Just heard a commercial for a men's multivitimen and it's in the form of gummy bear type tablets.

Really?

Is it that hard to get men to take care of their own health?

 

The Kansas City Chiefs Professional Football Team was faced with a tragedy on Saturday. 

One of their stalwart linesman did the unthinkable.  He shot his girlfriend, went to the training facility, spoke with the general manager and coach, thanked them for their help in his career and then shot himself.

This tragedy has so many victims.  His mother who was there when he shot the girlfriend, the 3 month old child that is now an orphan, the girlfriend,  the men who experienced watching this troubled young man take his life, those who looked up to him as a role model and leader, and of course, the young man himself.

Which brings up this idea:  Should the Chiefs played their game on Sunday?

Obviously, from a financial point of view, it made sense. The Chiefs have had a lousy season and they are having trouble filling the stands which is how the bills are paid.  Rescheduling would have been a nightmare and trying to get sufficient workers for concessions, etc. would have been difficult.  Their opponent, the Carolina Panthers also had a vested financial interest in this, and let's not forget that when you play on TV you get paid big. 

A sportswriter from Kansas City editorialized that it was scandalous to play the day after the deaths.  His reasoning was that this cheapened the lives of the player and of victims of domestic violence.  This, I think, was a brave stand to take.

Another national sportswriter waxed on about the culture surrounding football and how it teaches young men and boys to "man up", cover up their emotions and just tough things out.  After all, football players are supposed to be the toughest guys around.

Bob Costas, nationally known sportswriter and sports "celebrity" took to the air at halftime of the game denouncing the gun culture and the violence around it.  Costas is being roundly thumped by those who cannot seem to see guns and danger in the same scene.  (In the interest of transparency, I am a gun owner and I can use guns safely.)

The players stopped for a moment of silence prior to the game in memory/honor of domestic violence victims.  Then they went out on the field and performed acts of legalized (and highly paid) violence.

Football is a violent sport.  The fans enjoy the speed and they enjoy the hits.  This is not likely to change anytime soon, unless the prevalence of concussions finally and completely kills off the sport, and that is highly unlikely.

Death is a curious thing and the response of those affected by it is also a curious thing.  Getting back in the routine of life does seem to help a person get through the difficult time right after a death.  But when is too soon?

Was it fair to expect these men to go out and do battle on the field (an image widely used and promoted by those who talk about football) so soon after the death of their friend?  I imagine that the discussion will go on for some time about this.

One commentator mentioned that being tough guys means that you can never show your soft side. 

Apparently, on Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs showed the world how very tough they are.

 

Just how private do you want your life to be?

We live in an age where our cell phones can tell the world where we are or have been or we let the world know where we are through our social networks.  If it is our choice, we seem to want folks to know that we are mobile.

But what are the limits to that?

In Texas, a school district is involved in a dust up over whether or not students should have tracking chips in their student IDs.  One student, Angela Hernandez, has brought a civil suit against the school (which suspended her for not wearing the ID) claiming that the chip represented the "mark of the Devil" and violated her religious rights.

(The mark of the Devil is a sign that the end of the world is coming and that the wearer has signed on to the dark side.)

A judge issued an injunction against her suspension for the moment.

The school district was willing to deal.  Tell your dad to zip his lip and you can wear an ID without the chip.  Not happening, said the family.

The discussion has been hot and heavy over this.  I'll try to condense it in bullet points.

 

On the girl's side:

>The IDs were assigned to students without an opt out.

>Her Christian religious beliefs are that the Mark of the Devil is a sign of giving up to evil.

>Her civil liberties have been violated.

 

On the parent's side:

>It's a public school but the public had no voice in the policy.

>Our daughter's civil liberties are at stake.

>The school district is using the badges to create revenue from the government.

>The school should not have tried to shut us up.

 

On the school's side:

>Being able to keep account of students does help with revenue (schools are paid monies from the state based on attendance).

>The badges help us find students quickly in emergencies.

>The badges help us find students who are skipping class.

>The badges help us keep undesirables out of the building and help us keep the students and staff safe.

 

On the legal side:

>The judge found issues with the suspension (apparently not wear the badge was not listed in the handbook as a suspend-able offense.)

>The judge had issues with the "deal" with the father to stop talking and let the girl wear a badge without a chip.

>The judge wanted to see if there were precedents about such cases elsewhere.

 

This issue is a tricky one.

  We live in a society where bad things sometimes happen in schools.  Without rehashing some of the awful scenes in the past, let's just say that troubled people find themselves using violence to solve their problems and innocent victims as their targets of rage.  Schools provide a lot of people in a fairly small area and make dandy solutions to angry people looking for a crowd.

Drug deals are still an ongoing problem in many schools and those engaged in dealing often bring weapons with them.

Kids skip classes and school and the school is responsible for them while they are supposed to be there. If a kid skips and the school does not make an effort to find them and something happens to the kid, the lawyers trip all over themselves to sue.

Non-custodial parents show up at schools and try to get to their kids to violate court orders and leave with them.

Individuals with no business being in a school try to get access for a variety of reasons, such as thievery.

The government ties a lot of revenue up in whether or not the attendance is robust at a school.

What on earth was the district thinking in trying to play "let's make a deal" with the father?

And just what are our rights to privacy?

Radio-Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) are becoming more and more common.  These chips are found in clothing to stop shoplifting, in automobiles to track them during their build, animals to keep track of them over wide areas (such as ranches), bookstores and libraries use them to discourage people from stealing materials, in EZ-Pass systems for collecting tolls on highways, on machine readable travel documents, in tracking the baggage at airports and a variety of other uses.  The information on the chip can be customizable, being as rich or as bare essential as necessary.

My understanding of the chips being marketed to schools is that the information on the chip contains the students name, identification number (which is NOT the Social Security number), schedule, and parent contact information for emergencies.

If there is a valid reason for not having the chips, it would be this.  The FERPA law (which protects a student's information about their education) might be touted as a reason to ban the chips.  FERPA protects information about a student's grades, etc.  It's a running joke among educators that between HIPPA (which protects health information) and FERPA (which protects educational information), technically schools have no students, since we cannot confirm or deny that they are alive (health info) or that they are a student (educational info).  Thus, in a stretch, having a student's grade in the information would violate FERPA because it would indicate that the student is or has had some education (as shown by their grade level).

Don't laugh.  Sillier things have been fought out in court.

As for the privacy issue, my questions would be this:  Does the student have a Facebook, Twitter, or other social network account?  If so, they have signed away a lot of their privacy and their parents were most likely not involved in this or even know what information is out there about their child.  Is that child a member of a group that has a webpage or has been mentioned in a news report? Are there photographs of the student online anywhere? If so, the student can be identified from the information coded in the digital photograph which would give the date, time and often location of the photo.  A photo at a school event would be a way to locate that student.

Many will argue about civil liberties.  True it is that in today's society, liberties are being waived in a variety of small ways.  But to say that the school has overstepped their bounds is splitting hairs on this one.  Between cameras on buses and cameras in school and cameras in the public, chances are that students have been photographed hundreds if not thousands of times and their location duly noted.  In attendance programs where teachers count attendance in the classroom, the student's photograph is part of that system.

Privacy has been already given up by many, often without them paying any attention to when or where or how.

As for the mark of the Devil argument, the mark (as described in the Book of Revelation) was embedded in the person.

We aren't quite there, yet.

This whole situation will play out.  It will be interesting to see what happens.