A Boomerang Comes Back

CANBERRA (Reuters) - "Proving boomerangs really do come back, an Australian town was on Thursday celebrating the return of a boomerang stolen from an outback museum by an American tourist 25 years ago."

Boomerangs are a technological marvel going way back beyond recorded history. How could anyone ever imagined such a piece of wonder, a tool designed to catch dinner and return when it failed to do so. I imagine that its first creator played at throwing various sticks, spears, and anything else that stood out in the brush. By serendipity and slowly working their way up the first such learn curve, the first boomerang creator discovered the unimaginable.

Or, is the boomerang's design was imagined out of necessity by a hunter-gatherer because chasing and losing spears is such a tax on time and energy? My idealist friends will enjoy this notion: Perhaps the first boomerang creator imagined that a curved object would return simply because it has a curve. Perhaps this pre-historic physicist intuited the boomerang's design. Perhaps some sort of sympathetic magic was at work in the creator's mind as he (I'm not sure that this creator was male.) molded theory into practice.

Getting back to the theft above, a spoiled American visitor perpetrated a crime against an Australian museum and technological history. He stole from one of the very first creators of a truly revolutionary design, a design used to this very day on swept wing aircraft as well as the "flying wing." I wonder how many visitors to that museum missed out on seeing this boomerang and were somehow less excited about technological innovations as a result? Well, at least the thief grew up and returned the boomerang, an object created for its return value, an irony for certain. Besides, the museum must have had other boomerangs to display.

Most of us do dumb things when we are young and many thieves are young. I figure that thieves that continue to steal in their senior years are still immature, at least in the industrialized countries. Overall, it is a good thing for cleaning up crime that none of us stay young for long.

I recall the thieves in Iraq looting and destroying museums when the US invited itself into that ancient part of the World, and they did not look so young. The artifacts stolen were not like the prehistory boomerang stolen as we read in the article from Reuters. No, the artifacts stolen from the people of Iraq and the future's memory were not designed to return; They will not return because in most cases they have been destroyed or lost. In those few cases that priceless stones and such make their way to the market, individuals will pass them down their family line, well beyond the reach of the public view.

That's the way it goes in the ironies of thievery, history, and technology.

Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleaners

John Dewey and Social Testing

John Dewey was big on hands-on experiential training for general education. Like, taking a piece of cotton, holding it in front of a classroom of young learners, talking about it, and then passing it around.

He would have, and probably did, cause others to create lesson plans around cotton to teach World and American History. He would have, and possibly did, cause others to have students analyze cotton's texture and its visual patterns under a microscope.

Dewey's approach left testing to the side, or should I think and say, "Dewey never stopped testing because he was testing his own philosophy of learning and practice incrementally." Testing is or should be an on-going activity inseparable from the learning process as well as indistinguishable from learning, in the most part.

In the social field we run into problems with testing. The latest on public schools and testing should be enough to prove this point.

Social testing is an ethical issue that goes beyond the classroom. Social testing gives the learner an opportunity to follow his or her choices, although the choices to be made are structured by rewards given at random and by schedules of positive reinforcement. The outcomes are still hard to predict because of the many variables present before testing, the many unknowns that the learner has processed in their own testing of others in their socialization process.

I have, I believe, been fortunate in my education, or at least my socialization; Perhaps I've been trained to be a little too sophisticated in some regards, less so in others. I've been fortunate in terms of knowing where I was going with my "social testing." I have not been surprised. Disappointed, yes, surprised, no. I suppose there's a little bit of Iago (Shakespeare) in all of us. The worse characteristics of human manipulation, that is. I hope not to duplicate these on my own part or the part of others. It unfortunate when I see Iago emerge in others at the end of my social testing of their character.

Kurt Vonnegutt I wish I could write like you!

So it goes.

Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleaners

William Jennings Bryan and Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee with the right ideas on the wrong side?
It depends on your politics.

• Huckabee supports the FairTax as a replacement for the current tax system.^[153]

Bring the war home -

Article, Bring the War Home.

Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq? Who stole from Iraq? Who humiliated Iraq? Who desecrated Iraq’s holy sites? Who damaged the honor of Iraqi women? It is none other than the … occupation.

The occupation is the first and last cause of the problem, it has overthrown the [former] regime without a plan, it has suppressed the state with no reason, it has led to the resistance and it has infiltrated it, it has brought al-Qaida to Iraq

Veteran suicides

I'm not sure if these figures are sociologically or politically significant or not. I have no figures for the general population or other populations to compare with.

According to one report quoting CBS, approximately 1,000 veteran suicides occur weekly in the USA.

Methodology: Telephone calls to all counties in the USA requesting data on this subject, which is not (apparently) available from the US Government sources. I would very much like to be corrected on the unavailability claim regarding veteran suicide data availability via the US Government. After all, Durkheim died 91 years ago. This should not be asking much from the government that placed a man on the moon!

The Bush administration, which is widely known, also, uses rose colored spectacles to describe its support for Veterans.

Iraq veterans agains the war

Iraq veterans against the war.

An Open Letter to the Anti-War Movement From Iraq Veterans Against the War

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the quagmire known as the invasion/occupation of Iraq, many of us feel a need to mark this occasion with an appropriately momentous show of resistance. For the past few months, IVAW has been organizing "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan." From March 13-16, 2008, we will assemble the largest gathering of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in history, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors, to offer first-hand, eyewitness accounts to tell the truth about these occupations — their impact on the troops, their families, our nation, and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Winter Soldier will require IVAW's full attention and organizing capacity leading up to and during the event.

Re-visiting the traffic scene --

I know this is not a popular idea among many people, but I must say it again and again: I have to admire the California Highway Patrol as well as other state police agencies.

They really do risk their lives policing the crazies among us on the highway at the risk of their own lives almost constantly, daily. These people are by far a select and elite group. Granted, there have been times when a few diminished the glaring luster of the many, but their ranks are by far over-flowing with special concerns for people in general. I see it in their work, their methods, their personal risk taking. I feel sorry for those lost in the line of duty.

I am tired now. I needed to get this idea going and will return when I have more time. Frankly, I hate our most popular mode of transportation. I will say too that our highway system has too many potholes. I will say too that our highway system is so well engineered that it is the reason more people are not maned and killed daily.

I just feel good about what I see in our policing agencies on the highway and I feel good about our highway system in general.
Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleaners