Monday Reads: Crazy from the Heat (and other things)

Good Afternoon!

The heat is just unbearable around here.  I’m not sure I can take another couple of months of this but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it other than keep the shades drawn and send good thoughts to my functional but struggling central air unit.  I’m definitely wearing as little as possible around the house.  I thought I’d take the opportunity to feature crazy and strategically placed fruit today.

There’s a lot of craziness out there along with the crazy heat.  This first appalling story is from Indiana about a second grade teacher who punished a child for not believing in gawd.

A Lawsuit recently filed against a teacher at Forest Park Elementary School in Indiana alleged that a 7-year-old student was “banished” from sitting with other students at lunch after he revealed that he did not believe in God.

According to the lawsuit obtained by The Washington Post, second grade teacher Michelle Myer interrogated the student, who was identified with the initials A.B., about his religious beliefs after he told his classmates on the playground that he did not go to church because he did not believe in God.

As a result, the child was ordered to sit by himself during lunch for a three-day period.

“The defendant’s actions caused great distress to A.B. and resulted in the child being ostracized by his peers past the three-day ‘banishment.’”

“Ms. Meyer asked A.B. if he had told the girl that he did not believe in God and A.B. said he had and asked what he had done wrong,” the lawsuit explained. “Ms. Meyer asked A.B. if he went to church, whether his family went to church, and whether his mother knew how he felt about God… She also asked A.B. if he believed that maybe God exists.”

Several days later, Meyer sent A.B. to talk to another adult at the school, who “reinforced his feeling that he had done something very wrong,” the lawsuit said.

“On the day of the incident and for an additional two days thereafter, Ms. Meyer required that A.B. sit by himself during lunch and told him he should not talk to the other students and stated that this was because he had offended them. This served to reinforce A.B.’s feeling that he had committed some transgression that justified his exclusion.”

“A.B. came home from school on multiple occasions crying saying that he knows that everyone at school – teachers and students – hate him,” the suit continued. “Even now A.B. remains anxious and fearful about school, which is completely contrary to how he felt before this incident.”

I’ve been writing about the AirBnB Crazy GreedFest being perpetrated on our historic neighborhoods by out of towners.  Here’s a first hand look at what this is doing to affordable housing in the famous Treme neighborhood.  The author of this is Deborah Cotton who was a blogger of note post-Katrina.  Cotton was shot when some one fired into a celebratory second line parade.  She nearly died and is now disabled. This link goes to the listing for her former home owned now by a carpetbagging lawbreaker from Austin.

“AIRBNB is a serious problem people. This lovely apartment was my home in Treme for ten years until it was bought by Carrie Altemus who owns and runs bed and breakfasts around the city. I was still recovering from being shot when she bought it and told me I had to leave, that she needed the apartment for her elderly father. I asked for a few extra months because I was on a list to get subsidized housing due to my disability and was waiting for an affordable apt to come available but they told me ‘NO’. I was rushed out so they could renovate it and then rent it for $150 p/night – $4,500 p/m, def more than I was paying in rent. Another affordable apartment turned over to tourists and this Austin ‘entrepreneur’. Pretty soon the whole city will be rented to tourists and the rest of us residents will have to move to the West Bank and drive in to serve them.”

The NRA and whack-a-doo politicians like Bobby Jindal always want more guns and armed citizens out there looking for the OK corral moments.  Well, here’s some experimental research that shows that’s a really bad idea.

The notion that more guns are always the solution to gun crime is taken seriously in this country. But the research shows that more guns lead to more gun homicides — not less. And that guns are rarely used in self-defense.

Now a new study from researchers at Mount St. Mary’s University sheds some light on why people don’t use guns in self-defense very often. As it turns out, knowing when and how to apply lethal force in a potentially life-or-death situation is really difficult.

The study was commissioned by the National Gun Victims Action Council, an advocacy group devoted to enacting “sensible gun laws” that “find common ground between legal gun owners and non-gun owners that minimizes gun violence in our culture.” The study found that proper training and education are key to successfully using a firearm in self-defense: “carrying a gun in public does not provide self-defense unless the carrier is properly trained and maintains their skill level,” the authors wrote in a statement.

They recruited 77 volunteers with varying levels of firearm experience and training, and had each of them participate in simulations of three different scenarios using the firearms training simulator at the Prince George’s County Police Department in Maryland. The first scenario involved a carjacking, the second an armed robbery in a convenience store, and the third a case of suspected larceny.

They found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, people without firearms training performed poorly in the scenarios. They didn’t take cover. They didn’t attempt to issue commands to their assailants. Their trigger fingers were either too itchy — they shot innocent bystanders or unarmed people, or not itchy enough — they didn’t shoot armed assailants until they were already being shot at.

A government shutdown is looming once again.  Taking our economy and our federal agencies to the brink appears to be a ritual of summer and fall these days.

The chance of a federal government shutdown increased dramatically and precipitously last week from 40 percent to 60 percent. It’s now more likely than not that a shutdown will result from the craziness going on in Washington.

With the House already in recess until after Labor Day and the Senate about to leave town this week, all of the components that had led to my previous 40 percent estimate got worse. There’s now even less time – Congress will be in session only a handful of days before the fiscal year begins on October 1 – for the House and Senate to devote to appropriations.

The leadership has already admitted that nothing has been decided about how to deal with this situation. In other words, this will be the kind of last minute, ad hoc decision that in the past has repeatedly failed and led to unwanted consequences…like a shutdown. In budget technical terms, the House and Senate leadership will be flying by the seat of its pants.

With the House having passed only six of the fiscal 2016 apropriations and the full Senate having considered none, few of the major program decisions have yet to be made and there won’t be time in September for Congress to make many (or even any) of them,

Thursday night we will have an live blog of the Republican Rumble of the Really Unhumble.

With just more than half the declared candidates on stage, the event will give voters a chance to see whether the debate gets into policy differences or ends up being a slug-fest.

Recent primary debates have produced a share of race-defining moments: Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet over whether the former Massachusetts governor was for individual health insurance mandates; then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment when he forgot one of the federal agencies he would eliminate as president; and then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s quip that Hillary Clinton is “nice enough.”

But this debate includes one major factor not seen in past debates: Donald Trump.

The boisterous real estate magnate, who has been a walking headline since he jumped into the race in June, has exceeded expectations, rising to the top of polls for the last couple of weeks.

That will likely give him the right to stand center stage at the debates based on plans reported by Bloomberg last week. But what happens then is anybody’s guess: Will Trump draw a peppering of questions from moderators, attacks from other candidates or be ignored? What will he say?

“The expectation is that he is going to be a bull in a china shop, perhaps a lack of specifics on policy, perhaps flouting the debate rules, getting too personal on stage,” said Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“He needs to confound those expectations by having some substantive policy points on issues that are important to him, perhaps acting in a less abrasive manner than he’s well known for.”

Political junkies and experts believe Trump will bring his typical braggadocio to the debate stage despite their sentiment among Republicans that it makes him unelectable in a general election. Trump has been mum about his debate prep, telling CNN he doesn’t have a coach.

I’m thinking this should be a slugfest.  Trump is definitely not going to be the only crazy one on the stage but he will definitely be the loudest.

So, that’s it for me.  I have to get some grading done.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?  And mind the strategically placed fruit!!!