Thank God there is the occasional good news to offset all other news. This week we are confronted with the Uvalde report. The report is complete with the pictures confirming what we already knew. Children suffered and died because of the cowardice displayed by a vast assortment of men chosen for their qualities to protect and serve. Before we delve into that misstatement / misunderstanding, let’s look at the good news.
By all means watch the video, multiple times. What you are watching is a pizza delivery driver that just happened to be passing by realize that there was the possibility that he could do some good if he threw himself into action. He saved five children from a certain fiery death.
Most importantly, he raced back into the raging fire when he found that there was a six year old still in the house. You can see him bring her out as the firemen are putting on their fire-retardant gear for their assault on the house. Nick Bostic is the hero’s name and you can see from his shorts and t-shirt he didn’t need to suit up to go into action.
“I was ready to lose my life that night,” was what he said after the ordeal. He didn’t die, but he did receive a broken arm while jumping out of a second story window while cradling a six-year-old that now has a chance to grow up, graduate, marry, have children of her own. The Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I’m sure that now Bostic can count the children among his friends, but at that particular moment, Bostic was prepared to give his life for strangers. An example of pure bravery.
Now we flip the coin:
Note the difference in urgency between a house fire and a psychopath shooting children. Honest to God, watching these police it’s like they’re checking to see whose turn it was to bring snacks. With each piece of information revealed we find out more and more that the first order of business was not to stop the killing of innocents. Even after the child inside the class room got a call into 911 to explain that they needed help, the police just meandered about like neighbors at a yard sale. No urgency here, just innocents being slaughtered. “Let’s be careful out there.”
Forgiving the possibility that the “first responders” were not adequately armed for the situation, although two of the three officers do have semi-automatics and body armor, how can we forgive the inaction of literally hundreds of up-armored police who arrived on the scene minutes later?
The Texas Rangers have made hay off of the phrase, “One riot, one ranger” for over a hundred years. How do they justify not one ranger being willing to confront the killer? How do they rationalize taking the weapon from an off duty officer who wanted to go in and get his wounded wife? How do they explain arresting a mom that drove forty miles to the scene that was frantically trying to free her child? It seems that the ones that had the courage to do something were pushed aside that day.
A lot has been said about doors and keys and classrooms and/or offices. The first group into the hallway knew where the shots came from. They knew it was a classroom. The little girl begging for her life to the 911 operator told the operator where she was. Meanwhile, we hear Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Arredondo yelling into the void that he thinks is the shooter. Arredondo apparently thinks he can send the shooter a pizza and that after a while the shooter will fall asleep and the officers can slip in and take his gun away with no loss of life to the police.
Look at this timeline provided by the Texas Tribune and the Texas Department of Safety
12:46-12:47 p.m.
Arredondo gives approval to enter
12:46 p.m.
“I can hear the police next door.”
— Student who called 911
12:47 p.m.
“Please send the police now.”
— Student who called 911
12:50 p.m.
Officers kill gunman
I count three minutes from order given to situation ended. Imagine the difference in the situation if the breach order had come at 11:38 when Arredondo arrived on the scene? We don’t know how many babies would have been saved, but surely more than the final result.
A lot of times you hear that the cover-up was worse than the crime. All government agencies have been very reluctant in being transparent about the events at Uvalde. This is one time that I think the crime of cowardice, of shirking one’s sworn duty is far worse than the coverup. There will be trials. I’m assuming that the defendants will ask for a change of venue since the defendants have definitely tainted the jury pool. I’m a big believer of defendant rights, but this is one case I think should be tried where it happened.
Hopefully justice will be served and policies put into place to prevent this from ever occurring anywhere in our country again. Just remember if you’re ever in a life threatening situation, call Domino’s.
Just finished watching the documentary “Unprecedented” directed by Richard Ray Perez. This is the documentary that has provided behind the scenes footage to the January 6th committee with regard to what was going on within the Trump camp on the day of the insurrection. Lots of “state of mind” questions seem to have gotten answered by some of the documentary’s footage.
The filmmaker was allowed to follow the Trump family all around the country during the 2020 campaign. The film gives the viewers a behind the curtains view of each family member as they stumped hard to Make America Great Again, Again. There were very staged sit-down interviews with the family, but the real meat came from the snippets taken before and after the individual rabble rousing.
What came through was how dedicated the children were to helping their father maintain his power. Their interest was not unselfish, nor was it sympathetic to the multitude of issues, mental and physical, the Donald exhibits. The “fifty speeches in forty-eight days” was the price the children were willing to pay for the family to maintain its stranglehold on America and continue the dynasty.
We all remember the Clampett Trump family visit to the Queen and what the Trumps felt was the opportunity for the two bloodlines to mingle and strategize. That’s how it works, right? One person is elected and then the family just takes turns being the supreme leader until they’ve all had a turn? The documentary makes the leap that it will be Don Jr. that will follow in the Donald’s footsteps, and not the fairest child Ivanka. Start popping the popcorn if they are both still free during the next election cycle.
It’s admirable that the daughter could be perceived as the heir apparent, and if you ignore all of the salacious gossip surrounding the pair, and I don’t, it would seem right and proper that Ivanka would win out over her mouth breathing brothers. But how sad for the brothers. Here are two guys that no matter how hard they try, they, like their father, will never win the approval or the love of their father. No amount of risk taking, felony committing, womanizing, race baiting, double dealing or cheating will ever be enough to win the favor of their father. How sad.
Like their father before them, the boys were instructed by a critic, not a promoter. The Donald only has time enough to promote himself and anyone that steals that limelight is suspect. It was very telling to watch the Donald viewing his son’s campaign speeches. The proud smile he had for Ivanka’s performance was turned into a grimace suggesting a bad bowel blockage after viewing his sons.
Not that the boys hadn’t thrown every accolade and hyperbole they could at the frothing crowd. The speeches promised “a chicken in every pot” in an America where only the “right” people could own a pot. The boys stood before God and everybody and promised that their daddy could walk on water, if the liberal congress and media would just get out of the way.
How the Donald was not overcome by the sheer volume of prevarications espoused by his heirs was amusing. These boys are world class truth benders and one would think that that alone would have put a twinkle in daddy’s eye. But alas the only twinkle in the Donald’s eye was for Ivanka.
We know that Fred Trump, the Donald’s father, drove his namesake to an alcoholic death. Fred Jr. couldn’t withstand the scorn heaped upon him by his dad who wanted him to follow in Fred Sr.’s real estate footsteps. From the looks of this video it looks like another generation of Trump sons is on their way to a substance abuse problem.
Sadly, there’s another generation of Trump sons being ignored by their father’s insatiable drive to measure up to their father’s expectations. All dynasties eventually fade away. The end of this one can’t come soon enough.
“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” was a rebuttal given by Joseph Welch to Wisconsin Republican Senator Joe McCarthy at the Senate hearings in 1954.
McCarthy, the lunatic Senator from Wisconsin, was distinguishing himself in front of America by conducting a witch hunt for communists. Lacking any of the qualifications normally found in a Presidential candidate, McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn plowed through people’s personal lives in an attempt to gain national recognition for a potential Republican party nomination. McCarthy and his chief counsel Cohn ran roughshod over witness after witness under the guise of ferreting out any communists that might be “hiding under our beds” in an attempt to gain notoriety for himself.
The McCarthy hearings were aligned with the Hollywood Blacklist and authors and actors had their careers cut short by the accusation, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the communist party?” Relentlessly grilling and insulting witnesses, McCarthy set a tone for the meanness, the pettiness, that lies deep in the soul of the Republican party today. Finally, McCarthy was brought up short by the question from Welch, “Have you left no sense of decency?” America heard the question and decided that they did have a sense of decency and the hearings were brought to an end.
This past week came the announcement that a ten year old rape victim was denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio because she was determined to be three days past the six weeks cutoff date. Take a moment. Get a drink of water and slow down your life long enough to contemplate what a full term pregnancy will do to a little ten year old’s body. Now, take another moment to contemplate the psychological damage done to the child through absolutely no fault or action of her own.
Somewhere in the bowels of hell the Republican party has deemed themselves to be the prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner and media rep, all in one for all of us.
I’d like to think that it’s only a sliver of the Republican demographic that would be so heartless to enforce a pregnancy on a ten-year-old. I’d like to think that the majority of Republicans don’t think that rape victims should carry the child of their rapist, have to share custodial rights with the rapist, sit at the family dinner with their child’s father who might also be their father. I’d like to think that it’s only a sliver of the Republican party that is this cruel, this mean.
Evidence does not support my notion. Ronald Reagan famously said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left me.” Horse Hockey! Reagan left the Democratic party to quench his/Nancy’s lust for power, his need to tell everyone else what was right and wrong, to be the lead actor on the biggest stage in the world. Aided by unscrupulous individuals like Newt Gingrich, the Republicans set a course for dismantling all of the social programs so vital to the American poor and middle class. The heartless movement that they started has become the American Taliban we see today.
American Taliban, a bridge too far? What else do you call a society that is being governed by religious theories? If a sliver of society doesn’t believe in abortion, gay rights, miscegenation, a woman’s right to control her body and her destiny, and you have six Supreme Court justices willing to throw the Constitution aside in favor of dogma, what do you have?
When you throw in the sliver’s irrational support of guns, the guns that enable that sliver to have a “louder” voice than the rest of us, we wind up with daily crises that divert our attention from the main issues. These people want child rape victims to give birth to the consequence of their most horrible moment in life.
I ask you again, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
“Once upon a time” as most fairy tales start, there was a zeitgeist in America of doing good and being the “good guys”. Most people took pride in living honorably and in doing for others.
We all remember the cartoon about the Boy Scout that was so desperate to do a good deed that he walked an old woman across the street against her will. Such was the expectation for good citizenship in the community that the Scout saw an opportunity to do a good deed where none in fact existed. What the heck happened?
The persecuted Christian right wing is now wreaking havoc from the Supreme Court on the rest of us. The “righteous few” are doling out decisions for us everyday Americans who just want to muddle through our daily lives without the fear of our children being shot while they’re at what should be the safest spot in the world for them.
Now admittedly we had our fears as school children in my day. We hid under our desks to enhance our survival from nuclear attack. The likelihood of that attack was minuscule compared to the likelihood of being shot by an aggrieved shooter in today’s world. An aggrieved shooter that can’t get the mental health services he needs because “the money’s just not there,” but can buy a military weapon the same day he has his mental break, no questions asked.
More school children have been killed so far this year than on duty police officers. Let that sink in for a minute and ask yourself why the Supreme Court would tell the states they can’t regulate guns in their states. Juxtapose that ruling for FREEDUMB! against the very narrow view of freedom when evaluating a woman’s right to choose when to start a family. Somewhere in there the “right to life” has gotten muddled. It seems “forced birth” has become equated to a right to life, and the right to life is how well you can dodge a bullet.
In my twisted convoluted Judaeo-Christian belief system I’ve equated the Golden Rule as the only tenet I need to embrace. I should do unto others as I would want done unto me. I don’t want the court system telling me I don’t have control over my own body. That’s a bridge way too far.
If I don’t want the courts telling me I have to get a vasectomy or produce seed for a generation of super Americans, I should respect the rights of the female population to not have a group of religious zealots doing their thinking for them with regard to family planning. If they can tell you you have to have a baby, they can tell you which sex is acceptable.
As pointed out before, the absolute buy in of the mother is a prerequisite for me to the birth of a child. The state’s needs for children should not be part of the equation. Family planning shouldn’t be a consideration for future armies, or altar boys.
Not so for Justice Amy Cony Barrett. It seems that the gentle prevaricator outlined the shortage of children for adoption in her opinion of Roe vs. Wade. While commendable that she has adopted children of other races and with special needs, does she have the right to force her beliefs on the rest of us? I think not. The Constitution used to be pretty clear on the right of privacy.
Does Uncle Clarence have the right to finally get even with “the libs” after being subjected to their heretical viewpoints of freedom? Apparently he thinks so. It will be interesting to see his take on Loving vs. Virginia when it comes before the court. I may misunderestimate him. Ruling that blacks and whites can’t marry might have been his game plan all along to avoid a costly divorce from Ginni.
The wah, wah, wah, you hear is the unloved babies about to be born and those of us who remember when empathy for others was a thing. A Christian thing.
In news that we should all be concerned with, on a level that runs much deeper than our obsession with politics, it has been revealed on Youtube that any day now is the beginning of the “End of Days”. You’ve got to skip past all of the trailers for Arnold’s movie of the same name, but eventually if you keep scrolling you’ll get down to where the prophets are doing business.
According to some religious seers, the Antichrist will be unveiled today, or maybe tomorrow, or certainly by the end of next week, and with that revelation, Armageddon is just around the corner. While I do mental gymnastics with all of the possibilities of the Rapture, I wonder how the Antichrist will be revealed. For those unfamiliar with the scripture, I will defer to the secular humanists at Wikipedia to define the phenomenon .
“In Christian eschatology, the Antichrist or anti-Christ refers to people prophesied by the Bible to oppose Jesus Christ and substitute themselves in Christ’s place before the Second Coming. The Antichrist is announced as the one ‘who denies the Father and the Son.’ Jesus alerts his disciples not to be deceived by the false prophets, who will claim themselves as being Christ, performing ‘great signs and wonders.'”
According to “Christian eschatology” and Wikipedia, there’s millions and millions of people who are awaiting the return of Jesus Christ. Some are convinced that the second coming has arrived in the form of one Donald J. Trump. These people are so convinced that they’ve even erected a billboard declaring their belief to one and all that the Donald is truly the anointed one.
Never the one to let a quality scam get past the rubes, the Donald just smiles benevolently and accepts their adoration. Maybe in some corner of his Swiss cheese like brain, there is a neuron firing, “You are Jesus, you are Jesus.” That would certainly explain his miraculous escape from being held accountable for any of the multitude of sins he has committed.
I’ve often wondered how the faithful have ignored the Donald’s complete ignorance of anything regarding religion. In this video the Donald is being asked what his favorite part of the Bible is, his favorite verse. As you can see, the Donald won’t be pinned down, “he likes it all.” It might have been easier if the interviewer had asked the Donald if he could recite John 3:16. Any child that has ever darkened the door of any church knows the answer to that one. It’s a shame he’ll never get asked.
No, the Donald just likes the Bible, “all of it”. So much so that he felt compelled to carry a copy across the street from the White House to proudly display it upside down in the churchyard. Now there are those among us that see the symbology of upside down Bibles and crosses and such as signs of the Devil. I’m not saying the Donald is the Devil, but maybe he’s Devil adjacent. Or maybe he is the one prophesied, the one who parades as Jesus but is really the false prophet.
In news that you’ll never be allowed to see in the main stream media, the Donald’s normal stylist has replaced by someone who has been forewarned to cut around the two prominent horns emanating from the Donald’s frontal lobes. The paired hollow sheaths of keratin are currently hidden by the Donald’s coiffure. Those “Make America Great Again” hats aren’t just for advertising, you know.
I could be wrong, but I prophesize that at some point a really strong wind or perhaps a fall will unsettle the coif. Once confronted with the evidence, will the MAGATS believe the evidence of the Donald’s duplicity or continue to follow him to his just reward? Stay tuned. “But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”
What more do I have to say than it’s the thirtieth-sixth anniversary of the release of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”? The instant classic was released to the world on June 11, 1986 to critical and popular acclaim. Who knew so many of us would identify with a Chicago rich kid slacker? John Hughes did.
Starting with Pretty in Pink in 1984 and continuing through Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987, Hughes spun tales of teenage angst into box office gold. Ferris Bueller earned 70 million at the box office placing it at number nine for the year. Top spot went to Top Gun. I guess most of America was more aligned with watching a farcical dogfight with World War III implications than watch Matthew Broderick pose as Abe Froman the sausage king of Chicago. To each his own I guess. I thought Ferris’s impersonation was spot on.
It wasn’t the impersonation that made Ferris a legend, however. It was clear from the tone of Ben Stein’s “Beuller, Beuller, Bueller, Bueller,” and the immediate response of one of his classmates that Ferris’s panache had earned him a degree of notoriety. The response of the classmate sounded more like an urban legend than an accurate accounting of Ferris’s absence. The explanation was delivered by Simone, the prettiest girl in the class, with such relish that it cemented in the viewers mind that Ferris Bueller was “the dude”.
Only “the dude” could convince his hypochondriac best friend Cameron to play hooky with him. Not only play hooky, but to do it in style. The boys steal Cameron’s dad’s most precious possession, the “thing that he loves the most”, his Ferrari, to squire the group on their adventure. After checking out Ferris’s girlfriend from school, the trio embark on their odyssey of fun for the afternoon that culminates in Ferris leading a parade through Chicago. Just a typical day for any American high schooler.
The great thing about movies is the total suspension of reality for a couple of hours. Teenage viewers from all stripes were transported to a reality that less than the top five percent of the world could experience. The first clue that the Buellers were not an average middle class family was the thousands of dollars of electronic equipment Ferris used to carry out his ruse of being sick. The second clue was the private bathroom. This is not an average American middle class family, but we identify with them just the same.
Through John Hughes’ writing and directing we find a way to embrace a smug, self-centered rich kid slacker as a role model. Somebody we’d love to give us a call the next time he’s going to boost a priceless car and act out. We accept the idea that destroying the Ferrari was actually a good thing for Cameron’s psyche. We ignore the fact that the dad had built an exhibition room to display the “thing that he loved the most” and that it too was destroyed. Just another day of hijinks in the cool kid’s club.
Not to rain too much on the parade, I do have to admit to loving all of John Hughes movies. I’m particularly fond of “Pretty in Pink” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” for their more modest settings and characters. Not that we all wouldn’t love to live in Ferris’s neighborhood. The neighborhood where there are no consequences for actions. Where even the least studious philosopher can counsel, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Welcome to middle age, Ferris.
There are a great many things that are different in small towns from big cities. The topic for today is policing.
I grew up watching Andy Griffin of Mayberry fame. While his character is based on a true life character, most people believe a policeman with strong ties to the community is a fiction. Not true. Sheriffs in small towns are elected, and, as a result, are known by the community they serve. More importantly, they know the members of their community. I believe that knowing the people in the communities that the police serve has more to do with how criminals are handled in the smaller communities than they are in the cities.
When was the last time you heard of a small town sheriff rolling up to a report of a kid playing with a toy gun and opening fire in three seconds? Never. In a small town, the sheriff would have likely rolled up, told the kid to quit acting a fool or he’d tell his Momma. The sheriff would probably mention the kid’s Momma’s name, just to drive home his point.
I get it, we don’t all live in small towns where everybody knows everybody’s name. That said, I feel a national effort to humanize suspects is in order. Kind of a “Black Lives Matter”, with a subset of, “don’t dehumanize any of us”. The dynamics of policing change when you view a “perp”, or my favorite, “un-sub”, as a daddy, mommy, son or daughter. The preservation of life should be the absolute first order of business for the police, even if it means that occasionally they’ll get their uniform a little dirty. A life should have a higher value than a cleaning bill, right?
The police are so over-equipped with gadgetry that is designed to disable suspects, I think they feel cheated if don’t get to use their toys. It has been reported that there have been over 1,000 deaths due to tasering in the United States. What do all of these dead subjects have in common? They were all unarmed and most of them were people of color.
Are there other methods available to police that are possibly less lethal to use? Of course. Most countries use the baton as the method of choice. The baton allows the officer to apply a proportional amount of force to a situation while not running the risk of killing a suspect who might be endangered by other methods, such as pepper spray. Since 1990, there have been 60 in-custody deaths in which pepper spray was a contributing factor. In-custody deaths. Pepper spray is not just an irritant to an asthmatic, it’s a death sentence.
To what can we attribute the over use of force in America by the police? I believe the police are scared to death. I’m not ready to cynically say that they all are a bunch of neo-Nazis. I think they’re scared, and out of that fear, overreact. Do they have reason to overreact? In my opinion, and a study done by the CDC, no.
According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, “In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013) ” Let that one soak in for a while. You are three times more likely to be killed by gunfire, if you are a preschooler than if you are a policeman.
President Biden recently pointed out that since the year 2000 more school children have died due to gun violence than the total of military and police killed combined. Something is clearly out of whack here, and the answer is not that we need to up armor the kids.
To me, the answer is the sense of community the police officer needs to have, the training in non-lethal methods, and strong robust gun control measures to be enacted. It’s not sexy, and it doesn’t move billions of dollars worth of military weapons to the police, but it could work. It works everywhere else. Don’t spare the rod, and save the child.
“Something is happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”; what prophetic words from the Buffalo Springfield back in 1966. The song, “For What It’s Worth” was covered by Tupac under the title, “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto” in 1997. Tupac’s cover reinforced to one and all that things hadn’t really changed that much in the thirty years separating the releases. There was still “a man over there with a gun, telling me I got to be beware.”
Now, nearly sixty years later, we continue to question why is that man over there with a gun, and why should I have to beware? Why can’t I just live my life peacefully, raise my kids and spoil my grand-kids without having to worry if that “man over there” isn’t one of the “good guys with guns” but one of the monsters that prey on the unsuspecting?
There can’t be a more unsuspecting portion of the population than our children, and there shouldn’t be. Kids should be free to dream their dreams, worry about math tests and if Susie or Johnny really likes them. Children shouldn’t have to worry if this is the day that society’s failures catches up with them and ends their dreams. Most importantly children shouldn’t have to be charged with protecting themselves from something that in most societies plain doesn’t exist. Demonstrations are being held all over the country protesting the latest killings of innocents. While the protests go on, more and more innocents are led to the slaughter because the people that take an oath to “preserve and protect” abdicate their responsibility. Elected officials at all levels know that what’s going on is wrong, that the killing of innocents is indefensible. Still, they offer their pablum excuses, and hide behind a law that was enacted when the most skilled riflemen could only fire four bullets a minute. They continue to cower to appease the NRA and gun lobby in spite of the overwhelming disapproval of the public to the current state.
The AR-15 like the one used at Uvalde can fire up to 400 rounds a minute if equipped with a bump stock. The police found 142 spent cartridges inside the school at Uvalde and 173 live rounds. The police found over 1650 rounds of ammunition at the school in various locations indicating that the shooter was well prepared for maximum mayhem. It also indicates that a gun dealer never asked, “What kind of deer are you going after that you need over 1,600 rounds to stop?” Would the gun shop owner have questioned the purchase if the shooter had revealed that he was hunting “dears” not deers? Probably not.
The rate of fire of the assault weapons that our legislators can’t keep out of the hands of harmful people is important, but so is the response time of those charged to protect us. You know, the “good guys with a gun.” Some of the innocents were calling 911 and pleading with police to help them. Telling police that some of them were still alive, the children described the horrors they were confronting. Meanwhile, the “good guys with a gun” cowered in the hallway waiting for reinforcements. An executive decision had been made that an infinite number of children were not worth the life of just one police officer.
We are at a point now that even the stupid get it. If the police are this afraid of the population, then the population should not have guns. That’s how I’ve lived my life for lo these many years. Don’t own a gun, don’t need one. I shouldn’t have to worry about being shot at a routine traffic stop any more than the police should have to worry about stopping me. It’s time to deescalate our society and let the police just worry about the “bad guys” not all of us. If we disarm, maybe the police can too. Think Barney Fife. Doubt I’ll still be here in another thirty years, but if so, I’m going to be mighty disappointed if “there’s a man with a gun over there.”
Tragedy everywhere. It’s hard to focus on just one piece of bad news. While you try to figure a way for society to bounce back from one cataclysm, another calamity is slapping you in the face. Bad news travels fast, as they say, but does there need to be so much of it?
Sometimes it feels like being a speed bag in a Muhammad Ali workout. Rat-a-tat-tat the numbing blows keep coming until we are overcome by the sheer volume of blows. Death, destruction, pestilence and famine are present everywhere, even in the richest countries.
Surprisingly, the “happiest people on Earth”, the Finns, have decided to buy an insurance policy from NATO to gain a sense of protection from their neighbor. What has changed the Finns long standing policy of neutrality? Obviously Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine was the catalyst for their decision to apply for NATO membership, but could there be more “burning” issues?
Finland shares an 830 mile border with Russia that is predominantly rural forests. Currently Russia is on fire and there is not enough manpower on hand to put out the fires. The fires are so large and uncontrolled that the smoke from the fires is carrying to the western United States adding to the pollution here. Studies have shown that the fires in Russia are getting larger and more frequent every year. These are not just “ordinary” fires. These are peat fires that are burning rich organic material that is carbon rich. This carbon not only releases huge amounts of methane and carbon into the air, but can enter the lungs of mammals and create disease.
The fires increase the causes of global warming and therefore create more wildfires. Russia is in a cycle that could be existential, and I’m not just talking about ticking off everyone else on the planet because of your aggression. Putin’s plan may have been to gobble up as much territory and resources as possible to keep his already under-served population from extinction. There are reports that the peat is burning even around frozen lakes. Even to the most dull of us, we recognize that when the ground is burning under your house it’s time to move. Putin has never been considered dull.
No one country or peoples are immune to the effects of these fires. These peat bogs exist in a large number of countries around the world. The issue is that while they are normally fire resistant because of their wet nature, global warming has dried the bogs and made them susceptible to being ignited by wildfires. The key is prevention if possible and rapid response if a fire does break out. Russia’s commitment to take the resources it needs rather than protect the ones it has could prove to be its undoing. Every able bodied Russian is off to Ukraine to loot and rape and pillage while their homeland is becoming tinder. How could a supposed super power ignore science and keep on fanning the flames of disaster?
While it’s hot as the dickens here in Georgia, at least we’re not on fire like they are out West. The mind just boggles when you see the amount of acreage being consumed by fire. Fire seems to be pretty indiscriminate, too. Rich folk’s houses are being burned right along with the trailer parks.
Watching the crews going through doing cleanup, and only finding smoldering wood is pretty sobering. All of your mementos, all of your capital gone in a flash while leaving behind just a smoldering outline of where you once thrived. The sight should be sobering. It should be a wake-up call that climate change/global warming is real. It is estimated that there will be 1.2 BILLION people displaced by climate change by 2050. Some of them will be driving tanks.
Nothing bands humanity together like a disaster. It would be great if we could band together to prevent a disaster.
In the words of the great philosopher and business tycoon, Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Have truer words ever been spoken? Whether your I.Q. is stratospheric or slightly higher than a rutabaga, people can be more truly judged by their actions than what they made on their S.A.T.S.
All of us sharing this planet have the expectation that the people that we interact with on a daily basis are, if not pulling in the same direction, at least not land mining our path. We presume that a person with “average” intelligence realizes that we as a society can accomplish so much more by working together than with one group carrying all of the load while the other group runs through the woods with their hair on fire.
We are wrong to presume. Average intelligence in the United States has dropped to an I.Q. of 98. When I was growing up it was 100, which was fairly consistent throughout the world as I recall. Now we’re three points dumber than our neighbors to the north. What happened? I suspect it’s the enforced breeding programs by the elites. You know where only Muffy can be betrothed to Biff and Skylar can only be seen with Cameron and Huxley. The Donald and his progeny has single-handedly dropped the average half a point at least.
As the recipients of “royal blood” can attest, sometimes the best genetic match is not the person closest to you. Exceptionalism is not a good thing in societal terms. Not only is society more likely to breed itself out of existence, but there is no place for the “diamonds in the rough” to emerge. “Talent and intelligence are equally distributed throughout the world. But opportunity is not.” So how do we ensure that the cream rises to the top and that we’re not at the mercy of one of the Donald’s offspring to come up with a cure for cancer?
First we have to recognize the dynamics of what average I.Q. means. In the case of the U.S., roughly sixty-eight percent of the population has an I.Q. of 115 or less. Please pause and dwell for a moment about the last time you interacted with someone that you suspected wasn’t “the brightest bulb in the box.” Now recognize that that person was around the 100 I.Q. mark and that roughly 68% of the population is not as quick as he is. Now speculate that there is a well funded movement designed to exploit those individuals for their own benefit.
In addition to perpetrating falsehoods on a constant basis through the media, this group is hard at work on dismantling the last bastion of civil discourse open to the vast majority of citizens, the public schools. Most of us learned in public school the rights and privileges of American citizens through history and civics courses. I understand that Civics is no longer taught most places. How convenient…. If the average citizen doesn’t learn their rights, their responsibilities and the way to preserve their rights in school, they’re certainly not going to learn them from the Faux News Network. The Faux News Network has its own agenda and it’s not inclusive.
The Faux News Network and its benefactors/promoters are masters at taking complicated issues and reducing them to buzzwords that the person of “average” I.Q. can latch on to and use to sound like an “informed individual” when shouting them out at a school board meeting. Phrases like “cancel culture” which is Faux’s take on the public telling a business “we’re not going to use your products anymore if your behavior continues in the same way.” What’s the public’s recourse to protest the bad actions of a corporation, burn all of their locations to the ground? Seems like boycotting the product until they meet acceptable standards would be more desirable than a fire sale. But God forbid we “cancel” anyone.
Speaking of cancelling anyone, Faux is working hard on cancelling, people of color, gays, liberals and anyone that is intellectually capable of seeing through their smokescreen. BTW, it’s ok, if Faux is doing the cancelling. It’s also ok to cancel anyone that is “woke”. Woke is a person that is sensitive to the plight of anyone not in the W.A.S.P. mold of the Faux News hosts. Woke is a person that knows that Blacks were once owned in the U.S. and have a had a struggle overcoming that time. Woke is a person that believes that history shouldn’t be “white washed” to make some people’s feelings feel better.
History is what it is, which brings us back to the importance of schools in the development of societal norms in children. In particular the children who are not intellectually inclined to seek out all of the positions of an argument. These children need to know that everybody is different and unique and should be respected for their diversity. That’s not “indoctrination, it’s just good manners. After all, what would Jesus do?
