Steaming Turd

This article details a recent “school shooting” campus police training drill held at a state college in North Carolina in which information about the drill was disseminated by e-mail and text messages, but understandably, not all of the students had actually received the message about the drill.

Once the drill was actually held, it consisted of a campus police officer dressed in civilian clothing bursting into a classroom and holding the class at gunpoint using a fake red plastic gun. After ten minutes of holding actual students at fake gunpoint, campus police arrived and fake disarmed the fake shooter.

There are several things wrong with this situation:

1. E-mail and text messages are not reliable ways to spread information about this sort of event. Posters should have been put up near and in the affected classroom and building, and a campus-wide snail-mailing should have been considered.
2. The campus police officer playing the role of the shooter could have come into the classroom calmly, explained why he was there, and asked the students to remain calm while the drill takes place. He could have waited to go “in character” until campus police arrived, or at least until after he had explained the nature of the drill and indicated that the weapon was indeed fake.
3. Actual students did not need to be involved. If a student had been carrying a concealed weapon that day, there is a possibility that the campus would now be mourning the death of a campus police officer.
4. A ten minute response time is abysmal. Within ten minutes, it’s quite likely that an actual campus shooter - one bent on causing death rather than taking hostages to forward an agenda - would have already killed numerous people, including himself.

The college is now providing counseling to any traumatized students in need, but they should feel fortunate that nobody was actually hurt that day. A simple drill intended to test the readiness of campus police to respond to and defuse a dangerous situation could easily have gone awry due to the extremely poor planning and judgment exercised.

This article discusses a fellow named Imad Mughniyeh, a top Hezbollah terrorist leader who, according to Hezbollah’s TV in Lebanon, was killed in Damascus, Syria, in a car bomb. Hezbollah, of course, blames “the Zionists” (meaning Israel).

Let’s examine the situation more closely: You have one of Hezbollah’s top terrorists, wanted by the US (with a $25 milliion bounty) on charges of hijacking a plane in 1985, wanted by Israel on charges of blowing up an embassy and a Jewish center in Argentina in 1992 and 1994, reputed to have changed his appearance a number of times throughout the 1990s via plastic surgery, of whom no recent photograph exists (explaining the dated and grainy photo provided to the media by Hezbollah), and killed in a car bomb likely to leave only unrecognizable remains.

Uh, he’s not really dead? Duh!

Okay, I have absolutely no evidence to back that up. But it’s certainly the first thing I thought when I read the article.

I don’t know if anybody else will find this as interesting as I do, but it turns out that one of Bobby Cutts’s lawyers was also the defense attorney on the case where I served as a juror a couple of years ago.

Okay, in truth, I’m not all that interested in the Bobby Cutts trial itself. (For those who don’t know, Cutts is a married police officer who is accused of killing his nine-month-pregnant girlfriend.) But I happened to see a bit of the trial on TV, and noticed that one of the defense attorneys looked awfully familiar.

Ars Technica reports that the Kanawha County, West Virginia, tax assessor’s office is trying to get an injunction against a local company called Seneca Technologies that earlier managed to get a court to require the assessor to provide digital copies of county tax maps for the low low price of $20 (sufficient to cover the actual reproduction costs for the county to provide those maps on CD or DVD or whatever). The tax assessor doesn’t want to lose the $8 fee per paper copy of each map made. The Ars report indicates that the tax assessor is trying to assert copyright protections, but it also mentions a state law specifically forbidding unauthorized redistribution, so I’m not sure copyright is the actual applicable concept here.

The reason why I find this amusing is that, less than a year ago, I was standing in the map room in the Kanawha County tax assessor’s office talking to a friendly fellow who worked there. I actually asked him why this stuff wasn’t available online for Kanawha County, because there was a growing desire across the country to make such information available online, especially since all of that information is already available via computer internally. He gave an answer that more or less indicated agreement with me.

Well, I guess now I know the “official” answer: Kanawha County doesn’t want to be cool like their friends in Monongalia County, who not only is the first WV county to put their tax maps and other info online, but also somehow managed to snag the domain name “assessor.org”.

The Stargate folks sent out a press release today stating that Robert Picardo (aka the Emergency Medical Hologram from Star Trek: Vger) will become a regular cast member on Stargate: Atlantis next season.

When they announced recently that Amanda Tapping (Colonel Samantha Carter) would be stepped back down to a recurring role due to her involvement in her new series Sanctuary, the thought of Robert Picardo’s character, Richard Woolsey, assuming command of Atlantis crossed my mind, but I dismissed it quickly because Woolsey has had only minimal net progress in any episode gaining credibility with the rest of the characters. Yes, he does make forward strides, but only after making backward strides earlier in each episode, and he always manages to make people dislike him again the next time he shows up.

Apparently, the decision-makers on the show have decided that they can do something good with the standoffishness of Woolsey versus the rest of the Atlantis crew. I’m apprehensive about that, but Robert Picardo is my third favorite actor playing a recurring role on Stargate (behind Carmen Argenziano’s Jacob Carter/Selmak and Tony Amendola’s Master Bra’tac), so maybe things will turn out well.

By the way, a new feature-length Stargate movie comes out on DVD next month. It’s supposed to tie up the Ori storyline that got unceremoniously dumped when Sci-Fi cancelled SG-1.

I, like many Americans, have a strong dislike of the NE Patriots. I’m not a big fan of the Giants, either, but I’m glad they (somehow) managed to win. The reason? Two words: Randy Moss.

He finally gets traded to a team that doesn’t suck, makes it to the Super Bowl, and is supposed to be a shoe-in to win. Instead, his team loses to an NFC Wild Card by three points. I’m sure he thinks he was robbed.

I say it’s his just deserts for being a narcissistic pompous jerk for the past 15+ years.