Tag: news

Brexit, or when people vote to harm themselves

Frankly, I am just stunned that the voters of the United Kingdom decided to leave the EU.  Obviously I am not British, and I can’t pretend I understand all of the issues going on there that might motivate people to vote that way.  But I do know that many of the consequences predicted were not good. And I also know that many of the people who voted to leave are in the parts of the UK that depend on the EU the most, like Cornwall.  The government of Cornwall is now insisting that the UK government make up for the 60 million pounds a year of EU funding that will be lost by Brexit.  To quote from Cornwall directly:

Prior to the referendum we were reassured by the ‘leave’ campaign that a decision to leave the EU would not affect the EU funding which has already been allocated to Cornwall and that Cornwall would not be worse off in terms of the investment we receive. We are seeking urgent confirmation from Ministers that this is the case.

Suddenly Cornwall is like some teenage kid who seriously pisses off his parents, and then suddenly doesn’t understand why they aren’t going to pay his college tuition anymore. You guys really didn’t think this through, did you?  And you believed everything that the Leave Campaign told you?

Oh, dear.

You know, that would be comical if it wasn’t so damn tragic, because there are going to be real consequences now, which will affect a lot of people’s lives.

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A terrible anniversary today – the Freedom Summer Murders

Fifty two years ago tonight, three young men were murdered by a group of white Mississippians in the Ku Klux Klan.  Among the men complicit in this crime were members of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office and the Philadelphia (Mississippi) Police Department.

This was a mere six years before I was born.  Many people of my generation are familiar with this event through the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, although the film doesn’t even cover everything that happened that awful summer.

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That horrific crime in Orlando and two heroes

Kelly and I have both been shocked, horrified, and angry over what happened in Orlando.  Truly, it is stunning to me that such a thing could happen, and even more stunning that we as a society could keep allowing these events to happen over and over and over again.

Kelly vented a lot of anger in her earlier post, and there’s nothing more I can say about how we feel about this.  But I want to be a little specific about some of the intellectually dishonest arguments being made by people around the country trying to explain all this away.  I also want to talk about two people who were there, and who did everything they could to save people’s lives, and still couldn’t save everyone.  They are still heroes, even if they themselves probably don’t feel that way, and probably wouldn’t use that word.

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Enough

Despite living on the very cusp of the middle class and constantly worrying that one slip will send us spinning into a void from which we won’t be able to return, Geoff and I enjoy a lot of privilege.  We’re white, we’re straight, we’re cis gendered, and, though we live in an expensive area of the country, we live in a fairly safe area of the country.  Gun ownership isn’t very high and health care is good here.  It’s isn’t nearly as hard to get good mental health care here as it is elsewhere in the US.

And yet, after what happened in Orlando yesterday, I’m angry.  I am angry that we live in a country that has wholly abdicated the promise of freedom upon which it was founded.  We are no longer free from tyranny and fear, you and I.

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Sometimes, fear is a good thing

As a part-time first responder who is interested in emergency management, disaster recovery, and safety in general, I read pretty much everything related to those topics that I can get my hands on, including a lot of stuff about how people respond in a crisis.  It’s fascinating stuff, and some really excellent books have been written about it, such as  Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why. 

A side effect of this is that I have started paying attention to what I would call “unusual” deaths and accidents.  People keep doing things that I would consider to be pretty damn unsafe, and it costs them.  Recent examples are plenty.  A man leaves the designated paths at Yellowstone, and falls into a spring that is so high-temperature and acidic that there is literally no body to recover.  A young man accidentally shoots himself while taking a selfie with a pistol.  A tourist in Australia goes swimming at 10 at night in an area clearly marked with signs warning about crocodiles and gets killed by a crocodile over 14 feet long.  Or the guy in Georgia back in March who decided that it would be cool to pack an old lawnmower with 3 pounds of Tannerite and then shoot at it from only 40 feet away.  He blew off his own leg, and the whole thing was caught on video.

And I realized that what all of these people had in common was this: a lack of fear.  Specifically, a lack of what I would consider to be the healthy kind of fear.

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Wow – there are zika virus conspiracy theories now

This is a thing?  Snopes has to talk about it?  Wow.  OK, where do I start.

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Gratitude & Grief

Life is always a mixture of the bitter and the sweet, the dark and the light, the gratitude and grief.  I admit that I often focus on the bitter parts to the exclusion of all else.  That is in large part due to the fact that a large portion of my 20’s and almost all of my 30’s have been spent dealing with one crisis or another and, last year, dealing with death after death.  That, and the way that people treat you, tends to color one’s outlook on the world a bit.  Depression doesn’t help either.

That being said, this year is turning out to be one of the best in a long time.  Despite losing Bucky last week, things seem to be looking up for us.

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Dear Benioff and Weiss… WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?

OK guys, I get it.  George just hasn’t been able to crank out the books fast enough, and now the TV show has caught up to the books, more or less.  So now you no longer have all that juicy source material to work from, you just have whatever tidbits GRRM has given you about where the story is going.  That’s fine.

But guys?  I’m worried.  Frankly, you are starting to scare me a little bit.  Not having Book Six or Book Seven to work from does not mean that you should suddenly become nihilists.  It’s not a race to see who can kill more characters.  Moving the story forward does not mean taking a large metaphorical dump on the hopes and dreams of the fans, ok?

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Indianapolis brewery owner is made of awesome

I can’t say I have ever been to Indianapolis.  But I ever go, I am going to give the Black Acre Brewing Company some of my business, at least stop in for lunch or something.  Why?   Because the owner, Jordan Gleason, threw a sexist meathead out of his place and then posted a Facebook rant about how appalled he is by the way women in the service industry are treated and by sexism in general.  And his post is going a bit viral as a result.

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Something positive, for a change

Well, I thought it would be nice to talk about something a little more uplifting, so I thought I would share this story with you.  At least until I can find something with cute furry animals.

This past Easter Sunday, some kids interrupted their Easter Egg hunt to help the police catch a couple of burglary suspects.  And they did it in such a clever way, I still find myself marveling at how quickly they thought on their feet.  Check out the video below the cut.

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