So there’s a giant fire in California and it looks like the only thing that’s gonna put it out is for Canada to melt and head south.

Firefighters are evacuating homes in the line of fire.

They ain’t going. And you can’t make ‘em.

They are met with people who have guns and [are] saying, ‘Get off my property and you are not telling me to leave,’” he said.

In response to those who flatly refused to evacuate, he said, deputies were asking for next-of-kin information.

Now, here’s what I say.  When people come to the hospital without a COVID vaccine and expect us to break the back of our health care system to help them, it pisses me off.  If you want to stay in a house that’s gonna burn down, do not expect us to come rescue you once the fire is at your door and there’s no escape route.  Give us your kids and then go sit in your kitchen and drink the kool aid.

How dumb do you have to be to shoot somebody risking their lives to save you. Pretty damn dumb.

It was bound to happen, but somehow we are all surprised anyway. The facts on the ground don’t seem to match what is happening in Austin. I know you’re shocked. The largest school district in the state is about to take on the governor and I’m sitting here with popcorn.

They aren’t the only ones. We recently got the electronic message from our local superintendent. They won’t be one of them, but he did manage to throw some shade on the governor before the message was done. It was clear that they likely would have had a mask mandate had there not been an executive order expressly forbidding it.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult not to call the governor an idiot. It is becoming increasingly more difficult not to call anti-vaxxers idiots. I’m not going to try anymore. Peruse social media and they are the jackasses that keep asking you if you’ve done your research on the vaccine. They are the ones that ask you if you’ve accessed the Google machine when the CDC talks about how we should continue to mask up.

They are the ones that spout off “alternative facts” about the vaccine. They probably came from OANN, Newsmax, or Fox News. Maybe they watched a video from the same guy that claimed his pillows cured cancer. At this point I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’m sick and tired of being tolerant to nonsense.

There are no acceptable alternative views on this. Not every viewpoint is valid. Somewhere along the lines we somehow confused tolerance and open-mindedness with allowing every jackass with a computer to spout off bullshit that doesn’t make any sense. So, I’m sorry the governor is offended. I’m sorry if local government entities need to treat his little executive order like the toilet paper it is. Actually, I’m not sorry.

Figuratively speaking, he needs to sit down and shut up. Anti-vaxxers need to sit down and shut up. Either you can get the shot or you live in isolation. It is high time we started requiring it. Don’t pussyfoot around these people anymore. They are idiots and no amount of tolerance or consideration for their feelings is going to make any bit of difference. They are idiots pure and simple.

I’m sure the governor and lieutenant governor are going to flap their gums about nonsense when HISD votes on their mask mandate. I don’t give a shit. It is time for them to either do their jobs or sit down and shut up. The time for tolerating fools is long gone.

H. Scott Apley was a Dickinson city council representative and a member of the Texas GOP executive committee.  He was also an anti-vaxxer and anti-masker.  He’s railed against public health policy and flaunted guidelines to keep people safe.  Last Friday he posted a claim the COVID vaccine doesn’t work on Facebook.  Over the weekend, he, his wife, and his son all tested positive for COVID.  He was admitted to a hospital in Galveston on Monday, and he died yesterday.

Oh, and here’s his Facebook profile pic:

He gave his life “owning a lib”.  He sure showed us.

Before this week I had never heard of Jeffrey Clark.  Who’s Jeffrey Clark, you ask?  Clark is a Trump plant in the DOJ who conspired with him to insert the DOJ into The Big Lie.  Clark wrote the draft letter that he tried to get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to sign alleging that the DOJ was investigating “various irregularities,” and, “…we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”  The letter urges the governor to Georgia to reconvene the state legislature to reconsider the certification of the election for Joe Biden and choose a different set of electors for Trump.  Luckily for democracy, Rosen refused to approve the letter.  After his refusal, Clark then conspired with Trump to fire Rosen and appoint him as acting AG so he could use the DOJ to complete a coup against the duly elected president.

Even as we watched the train wreck of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election with The Big Lie, we didn’t know how close we came to a coup enacted by Trump plants not only at DOJ, but also DOD and other agencies.  And the terrifying thing is that NONE of these officials have paid any price for their treasonous conduct as employees of the US government.  That’s the shameful part.

Watching politics evolve (or devolve) over the past few decades has been an out of body experience. Of course, social media has been made a lot of this easier to see than before, but it isn’t the cause of any of this. The seeds have always been there.

Two things on social media brought this to a head this week for me. One was a church sign that said that faith trumps facts. I’m paraphrasing there, but that was the basic message. We’ve been in a fact free environment for quite awhile, but the difference is pretty clear. It’s not that we can’t agree on policy. That’s as old as time itself. It’s not even that we can’t agree on facts. That’s more recent, but it has been going on for awhile. It’s that we can’t even seem to discuss issues that most people would agree are real issues.

The state of Texas has been ground zero for this phenomenon longer than most of the country. We’ve passed looser gun laws seemingly every term. We’ve protected girls in bathrooms. We’ve banned transgender kids from playing sports. We’ve passed stiffer and stiffer abortion laws. It isn’t so much that these policies are wrong (which they are). It’s that they don’t have any impact on 99 percent of the people. Bad policy is bad policy. These policies are a waste of everyone’s time.

It is disheartening to not only lose a debate over a key issue, but to fail to have the issue addressed at all. Three years ago I was diagnosed with diabetes. Since then I’ve spent time with six different doctors to manage the impacts of that disease. I’m not sure if single payer really is better than a private/public mixture of insurance. I certainly think after dealing with my own stuff that I’d prefer single payer. I don’t mind opposition. I mind not even having the conversation.

The same is true for the infrastructure in the state. Is is better to have highways that stretch across 20 lanes or is it better to have a robust public transportation system that includes buses, commuter trains, light rail, and other options? Again, it isn’t that some have differing opinions. It is that we can’t seem to have the conversation.

Another couple of memes brought this home. One had someone question the CDC and asked why we don’t do our own research. Another seemed to indicate that progressives were somehow ushering in the beginning of fascism. We could be having a robust debate about how to properly implement the CDC’s recommendations. Instead, we have Earle doing a Google search and declaring himself smarter than the people that have studied disease and its spread patterns for their entire lives.

I’ve spent time here on education and matters of faith. It’s frustrating for some, but at least there are conversations. We can’t fix the problems of the 21st century without conversations. We can’t debate the environment, education, safety protocols, infrastructure, or anything else if we can’t even acknowledge that they are issues. When did this all happen because I don’t remember it always being this way?