THIS & THAT XIV

 

          I recently read a discussion of the problem with 12 AM and 12 PM.  I know some people have it burned in their minds that 12 AM is midnight and 12 PM is noon, but it has always confused me.  On a digital clock, you will find that at the moment the time changes from 11:59 PM to midnight, the little dot indicating “PM” disappears, indicating that midnight is the beginning of AM.

          The problem (i.e., my problem), is that the decision to do this is purely a convention.  It is not based in logic or reality, so the only way to remember it is to remember it.  You cannot reason your way to it.

          AM means “ante meridiem,” which means “before the meridiem,” which means “before noon.”  PM means “post meridiem,” which means “after noon.”  However, noon itself is neither ante nor post.  It IS the damn meridiem, so it can’t be before or after.  The same is true of midnight (in a slightly different way).  Midnight is exactly twelve hours before the meridiem and exactly twelve hours after the meridiem, so it really is neither AM nor PM.

          Let us abandon this farcical convention which adds nothing to our understanding of time and only serves to confuse the unwary, like me.  Let noon be “noon,” and nothing else.  And let midnight be midnight.  Every other time of day can still be AM or PM, because that will make sense.

 

*

 

          Every married couple on a TV commercial now must be interracial.

 

*

 

          Suggested new name for the Cleveland baseball franchise: The Redskins.

 

*

 

          I have very fond memories of my mother’s fried bologna sandwiches.  They were my favorite food for several years when I would race home from my elementary school for lunch and a Popeye cartoon.  And then, well, I grew up.

          In the grocery business, bologna is a sleepy little product.  It sells steadily but it’s not cool or hip and I always assumed it never would be.  But in searching for stocking stuffers at the dollar store recently, I found Garlic Bologna in the refrigerator!  Yes!!!  This is what bologna has needed for decades---flavors.  Green tea bologna, pumpkin spice bologna, red bean bologna, jalapeno bologna….

 

          *

 

          Back in August, the CDC changed its guidelines to provide that COVID testing would no longer be routinely done on people without COVID symptoms.  The new directive was ignored (and even denounced!) by most state and local public health officials.  Testing!  We need MORE testing!!  Testing, goddammit!!!  Nobody ever explained, at least to my satisfaction, what the purpose of all this testing is, but the politicians and the bureaucrats love testing, and can’t get enough of it, no matter how inaccurate the tests are or how many false positives result.

          This is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect states run by Democrats will begin to embrace the new guidelines around the end of March, as the seasonal resurgence of respiratory illnesses (a few of which are COVID), comes to its natural end.  By testing only those with symptoms, we will stop finding so many “cases,” and this drop, along with Biden’s aggressive, really-smart, non-Trumpian vaccine initiative, and a federal mask mandate, will allow officialdom to tell us how Biden conquered the virus.

          We will be warned we have to behave or there will be more restrictions, and of course, there will be more lockdowns and mask mandates when respiratory-infection season returns in October, but this summer might be relatively carefree so we can all celebrate the genius of Joe and the evil of Trump.

 

*

 

          There were two mysterious casualties during the violent breach of the Capitol Building last Wednesday.  It has been five days and we have been told virtually nothing about the deaths of Brian Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt.  In an event of such enormous public importance, there is no excuse for the official silence surrounding these horrific deaths.

          Brian Sicknick was an officer with the U.S. Capitol Police.  He died Thursday night from, according to Acting A.G. Jeffrey Rosen, “injuries he suffered defending the U.S. Capitol, against the violent mob who stormed it on January 6.”  And that’s it.  This statement is the only official word on what happened to Officer Sicknick.  We don’t know how he died, who may be responsible, or even where it happened.

          The refusal to publish any information about this officer’s death does him a tremendous disservice.  I would like to think this man was a hero who died defending his nation against an insurrectionist mob, but the news blackout suggests there may have been something about his actions the government doesn’t wish to disclose, or that the story of his demise would be somehow embarrassing to his family or to the Capitol Police.  In the current climate, the only thing the Attorney General’s silence can do is foster conspiracy theories that none of us needs.

          Ashli Babbitt was a 14-year Air Force veteran who took a single bullet to the neck in the Capitol as she was trying to break through a door into the Speaker’s lobby.  She was a trespasser, and a violent one, but apparently unarmed.  In the video that was released of her death, there appear to be armed officers both in front of her and behind her at the time the shot was fired.  It is a chaotic scene with other demonstrators in the immediate area.

          Who shot her?  And why?  We have been told nothing about that.  I am absolutely in favor of giving police the benefit of any doubt in a dangerous situation, but one thing we have learned in the past year is that police no longer get carte blanche in a situation where lethal force is used to stop an unarmed offender.

          Also, needless to say, this is exactly the kind of situation where martyrs emerge in political movements.  Ashli Babbitt---say her name.

          Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen could not have chosen a worse public relations strategy to deal with these killings.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki