Category: News

In the September 2024 Reader’s Digest, we have a little aside that is a little incomplete.

The title of the 1970s movie The China Syndrome refers to the idea that if you dug a tunnel through the earth (ignoring the molten lava core), you’d end up in China.

C’mon, man. Who wrote that? Don’t answer; I know it’s someone who was born this century and does not know that China syndrome refers to a nuclear meltdown at a nuclear plant where the core would burn hot enough to descend into the earth. No, not all the way to China, but still, it would be bad. The young person would also not know that The China Syndrome is one of the reasons we don’t have nuclear power almost fifty years later.

I remember seeing a lot of headlines in summer of 2001 about shark attacks. So when I start seeing lots of stories about different animals seemingly attacking humans a bunch like Jogger left bloodied, dazed and crying after getting mauled — by a gang of otters and River otter attacked and dragged child under the water, wildlife officials say, I start to get a little anxious.

Of course, it probably is just a matter of “journalists” suddenly watching news services and X.com for matching stories to dish up as companion pieces.

It does not calm my nerves, though, that the summer has been full of stories about shark attacks.

Just for Rob K., who is a legacy Modern Woodmen, I’m posting Modern Woodmen news from over in Elsinore:

Of course, a gift to a small museum does not emphasize the old fraternal part of the fraternal benefits organization, but they’re still around and doing good things.

I think they should have proper walk-on music, though. Something almost along the lines of this:

That’s Gloryhammer with “The Hollywood Hootsman” from their old album Space 1999: Rise of the Chaos Wizards from 2015. I still think of Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex as their new album even though it’s five years old. I guess I have actually joined the Ancient Oldmen.

School district’s new grading system gives students a low grade of 40% instead of a zero:

A school district in Missouri adopted a new grading system that prevents students from receiving a zero even if they didn’t do the assignment.

The Kansas City Public School district launched the “no zero policy.’

Essentially, the minimum grade on any given assignment is 40%. The policy is designed to help struggling students catch up, KCTV reported.

I laughed out loud at the story. But it’s not funny.

Sadly, the recent paradigm has been that a student can turn an assigment in late for half credit. So now actually doing the work, albeit late, only will yield one up to an additional 10% for the student’s efforts. So why bother?

Because it makes the administrators look good.

Fatherhood at Fifty Is a Growing Trend, With Impacts on Child Health

We at MfBJN noted the number of grey-haired dads in newspaper full color insert adverts in 2011:

That’s 3 of 6 of the images that have a father and a small child in them. Note that roughly half of these fathers of small children in the Macy’s world have greying or white hair.

(Link via Instapundit.)

If you see this color painted on a tree in the woods, your life could be in danger — here’s why:

Forget a red flag — if you see purple, start running.

In nearly two dozen states, a purple marking on a tree or other stationary object out in the wild denotes private property, and depending on where in the United States you are, landowners could be heavily armed.

To be completely safe? Keep out.

PANIC! RED STATES == DANGER!

“If it’s just purple paint with no signage, people may be less likely to understand what that is unless the state itself and organizations across the state have done a significant job getting that info across to all visitors,” he said.

Not to mention, determining where public land ends and private property begins is pricey, but to allow landowners to mark their territory themselves could create another host of issues.

Maybe you should learn a little something about where you’re going before wandering into the woods.

Jeez, I am not a hiker, and I know what the purple means. And I’ve pointed it out to my children what it means so they would know.

Anyone who insists on signage every couple of feet so that wanderers off of the path in a state park can see them does not actually understand how expensive that would be for a land owner. Or think that they’re entitled to that sort of coddling no matter the cost.

Blaming crime on immigrant populations is not backed-up by data in Missouri.

Sounds like data disproves the thesis, ainna? But no:

Furthermore, no apparent records exist to support the notion that a population of undocumented immigrants is a significant cause of Missouri’s crime.

When the bureau asked the county prosecutors’ offices in Jackson, St. Louis, Clay, St. Charles, Cape Girardeau, Greene, and Jefferson Counties, the responses were largely the same: that law enforcement agencies do not record or submit information about a suspect’s immigration status to prosecutors.

“Suspect immigration status is regularly not provided to our office by Law Enforcement when a case is submitted,” a reply from the Clay County Prosecutor’s Office said.

The Missouri Department of Public Safety said it likewise has no data on the rate or frequency of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

Are they even allowed to ask immigration status any more? In a lot of cases, they are not.

The only “data” is this from 2020:

A 2020 report from the Department of Justice study found immigrants are half as likely to commit crimes compared to native citizens.

“Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over two times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over four times more likely to be arrested for property crimes,” the study said.

Small consolation to the victim of a crime commmitted by someone who shouldn’t be here in the first place. All crimes committed by criminal entrants are additional crimes, not part of a whole number that would have been the same if they had been denied entry and opportunity.

In an election year, the popular question in pop politics is “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” But I have another to add:

I haven’t been to the library in a while, gentle reader, so when my beautiful wife and I went in late last week, I was surprised to see a little security guard station with a security guard in it at the entrance to the library proper, past the gift shop, the bathrooms, and the meeting room entrances. I mentioned it on the way out, and my wife agreed that she hadn’t seen it before, either.

Yesterday after church, we stopped at the Hy-Vee, which is almost the most la-di-dah of groceries in Springfield. At 9:30 on a Sunday morning, Hy-Vee had an armed security guard walking around the front of the store.

Now, this was not atypical for the store where I worked back in the day, but that store was in a neighborhood in transition. Why are all of the neighborhoods seemingly transitioning these days? And why are security guards proliferating?

And is there any particular persuasion of elected official who might have an impact on reversing that trend? Hint: It’s not the former prosecutor.

We watched a bit of the RNC last night, hoping to catch Donald Trump’s talk, and I couldn’t help note that the entertainers who took the stage were all old. I mean, my boys didn’t even know who Hulk Hogan was (“He’s our generation’s John Cena,” I said, but he’s more likely between John Cena and The Rock. I told them I watched the cartoon in the 1980s.

And Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” is forty years old this year.

I remember seeing him perform that song at Savvis Center in the St. Louis Blues home opener in 2001, the first game since the attacks (somehow I managed to be at Busch Stadium when it reopened in 2001, but all we got was Jack Buck reading a poem). That was twenty-three years ago.

And my beautiful wife was surprised that Kid Rock was a rapper. She was not familiar with his 1990s work.

“Bawitdaba”	“Cowboy”

“You’re more familiar with ‘Picture’,” I said, knowing that his 21st century work, the hits that have crossed over onto the country charts/radio stations, are more sung songs.

“Picture” (2002)	“All Summer Long” (2008)

Sweet Christmas, “All Summer Long” was sixteen years ago.

But my wife was not actually familiar with Kid Rock’s oevre at all. Which is to say she hasn’t listened to the radio in a long, long time. “Cowboy” and “Bawitdaba” make appearances on classic rock stations, and “Picture” and “All Summer Long” were all over The Greatest Hits of the 80s, 90s, and Today stations and country stations back when they were fresh (but I don’t hear them much anywhere now).

Still, they are all old.

Jeez, did I only do it in 2004?

I’ve put a livestream of the current evening’s proceedings on because I want to see what the man wants to say, and suddenly I am taken back.

Ozark Electric Co-op members vent to state leaders about ‘demand charge’:

Some frustrated Ozark Electric Cooperative members appealed to state leaders and lawmakers on Monday. They’re upset about the “demand” charge on their bills.

The new charge affects more than 30,000 co-op members or customers.

I paid my first bill with the new charge on it, and it was an extra fifty dollars, or about an extra 13%. We run appliances all day here, and summer means the A/C is kicking on all the time and the pool filter pump is running constantly.

Not mentioned in this story are the reasons why the price of energy is skyrocketing, including man-made and government-made decisions such as Missouri Clean Energy (Proposition C) from 2008 (which you might recall, gentle reader, I opposed in 2008, and as expected, the price increases it caused are coming over a decade later when the item was on the ballot, so the public can not know (and I note that some dude is trying to get another ballot initiative to increase the percentage from 15% of power production having to come from “renewables” to 30 or 50%).

Also not depicted: EPA mandates which have caused power companies to shutter generation capacity. Although perhaps with the Chevron deference no longer operative, maybe some lawsuits will restore some sanity to power generation. Eventually. Maybe.

But it would be nice if people would recognize it’s not the electric company responsible for this. It’s motivated, uninformed voters and government lackeys forcing the prices up, often years or decades after the cause has been made.

Biden administration announces new rule to protect workers from heat-related illnesses:

Senior Biden administration officials announced a proposed rule Tuesday to prevent heat-related illness in the workplace, as climate change brings hotter temperatures around the nation.

In a call to reporters Monday, officials spoke on background about the new rule, which the administration sent to the Federal Register Tuesday for review. Depending on the heat index, the rule would require employers to monitor workers’ heat exposure, provide cool-down areas and take mandatory cool-down breaks.

This new rule comes as extreme temperatures will engulf much of the country at some point during the year. Heat waves occur more frequently now compared to the 1960s, from an average of two per year to six in the 2020s, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Heat waves have also increased in duration and intensity.

You would not believe this, but all of history has occurred within the living memory of young striving activists in government and in “independent” news organizations like the Missouri Independent.

You know what this will do?

Make the cost of building anything higher; make it harder to repair roads; and so on. Springfield Parks have had to establish a rolling schedule for their public pools even amidst the most frightening weather that twenty-three-year-olds from elsewhere can remember because they cannot hire enough life guards to staff the pools. Good thing that this particular initiative will help with people suffering from the heat by further limiting the pools’ hours of operation due to increased staffing requirements.

But nobody could see the downstream effects of this plan except for those who are not experts in public policy and who instead live in the real world.

(Link via the Springfield Business Journal‘s free daily newsletter.)

The Branson / Tri-Lake News has started dropping cocked ads in the middle of its news stories above the fold on the front page, which catches one’s eye, I suppose, but it can lead to some unfortunate occurrences if the paper publishes actual news on occasion.

Wherein it almost looks as though the candidate for office has been charged with murder.

I wonder if he got a freebie or two out of the situation.

Stop the presses! The St. Louis Post-Dispatch brings us this breaking news!

Ascension parishioner thought Chesterfield ‘militia’ could bring young men to Catholic Church

The man who tried to start “The Legion of the Sancta Lana” at Ascension Catholic Church said he regrets describing the group as a militia.

* * * *

“Seeing the closure of Catholic churches and the dwindling congregations across St. Louis, it was my intention to create an organization for young men to push themselves mentally, physically, and spiritually through the practice of discipline, study, and fitness modeled after the military,” Ray said in a statement provided to the Post-Dispatch. “The use of the term ‘militia’ is regrettable and does not accurately represent the intention of the organization. However, the current state of the Church in The West is equally regrettable and I’m sure we can all agree that we are in desperate times.”

C’mon, man, this is top news? This is a notice in a church bulletin with keywords that cause right-thinking people to clutch their pearls and to help watercolor the picture that Christian Fundamentalists Are Arming Up To From Trump’s Irregular Army or something.

I would say “do better,” but the paper can probably not.

I haven’t seen the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently, but I did have a dental appointment this week, so I got to glance over the Springfield News-Leader these days. And I kid you not, it was six or eight sheets of newsprint, so twelve or sixteen pages. That is, about the same size as the small town weeklies I take. Which means, what, twenty stories? Fewer? (Maybe I should actually count them the next time I’m at the dentist.) I won’t say the business model is completely failing, but journalist doesn’t seem like it’s a career path to the middle class.

Republicans and conservatives should maybe consider not dwelling so much on Joe Biden’s age and infirmity like this:

• This Is Why Democrats Are Panicking About Joe Biden
• Don’t fall for Joe Biden’s nice old man act — he’s just lowering expectations
• Obama Rescues Biden After Another Embarrassing Senior Moment

And so on, and so on, ad absurdum.

Because the more the message is “We need to get this doddering old man out of the presidency,” the more easily it is defanged by the Democrats switching to another candidate at the last minute.

Policies, guys. Focus on the policies that have led us to this place. Do not confuse the policy with the policymaker, or we’ll end up with a different policymaker with the same policies.

NYC parents having meltdown over $14 ice cream cones: ‘It’s out of control’

My son started his cross country practices this week, and after picking him up from practice, we stopped at the doughnut shop in Republic (no, the other one), and the total for 6 doughnuts and a breakfast sandwich was almost $20. Which used to be what a trip to a restaurant with my beautiful wife cost. Breakfast for one in Republic is now over $30 (I eat a lot and tip well), and our anniversary dinner last month cost about $60, which used to feed the whole family at a restaurant, but that’s $100 now.

Not that we eat out much these days or even get doughnuts from a doughnut shop these days (half a dozen doughnuts at Walmart is still only five or six dollars).

Wages are going to have to go hella bunch up to make the economics of that work out again.