Okay, so here’s the deal.  Yesterday I get this official warning on my phone, my watch and my email, all at once, like the world is coming to an end.

Look, I live on the Texas Gulf Coast, where this summer all that separates us from hell is a barbed wire fence and it’s down in a few places. We get two to three weather warnings a day so normally I’m not impressed by warnings, until …

What in tarnation is a “red flag warning?” I do not know, and I do consider myself to be an educated woman. I scored a 780 on the SAT verbal, dammit. I admit that was a long time ago but I remember most of the words and can still probably whip your butt at Scrabble.  So don’t sass me about words.

And, while you’re at it, do not send me a warning without telling me what I should be scared of.  That’s like sending me an official government text that says, “PANIC!” and that’s all.

My young friends tell me that there’s a comedian on the internet machine named Matt Rife who talks about red flags as indicators of people you are dating who have personality disorders. I am not currently dating and find it intrusive that the government thinks I am.

Okay, so there’s a link in this message. It takes you three full page scrolls on your phone to find out what a red flag warning is and by that time you probably would have died without even knowing why.

This is exactly what it says, ellipsis and all.

“A red flag warning means that critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now … or will shortly.”

Okay, so not only is that not the least bit instructional, two days before this red flag crap, I got this message from the same damn place:

I am told there is a blue flag warning that means a police officer is down.

So, I guess I’ll make a list:

Green flag warning: don’t eat the hamburger meat.

Yellow flag warning: larger than average sun today.

Lavender flag warning: People in drag at the library.

Orange flag warning: Trump trial starts.

Free free to add to the list.

Alvin, Texas has a world-famous native son in ace pitcher Nolan Ryan (#34). I know this because every time I traveled down Highway 6 to (and through) Alvin I was reminded of this fact with a roadside sign that announced the fact that he, indeed, was raised there.

Not born there, mind you, but was a resident since he was 6 weeks old. Ryan led his Alvin High School baseball team to the Texas State finals in 1965.

No one outside of Texas knows much about Alvin, but those that do, know about Nolan Ryan’s ties to that community. Positive stuff, obviously.

But now Alvin has another celebrity for it to claim…or not, depending on your politics.

Abigail Jo Shry, 43, of Alvin, Texas made national news this week when she threatened the life of Judge Tanya Chutkan who is hearing the January 6 case in DC against TFG. Oh, and she also wants to show Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee to the afterlife, along with any and all Democrats in Washington, D.C., as well as any member of the LGBTQIA+ community.

A ponderous list.

Representatives of the Department of Homeland Security asked her about her threats in a recent “knock and talk” in which she admitted to having no plans to travel to DC, but did admit that should Congressman Jackson Lee make a trip to Alvin, then “we need to worry”.

Indeed.

Like Judge Chutkan, Rep. Jackson Lee is African-American but that seems to be the extent of their commonality. However, Rep. Jackson Lee does not represent Alvin, so for that reason, would (thankfully) have little reason to stop by.

I never did, either, for that matter. 

But fame is fleeting and I suspect that Nolan Ryan will once again have sole claim as the Number 1 (or #34) favorite son of Alvin once more. Or so we can hope.

I gotta say, with the beautiful perfect indictments handed down in Georgia last week, making old timers vividly remember General Sherman coming through Georgia, the best part may be the recent photos of the indicted people facing mandatory prison time if they are convicted.  Honey, most of them look like they just opened the Ark of the Covenant.   

I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, like eating tamales anywhere north of Dallas, hit an elevator button five or six times thinking that would piss off a slow elevator, signed a contract by neon light, and shared my deepest darkest secrets with an Arabian prince who contacted me by email to leave me his estate when he said he was going to die the next week. 

But  even I know that when you’re a Trump elections official in Georgia, you don’t send a written damn invitation to Trump’s buttdumb attorneys to help you facilitate a breach of the voting systems you oversee. I would say, “How dumb can you be?” but these guys would see that as a challenge.

Here’s my center of attention: I wanna know more about the unindicted co-conspirators rats in Georgia.  The Daily Beast has some ideas.

It just so happens that their guess for #1 is the same as mine.  Tom Fitton, the Darth Vader of Judicial Watch. I guess ole Tom had to flip because prison jumpsuits don’t come in size 12 year old boy.  Tom thinks his tight shirts are a turn on to the church ladies and maybe he’s right because men in chains would certainly appeal to them.

Go on over to Google to run an image search for Tom.  Or don’t.  He’s a mess.

While it would be fun watching him in the weight room of a Georgia prison, his ability to flip on Trump and Giuliani might be worth missing that particular visual punishment.

.

I just love this ——

As our former president negotiates his way through a fourth set of indictments it seems pertinent to talk about why it hasn’t had much of an effect on his base. In point of fact, he is still the odds on favorite to win the Republican nomination. The concept might seem foreign to most of us, but I have a working theory. Simply put, most of us think small. I could get into advanced psychology here, but suffice it to say this gets into moral and ethical development. Essentially, most observers see moral development in three stages. The early childhood stage has people simply meeting their needs and ignoring moral norms. In early childhood we wouldn’t even know those norms anyway. Most things exist as an extension of self. So, concepts like the self-determination of other people or family pets are foreign concepts.

When we enter adolescence we start moving to the second or third stage depending on how much we develop as people. We recognize the rules and norms of society and we follow them because we are afraid of what will happen if we don’t. That’s the second stage. A good chunk of the population never gets past this point and as long as we get to this point then society functions smoothly. The third stage involved us developing our own moral and ethical code that can exist simultaneously with the norms of society. These norms are usually beyond that of society and move us to a higher moral plain. It is more the question of what we do when the world isn’t watching.

It is this paradigm that has many Americans trapped in his moment. It is the belief that someone that might be guilty of the same kind of nepotism that we see in our walks of life is somehow morally equivalent to someone that has brazenly broken the law at every turn. Ultimately, the same is true for all of these indictments. It all seems too much. No one could be that horrible. So, it immediately seems like a double standard. We want to indict the other guy because we “know” he must be doing the small stuff. If your mind will not allow you to do the big stuff then it will have difficulty recognizing the big stuff that other people are doing.

Essentially we are watching a Discovery True Crime documentary before our very eyes. One of my favorites involves the “monsters” in our own home. We didn’t think they could do it, but there were signs. Signs. In each and every episode the living victims talk about how they saw some horrible things, but couldn’t believe that the monster would do THAT. The audience is frantically shouting, “get out now. Leave. Hurry and don’t look back.” Yet, it never seems to happen. Those willing to do the big are monsters. We elected a monster in 2016. He will keep doing these things. He has been indicted in four different jurisdictions. He was found civilly liable for sexual assault in a fifth jurisdiction. He is overtly threatening judges, lawyers, and witnesses. He is calling on his supporters to fight in his name. He isn’t hinting at it anymore. Go big or go home. When someone tells you who they really are you have to believe them.

It is 8:00 pm Texas time on Monday night and I’m waiting to hear what the 10 indictments against Donald Trump in Georgia say.

I am being told that it could take as much as three hours for the indictments to become public information.

So, we wait, which we’ve had a lot of practice at.

UPDATE at 10:00 Texas time – 41 counts 18 people+ Trump indicted. Meadows, Giuliani, Powell, Ellis, wow! It’s the Georgia Bar Association Full Employment Act.