Ref. : The fat man in Casablanca.

It is too dammed hot. Good thing I have been looking into air conditioning some more. Turns out I can get a window unit from Canadian Tire for around $109, which is way less than the $175 that the Ashton Group (no relation) is asking.

But the Ashton Group’s price includes installation, and from what I have read that is no small thing for those of us who are not lucky enough to have a window the exact same shape as an air conditioner. From what I can tell, in order to really make these things work, you need to fill the rest of the window with something in order to make it a tight fit, and that involves getting a big chunk of plastic and cutting it to fit the window and then cutting a hole out to fit the air conditioner into, and all of that makes my head spin and gives me images of myself staring at a pile of scraps of white plastic, with a slightly blood-streaked Exacto knife in my hands.

See, part fo the problem is that we don’t have any horizontal windows in this apartment. All our windows open vertically, that is to say, right to left. And all the window unit air conditioners I have ever seen seem to be designed with horizontal windows in mind. Stick unit in window, lower window till it reaches top of unit, and voila, a seal can be formed.

But I am pretty sure that the only way that would work for us is if we stuck the air conditioner in sideways, and I am pretty sure they are not designed to work like that.

I may be wrong.

Until I sort all this out, though, all I can do is hydrate aggressively and point the fan at my head and try to make it through the afternoon. Right now, I have a heat-stroke headache and a little nausea, and so writing today’s blog entry is not real easy. I would rather be pulling a siesta right now and sleeping through the heat.

But I will be getting together with friends later, so that means I must needs blog now. Oh, how I suffer.

And speaking of heat, Iraq. (Because it’s very hot there. Wow, what a deft segue.)

As far as I can tell, we have to intervene. These ISIS bastards are not just some random faction in the sectarian melting pot. They are evil people who round people up and kill them, and I am pretty sure we are against that kind of thing.

But I can see why Barack Obama doesn’t want to step back into that quagmire. None of us do. We were all very happy to get the hell out of Iraq and leave them to their own devices.

“Well, we’ve done all we can. It’s up to you now. ” we told the Iraqi people, and they seemed pretty happy with that too. And we didn’t just run away, we left them with all the trained local soldiers and modern-ish military hardware they needed in order to competently defend themselves.

But there was no way we could have seen ISIS coming. We might have predicted that something like ISIS might arise, but we had no way of knowing that such a group would have a very brutal “take no prisoners” attitude that strikes fear in the hearts of their enemies and causes them to flee rather than risk being captured by ISIS and, if they are lucky, merely shot in the head.

So these pricks are way beyond the Geneva Convention, let alone any other form of moral restraint. They will continue to slaughter innocent non-combatants until they are stopped.

And we really don’t want them becoming the new government of Iraq and Syria.

Unfortunately, this means that the Republicans are right when they say intervention is necessary. They’re right for a lot of the wrong reasons, but they are right. They are even right when they blame this on the withdrawal of American troops… it is pretty hard to imagine that ISIS would have made much progress against the American military machine.

However, as painful as it is to agree with those morally deranged morons in the GOP, this turmoil might turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Obama, because if he does decide to intervene, he will be able to show the GOP and the rest of the world how you do an invasion of Iraq the right way.

Just imagine the dismay and confusion amongst the Dick Cheney set when not only does Obama do everything they said he should do (making it real hard to disagree with him on it, even for them), but does a way, way, way better job of it than Dick and Bush and Rumsy and Rice and the rest ever did.

That would drive them nuts. And they could totally do it, too, seeing as they are not, in fact, mentally retarded spoiled rich people who have no conception of the value of a dollar and who think of war as a fun game you play with the lives and money of poor people who don’t matter.

Obama has a lot of flaws, but he is very well organized and capable, and that is just the sort of person to lead both a smoothly efficient counter-ISIS operation and any resulting nation-building required afterward.

There certainly wouldn’t have been any of the insanity-producing incompetence that Dubya engendered last time.

It starts with the military advisers already there. Next will come air strikes, which are not a total solution but can at least keep ISIS bottled up in the cities they already hold. You might be able to hide an army in a city, but just try to move your troops against Baghdad when any visible troop movement results in death from above.

I also think special attention needs to be paid to where these motherfuckers are getting their money, and we have to be absolutely ruthless in punishing whoever is holding their cash for them.

Well, that’s all for me today, folks. See you again tomorrow!