Why America loves its guns?

The question is a little misleading. And I really don't want to mix it up with well funded lobby groups like the NRA. My actual question is this what role does the media play-and continue to play in the aftermath of shootings involving multiple victims in the US.

There is a great comment attributed to Morgan Freeman, the gist of which is this. If you put the killer up on a pedestal even give him (to my knowledge female's don't commit that many mass murders) a catchy nickname, you glamourise and even memorialise their crime.

An example, everyone remembers the 'trenchcoat mafia' but try and name one single victim of Columbine, without resorting to Wikipedia. Can you?

24hr news channels have to have news, so when something awful like Sandy Hook or Gabriel Giffords or Century Sixteen happens they flock to the spot and drill down into the life of the the looney that committed the crime, they interview his mother, his babysitter, people who went to school with him (that's him again with the single white guys) and lay out a buffet of his life on the next bulletin and we lap it up, ratings go up, much hand wringing, talking heads, psycho babble and on to the next big bad thing.

We get the media we deserve so someone must be watching this crap but how different would things be if the shooter wasn't named, no details. That is what a lot of European countries do, Mr A, or Mr S, that's all they get they are not glorified. An investigation is carried out and the findings used to make sure that 'this never happens again'

But in the US it happens again and again. Ask yourself, why is that?



I haven't put any references with this article but I will research the male to female ratio in regard to major incidents involving firearms and add it to this post.

Would you hang up on the Queen?

It's been all over the news this week, the prank call by two Australian DJs to King Edward the 7th hospital where the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge was being treated.
The DJs are defending themselves saying that they didn't think they'd get put through, as a result of their stupid, childish prank the nurse who took the phone call took her own life less than a day later.
Some say the nurse was too gullible but would you have reacted
any differently? We are all instilled with a need to be helpful
(read the art of deception by Kevin Mitnick) and would your first
reaction be a) oh my god I'm talking to the actual queen or
b) why isn't she using William's mobile number this must be a hoax.
This was social engineering and a woman is dead because
of it. Public opinion should take these two idiots off the air.
I would've done the same as the nurse.

Why can't we cure the common cold?

First of all, common cold? Are there posh colds? Bear with me, all I've been doing for the past couple of days is reading, pondering sleeping and coughing. Stupid little asides like that keep popping into my overheated brain. Today, thanks to some meds for a 'severe' cold (I wouldn't call it severe but then it wasn't 'common' either)I'm vertical instead of horizontal.

However the question remains, our scientists can put a man into orbit, they can cure certain genetic diseases, what's a pesky little viral infection to science? And a cold is a virus which is why antibiotics won't help because antibiotics treat bacterial infections.

I prefer a natural approach but sometimes you have to wheel out the big guns so when two days of steaming, hot honey lemon and ginger and salt gargles didn't help, I went the drugs route. Of course I went roaming around the internet before writing any of this. I came across several interesting sites, links are below. I also came across the reason (I think) that I caught whatever it was. My smartphone use has gone through the roof.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/729866/how_to_heal_a_cough__does_anything_really_work/ http://purehealthguide.com/2012/04/honey-diy-beauty-tips-home-remedies/ http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cold-remedies/ID00036 http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/chicken_soup_and_recipes_for_cold http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2222538/A-breeding-ground-flu-diarrhoea-eye-infections-Is-smartphone-making-sick.html

Why are we wasting all this natural talent?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he declares that 10,000 hours is the time it takes to perfect your talent. I don’t 100% agree with that because I think we all have something we gravitate towards, we’ve all heard of child prodigies. The one that springs to mind is Ruth Lawrence, who was accepted to Oxford to study maths at 12 years of age. But your experience is more likely to be the star athlete who blew by you at every race or the kids who absorbed languages like a sponge while you were still struggling with your German vocabulary tests.

Another one is much closer to home, my brother. A gifted musician, he won a scholarship to RCM in London. He’s the only one in our family with a degree, a 2.1 but not in music. He went into engineering.

In England the school system isn’t set up to nurture natural talent, you have to choose what you want to study at an age where you shouldn’t be making decisions like that. The saving grace is that if you choose not to pursue higher education, you will still be able to get a job based on experience gained through doing other jobs.

The US is a completely different animal, here the paper is everything, a degree is the goal, saving for a college a family obligation. There are multiple advantages to having an education centric society but here’s the thing.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed two battlefield medics, newly returned from Afghanistan for a school nurse position. The man and woman told how they patched up casualties and got them back on the battlefield, these people saved lives, every damn day. You would think, based on their front line experience that any ER in the country would be honoured to have them. You would be wrong, no BSc, no ER and definitely no school nurse position. They have to retrain for years before they can do a job like that, one they could probably do in their sleep.

A friend’s wife, had her pay cut because she didn’t have the correct qualification, note she’s been doing her job for nearly 10 years, flown lifeflight, taught others, and it’s not like she suddenly got dumber overnight, no paper, less money.

One final example, a friend and colleague who went off to teach for a year, she came back because they told her she’d have to get qualified to take it further, the kids loved her, she was an excellent teacher, but no paper, no inspirational teacher.

I'm sure you can come up with plenty of examples of your own, or come see me in the shop and we'll talk...

Is there such a thing as too many managers?

Corporate America, thinks not. The function of a manager should be to manage a group of workers, to make sure they have the finance and resources and knowhow to get the job done. I know a group of workers who have just suffered their semi-annual cull (12 workers-this time), they are all a talented bunch, on whose shoulders the technical reputation of their company rests. Of course layoffs happen, but how many managers do you think got laid off? Go on, have a guess?

One? Two? perhaps three?

Nope it was zero, zip, zilch.

This is a big, big company with a worldwide reputation, and multiple layers of managers who seem to do nothing but manage thin air. The only thing these people seem to be good at is

a)panicking when deadlines they haven’t told anyone else about are a week away

b)having meetings, sometimes even meetings about meetings

c)collecting pay cheques and bonuses (for apparently managing said thin air)

I am not against all managers, there are some good ones out there, however when your ratio is 7 managers to 1 worker something is clearly wrong.

Is it just me?

Or is social media becoming less of a communication tool and more of a nosy parker? I have been on Facebook for several years now, mainly to keep up with friends in faraway places, we get little snapshots of each others lives and that was fun. Now more and more I'm being told what I should like.

The rot started when FB went public, they need advertising revenue to keep the shareholders happy, I get that. I also understand that FB deems that my friends and I should have similar interests right? Wrong!

We aren't drones, my friends have wildly different opinions to me, and I don't care about that. I'm not going to stop being friends with someone because our political views don't match up or if they like Justin Bieber and I don't, or they love 50 shades of grey (and I don't). Our differences are the things that make us interesting. But I'm getting off topic here.

I have FB on my phone (or should I say had because I just deleted the app) and this morning in my news feed was a post about real estate from someone who is not a friend and which I am encouraged to 'like'. It was actually cathartic to delete the FB app. It still lurks on my computer but that doesn't issue a siren song of clicks beeps and pings. Mobile FB I'm not going to miss you at all.

Political Ads, why believe anything they say?

Let’s get this out of the way upfront, my political views don’t count. American politics is a closed book to me. Not because I want nothing to do with it, but because for a legal alien like me it is an offence to vote or attempt to register to vote in a federal election punishable by deportation.

Non-U.S. citizens, including permanent residents (green card holders), who vote, or register to vote, in a federal election also can be denied naturalization and/or removed (deported) from the United States.

That comes directly from uscis.gov. I checked my facts before writing this post in case anything had changed.

Apparently the people who put political ads together, especially the new breed of attack ads don’t. I’ll give you an example, a democractic candidate was redistricted out of his seat by the republicans (we’re in Utah they bleed red). He is now running against a republican for a senate seat and this is where it gets dirty. In his ad he says he voted against the stimulus and voted to repeal Obamacare. In the attack ad the republicans say he voted for those measures. Someone’s lying, and seeing as it’s on the democrat’s website I’m say it’s not him.

So that’s local politics what about the highest office in the land? Policiticans are slippery creatures, there’s that old joke ‘how can you tell if a politician’s lying?’ the answer being ‘his lips are moving’. Which you could apply to pundits on CNN and Fox News but let’s not go there. And this being Utah if we get onto church and state we’ll be here all day.

Pretty speeches are one thing but in my view actions don’t speak louder than words. Words are powerful, words are also recorded and it’s amazing how often you can get a candidate to argue with themselves because they held the opposing viewpoint when their party was in power. Once a flip-flopper… Name a president who hasn’t made more than one mistake during their terms. It’s not the mistakes it’s how the CIC reacts to them, but we’re getting off topic here.

Political ads, superpac ads, attack ads just use the mute button and go to FactCheck.org you can even ask questions about specific statements made by democrats or republicans.

As I said at the top of this post, my vote doesn’t count, but here’s something to make you think. Cos you’re thinking that back home, where I could vote, I voted labour (democrat) right? Wrong! In England my voting record was 100% conservative (republican) but english republicans are nothing like the ones they breed in the US.