COLUMN: BLUNDER ON … by John P. Flannery

It is remarkable how often, after the fact, everybody knows what should have been done to avoid the latest national disaster.  

You have to wonder if they really thought about the matter at all beforehand.

Consider how many Americans following the Boston Marathon bombing thought Chechens were from Czechoslovakia.  

Petr Gandalovič, Ambassador to the United States from the Czech Republic, had to inform the “social media” that “the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.”  

What we don’t know, we all need to know so that we can make informed policy decisions.  

To make matters worse, our modern political “dialogue” consists principally of public disinformation focused on banal distractions and not what really matters.  

We are a culture that poses with equanimity but that incites its citizens against immigrants, racial minorities, welfare mothers, feminists, gays and lesbians.

In the shadow of Earth Day, I’d like to underscore one of those issues that prompts a sadly anorexic dialogue about how we can safely breathe the air and drink the water.

The ostrich view oft heard is that, “the earth will right itself no matter what we do,” when everything we’ve learned since the industrial revolution has shown the outcome to be otherwise.

Some local fossil fool fanatic planted an over-sized wooden political poster at the intersection of local route 7 and the Berlin Turnpike in 2008 saying, “Drill, Baby, Drill!” 

What if someone put an oil rig or coal mine on his property -- like we find in West Virginia -- and conducted a follow-up interview, would he have a different opinion?  Perhaps not.

Among the most frequent political deceptions is how politicians tell us we should act for our children – no matter the issue.  

Really?  

Then what should we do in response to that California study that found a mom’s exposure to traffic-related air pollution could prompt autism in her newborn?  Columbia University found that babies in the womb, with prenatal exposure to air pollutants, suffered more from anxiety, depression, and attention span challenges. In China, where the children are wearing masks to insulate them from the polluted fog, they found prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollutants prompted children born with smaller heads, slower growth patterns, and poor cognitive development. 

What are we going to do for these unborn children?

Nor can we ignore that we have the challenge of those who don’t know the difference between a Czech and a Chechen. 

A large segment of our population has embraced a cartoonish cosmogony of how our planet and life began.  They refuse to accept what a basic High School Chemistry class teaches about the greenhouse effect.  We are going to have to work around this ignorance.

In our County, Loudoun, we have adults who tell their children to clean their rooms but they won’t clean our streams.

In our State, Virginia, our General Assembly defers to mining and drilling, almost without exception, 

and discourages alternative renewable energy sources even though we have these powerful winds up and down our Atlantic coast that we could harness 

In our nation, we are sharply divided over the approval of Trans Canada’s proposed 875-mile 3-foot diameter Keystone XL pipeline, that would transport 830,000 barrels of crude tar sands oil a day from Canada’s strip mined Alberta boreal forest into our nation.

This dirty oil doesn’t spurt out of some old-fashioned well rig.  You’ve got to excavate two tons of sand to get one barrel of bitumen, called “junk energy.”  Bitumen is called “junk” because it produces less than a quarter of the energy you get from conventional oil, and releases 450% of the climate-changing carbon emissions of crude oil.

The proposed pipeline would carry this tar oil across the high plains states, across 250,000 ranches and farms, and past 1,500 waterways, from the Yellowstone River in Montana to the gulf where the refineries are. 

As for those promised “new” jobs, forget about it; there are only about 35 permanent local jobs and 390 temporary jobs for Americans (the bulk of the temp jobs will go to skilled Canadian workers). 

This pipeline may put at risk the million jobs we now have from those ranches, farms and waterways.  Last month, 200,000 gallons of tar sands crude “leaked” from a pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, and devastated that community.  This happens all the time.  In the last twenty years, there were 5,611 pipeline failures releasing 100 million gallons of oil.  If this new pipeline breaks, it can leak into waterways, even into the vital underground Ogallala aquifer that provides water to farmers and ranchers, water necessary to raise livestock and grow crops.

Forget about oil independence; once this dirty tar oil is refined in the gulf, it’s going to the highest bidder off shore.

We cannot afford to have our forehead slapping epiphany after we’ve gotten this one wrong.

No big signs will tell us we are about to reach the tipping point of this environmental disaster.

We have to get smart now or risk our own survival and, oh yes, the survival of our children.

RUNNING TOWARD DANGER – NOW THAT’S COURAGE! by John P. Flannery

Heartless psychopaths planted two home-made pressure cooker bombs loaded jam packed with tiny nails and ball bearings at the finish line at the Boston Marathon last Monday.

27,000 runners from 96 countries converged on Boston to run a race repeated every year since 1897.

When the container ripped apart from the exploding powders within, projecting shrapnel from the torn cooker, hurling nails and ball bearings indiscriminately, it cut legs, maimed, and even killed three innocents including an eight year old boy who had just congratulated his Dad on finishing the long race.

Unaware of any danger, distracted, celebrating a world-renowned athletic event convened on Patriots 

Day, runners, family, and friends were enjoying a grand race on a day that honors our revolutionary spirit, when our forbears resisted British rule at the battles of Lexington and Concord.  

A momentary and understandable panic enveloped this marvelous sporting event when first, one bomb, and then another down the street sent powerful shock waves at ground level, knocking a 78 year old runner to the ground, pumping clouds of white smoke straight up into the air, transforming the viewing spaces by the finish line from a crowd of contented onlookers into a scene of screaming carnage.

A pastor at the ceremonial service afterwards, on this past Thursday, said he was at a loss to understand where God was on the day of the twin bombings.

Of course, if we truly have free will, some are free to choose to kill innocents – as happened that day – and without God’s willing it.

I’d like to think, however, that there was a divine will at work, inspiring runners, family, friends, citizens, police, emergency personnel, doctors, and nurses to run into the smoke of the explosions, without knowing whether there were other explosions to come, toward the screams of pain, toward the fallen, undeterred by blood and severed limbs, so that they could help those in pain and shock.

Some philosophers talk about our connection, one to the other, and how we will risk our lives for another, even for a complete stranger, at the risk of our own.

After the investigation that followed, we focused the nation’s attention on two brothers that the authorities and the relentless news outlets declared responsible for this inhumane outrage.

One brother is now dead.  The surviving younger brother is wounded, in custody, and recovering at a hospital.

Unfortunately, this is where all that we accomplished may run off the tracks.

The federal crime that seems to fit the array of daily news reports is using weapons of mass destruction (18 United States Code Section 2332a), and the surviving suspect could therefore face a death penalty if the Attorney General makes that determination; by contrast, Massachusetts has no death penalty.  For the purposes of this statute, the “weapon” must only be a “destructive device,” defined elsewhere in the federal code (18 United States Code Section 921), as any “bomb.” 

Some would prefer we charged an act of “terrorism” (18 United States Code Section 2332b), but we’d have to have “conduct transcending national boundaries” and, at this writing, there’s no such evidence.

There are those in the government who insist that a team of special “interrogators” interview the hospitalized surviving suspect without telling him he has a right to remain silent. 

You all know that an accused in custody has a right to remain silent.  It is true that there is a Supreme Court case that said, under more narrow circumstances than we have here, that there can be an exception to advising a person he has a right to remain silent, a public safety exception. 

There are several problems with that. 

First, the authorities told the public when the surviving suspect was arrested that the public was safe.  Oops! 

Second, you probably can see why this “exception,” if applied as the government proposes, could engulf the constitutional right to remain mum in any case involving public safety, like when guns or bombs are involved. 

Third, if the government decides later that it’s a tad short on evidence, and the Court decides, “you G-men went too far,” then whatever leads the government follows from what the suspect said, may be thrown out, as well as whatever he said. 

Fourth, this may be a lot of thumb sucking because, in the end, the hospitalized suspect may not be able to speak, or he may be smart enough on his own to say that he’d prefer to be silent and have an attorney advise him who was forthright about his rights.

Some others want to treat our suspect, who is a citizen, naturalized a year ago, as if he were a war combatant and try him by a military tribunal.  No matter that there is no evidence that he is a combatant.  At worst, he is a remorseless killer

Boston was unbowed by this tragedy.  The people showed great courage. 

Our government should show some courage, trust in the rights of an Accused to choose not to be a witness against himself and to demand a public trial by his peers.

OP-ED: JUVENILE INJUSTICE IN OUR SCHOOLS by John P. Flannery

Many students and parents are rightly upset that school principals, administrators and counselors conspire and combine with police assigned to the schools (called “resource officers”) to make schools more like prisons.

Police are assigned to almost every school with one principal function being to criminalize what used to be student discipline, to stigmatize young students, to compromise their futures - what schools they may attend and what jobs they may aspire to have.

Nor is this some informal arrangement between the school and the police.  It’s the law.  Virginia Code Annotated Section 22.1-279.3:1 spells out how student discipline at the school transmogrifies into a crime.

This offensive pincer movement, by which the state combines a school disciplinary action with a criminal prosecution has prompted righteous fury among students and parents for the students have been denied the basic protections any adult would enjoy in his defense.

Principals, administrators and police, posing as “trusted” overseers, acting in the place of the student’s parents, deny students any right of privacy, conduct arbitrary searches, put every student at the risk of a frisk, force students to write confessions, and then tell the police (resource) officer down the school hallway that they know a crime has been committed, using what the student told them in “trust.”

The student is denied any right to have a parent or counsel present when he’s searched or coerced to give a statement that implicates him or her.  A Virginia House bill (H.B. 1548) was introduced requiring notice to the parents so they could be present if the student could be suspended or expelled; the House passed it; the Senate, however, killed the Bill; this “oughta” be the law in Virginia and across the nation.

The school imposes these suspensions and other punishments immediately, and doesn’t hold the punishment in abeyance while the student appeals.  As Alice learned from the Queen in “Wonderland,”  just as we do here in Loudoun, first we punish, then we consider the “evidence”  afterwards.  Worse, students and parents insist that what passes for “evidence” in these appellate administrative proceedings makes gossip look reliable.

In addition, while anyone accused of a crime has a right to remain silent – to put the government to the test of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt without being a witness against oneself, our school system insists that the student give his side of the story to prove his discipline is unfounded; the rub is that statement to avoid the school discipline may then be used against him in the pending criminal prosecution.

To give you some idea how big a problem this is, in Loudoun, in the 2011-2012 school year, there were 2,676 discipline cases. 

700 of the suspensions and expulsions were for “disorderly conduct.”  In 45% of the “disorderly” cases, the student allegedly showed “disrespect” or “defiance.”   The Virginia Code defines “disorderly” as a student “unwilling … to submit to authority or [s/he] refus[es] to respond to a reasonable request.”  Who decides if the school administration’s request is “reasonable?”  Plainly, not the student!   We know who wins this argument.

Of the 43 suspensions or expulsions for a “weapon,” almost 58% of those were prompted by a “weapon look-alike” or “possible” weapon.  Students, be careful how you turn your thumb and index finger in the Loudoun County School system – so it doesn’t look like a gun!  You can be prosecuted for the fanciful imaginings of a school principal who mistakes chimera for cartridges.

98 of the suspensions and expulsions last years were for “drug violations” and 82.7% of those had to do with pot possession.  We handle these cases in the worst possible way, disciplining the students by removing them from school, pouring red slanderous ink into their student portfolio to compromise their prospective education and employment, prosecuting them criminally, insisting on drug counseling (whether they need it or not), and then parking them at Douglas, an Alternative School, for thirty days, where, one participant told me, you are subjected to “a terrible program where kids are stigmatized as potheads and druggies …demoralized and looked down on …” and the homework assignments from your regular school are forwarded without any instruction on how to complete it.

The system is also thoroughly discriminatory.  Hispanic students are 1 ½ times more likely to be suspended or expelled as compared to their percentage of the student population, Black Students are 3 times more likely, and IEP Students nearly 4 times as likely.

It’s too much trouble to be fair – so our schools aren’t.  It’s too hard to confirm the information is reliable – so we don’t. 

While we wait to no avail for reform, for fundamental fairness, every student must learn to defend himself or herself in two ways:

First, refuse to consent or participate in any search of his or her person or property unless and until a parent and/or counsel are present.

Second, remain silent, refuse to speak or write any statement unless and until a parent and/or counsel are present.

If the “system” is unfair and unjust, then let’s help make it fair.

FOR AN EDITORIAL AND FEATURE ON THIS PROBLEM NATIONALLY:

editorial - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/criminalizing-children-at-school.html?_r=0

feature - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/education/with-police-in-schools-more-children-in-court.html

COLUMN: LOUIE’S LOCK AND LOAD EATERY by John P. Flannery

Ready to go to Louie's to eat!

I’m Louie, originally from up around Pleasant Avenue in Manhattan, the “Big Apple,” where we have the Sullivan laws and guns are verboten.  We got a crazy Governor who is imposing even more stringent gun laws.  Who needs that?  It’s nature’s way to thin the herd – violence I mean.  Guns don’t kill people.  It’s the men with guns who kill people.  They’d do the same thing with a jack knife.

So I came to the hand gun capitol of the world, Virginia, where a man can wrap his hand around a gun and carry it almost anywhere.  I could feel the air fill my lungs with liberty when I crossed the Potomac.  This is a place that understands the Second Amendment.

I had a great sub pizza place in New York, called “Louie’s,” what else, but I didn’t feel free, not with the Mayor beefing that all these Virginia hand guns were coming into New York killing people.  Whine!  Whine! Mayor Boohooberger.

Now I’m opening a restaurant in Purcellville, and I’m calling it “Louie’s Lock and Load Eatery,” where a man can bring his gun and let those girly men and tense women take their appetites elsewhere – if they can’t understand the need to open carry.  Who needs ‘em?

I’m getting a liquor license and I hope to change the law in Virginia so that real men and women can drink and open carry their side arms.

You know in Tombstone, Arizona, they didn’t allow guns into the saloons.  Pansies!  If Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the boys hadn’t defied Tombstone’s ordinance banning guns within the city limits in 1881, we would have never had the gunfight at the OK Corral wiping out the Clanton Brothers and the McLaurys – and, well, also wounding a few Earp brothers.  They did this with six-shooters.  Maybe a shotgun or two.  30 shots in 30 seconds.  Congress today wants to limit magazines.  Poppycock!

I’m gonna preserve the delicious meatballs we’ll be serving at Lock and Load with gunpowder.  Too few people don’t appreciate that the nitrites and nitrates in gun powder have been used to preserve meat going back to the middle ages.  I know salt peter has gotten a bad rap.  But this is a good idea.

Our menu is loaded with our specialties - kapow pizza, shootin’ subs, pistol pasta, ricochet rolls, and projectile pie.

We are not concerned that some gun nut will come into lock and load and go postal on us.  We’d cut him down in a New York minute. 

Our door is modeled on Clint Eastwood’s famous “Sudden Impact” line, with a lifelike shooting arm coming straight out of our front door, holding his long barreled .44 Magnum revolver, and a recording says, “Make my Day!”  Isn’t that just the greatest?

I’ve been surprised that some have said my concept is “creepy.”  Really?  Well, I expect to carry high and tight on my fleshy thigh, my big bad boy, my Smith and Wesson Model 500 Magnum.  It’s got a barrel almost 8 ½ inches long, has an extra-large exposed hammer, satin stainless finish, it’s a 5-shooter cylinder, 350 grain bullets, but you don’t need more than five shots.  It’s got a 2,600 foot/pound muzzle energy.  It’s for hunting, yeah, the most canny animal of them all, the two-legged animal.  It knocks down whatever it hits.

Like I said, Virginia’s the place to be if you love your guns.  And Louie’s Lock and Load Eatery is the place to eat while you open carry the gun you love.