Yearly Archives: 2007

21st Century Neighborhood Watch

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Over at Life in Forsyth Lucy has a post titled "Another White Van" that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of a vigilant neighbor armed with email.  It seems that a man was seen trolling their neighborhood in a white van.   A neighbor noticed him, did a little research on the tag numbers, got a name and thought they found evidence that the driver was a registered sex offender.  They fired off an email to warn the neighbors and the neighbors forwarded it to their friends and pretty soon everyone was on the alert.

Well, it ends up that there the person they spotted had the same name as a registered sex offender but he himself had a clean record.  In addition, he was in the neighborhood with his girlfriend to pick up a dance student and since he’d never been there before he was slowing down in front of houses in an effort to find the right house.   Unfortunately the person who knew this wasn’t part of the email loop so didn’t know what was going on. Luckily one of the people in the loop found out the truth and let everyone know.

Lucy, who is also a 2004 transplant from the DC area, points out the the Beltway Snipers were originally thought to be a white guy in a white van, but in fact were two black guys in a blue sedan.  Her point is a good one: while it’s always good to be vigilant we can often be led astray by half truths and speculation. This case also points out the inherent flaws of email; just ask anyone in the working world to tell you stories about someone left out of the loop for a project or meeting because they were accidentally left off the "cc" list.

Luckily no one got hurt in this case, and it seems that at least one of the neighbors did the right thing by contacting the police instead of handling things themselves.  The police were the folks who figured out it was a case of mistaken identity.  I’m assuming they contacted the driver and found out why he was there  so he might have gotten a little fright when they called, but that’s infinitely better than getting a beat-down from a bunch of scared neighbors.

Out of NoVA by the Skin of our Teeth

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As I’ve written many times before I grew up in Northern Virginia.  My family moved there in ’72 when I was in first grade and I lived there until we moved here in ’04.  Celeste’s family moved to Northern Virginia in ’79 and she lived there until we moved.  We both went to college at George Mason University in the heart of Fairfax County so we didn’t even leave the area for school. (Well I spent my freshman year in Nebraska at Concordia College-Seward, but that was really like an extended vacation).

We had several reasons for moving, but probably the most prominent was that we just couldn’t stomach the craziness anymore.  What had once been semi-rural suburbs had been fully developed and it seemed that just about every open space had been paved over and rush hour had grown to an all-day affair.  Hell, there were even traffic jams on Saturday.  If Northern Virginia had remained as it was when we first got out of college we probably would have stayed, but we just couldn’t take what it had become.  We could see first hand that growth in the area was out of control, and each year it seemed the NoVa counties were announcing astounding population growth.  So we got out.

Today I came across this article on WashingtonPost.com that makes me even happier that we left when we did.  Let me give you some numbers and excerpts from the article:

  • Loudoun County has added more than 100,000 people since 2000, increasing its population by 59 percent
  • Prince William County, where Celeste and I lived from ’96-’04 has added 88,000 people since 2000
  • "Fairfax County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, has packed in nearly
    47,000 more residents. The next fastest-growing counties — Stafford,
    Spotsylvania and Culpeper — are on the edges of the expanding region."
  • Overall, the state’s population has grown by 560,000 since 2000
  • "The study also found that 33 cities and counties have lost residents in
    the past six years — older urban areas such as Richmond, Petersburg
    and Roanoke, as well as rural counties in Southside and southwestern
    Virginia. Many of those residents seem to have migrated north, along
    with workers from other parts of the United States and the world who
    have been lured by the Washington job market."

That last item doesn’t surprise me.  Southwestern Virginia, along with northwestern NC, is actually served by many of the media outlets here in Winston-Salem and they are suffering the same economic fate as the rest of the region, with huge chunks of jobs in the furniture and textile industries going overseas.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re heading to places like Northern Virginia for jobs.

Speaking of jobs, here’s another tidbit from the article:

No other region in the country, however, has created as many jobs in
recent years as the Washington metropolitan area. Between 2000 and
2005, the region added 359,000 new jobs, said Stephen S. Fuller,
director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason
University, citing Labor Department statistics. That was 75,000 more
jobs than the nation’s No. 2 job engine, Miami.

"We’ve been
adding jobs faster than we’ve been able to add resident workers," he
said. "Had we been able to produce more housing, we could have added
more people." The Washington region is the eighth most-populous in the
United States, Fuller said, but is fourth in the number of total jobs,
trailing only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The imbalance
probably means more congestion on Northern Virginia’s already-choked
roads. "The downside [to growth] is pretty clear," said Corey A.
Stewart (R-Occoquan), chairman of the Prince William Board of County
Supervisors, who was elected last year on a pledge to curb residential
development. "Increased tax bills. Crowded schools. Public services
stretched and overwhelmed."

I can’t argue that the job market in the DC area is great.  The problem is that housing is so expensive that all but the highest earners end up moving to the outer counties in order to afford a decent place to live.  Public transportation is expanding, but it can’t keep up with the pace of growth so that puts more people on the road and makes an already bad traffic situation almost impossible.

Now that things are getting ugly in places like Prince William and Loudoun the local politicians are starting to tighten up on development.  Unfortunately they didn’t listen to their constituents who were shouting for limits ten years ago.  Instead they gave the developers free reign and now they’ve got a mess.

The leaders here in the Piedmont Triad are pushing hard for more economic development, and in the wake of the exodus of all the textile and furniture business it’s hard to blame them.  I hope, though, that they take a long hard look at what happened in Northern Virginia and control growth from the beginning with a comprehensive growth plan.

I’ve always loved tilting at windmills.

First Pigpoop, Now an H-Bomb

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First I found out that Smithfield Foods has turned parts of eastern North Carolina into a festering pool of pig poop, and now I find out that the area is home to an unexploded H-Bomb that plunged into a swampy field when the the B-52 carrying it crashed in 1961.   Lenslinger wrote about it and I decided to look into it a little more since, well, it’s kind of a wild story.

The bomb plunged into the ground and thankfully didn’t explode in a place called Faro, NC.  One Google search on "faro north carolina" brings me to the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Emergency Response and Environmental Branch.  Here’s the description from their site:

In addition to nuclear facilities and the statewide network,
ERM performs environmental monitoring at four other sites:

  • Pulstar, a
      research reactor located at NC State University in Raleigh
     
  • PCS Phosphate,
      a phosphogypsum mining and manufacturing facility in Aurora
  • Faro, NC, the
      crash site of a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons

Nice.  So not only did a bomb drop 45 years ago, but it’s considered a significant enough risk that the state nuclear inspectors still keep an eye on the site.

Whatever thoughts I had about someday living on that side of the state have pretty much been killed by the idea of wading through possibly radioactive pig crap to find a house that will cost a mint to insure due to the hurricanes that hit the area often enough that the hockey team is named the Hurricanes.  The mountains it is.

Holy Hogcrap Batman

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Being in the land of Lexington BBQ and being an omnivore of great accomplishment I do love me some pork.  Unfortunately for my peace of mind I read this article from Rolling Stone about the hog processing industry, and Smithfield Foods in particular.  I don’t recommend reading it right before a meal.

The whole article is disturbing, but this excerpt hit home because the operation in question isn’t too far from where I live:

Smithfield’s expansion was unique in the history of the
industry: Between 1990 and 2005, it grew by more than 1,000
percent. In 1997 it was the nation’s seventh-largest pork producer;
by 1999 it was the largest. Smithfield now kills one of every four
pigs sold commercially in the United States. As Smithfield
expanded, it consolidated its operations, clustering millions of
fattening hogs around its slaughterhouses. Under Luter, the company
was turning into a great pollution machine: Smithfield was suddenly
producing unheard-of amounts of pig shit laced with drugs and
chemicals. According to the EPA, Smithfield’s largest
farm-slaughterhouse operation — in Tar Heel, North Carolina —
dumps more toxic waste into the nation’s water each year than all
but three other industrial facilities in America. (Emphasis mine).

Ain’t that nice?  There’s a whole lot more about Smithfield’s North Carolina operation in the article and it’s enough to make any normal person sick, if not by the descriptions of the pig crap then by the polluting practices of the industry.  Here’s another excerpt to get an idea of what you’re in for:

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle
is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and
terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They
become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters
microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will
rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory
pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and
are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds —
oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would
likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying
until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be
slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many
drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own
power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally
killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit
its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a
host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide,
carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals.
In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens
that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella,
cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit
can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons —
cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single
slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run
thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions
between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn
piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the
lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods
have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate
swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and
spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the
industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn
hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow
mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be
punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the
liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can
inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding,
accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the
lagoon in all directions.

and

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a
theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In
North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2
million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million
gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the
Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia,
Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of
the Clean Water Act — the third-largest civil penalty ever levied
under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of
Smithfield’s annual sales.

and

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming
happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by
a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of
effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina.
It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history,
more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years
earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched
it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen
miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea,
every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the
millions.

It’s hard to conceive of a fish kill that size. The kill began
with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and
dying. Then it spread in patches along the entire length and
breadth of the river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were
mounded wherever the river’s contours slowed the current, and the
riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a day dead fish completely
covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and beached and
piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the
river with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white
bellies — more fish than the river seemed capable of holding. The
smell of rotting fish covered much of the county; the air above the
river was chaotic with scavenging birds. There were far more dead
fish than the birds could ever eat.

Spills aren’t the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste
lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999,
Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste
into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers.
Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several
feet underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide
closing over the region’s waterways, converging on the
Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long,
well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained
behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the
land. Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered
in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead
pig three miles off the North Carolina coast.

Reading this reminds me about the time in college I was assigned "The Jungle" as part of an English Lit course.  I couldn’t eat burgers for a while, that’s for sure.

BBQ anybody? 

Traffic in the Triad

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What passes for traffic here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina would be considered a great traffic day back in DC (or in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc.).  Yet we do have traffic reporters and since they usually have one accident a morning to talk about they have to fill the time somehow.  WXII’s traffic reporter, Jenny, has had some memorable moments.  Here’s her most famous, the Traffic Rap:

Well I’d rather have a traffic reporter with time on her hands than to have actual traffic. I think.

Chicken Little’s Revenge

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So you’re sitting in your house watching television when a giant chunk of ice blasts through your roof and scares the bejezus out of you.  Your tendency is to think, "Man, what a bizarre and unlikely event" but you’d be amazed to find out that things falling from the sky happens more often than you’d think.  Simply visit this page on Boing Boing to find links to three such events and do a Google search on "frozen poop falling from airplanes" and "space junk falling to earth" to find enough stories of crap falling from the sky to make you want to invest in a Kevlar umbrella.

As the man known as "Turd Blossom" I think the odds of me being taken out by a ball of frozen poop falling from the sky are actually pretty good.

Sex and Taxes: Now That’s a Reporting Gig

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David Cay Johnston is a reporter for the New York Times who has written many articles about the IRS and the US tax system.  Heck he’s written books about taxes, so imagine my surprise when I saw that he wrote an article titled Is Live Sex On-Demand Coming to Hotel TVs? I can imagine some other reportorial combinations that might make more sense, like say taxes and celebrity obituaries (death and taxes, get it?), but sex and taxes?  He’s also written an article titled Indications of a Slowdown in Sex Entertainment Trade so I’m guessing he’s bringing the same in-depth research to porn that he does to taxes.

Oh, wait he has written an obituary so I guess my death and taxes idea wasn’t too far off.

I’m wondering if Lex is looking to start covering the sex trade.  He spent years covering religion so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch (insert Catholic priest or Jimmy Swaggart mention here).   I wonder if JR would let him?  I’m thinking it might be a good way to kick start the News & Record’s multimedia ambitions.  I can pretty much guarantee you that they’ll be beating WXII to the punch, as it were. And maybe he can get some video tips from Lenslinger.  And what the heck, I guess I can step up and help with the research.

Last thought on this tangent: when staying in a hotel always, ALWAYS, sanitize the remote before you use it, or at least wash your hands vigorously after using it.  You really don’t want to know where it’s been.

Different Trouble at School

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Thanks to distance learning programs becoming more and more common the kinds of online degrees you can find today are much more diverse than ever before. There are many online universities to choose from as well, so you can make sure that your online university offers what you are looking for ahead of time, like an online special education degree for those who want.
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Snowletter
Back on October 30, 2006 a teacher and the principal at Lewisville Elementary were suspended with pay while they were investigated.  I originally posted about it here and I’ve updated the post several times since then.  At the beginning of the new year the principal, Mr. Rash, was reinstated with his pocket a little lighter (10 days of his suspension was unpaid) and today (January 17, 2007) the teacher, Mr. Snow was reinstated in full.  I should point out that Mr. Rash was suspended because of how he originally handled the allegations against Mr. Snow, thus the unpaid part of his suspension, and Mr. Snow was suspended due to the allegations for which he has now been cleared.

The image above is a scan of the letter that the school system sent home with the students today (click on it to enlarge) and this followed a late automated call from the school superintendent last night.  That call was made because the father of the child who made the accusations showed up at the Board of Education last night and during the public part of the meeting complained that Mr. Snow was going to be reinstated. From the article about it in the Winston-Salem Journal:

An angry parent
confronted members of the Forsyth County school board in a meeting last night after he learned that school officials planned to return a
teacher who was investigated by the sheriff’s office to the classroom
this week.

"What concerns me
greatly is I learned of this decision via the grapevine," said the parent, whose child is a student at Lewisville Elementary School and
one of the children involved in the misconduct allegations against the
science teacher, Alan Snow. The Winston-Salem Journal is not
identifying the parent in order protect the identity of the child.

The parent said he
is concerned that he might not have enough time to prepare his family for the teacher’s return if it happened as quickly as school-system
officials told him that it could.

Superintendent Don
Martin and school-board chairman Donny Lambeth interrupted the father
a few minutes after he began speaking during the meeting.

Martin also
approached the father in the auditorium after the meeting ended and chastised him for talking about the case during an open session,
telling him that doing so could create more publicity before parents
could be advised about the teacher’s status.

The parents of the
child involved in the case met privately with the school system’s attorneys and other officials after the public meeting.

Martin updated the
school board on the case during a closed session last night, but he said later that no decision has been made about whether Snow can return
to teaching.

In his letter to the parents Superintendent Martin expressed regret that the investigation by the Sheriff’s and District Attorney’s offices took so long and that he appreciated the parents’ and Mr. Snow’s patience in the matter.  I’d say the least they should be is appreciative.  The man lived through the holidays with this hanging over his head and he’s been in limbo for close to 90 days and that’s simply unacceptable to me.

In a comment posted a couple of days ago on my original post a person going by the moniker P. Smith made some interesting comparisons between Mr. Snow’s case and the Duke Lacrosse case.  In the first paragraph of that comment he/she wrote the following:

Some interesting comparisons to what happened at Duke and the case in
Lewisville–an allegation from an unreliable witness–in this case a
teacher with a vendetta against another teacher. Sounds like the
science teacher is coming back to Lewisville after a thorough
investigation which found no wrong doing on him. Now, the question is:
what happens to someone who makes up a story to "get back at another
person"?

Until now I’ve only heard about a student making an allegation against Mr. Snow, but P. Smith seemed to know about Mr. Snow being cleared at least a day before it became a news item which leads me to believe he/she is tapped into the "grapevine" that the student’s dad referred to in the Journal article, and so I’m wondering which teacher the grapevine is saying had it out for Mr. Snow.

Now comes the truly hard part for the school.  Mr. Snow is an incredibly popular teacher with many students and parents and I have a feeling that there are going to be some festering wounds left by this experience.  I can only imagine what Mr. Snow is feeling these days, and he will be a larger man than most of us if he is able to return to school and not harbor some serious animosity towards those who were ready to believe the worst. (Speaking of which, to this date no one has said what Mr. Snow was accused of, so everyone was left to imagine the worst).  And I’m sure that there will be many members of the Lewisville community wondering what the consequences should be for those who filed the allegations against Mr. Snow.  There will also be those wondering if Mr. Snow has grounds for a civil case against his accuser’s family and there may even be those who will push him to sue.  Finally, I’m sure there are plenty of people who know who made the accusations and I’m willing they won’t be too shy about sharing that knowledge.  All of this can spell serious trouble for the school’s community, and I guess the best we can hope for at this point is that we keep the kids out of the fray as much as possible.  That’s something about which I’m sure everyone can agree.

As for the school system I think they have to seriously re-think some of their policies.  When I talked to the Assistant Superintendent for Lewisville, a very nice lady named Charlene Davis, she emphasized to me that if they are going to err it is going to be on the side of protecting the children.  I’m all for that, but I think they can do so without killing a teacher’s career.  For instance, I see no reason to make the teacher’s name public until there’s sufficient evidence or reason to do so.  Sure we the parents will probably know what’s going on, but in the Google Age the accusations will live long and spread far whether they’re founded or not.  Let’s put it this way; if Mr. Snow decides to leave town and start fresh somewhere else he’ll probably be checked out by all potential employers and if they type his name into a search engine what do you think will pop up?  What are the chances they’ll see the article about the allegations and then stop looking before they get to the articles about his being cleared?

What I mentioned to Ms. Davis is that they could have protected the kids by removing Mr. Snow from the classroom and they could have protected Mr. Snow by saying that he was on a temporary assignment with the school system, or that he was taking a leave of absence.  Whatever, as long as they don’t make public that a teacher is being investigated until they have solid evidence that something’s going on then I think they’ll be doing a lot better.

Another issue they need to work on is communication.  They definitely did a better job once enough parents complained about not knowing what was going on, but they need to have a communication process already planned out for instances like this.  By not communicating effectively they let the grapevine or rumor mill do the communicating for them and that helps no one.

**Update 1/22/07** In the Sunday, January 21, 2007 Winston-Salem Journal columnist Scott Sexton had the following in his piece:

The man wanted to know
whether school officials were about to put a teacher who had been
investigated on sexual-abuse allegations involving his son back into
the classroom Thursday morning. If so, he wanted to know why he and his
wife had not been told about it.

and

Dealing with sex-abuse
allegations is difficult for all parties. The parents ride an emotional
roller coaster, and the teacher, whose livelihood and reputation are at
stake, goes through hell, too. Investigators have to tread lightly when
interviewing a child, and school officials must work hard to balance
the serious nature of the accusations with the rights of their employee.

As far as I know this is the first time that the specific allegations against Mr. Snow have been made public and I’ve emailed Mr. Sexton to see if he’ll share where he heard those specific allegations.  Was it at the board meeting (did the father blurt it out during the public session) or did he get it in private from the family or from a school official?  And no matter the source, why specify the charges now that Mr. Snow has been cleared and after everyone (including his own paper) had been so careful to avoid publicly airing the specific allegations?

To sum up I can only say that I hope that Mr. Snow can find peace back at school, the Lewisville community can somehow patch the wounds of this event and the school system can learn from its mistakes before more careers are jeopardized.  As for the child and his family, I don’t know them (don’t want to know who they are) and I only hope that they somehow find whatever help they need. 

I Swear

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Here in North Carolina an appeals court just ruled that a Muslim woman can proceed with a lawsuit claiming that she should be allowed to swear to tell the truth on the Quran instead of the Bible.  As you can imagine this is causing some consternation among the locals, and it’s making for some nice debate.  Over at the Greensboro News & Record Doug Clark makes this point:

This is an important case about an old tradition, or ritual, in our
courts. I think there is continued value in asking witnesses to swear
their truthfulness upon a sacred text (or affirming their oath if they
prefer). But the practice is meaningful only if the text is held as
sacred by the persom making the promise. If that’s a Quran, or the
Hebrew Bible, or some other holy text, then so be it. Our law should
not bestow authority exclusively on one above the others.

I have to say that I agree with Doug’s point.  I mean how logical is it to ask someone to swear the truth on something they don’t believe in?  Doesn’t it give them license to lie?

In my role on the Lewisville Zoning Board of Adjustment I get to hear "cases" along with the other board members.  In our training we were told that we function pretty much like judges in a court of law; our job isn’t to offer an opinion on how properties should be zoned but rather to interpret whether or not the zoning laws are being met.  Whenever we hear a case we have witnesses who either support or oppose the proposed project and we have to swear those witnesses in.  Most do swear on the Bible but in one case we had a lady who said that it went against her Christian beliefs to swear on the Bible so she was able to simply affirm that she would tell the truth.  Her position was a new one to me and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I came across a comment from Cara Michele on Ed Cone’s blog about the Quran case.  Here’s what she wrote:

"Again, you have heard that it
was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the
oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all:
either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is
his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.
And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white
or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything
beyond this comes from the evil one."  — words of Jesus in Matt. 5:33-37

If the Bible is your sacred text, then you’re not going to swear on it.  (That’s assuming that you’ve read it.  And if you haven’t read your sacred text, well… what are you waiting for!) 

And if the Bible isn’t your sacred text, then swearing on it is basically meaningless anyway, right?

Irony.

Interesting, huh?  Personally I’d be fine with moving to a non-sectarian affirmation of truth across the board.  Perjury is perjury whether you swear on the Bible or on a stack of X-Men comic books, so why not make everyone’s lives simpler by simply requiring witnesses to say "I promise to tell the truth"?

On a lighter note, this reminds me of a moment we had last year when we (the ZBOA) couldn’t find the Bible and we ended up using the town attorney’s PDA Bible memory card for the swearing in. I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an act of faith for us to believe that the memory card was in fact a Bible, but in the end it didn’t matter as long as the people involved believed it was a Bible. And of course if we hadn’t found the Bible we could have proceeded with everyone affirming that they would tell the truth.  Kind of makes me wonder what the big deal is here.

 

Forecast Gloomy

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I was enjoying my cup of coffee this morning while catching up with email and favorite blog posts and my mood was positively sunny.  Then I came across this post on David Boyd’s blog and followed his instructions to view the Nuclear Jihad videos on the NY Times website.   Well, there went my good mood.  Here’s what David had to say about the videos:

The only thing more shocking than how extensive and user-friendly the
AQ Kahn network was, is how surprised our intelligence and government
officials were at how extensive and user-friendly the AQ Kahn network
was.

If we were this clueless about what was happening, even after our
senses were heightened following 9/11, then we’re just waiting. This
thing is Hurricane Katrina + 9/11 * 1000. We know it’s coming. We don’t
know where and when and what we’re going to do about it.

This economy and lifestyle we have in the US and the West in general is
a powerful thing. More people are living well in the West than have
lived well in the history of the world. This is the pinnacle of human
achievement and one wonders what can happen to derail it. This is it.
Once the bomb goes off, we’ll look back at this period of innocence and
naivete with longing. Enjoy it while it’s happening.

Remember when the 9/11 report came out and everyone was saying that our intelligence breakdown was in part a failure of imagination?  Well, how hard is it to imagine that at some point in the future we’ll be looking back at our current naivete with longing?  Think about how we look back at pre-9/11/01 now and then multiply by a factor of 10 and I think we have an idea about how right David probably is.

There went my good mood.