ChrisR

colinian, on 08 Dec 2015 - 11:16 AM, said: Is that a Bugs Bunny way of saying 'moron'? It's actually a 3 for 1 insult. A popular phrase back in the days Bugs Bunny was created, when somebody was saying something ridiculous, was "Tell it to the Marines!" So "what a maroon!" convicted one of being gullible, a moron, AND a Marine!

Mark Twain is credited with the great quote about statistics: "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." The BBC, normally among my most trusted news sources, has certainly mucked this batch up. For starters, their stats come from a wide number of sources, and seem to be cherry picked in an effort to put things in their most ominous light. Going to a single source, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate) gives us a more level view. Here we find that the total all-cause homicide rate in the UK is 1 person in 100,000 each year (653 in 2011) compared to the US rate of 3.8 persons per 100,000 (12,253 in 2013). Clearly, much worse in the US. But the BBC then quotes a separate group, Politifact, as citing 1.4 million US firearm deaths in the 43-year period of 1968-2011, an average of 32,558 US gun fatalities alone per year. This number suddenly dropped by more than 20,000 per year by 2013? Somebody's numbers are way off. So staying with the UNODC figures cited by the BBC, it claims the gun death rate as 30 times that of the UK. No argument there. But the UNODC states the US murder rate is only 3.8 times that of the UK. So a Britisher is almost 10 times more likely to be stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned, or poisoned to death than his American counterpart. Not surprisingly, there is a group of British doctors who've advocated removing kitchen knives from British homes. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4581871.stm) Are there too many gun deaths in the US? Definitely. But bandying about statistical comparisons gets to be rather meaningless. After all, in the same UNODC report you'll discover that the overall homicide rate in Greenland is 19.4 per 100,000, or more than 5 times that of the United States. Must be all those glaciers. Perhaps a dose of global warming would help out the surviving Greenlanders. It seems like a good year to vacation at home.

Just noticed your story here. You realize, of course, that South Williamsport is also headquarters for Little League Baseball and their annual world series. You think... nnnaaaaahh

You may want to take notice of the fact that at least 80,000 signatories have joined your list (despite my disagreement <sigh>) so congratulations! Not only is BBC doing some serious re-thinking on the matter, but so are other folks in the sports business world: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-35046629

Donald Trump is simply the greatest thing that's happened to the Democratic Party in decades. Someday, after all is said and done, an author will step forward with the "true" story that Don's candidacy was cooked up in the DemoDonkey's Kitchen to demolish the Republicans once and for all. His unretracted threat to run as a third-party candidate should he not win the Repub nomination weighs heavily on the Elephants. They know only that whether he wins or loses that nomination their party will be shattered. Meanwhile, the Dems could run Jeffrey Dahmer and take the White House.

Wow! An honest politician? Donald Trump no less? The reporter asks how he's going to solve a problem. He acknowledges he's clueless and wants the press to solve it for him. The bonus, of course, is that when the solution doesn't work it's not even Don's fault. Brilliant! The Age of Miracles is yet upon us.

An interesting, perhaps somewhat sobering, tale. To my thinking, it's great as is. Obviously it cries out for more, but whether that comes from you as the writer or me as the reader... well that's entirely up to you. Nicely done.

Short, sweet, to the point, and the good guys win. Ya gotta love it!

So what, exactly, has changed over the years? When I started work as an EMT, our station was across the street from the high school. This being Texas, in the parking lot every boy's car was a pick-em-up. In the window of each was a gun rack with the BB, .22, 30-30 and 30-.06 rifles the boys had received on their 10th, 12th, 14th and 16th birthdays respectively. Most had a shotgun behind the seat as well. Guns were readily available and accessible and nobody thought twice about it. In the years I served there, the only two gun incidents in town were adult suicide/attempts. There were no background checks, no gun control, nada, In fact, when the first feeble gun control measure was enacted in the state, limiting handguns to cops, military, persons traveling [never clearly defined], and persons "engaged in lawful sporting activities", UT sponsored the first annual "Armed Ping-Pong Tournament". You had to pack at least a .38 to play! So what has brought the societal change? I've heard people decry cutbacks in mental health treatment as a cause, but I highly doubt that the vast majority of recent shooters would have been identified and treated and/or incarcerated prior to their actions. So what else is the common thread that did not exist in the past that has brought mass shootings into the forefront? Do we really have more today than in the past or do news organizations seeking ratings merely focus on them more readily? Is it the increase in population? Then get ready for an explosive century. Too many damned Yankees moving to Texas? Well, yeah, that's a problem, but not normally resolved with a gunfight. I'm honestly curious what people think. Something has changed in the country. What is it, and can it be undone?

I wish you the best of luck in collecting signatories, but I won't consider signing it myself. I've seen the quotes in which the gent says some pretty stupid and outrageous things, but I've seen nothing of a call for violence to resolve issues with gays, aside from typical boxer bravado. It seems wrong to do the exact same thing to somebody who opposes gays that they did to gays for generations. As Voltaire (or E.B. Hall) put it, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This applies to both sides of an argument. However, in a final voting situation, I can nonetheless hope that he is slaughtered.

"Meretricious" is on the list of the most misused words? I doubt I've seen it used at all in the last decade! Fortunately, this list provides a nice set of words for story characters who profess slightly greater verbiacal aplomb than they actually possess.

Chris - In one sentence you say you're not talking about Trump, but in the next you're talking abut God. There's a difference?

Thanks for the update Colinian! Great to hear. Hope your Thanksgiving vacation was a great one. I'll be looking for some leftovers in the next few chapters.

I'd somewhat expected, based on the title, that it would end at 26 chapters. But I'll pass on continuing.

Sometimes even presidential speech writers make rather odd errors. I was amused by President Obama's Thanksgiving commentary in which he compared contemporary refugees to the Pilgrims: “In 1620, a small band of pilgrims came to this continent, refugees who had fled persecution and violence in their native land,” Obama says. “Nearly 400 years later, we remember their part in the American story – and we honor the men and women who helped them in their time of need.”

Incredible photo there, and incredible work on the part of the two guys - not just the rescue, but even figuring out how not to freak the bird out during the rescue. Thanks for posting this, Chris.

Thanks for the info, Rutabaga. I'm not planning on needing one anytime soon, but perhaps I'll try working on a friendship in the DA's office for the heck of it!

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. Today is the day on which all Americans give thanks that Benjamin Franklin was never elected to office. Otherwise we'd be honoring the turkey as our national bird rather than stuffing our gut with it!

Just to make things crazier, there's yet another study out, discussed on BBC today. (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34846629) The finding in this study is that the nicotinoids do have an impact on individual bees, but not on the colony as a whole. The colony simply produces more bees to make up for the loss. The problem, of course, is that the concern has been the poison's involvement in Colony Collapse Syndrome in which the colony does not recover. Just keeps getting stranger. As to Chaynin's question: "[O]ne is left wondering whether Mother Earth has a system which allows it to re-boot to erase and expunge the damage done by humans." It most certainly does. And the dinosaurs were all erased in the middle of a major global temperature rise. Could it be heat-seeking asteroids?

At the moment, it does rather look like the eventual election choice will be between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. Of course it's still early in the race, a meteor could strike the planet at any time and absolve us from the necessity to choose, so I remain optimistic. In fact, however, those two are likely the best two out there based on their tremendous levels of experience. Trump has filed for bankruptcy four times now. He has the background necessary to lead us through a national bankruptcy that would free us from our overseas indebtedness. Of course Medicare and Social Security will be gone, but what the hell - old people don't count anyways. And as for Mrs. Clinton, can you name any person in the history of our nation who has been so thoroughly lied to about what was really going on inside the Oral Office while she lived upstairs ? She'll hit the ground running and never look back. Let's have the election today and be done with it.

The Balls of St. Mary's ?

Just saw a new film this evening: Spotlight. It is a well done, gripping, near-documentary about the team of reporters at the Boston Globe who uncovered the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Their revelations led to the worldwide scandal that still reverberates, although in fairness the more recent search for perpetrators seems to focus more on school employees and government officials. The film is not showing widely yet -- seems to be released to a few new cities each week -- but the theater I attended was packed. (And a 250 mile round trip, I might add.) The film is far less about the molestations themselves than the diocesan cover-up and the Boston Globe team that scaled monumental hurdles in order to uncover it all. It is nonetheless a deeply affective as well as effective presentation. I highly recommend it.

Chris - Tracked down yet another British study (University of Sussex) of bees and nicotinoids on, of all things, RT (Russian Television) at https://www.rt.com/news/bees-pesticides-pollen-study-553/. One of their findings, interestingly, is that bees working nicotinoid-laced plants actually bring less pollen back to the hive. This could point to plain starvation to help explain the mechanism for colony collapse. I'm thinking this might suggest a disincentive for apiarists to rent their hives out to farmers who use the poisons if the findings can be widely reproduced. As a minimum, the hive owners could put a per-hive value to be covered by the farmers in the event of loss, and make the price a bit prohibitive. Market forces could then play a role. Obviously, however, lots of study remains to be done. Hopefully soon, because the need for food is ever growing. Over the next 50 years, it will grow by another 2.5 billion (human) mouths to feed.

The exception to that might just be Ozzie Consular Officials. A friend's wife, a middle school teacher, got the offer of a lifetime: a one-year job & home swap with an Australian teacher and her family. Everything was going fine, but my friend almost scotched the whole deal. He and his wife were both required to obtain visas for the stay. He went in to the consulate where he was interviewed (as he put it, interrogated) and asked quite a few questions along the way. The officer finally asked, "Do you have a criminal record?" to which my friend responded, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know that was still required." The officer was not amused.

All of which reminds us what a sage Thomas Jefferson was when in his Notes on the State of Virgnia he wrote: Indeed I fear for my country when I reflect that God is just.