Lawrence. “I said: ‘Excuse me sir, but do you realize that you’re having sex with a pumpkin?”
He froze and was clearly very surprised that I was there, and then he looked me straight in the face and said: “A pumpkin? Shit …is it midnight already?”
The start of Autumn is defined as the transitional season of the year, occurring between summer and winter. It features an equal number of daylight hours and an end to the hot days of summer. I also know that autumn begins on the autumnal equinox (which was September 22 this year) and ends on the winter solstice. However, I don’t think most of us look at it that way.
It’s the cooler days that mark the end of summer, and in Florida our summers are long, hot, and feature afternoon thunderstorms. Autumn sees an end to that. Here in Florida, the weather is still what we would call warm, and most of the rest of the nation would call hot and humid, but at least it is punctuated by the occasional cold front, or at least what we call a cold front but is mostly just a brief respite from summer’s heat. You can usually tell late autumn because the color changes to the license plates.
For those reasons, I have my own definition of the beginning of autumn. Here in Sector Ocho, autumn is marked by the first time two consecutive days following the summer solstice where the temperature drops below 70 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 24c to those of you in countries using the metric system).
I have a personal weather station in my backyard that I use as my official measuring station because I don’t believe Florida’s numbers. My weather station is one of these. It’s located in my backyard in the middle of a clearing with the nearest block to wind (a tree) being at least 50 feet away. The low this morning was 61, the day before was 68. Autumn is upon us.
Anyway, the first day of autumn has arrived, and it was this morning, Saturday September 26.
What really marks the end of summer is the lower humidity. You see, the low temperature can’t go any lower than the dew point, a measure of humidity. At that point, any further energy lost from the atmosphere is spent condensing water vapor, not reducing the temperature. Cold fronts that make it this far south serve to bring in cooler, less humid air, which permits the temperature to drop down to the now lower dewpoint. If you have ever been in Central Florida during the summer, you know that the air is so humid down here, it feels like you can cut it with a knife. It actually feels THICK as you inhale it, like you are breathing in air made of jello.
The dew point temperature is the temperature at which the air can no longer hold all of its water vapor, and some of the water vapor must condense into liquid water. At 100% relative humidity, the dew point temperature and the air temperature are the same, and clouds or fog can begin to form, and you find everything outside is covered in dew. While relative humidity is a relative measure of how humid it is, the dew point temperature is an absolute measure of how much water vapor is in the air (how humid it is). In very warm, humid conditions, the dew point temperature can reach 75 to 77 degrees F, but rarely exceeds 80 degrees. Except here. There were more than a few days this summer where our dewpoint was over 80 degreesF. The highest I saw this summer was a dewpoint of 84 degrees. This morning’s dew point was 60.9 degrees.
Autumn in Florida is when dewpoints get below 70 for longer and longer periods of time, making the air FEEL cooler, even if the thermometer doesn’t show it. Dew point is the best indicator of comfort in a hot climate. Once the dew point of the air exceeds 66 degrees Fahrenheit or so, the air begins to feel hot and uncomfortably stuffy. The reason for this is that your perspiration cannot evaporate to cool you off.
Here in Florida, there are 4 seasons:
Hot: March through May F’ing Hot (Also known as Hurricane season, and in Orlando, tourist season): June through mid September Still Hot: Mid September through Mid November Snow Bird: Mid November through February
Autumn is, and always has been, my favorite season. Mostly because it marks an end to the insanely high temperatures of summer. You can finally go outside and do things. On the down side, that means I am going to have to clean the garage this weekend.
I still remember watching my mother put up those expanding paper fall decorations as the cooler breezes of fall pushed through the house.
The remainder of this year will be warm to hot, with occasional short cooler spells where the mercury ‘only’ makes it to 80 degrees or so. They are forecasting a late, but colder than normal winter. Let’s see how accurate that is.
