Sometimes it takes someone on the outside looking in to enhance the clarity of a situation. Such is the case with this FAQ by BBC News on the Michigan primary mess, which could be an even bigger mess for other states.
Of course, one might say RussiaToday doesn’t exactly accentuate the positive.
Zero tolerance is back, if it ever went away, and this time it has zapped a 4-year-old who attends my alma mater.
Newton (Texas) ISD Superintendent Gene Isabell said the 4-year-old girl was suspended for three days after allegedly showing a knife to another 4-year-old on a school bus, according to Jasper radio station KJAS. The station’s Web site reported that Tiffany Holloway said the accused 4-year-old produced a paring knife and threatened two of her daughters with the knife. But Isabell said a statement from the bus driver indicated the suspended girl had merely shown the other child a knife, which was given to the girl’s grandmother upon arriving home. The report by KJAS said the Newton County Sheriff’s Department was not investigating the incident and was not aware that it had taken place.
This kind of story drives a lot of people up the wall — one way or another — and with good reason. First and foremost you don’t want kids taking dangerous weapons to school. I know that if I was a teacher I would be especially weary of a 4-year-old toting a knife, especially given the presumed height of a kid that age. Yow, watch out for collateral damage! But did the kid really threaten the other girls? We don’t know the facts. And should the 4-year-old get kicked out of school and have a blemish on her academic record which will follow her around for the rest of her life? We don’t know the facts. Will the fact that we don’t know all the facts keep people from speculative comments which could range from the thoughtful to the other-worldly stupid? Sing with me: “Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you …
Just when tensions between Iran and the United States have been good and ratcheted up, it appears that, at least, the radioed verbal threats against U.S. Navy vessels could have been made by a heckler.
Navy officials said Iranian patrol vessels made threatening maneuvers at U.S. warships recently in the Persian Gulf as well as having thrown some type of objects into the water. However, the military is trying to determine whether menacing transmissions made during the time of the incident were related to the Iranian activity.
Navy officials acknowledged that in recent years ships and aircraft operating in that region had been verbally abused by an anonymous heckler or hecklers who goes by the “ethnically-insulting handle of ‘Filipino Monkey,’ ” the independent, Gannett newspaper Navy Times reported today. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told the Times that the video was “superimposed over the video” to give the viewer a better idea of what’s taking place.
Such revelations are not at all good for the military’s credibility at a time and in a place where the folks back home must pretty much rely on our government’s word to find out what the hell is going on. The way some “chickenhawks” are getting gussied up in their war paint, one sadly recalls the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” and wonders if we are getting, once again, sold a bill of goods.
If you don’t know or remember what happened in the Tonkin Gulf and how it provided the U.S. an excuse to turn Vietnam into a full-scale war then perhaps you might read material found on the link above.
What is most disturbing about the uncertainty over the verbal threats in the Persian Gulf is that it casts a cloud over the entire incident’s credibility. I want to think our military is not pulling our leg and will give them the benefit of the doubt. Along that path, one has to think that the Iranians sailors were out of their mind if they did what the video and the U.S. Navy purports. And if that was the case the captains of those Navy vessels would likely have been legally if not morally justified in blowing those boats and their insane operators to bits. But if it turns out the voice was the “Filipino Monkey” and was “coincidentally” transmitted at the time that the Iranian small craft were running toward the warships, then I’d say we may have a problem.
Sometimes when I need a laugh I go to PRNewswire for Journalists. The old saying that “bad publicity is better than no publicity” comes to mind when reading some of the million press releases which come from the public relations source. This headline immediately yanked me in:
“What Do Anna Nicole Smith and Jerry Falwell Have in Common . . . at Year-end?”
Of course, nothing immediately came to mind other than the fact that they were all dead. And dab nab it if I wasn’t right.
The release goes on to say Anna Nicole and Falwell as well as murdered Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor, former first lady Lady Bird Johnson had received so many remembrances online at Legacy.com that they were part of the “2007’s Top 25 Most-Eulogized People Online.” Congrats. You’re dead.
“One of the most striking aspects of the lists is that they blend the slightly gossipy appeal of guest books for celebrities with the very personal, almost religious and familial aspect of remembering more ordinary people,” said Professor Toby Miller, chair of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, who reviewed the lists at the request of Legacy.com.
The Web site hosts obituaries for an astonishing 60 percent of the dead in the U.S. and receives an incredible 10 million unique visitors each month, according to the news release. It would take my humble blog about 20 million years to generate that many different people clicking the old mouse-a-roo.
Having worked in two professions in which its members revel in macabre humor — emergency services and journalism — I can appreciate such a catchy news release hed to draw in an editor although such an approach may or may not offend some sensibilities of the general public.
If some TV ads which have played in my area are any indication though, perhaps the public may be loosening up with respect to humor and the dearly departed. Claybar Funeral Home in Beaumont and Orange, Texas, ran a commercial featuring two owners of the local chain who say something to the effect of “There are only two things in life that are certain. And we don’t do taxes.” More recently they did subsequent ads in which that line was delivered on a screen and the Claybars explain how they didn’t mean to be flippant, but … I thought the original was pretty funny though.
Well so much for my sick laugh for the day. Time to settle into the weekend and what is, hopefully, a good book or two.
Are we or are we not in a recession? I would think I should know because my part-time job involves studying costs of things. But I haven’t a clue. Recessions, just as most of economics, are hard for me to understand. Here is an explanation. And here is a more simplified version. In a nutshell, being that I am a nut, here is an even more simplified explanation from what I gather from these above linked explanations:
You got your economy and your economy is like gang busters. I’ve never really understood how gang busters were something that were fabulous. It’s kind of like the cat’s pajamas, the best, but I always liked that saying because it makes me think of a kitty cat running around in pajamas. But I am off track. The economy is good. Demand for goods and services increase. You know, that good old supply and demand. The prices increase, like say, gasoline? Demand decreases because it’s too freaking expensive to buy, like say, gasoline? Now you got yourself a recession. You have no gangs to bust and your cat has to sleep in the nude.
But a lot of bidness people don’t like that “R” word. As the great evangelist, the Rev. Ike supposedly said about putting bills in the collection plate instead of small change, coins: ” … make me nervous in the service.” So a lot of euphemisms are used for recession like “downturn” or “It’s not a recession. Everything is fine.”
And thus oil prices have gone down, today at least. But gas prices at the station across the street are $2.999 per gallon, and that’s cheap compared to a lot of places in the country. (Oh and just because we’ve got a gazillion refineries in our county doesn’t mean we are going to have cheap gas. That oil is coming from somewhere by ship, it’s imported, like a fine wine and as expensive.)
So, no, I don’t know either whether we are in a recession. But I do know we are in a sucky economy for lack of wanting to click onto the thesaurus and thus find a better word. And I do know that I am in a pretty crappy economic state right now. Not as bad as this time last year when I was sleeping in my Toyota pickup, but I could be a whole lot better.
