Hi again from the Bastion on the Puget Sound. We’ve reported several times about American youth who succumbed to suicide, most recently, University of Washington co-ed Carly Henley, We have also expressed grief and outrage for those American youth who were driven to this final tragic act by their peers. According to studies by the Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the leading cause of death of those between 15 – 24 and the fourth among children 10 – 14. More and more of these deaths are being attributed to bullying at school and on the Internet.
We were, therefore, encouraged to learn that ~ in preparation for a national conference on the subject ~ the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to American schools detailing the responsibilities of these educational institutions and in particular, how to recognize when bullying becomes a violation of the victim’s civil rights, a federal crime.
While I admit this is a good start, I don’t think it’s nearly enough. It’s just all the federal government can afford to do at present. I have some concerns now about the budgetary ability of federal prosecutors to investigate reports of civil rights violations in Academia. I am less unsure, particularly in these hard times, whether the schools alone have the resources, money or person power to effectively monitor the sadistic tendencies among their respective student bodies. And especially where lesbian and gay students are concerned, whether it’s as high a priority as preserving a sports curriculum or making capital improvements against a projected growth in the student population.
I also have serious doubts about whether increased security, greater vigilance or sterner sanctions by the government or the schools will do as much as hoped to solve the problem. There is a particular and unprecedented virulence in the cruelty our children are inflicting on one another. These are not just random attacks on targets of opportunity. They are intelligent, creatively constructed, sadistic campaigns by a group of young people to inflict maximum pain on another young person. Suicide is their ultimate goal and with the media coverage out there and a peer network online, every time a child kills themselves, other children contact those responsible to learn more about driving someone to suicide.
How children turn out and how they behave is first and fundamentally not only the province but the purview of their primary caregivers. So when I see young human beings acting with such deliberate savagery, I cannot help but wonder what on behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of the homes in which some of these kids live.
Is that where bullies picked up the idea that predatory behavior is acceptable? Like many child abuse victims, are they rationalizing the license to do that because their parents are hurting them at home? As busy as many American parents are working 50 – 60 hours for less than they made working 40 three years ago, is this a case of children not getting enough time and personal attention at home and taking it out on some of their age peers? Are the television programs, films, DVDs and video games which have replaced pacifiers as entertainment while parents pursue the private pleasures that are sometimes the only way to cope with life stress, are these desensitizing our youth to the needs of others for understanding and compassion?
This letter the Department of Education is sending out to the schools this week should find its way into the mailbox of every American household. If our children need to be parented by a community in order to stop killing one another, it’s about time we cared about them and accepted that responsibility.
If we cannot do that, we can at least be honest with them, tell them they’re not that important and then stop preaching compassion out of one side of our mouth and laissez faire material acquisition out of the other.
We reported earlier this year the arrest of a man who left vulgar, obscene and threatening voice mail messages with Washington’s U.S. Senator Patty Murray. We considered such behavior totally inappropriate and apparently so does the federal judge who put this idiot in jail for a year and a day. I wonder where a man who threatens a woman politician ranks in the prison hierarchy. I can’t believe it’s real high so I imagine he’s going to have some interesting nights. Yep, for more on this, please go here.
There’s a new dam across the Colorado River just south of the Hoover Dam that will absolutely and totally take your breath away, even if you never drive across the flipping thing. I’m real judicious in recommending any human engineering achievement which seeks to outdo the majesty of what was here first. This bridge, like Hoover Dam itself, is an example of what humankind can do when it works with nature. The story and the photographs are awesome so for more, yep, go here.
Well, it’s nice to know someone’s making out in the worst recession since the Great Depression. According to a report recently released by America’s Social Security Administration, wages for the 131 best paid workers increased five hundred percent between 2008 – 2009. Both average and median incomes dropped and one in 34 workers did not have any income at all. For more on this, go here.
Thanks to the vision, daring, courage and sheer chutzpah of a European scientifically-trained financier and investor, a “green” factory in Oregon has become one of the state’s largest employers. The SolarWorld factory in Hillsboro makes photovoltaics, which is a broad term to cover the collection, storage and generation of solar energy. Experts, including this international businessman, predict that within two years, the United States will be the second largest market for the solar energy industry, behind Germany but ahead of Japan and Spain. Yep, for more on this one, please go here.
We were neither surprised nor even outraged to learn that a Congressional investigation has determined that both BP and Halliburton were both responsible for the failure of the cement which precipitated the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Debacle. I will say, however, that if BP and Halliburton were parents who birthed and raised me, I’d probably be doing some serious praying for orphanhood. And that the total lack of ethics and concern for the impact on other human beings does not also become a hallmark of emerging green industry giants. Yep, for more, go here.
Sam: Ummm, I’m going to take a shot at this. Do they still incarcerate miscreants in dungeons under castles?
Felina: Dungeons and castles, yes. Quite so.
Sam: Maybe back East, Felina. I haven’t seen too many castles out here in the Northwest.
Felina: There are some in Victoria. But I do not remember smelling incarcerated human beings the nights we visited them.
Sam: And you’d have noticed. That was the holiday where you tried to give a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman a pooper scooper for his horse.
Felina: He was actually quite decent about it.
Sam: Cornered in a stable, having no idea how we got in there, looking into a set of smoldering blue eyes that are impressive even to other cougars, and then discovering that something big enough to eat him can also communicate with him, yep, I can appreciate why he might possibly have been on his best behavior.
Felina: “A set of smoldering blue eyes that are impressive even to other cougars,” eh?
Sam: And obviously to this member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They inherited a stiff upper lip from the English and then made it a global behavior gold standard.
Felina: The English are those people who live on the island on the other side of the one with little humans and lots of four leaf clovers. Where that Big Clock and all the castles with dungeons are. And where they drink lots of tea, eat little fried fish for breakfast, and sometimes kill each other after a soccer game.
Sam: Yep, those English.
Felina: Ah, so “the smoldering blue eyes” was not just some of your Yankee Doodle flipping charm, then?
Sam: Felina, we’ve been mated like eight millions years or so and there’s nothing wrong with our love life. So yeah, it was some charm and the total truth. However, we digress.
Felina: Quite so. We are the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Brownings of digression.
Sam: In a land where there aren’t very many castles so probably not very many dungeons either.
Felina: Where they punish the bad among their number by putting them together in cages in conditions unparalleled in the rest of Creation.
Sam: Yep, that about describes the American penal system. The world inside those cages is more savage that any jungle in all of time. All of the terrible things they did that got them sent there in the first place, they do to one another and there is absolutely no escape and no relief.
Felina: And the good human beings pay to keep them there and then are victimised when these savage specimens are released and again free to prey on their own kind. And this, they consider rehabilitation. Even for Jonah’s whale, that is a lot to swallow. The stupidity of it is absolutely stunning.
Sam: In a way, it’s an inspirational monument to bad examples.
Felina: In a land with so many such shining tributes.
Sam: So now that we’ve sort of re-established that, what’s with the emails and the question about those caves under the castles?
Felina: I was asking that this man who made the threats to Patty Murray be confined in such a place because I had not embraced the utter hell of those cages.
Sam: And before you found out there are no dungeons.
Felina: And before I found out there were no more dungeons. I have decided that this person is probably being punished enough. It still makes me sad but I am no longer angry.
Sam: Felina, human beings are the poor country cousins of the animal kingdom. As Dueling Banjo backwards as they sometimes appear, they are hard not to love. Just don’t let ‘em break your heart, Lass because if you care about them too much, they surely will.
Felina: Sigh. I know, my love. But they are quite talented banjo players.
Sam: They are indeed, Felina. They are indeed. And on that note?
Felina: And on that note, gentle readers, thank you and may the Creator bless and keep you.
SURVIVING HARD TIMES
Our thanks to Ray and Mei Ling in Brooklyn, New York for sending us this link to economic survival tips. The Recession has necessarily spawned a swarm of these but this particular website covers every from the single person renting to a home-owning family having trouble making their mortgage payments. It’s an easy site to navigate and the language is clear, concise, straightforward and friendly. Yep, for more, please go here.
ON THE CANCER FRONT
Taking aspirin to prevent colon cancer and to reduce its mortality rate has been an accepted protocol now for decades. The side affects of the recommended dosage, however, were enough for doctors to discourage the practice in those with a low risk factor. Now, it has been determined that a much smaller amount, like a tablet of baby aspirin, will accomplish the same thing but without the harsh side effects. Yep, for more on this one, please go here.
RESOURCES AND RELATED LINKS:
Cancer Research Journal
National Cancer Institute (American)
Fighting Breast Cancer: Breast Cancer Survivor Stories
Science Daily: Health & Medicine News
American Cancer Statistics 2009
Canadian Cancer Statistics 2009
HEALTH NEWS
I do so love it when one of my alleged passions turns out to be not only virtuous but healthy. I have a passion for chocolate second only to something else which is not a food group. My wife, Loretta Joy, God rest her soul, once bet one of her girlfriends that if she could get me to eat anything as long as it was either dipped in chocolate or coated in it. I don’t know what I ate that night and I don’t ever want to know. The bet she won we spent on a weekend at the ocean so there’s one more reason for loving chocolate. Yep, all this to tell you that scientists have “discovered” that drinking a couple cups of hot cocoa every day improves the health of the brain and sharpens mental acuity in general. Yep, for more, please go here.
One in three Americans could be diagnosed with diabetes by 2050, according to a recent study released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. The disease was the seventh leading cause of death in the States in 2007. The dramatic increase in the prevalence of this disease is closely linked to an equally alarming rise in the obesity rate, particularly among children. For more, please go here.
In an effort to entice appropriate choices, rather than force them, school lunch program administrators are doing what smart restaurateurs have been doing since mammoth steaks and tusk soup were on the commercial menu. They’re presenting it better. And it’s working. Yep, for more, please go here.
GOOD EXAMPLES
As any health care provider knows, individualized attention to patients can make all the difference. A nurse practitioner in Bellingham, Washington, a community of 80,000in the northwest corner of the state on the border with Canada, visits her patients at their homes and workplaces on a specially designed bicycle and trailer. Two years ago she started Mobile Medicine and made quite an impact on the community. For more on a dedicated medical profession who found a way to return to the days when country doctors made house calls, yep, please go here.
In what is seen as a brilliant academic application of cyber technology, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 2,000-year-old biblical and apocryphal texts discovered last century in caves in the Judean desert, earlier this week announced that it is joining with Google to download newly digitalized images of these ancient writings and make them available on the Internet. Now, since the reproductions are at least as legible as the originals and in some case, more, there’s no need to risk further degradation of them by exposing them to light and air. Yep, for more on this one, please go here.
I’ve always been a strong proponent of fathers and sons doing cool stuff together but I’ve got to admit I’d never have imagined such a team putting a camera into outer space, recovering it and publishing some incredible photos. Then again, these two individuals are native New Yorkers and even more specifically, from Brooklyn. If I’ve learned one thing about this particular “tribe,” it is that it is they who put the “push” in pushing the window. Nice going, guys. Yep, for a video on how they did it, go here.
NORTHSTAR FAVORITES
Sightline Daily is the best Pacific Northwest source of environmentally friendly news we’ve encountered yet. They draw from newspapers and National Public Radio sources in Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state.
Meade Fisher Observes Humanity From A Safe Distance is a blog authored by an outdoor writer, photographer, West Coast kayaker and environmentalist living in the San Francisco Bay area. These short, humorous, few holds barred observations on the machinations of the human species run from the whimsical to the arid and occasionally to the quietly outraged. I’ve been a fan of this particular writer for years and I’ve always found him worth the read.
SEATTLE SCENES
Fountain on the campus of the University of Washington
Photo by Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller.
Whether you live here or plan to visit ~ and whatever it is you enjoy doing at home or as a tourist ~ you’ll find it, you’ll find it listed here at seattlepi.com.
SEATTLE FACTS AND FIGURES
Seattle Rainfall in Comparison To Other US Cities
Seattle Geography & Climate
For more information about Seattle
OTHER RELATED STUFF FROM THE SHORES OF THE SALISH SEA
For live cameras on Seattle, the Puget Sound and Washington State
Mount Rainier slide show
Eat healthy while you’re here – Seattle PCC Co-Op
Take some fresh produce back to your hotel – Seattle Farmers Markets
CRITTER STUFF
We’re pleased to announce that one of our ‘resident’ orcas had a baby and she’s a real cuter, this one. There are two pods and this is the southern one, L-116, which spends most of its time in the Salish Sea in the American San Juans and the Puget Sound. This is the mother’s first offspring but another orca was born back in August and it is doing fine. This brings the population of L-116 to 86 now. For more and a picture of mom and offspring, yep, go here.
National Wildlife Magazine
Go Northwest: Northwest Wildlife Websites
BBC’s wildlife finder
National Geographic Daily News - Animals
Retrieverman’s Weblog: Engaging articles on domestic & wildlife in the American South
There’s a heavy earth moving equipment operator in Seattle who owes his life, twice, to his co-workers. Twice within three months, working on the same equipment at the same job site, this guy had a heart attack and the other guys on the job gave him the CPR that kept him from flat-lining. I think that’s all great but at least for me, it’s also a little spooky and I can’t help but wonder if maybe the reason he had those cardiac incidents in the first place might have had something to do with his fitness for the work, job stress, maybe the equipment didn’t like him or maybe the job they’ve been working on isn’t supposed to be completed. We’re watching this one and if it happens again in three months, we’re assuming a supernatural spin on this, wishing it a good life and never ever bringing it up again. I hear Pandora’s Box was beautiful as long as it was kept shut. Yep, for more on this one, go here.
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Rusty
