Thursday Writers Challenge

Write 500 words about: bees. Post a comment with a link to what you wrote, or with what you wrote.

#1

Everything about this setup sucks, lord,
Especially the part where you just sit in silence, 
Not responding to my hopeless whining
Give me something I can hold onto
Or please get out of the way
And let me embrace the despair that you 
Steadfastly fail to displace.

The cry of a child

On the list of things I should never have to do, and yet have to do far too often, somewhere very near the top is the entry that describes holding a child while they cry over their other parent's inexplicable behavior.

I love my kids, but this gets old, and frustrating. I cannot fix their broken relationship, any more than I could fix my own.

All I can do is hold them while they cry and, despite my growing cynicism and diminishing faith, find myself praying along with St. John at the end of the Apocalypse: "Even so, come, Jesus."

Don't send me email at work.

I'll admit to having a bias against using email ever since the company I work for was bought out by a large corporation, and our perfectly useful, secure imap server was replaced by an Exchange server that we have to run Windows inside a sandboxed VM in order to access it. (Unintended consequences strike again. Thanks, Sarbanes–Oxley.)

I'm not kidding.

Before the merger, to read my email, I fired up my client and read my email.

After the merger, to read my email, I:

• establish a VPN connection to the local office, using my "local" credentials (local ldap id/password)
• run remote desktop software to access a virtual machine running Windows 7 inside the office network
• establish a VPN connection to the corporate office, using my corporate credentials (secure token + pin)
• launch Outlook (as a contractor, I must use the full client, not Outlook Web Access) and sign in with my corporate ldap id/password, which are not synced with the local account.

On top of that, I probably have violated some policy just by posting this.

Any relationship between this byzantine process and batteries catching fire on airplanes is purely coincidental.

Last night, I dreamed of trains. Specifically, I dreamed that I was walking next to trains and train tracks.  Then I ducked to get under some branches, and someone tried to take my wallet, so I stabbed them with my pliers.

It's clear that my dreams are telling me to move to Portland. Or something else.

Sports reporters and Clearing logs

I met my wife on the Internet. I have had several significant friendships with people that I've only known or primarily known online. Two of my best friends are people I met via the Internet. Over the past years, I've had several friends that I've known only online pass away.

I have encountered people who obscure their identities in their online relationships. Some did so openly, acknowledging that their online persona was something that they intended to keep distinct from their "real life." Others did so in a fashion that could be considered subterfuge and misrepresentation.

At times, I have struggled with how to discuss my online friends with friends and family members. In particular, when talking to a person who has stated negative opinions about "online dating", Second Life (where I met my wife, for what it's worth,) or online friendships, I have on occasion allowed a misconception about the nature of my relationship to stand, or been less than forthcoming about it. For example, at least once in the past I've said that my wife and I were introduced by mutual friends; this is true, from my perspective, but it leaves out some facts: that our "meeting" was online, and that those "friends" were (with one exception) people I only knew online at the time.

A while back, sports reporters started telling us a story. They told the story that they wanted to hear, because it was a good story: the rising football star who lost both his grandmother and his leukemia-stricken girlfriend on the same day. It was a great story. It drove up ratings on TV and rankings on the web. It wasn't true, exactly. The girlfriend part, at least.

The staff at Notre Dame, to their credit, view Te'o as a victim. It's troubling that so many sports journalists are willing to pile on accusations that he was somehow a party to the deception. It's especially disingenuous because so many of them were in a position to investigate the alleged girlfriend as the various stories played out over the season, and none of them did. Nobody checked Stanford's student lists. Nobody looked for a death certificate. Nobody checked hospital records. Nobody did anything. Why not? Isn't that what journalism school is supposed to teach you? What does it say about the state of journalism when nobody bothers to verify a major news story about a Heisman candidate?

Considering the way online relationships have impacted my life, I am extremely sympathetic with Manti Te'o's situation. From what I have been able to read about it so far, he was naive, and he was victimized. Only he knows for sure, but absent any conclusive evidence, we should give him the benefit of the doubt.

Fisking Huckabee on the Bath MI Disaster

A post from Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate and late Conservative rock star, is making the rounds on Facebook:

Michael Tremoglie on the Italian website, Academia Res Publica, offers some food for thought about the Sandy Hook school shooting. He writes that the worst school killing in history wasn’t committed by a disaffected teenager, didn’t involve a gun, and happened before there was violent entertainment and before God was taken out of schools. In 1927 in Bath, Michigan, a middle-aged farmer blew up a schoolhouse, then detonated a car bomb. He killed 38 kids and six adults, and nobody ever figured out why.

Tremoglie notes that the only scholarly study of mass school killings was published by an Ohio sociology professor in 2007. It found that there is no holistic approach to investigating school killings, where interdisciplinary experts examine every possible angle and share their knowledge. Instead, different groups quickly seize on the tragedy to advance whatever angle they already believe. Liberals blame lax gun control laws. Conservatives blame violent media. Mental health groups say it shows the need for more funding. And so on. The study suggested that until we start investigating these tragedies the way we do other disasters, where experts from many different fields work together to discover the truth, we may never learn what really causes them or how to prevent them from happening again.

So much of this is untrue, it's pathetic.

The bombing was the work of a "farmer." Well, EVERYONE in Bath, Michigan at the time was a "farmer." But the bomber was also the former school district treasurer, a person known for being difficult, impatient and violent. He was bitter over his loss in a recent school board election, and was also facing foreclosure, and his wife was dying of tuberculosis. He had stopped working his farm, tried to give his horses away to a neighbor. He planted the explosives months before the event, and blew his own house up.

Mike Huckabee can't figure out why Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath school building. I can't figure out why anyone should listen to Mike Huckabee about anything.

The FBI has a very clear set of profiles for mass killers. The problem isn't that we need more investigations. The problem, clearly, is that we've created a culture where there's a prevailing abhorrence of guns and gun owners, and where people are unprepared to protect themselves. We've seeded the landscape with "gun-free zones" that are nothing more than target-rich environments for potential shooters. Paradoxically, we've simultaneously conditioned a generation of disaffected young men into numbness regarding gun violence via video games and movies. And to top it off, we've created a media system that sensationalizes the relatively rare mass killing incidents while largely ignoring murder rates in poor and minority communities.

There have been 76 people killed in mass-shooting incidents within the past 10 years. There were more than 440 school-aged children killed in Chicago in the past year. I submit that if we want to do something to protect children, we would be further ahead forcibly relocating the population of the greater Chicago area than we will either by more gun control or by putting police in schools.