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One night in Adams Morgan, the sons and daughters of lawyers and corporate executives padded into a friend’s rowhouse for a kind of group therapy session about their families’ wealth.
They are young people who have inherited or stand to inherit big money, and they are spending their post-college years living modestly and working to address the needs of the poor, hungry and politically disadvantaged. But the privilege they grew up with and the money coming their way nag at them in ways few people not in their position can fathom.
I hate to see anybody suffer, especially when inherited-wealth-induced guilt forces people into such intense and painful therapy sessions. I would be very happy to make them less guilty — they can just send me as much of their money as it takes to get them back to good mental health. I even promise to foolishly squander the money so they can replace all that guilt with loathing.
The kids’ “therapy session” was at a private dinner, which gave them a “rare chance” to talk about their guilt and their views on social equality without fear of “eye-rolling from people who might view them as spoiled rich kids playing at helping the downtrodden.”
Make that whiny, spoiled rich kids. Oops. Eyes rolling here.
Allegations stemming from a game of “strip Yahtzee” led to a Muncie woman’s arrest this week.
Amber M. Foster, 21, was arrested Tuesday night on a charge of false informing, a Class A misdemeanor carrying a maximum one-year jail term, after police said they determined her claims that a former boyfriend had raped her were false.
Investigators said the encounter between Foster and the ex-boyfriend came after she was the loser in a game of “strip Yahtzee” — a board game featuring dice — with a group of friends and had walked, nude, into her bedroom with the target of her accusation.
Hey, if you can’t play nice, don’t roll the dice. If you’re gonna play the game, don’t spread the blame.
Anybody interested in a quick game of strip Scrabble?
]]>“The dream of a joint solution to Fort Wayne’s and Allen County’s space needs through co-location just died,” a somber Mayor Tom Henry said in a hastily arranged news conference Thursday afternoon.
But who killed it? City and county officials identified vastly different culprits.
Well, the mayor should be somber, and more than a little embarrassed. As County Councilman Paul Moss notes, the city and county are already co-located and have been for a long time. Mayor Henry is the one who used a simple, specific need — for new police headquarters — as the excuse to rush into purchase of Renaissance Square and to pressure the county into coming up with the money to help fix up the building and move all city and county offices around sufficiently for taxpayers to not know where to go for what.
At least County Council members, right now the only political body in the county worthy of being described as fiscally responsible, had the sense to say, unanimously “Are you nuts?” and refuse to commit the money. So now the city is stuck with the $14 million tab for purchase and renovation of Renaissance, which will become City Hall, and the City-County Building will become strictly a county operation.
Who killed the dream? That is the most unnecessary question of the year.
]]>Saagarika Coleman submitted a letter to the editor of the Tribune-Star (see page A8) stating that she was “hit with a wave of shock. I was horrified” when she saw the sign at Bible Baptist Church as her father drove her to school Monday morning.
The sign stated, “Jesus died and rose and lives for you. What did Allah do.”
Well, since “Allah” is God and Jesus is, you know, the son of God, that’s a nice little non sequitir there. “What did Allah do?” Pretty much everything, is the way I hear it. I’m guessing the sign was really supposed to refer to Mohammad rather than Allah.
Perhaps that kind of ignorance can be cleared up by the “By the Book” Bible studies effort in Huntington. The program was suspended, you might recall, when a federal judge ruled that it was a violation of the separation of church and state because the trailers in which the classes were held were in school parking lots. Officials now say the programs are returning, and will serve 97 percent of third- and fourth-graders, with the trailers parked across the streets from schools.
Hair unsplit! Problem solved! Now there’s at least a chance some of those students will be mowed down trying to cross the street in traffic and thus be spared the scary possibility of being exposed to that dangerous religious instruction.
]]>It’s been 40 years since John Eckenrode was suspended from the University of Notre Dame for a sit-in during the Vietnam War, but he still remembers where he stood that day.
[. . .]
Ten students were suspended or expelled that day. They were dubbed the “Notre Dame Ten,” and the case drew national attention.
Two of the 10 returned Wednesday for a 40th anniversary vigil and to reflect on the role of a Catholic university in times of war.
[. . .]
The two graduates, two former professors and about a dozen others gathered Wednesday morning on the front steps of the Main Building. A cold rain gently fell as the group prayed for those who died in the Vietnam War and for innocent victims of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A “cold rain gently fell” and blah, blah, blah. That’s how we know those were serious times and these former protesters are somberly reflecting on their principled participation in disrupting their campus. The story notes with a touch of sadness that “Some wonder why today’s students don’t seem as interested and involved in moral issues.” I don’t know who the “some” are that wonder this, but there is an answer.
Today’s students ain’t gettin’ drafted, are they?
]]>Senate Democrats crafting a job creation bill are considering a proposal to give money to workers who cut their hours in order to avoid layoffs.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) would give unemployment compensation to employees who accept a reduced work schedule to allow their companies to avert layoffs or to hire more employees. Reed’s proposal for work-sharing was mentioned during the Senate Democrats’ lunch Tuesday, when Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) announced that an initiative focusing on jobs would soon be a priority, Reed’s office said.
The government paying people to work less so companies will hire more people — what could possibly go wrong? Hey, I have an idea. Let’s call it the “three workers to watch while one worker fills the pothole” act. As NR points out, this idea didn’t exactly work as planned when it was tried in France.
]]>Lt. Bob Hanna, the overseer of the Marion County registry, told local news station WRTV “We’re not going to remove anybody. We’re taking no enforcement action. As far as removing faces, names and addresses, we won’t do that without a court order.”
Maybe a lawyer can correct my misunderstanding, but isn’t a ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court pretty much a court order?
As the story notes, this ruling has the potential to bring about the release of more than 1,000 offenders from the state’s two largest registries in Marion and Allen counties. That’s understandably upsetting to people living in the affected neighborhoods, but the potential abuse of ex post facto laws against any of us is too great to allow them to be used against the worst among us.
]]>Kellogg Co. says there will be a nationwide shortage of its popular Eggo frozen waffles until next summer because of interruptions in production at two of the four plants that make them.
It’s funny how your mind works. I haven’t had an Eggo in years, but the minute I heard about the shortage I had a sudden hunger for one, with butter and lots of syrup, sausage on the side. And they say it will be the middle of next year before shelves are stocked at pre shutdown levels. Pop Tarts just don’t do it, do they?
]]>Someone needs to alert Bill Joy — IBM (NYSE:IBM) scientists, using an ultra-powerful supercomputer, have just replicated the cerebral cortex of your average house cat.
At the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., this week, Big Blue announced that it has made “significant progress” toward creating a computer that simulates a living organism’s brain with abilities of sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition. Best of all, perhaps, is that IBM said such a computer system could rival “the brain’s low power and energy consumption and compact size.”
Specifically, scientists from IBM Research, along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have reportedly performed the first “near real-time cortical simulation” of a cat brain that contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The simulation was performed on Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which has a whopping 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory.
147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes for a cat brain; sounds about right. The plans of our feline overlords are obviously right on schedule. I can has cheezburger. And you will bring it. Now.
]]>Debbie Coning of Portage, Mich., hasn’t slept a wink. She arrived at the Meijer store at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon to claim the first spot in line. She had driven all the way to Grand Rapids on Wednesday, only to be turned away because she got there too late. So she jumped in her car and drove another three hours to Fort Wayne.
Now that’s dedication.
Meanwhile, as Gov. Palin is drawing network TV coverage for her rock-star crowds in Indiana (here and in Noblesville later today), the Republican Governors Association meeting in Austin talked about how that group should be in the forefront of the fight to oppose an overreaching Democratic administration and Congress. But I wouldn’t want to bore people with the details of something so boring.
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