Waiting For The Other Storm To Drop
Tornado season anticipation; why it is normal for Trump to not be tried before the election
Sometimes comedy relies on the look a comedian gives people after they say something mundane. I recently saw a comic (on Tic Tok) note they had just moved to Minnesota, and casually state that Wednesday is the day all the tornado sirens go off, just to test them. Then the look. People in the audience dropped to the floors in hysterical laughter. We all know what that means, when people move here, and all the sirens go off several weeks before any tornadoes would ever arrive, but nobody told them this was going to happen. Makes me laugh.*
Anyway, today we will talk about tornadoes a little.
I also wanted to express two thoughts about the delay of most of Trump’s trials until after the election. The tl;dr: this is not unusual, and who cares anyway. But first….
[A Minnesota tornado stars in the movie “13 minutes.” I’m not recommending this movie at this time. ]
Attack of the Killer Tornadoes
Here in Minnesota we have a special kind of rock star, one that plays no music and only occasionally acts in a hollywood movie. We call them “weathermen/women” but they are actually true meteorologists who are also TV presenters at least for part of their career. For example, we have “Minnesota’s most physically ripped weatherman,” Sven Sundgaard. Sven was outed to media executives as gay, there was outrage, he was attacked on-line by white nationalists, fired, rescued by the state’s progressive community and presumably his own wiles, reinstated on public broadcasting, and is now one of our cultural leaders. Another is my friend Paul Douglas, who is one of the people at the national level that made TV meteorology legit and not just a job for a pretty face. He has served on our airways as one of the only TV meteorologists speaking the truth about climate change (which may or may not have gotten him fired, though the network has a different story on that IIRC). Paul did star as a desk** in a hollywood movie you may have seen (“Jurassic” something) and consulted on another movie starring a tornado. He continues to be a voice of reason and science in the climate change discussion.
I mention them because I am hearing these days in their voices a bit of nervousness, and it brings back some memories.
When I first moved to Minnesota, it was a year of amazing weather events in and near the Twin Cities. After establishing a beachhead for my family, I collected my daughter, who had been deposited by her mother (working overseas) in nearby Wisconsin. We drove from Milwaukee to Minnesota on June 18th 2001. As we entered the state from the east, bearing down on Saint Paul, we witnessed and drove under a giant bank of clouds with multiple rapidly forming wall clouds, bearing down on Wisconsin. The storm was technically in Minnesota but just crossing the border into the Cheese State. The research I did later convinced me that this was either the very same storm or a sister storm in the same cluster of storms that eventually did this, a little later in the day:
The tornado touched down at 806 pm local daylight time 1.5 miles east of Grantsburg … The path of the tornado averaged 1/8 to 1/4 mile, but reached its greatest width of ½ mile as it approached Siren around 820 pm, where it did F-3 damage. Two people were killed by the tornado, and there were 16 injuries. Four hundred homes were destroyed, 200 in Siren alone, with 280 homes damaged, and 60 businesses destroyed or damaged. Most of the damage occurred in an 8-block area of Siren. Approximately 14,000 acres of trees were leveled along the tornado path. The two people killed were in Dewey Township, about 14 miles east of Siren. An 80-year-old woman was crushed by a falling wall while trying to get to the basement, and a 77-year-old man was found dead about 100 yards from his demolished home, presumably thrown there by tornado-force winds. Many buildings in the path of the tornado through Dewey Township, including the Dewey Town Hall, were destroyed as well. Power lines, trees, and buildings were also damaged or destroyed at Alpha, Falun, and Mud Hen Lake along the path of the tornado between Grantsburg and Siren. Fifteen cows were lost when a barn collapsed near Falun. Some were killed outright. Others were injured and had to be put down.
The residents of this agricultural area reported actual cows flying through the air, not to mention the smaller livestock, only some of which were supposed to be capable of flight.
That year, and few subsequent years, saw record breaking tornado outbreaks and record breaking individual tornadoes in Minnesota. Since then, we have cycled through years with tornadoes and years without. For my own part, I was inside a large and sturdy building engulfed by a smallish tornado which then proceeded to produce litter across the urban and suburban landscape, scraping a few tiles off roofs but not much else. Another time I observed debris falling from the sky, debris consisting mainly of tiny pieces of shredded tree leaf, from a large tornado that drove by a couple of miles to my east after having seriously damaged a big chunk of Minneapolis. But many other years have had nearly no twisters.
In recent weeks we’ve seen horrible tornadoes to our south, such as in Oklahoma. This is how it goes in Minnesota. We hear news of tornadoes in Texas. We are concerned and we care but we are not alarmed. Another time, we hear news of tornadoes in Oklahoma and Nebraska. We start paying closer attention. At some point we hear news of bad tornadoes in Iowa. We check on our supply of blue tarps and put some fresh water bottles in the basement. Then the tornados arrive. Maybe that year, maybe the next year. Or, at least, that is how it seems.
And somewhere in there the voices of our meteorologist stars start to sound a little funny.
Yes, we should probably start to worry here, what with the Great Red And Green Finger of Death poking at us:
The pattern seems to start with predictions of afternoon wind and storms, with a threat of some being severe. They don’t materialize in real life, but are prominent in the predictions. Then some of the afternoons produce some actual thunderstorms. Then they get worse, and become more regular. I have the impression that the severe storm fronts come through about every other day, and maybe later in the day as they get worse (though almost all of our most notable tornadoes have been daylight events in recent years).
We are in that early phase, with the regular predictions of possible severe weather, not yet panning out. I’ll report back over the next few weeks if something develops.
Trump on Trial
As you know, my law degree is from Podcast University. It is a well known but not a highly regarded school. In all seriousness, I pay close attention to #sistersinlaw, subscribe to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, some of the Crooked Media podcasts, and the CAFE Insider Podcast. So, I’m basically a lawyer, right?
So the other day I was talking to a friend and he told me a harrowing story in which his wife’s bike was stolen, they caught the guy who did it, and the crime was still being adjudicated in the county court system. The theft happened over three years ago. In my distant past, I sat on a civil jury for a case where a fight had happened among some 15 year olds. We were at the last step in this legal process, and our verdict ended the court fight. The plaintiff and defendant were in their late 20s at the time of the trial. (We awarded the plaintiff almost nothing, by the way.) Just today, Christine Barrello was arrested. For what? For being part of the January 6th invasion at the US Capitol. The wheels of justice turn very slowly indeed.
I think there is a good argument that the criminal justice system took too long to go after Trump, but one might see that as the unfortunate outcome of people being freaked out by the whole thing and not quite knowing what to do. If everything is unprecedented, then guess what: There is no guiding precedent!
But since the various legal proceedings started, there have been continuous and repeated delays that are really annoying and that seem to indicate either a broken system or something nefarious going on with Trump in particular.
The thing is, legal proceedings take long periods of time. Legal experts whose hair is on fire over these delays are getting lots of interviews on MSNBC and CNN. Regular people are starting to put together conspiracy theories. People are coming up with the worst interpretations. But I think most of that is the fabricated outcome of our news media, not the actual criminal justice system.
Yes, there are delays. Yes, they are annoying. Yes, the SCOTUS is now a discredited cankerous arm of government, which by the way it usually has been (we’ve been coddled into thinking the Supreme Court is our friend by an unusual few decades of a good court). Yes, privileged-soaked Trump is above the law, but so are all the other privileged soaked nimrods. Nothing new to see there. But in the end, these things take time. Also, it is not normal to even have to think about the idea that justice delayed is justice denied especially if delayed until after an election. That simply does not align with the usual way of doing things. We are living in interesting times.
That is why this is not unusual, or at least, not unusual enough to interpret it as the end of civilization. If there are problems in our system that contribute to a delay in Trump’s trials, they are general problems, not problems Trump- or TrumpStans-invented.
Why does it not matter? Because Trump is going to be resoundingly defeated at the ballot box in November. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if all the trials followed his defeat. It would make those trials cleaner, easier to manage, and remove the stress caused by the (incorrect) idea that civilization depends on the verdict rendered by a dozen regular people. Also, once he is defeated, it will be more likely for some judge to actually put him behind bars after a guilty verdict from an early trial. That will mean Trump will thereafter be carted back and forth from a holding cell to the courtroom every day, instead of arriving in a motorcade. This will mean the trials will have a lower Carbon footprint, and that is always good.
Footnotes
*”Makes me laugh” is not just a statement, but a phrase used excessively as part of Minnesota Dialect, especially in certain Western Suburbs. Which is funny. Makes me laugh.
**See this. In the expanded oral history of Paul Douglas, I’m told there is a scene in Jurassic Park where some cable was loose and Paul had to hide under one of the techy consoles in the control room to keep the graphic display functioning during filming.
