Well, now I’m glad I waited a day to do this.  As time goes on, more details are coming out.

Yesterday, I would found it interesting that somebody would just go off killing people for no reason.  Even if there’s no mental illness, there has to be an incident that would make a person just snap.

Today, however, more is coming out.  Lets take a look at some choice quotes:

Meanwhile, the AP reported that Kazmierczak’s parents had placed him in a Chicago psychiatric treatment center after high school. A former employee of the center said Kazmierczak habitually cut himself and wouldn’t take his medication, according to the AP.

Surely, any time somebody has ever been in a psychiatric treatment facility, this should be examined before giving somebody a gun license?  Now, the media might be sensationalizing this (it’s what media often does), but I am increasingly of the feeling that people under current psychiatric treatment (as he appears to have been, even outside the facility) should not be getting access to guns.

Now, before all the “no law shall prohibit ownership of a gun” crowd comes to hunt me down (no pun intended), hear me out.  Look, people are in psychiatric treatment for a reason.  They’ve got something going on that doesn’t make them dangerous necessarily, but they can put dangerous thoughts in their heads.  Sounds simplistic, I know, but the point I’m trying to make is that when you have someone with a history of self-harm, putting a gun in their hands may not be the best choice one can make.  So, lets continue…

University Police Chief Donald Grady said Friday that there were no “red flags” suggesting Kazmierczak was dangerous or disturbed.

Now, I definitely don’t fault the police chief, here.  He’s not lying, I think, because during this time that Kazimerczak was a student, he was on his meds.  To the outside world, everything was peachy.  This guy didn’t have a mental illness to them, and it showed.  All the media reports show he was a model student, and quite the scholar.  And so people can go on to lead normal lives, even with a mental illness, if they’re continuing with proper treatment.   Then he stopped for some reason…

People close to him have told police he was taking medication but had stopped and had become “somewhat erratic” in the last couple of weeks, Grady said, not specifying what the medication was.

Again, no fault of the police chief here, because who are they to know this kind of thing?  Unless Kazimerczak was acting in a dangerous way, they wouldn’t have known.  Similarly, “erratic” is a bit vague.  When I don’t have some of my asthma medication, and less oxygen is getting to my brain, I also do some things I’d consider “erratic.”  Am I dangerous?  Surely not.  So, I can see this one going two ways, depending on what erratic behaviors he was exhibiting.  The story seems to suggest that it was something that should have concerned people, but they were also saying yesterday that he had no signs of mental illness, and that’s since been smashed.

So, the questions are:

1) What was he doing after stopping his meds, and if it was concerning those who knew him, did they say anything about it?

2) I’m unsure of the laws of Illinois, but do they do background checks on mental illness?  If not, they should.

2a). If they do checks on history of mental illness, did he show up?  If not, why not?

3) What is considered the line for unacceptable granting of a gun license in Illinois?

Now, I know that not every case is like this, but the fact remains that no veteran coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan should have to fight the Veterans Administration to care for injuries received during their service.

Like this man, Ty Ziegel.  He was very badly injured when a suicide bomber attacked the place where he was in Iraq.  When Ziegel got home, he had to fight the VA to get his “head trauma” coverage changed to traumatic brain injury.  That covers 100%, compared to head trauma’s 10%.  The point is, he should not have had to do this, they should have automatically done it.

Now, I’m not saying the VA has to cover everything that ever happens to a veteran off duty, but they should be covering injuries (physical and psychological) that happen to them during the course of their service.  They are putting their lives on the line to defend this country, and we owe them that.

The story has quotes from people who say the injury ratings system is antiquated, and I believe it is.  But, the VA has other problems.  State to state departments simply do not communicate.  I know this from personal (second hand) experience, because my mother had to handle my grandfather’s medical things for awhile.  She had to deal with getting medical data transferred from Massachusetts to my state when he came to live with us for a while.  I think the problem becomes increasingly exasperated after a several years out of active service.  The older veterans are pushed back to make way for the new, and may fall through the cracks.

My point is, this should not be happening.  It would seem to me, that until I hear of any more problems, the way forward is clear for the VA.  There are 3 steps that can be taken to clean things up a bit:

1) Fix the injury rating system.  The article says it dates back to WWII.  Hello!  This is 2007, and we know a lot more about what real injuries are now then we did.  Maybe this is the reason people who fought in Vietnam are having trouble getting psychological injuries covered.  Since back then you probably would have known about it!

2) Improve your communication, VA offices!  Maybe it’s time for some kind of national database of veterans, so that all offices can know their details, and what service-related medical problems they have.  It’d certainly help when a veteran moves to a new state, or has a VA-covered problem in a state other than their home.

Yea, I know, privacy issues.  I am normally against things like this, but I think it’s clear something needs to be done.

3) Make sure your hospitals are ran properly!  After the whole Walter Reed scandal last year (though I know it’s not in your jurisdiction), the VA should make sure its hospitals are keeping clean, and giving the utmost proper care to our veterans.

I think it’s a simple issue, though the solutions may be a little more complex.  We owe it to our veterans to make sure they are cared for after serving their country.

If there’s anything I hate more than chain email (and I hate chain email like I hate corrupt politicians), it’s badly researched chain mail, which seems to be a characteristic of a lot of them. Most of them are rumors started by someone who couldn’t spend two seconds looking up the facts, so they get all hot and bothered by the issue.

Take the new $1 coins from the U.S. Mint. I got a chain mail from my mother (who didn’t start it, so not her fault) complaining that these new coins should be boycotted because supposedly they don’t have “In God We Trust” on them. Well, apart from the fact that I could less if they did – I feel a lecture in the importance of God coming from a commenter in my future – something tells me that given most politicians in the federal government are not atheists, this wouldn’t fly with them. They’d be on the Mint faster than you could blink.

Sure enough, it’s not true. Just the position of the phrase has moved. As you can see, it’s now on the edge. This is interesting, because I think it’s the first time any coin (of any country, but not sure on that) has has words on the edge of them.

Now, I know what people are going to say, “But you can’t see it as easily.” Well, maybe you can to actually exercise for thumb and forefinger to get to it, but looking at the picture, it would seem that the words stretch the whole thickness of the edge, potentially making them a bigger font size than they are on any current coin. I’d have to see one to be sure, but if that’s the case, wouldn’t that make it easier to see? Especially for the elderly?

Surely doing this would make people happier, as it’s actually emphasizing the phase just that much more. But, people will probably still complain. By the way, “E Pluribus Unum” and the year are also on the edge. So, no people. This isn’t some vast far-left conspiracy to remove God from our lives. So, stop while you’re ahead.

As per usual, I’m late on this issue, but maybe that’s a good thing.  Instead of responding right away, I can get more facts by waiting.  My topic of discussion today is one Andrew Speaker.  You may remember him as the guy who plane hopped a vacation around Europe, before flying back to Canada, and then driving over the border into the U.S.  Oh yea, he also has one of the worst forms of tuberculosis, a deadly disease (more so in his case).

This man’s actions are inexcusable.  He seemed more concerned about getting married than getting healthy, or at least, protecting the health of others.  However, as there seems to be some dispute to this situation, namely that he claims a health official told him he wasn’t a danger to others.  So, on the hypothetical basis that this is true, I’ll concede that to him.

However, he was later told in Rome that the disease was much worse than the CDC had thought, and that he should definitely check in to a hospital.  It is then, ignoring anything else, that he decided to be irresponsible.  He took his flight to Prague (which I’m guessing was a layover) and on to Canada, potentially being directly responsible for anybody else who may get this disease.  Why would he do that?  He apparently didn’t think the hospitals in Rome were up to treating him.  Come on!  Rome is hardly the third world Speaker seems to think it is.  Perhaps he will see better treatment in the U.S., but for the time being, he needed hospitalization.  To go on and take the flight is nothing less than selfishness.   Obviously, he would have eventually gotten home, and probably quickly, too.  But no.  He had to play a role in determining the fates of up to 80 people.

Now, while Speaker holds a lot of blame for his actions, answers need to be had from the CDC as well.  Did one of their people tell Speaker he wasn’t a risk to people?  It does seem he was told, before his trip, not to fly (and then did, anyway) .  We need to know what exactly happened, and then we can assign blame.  However, in the meantime, Speaker has fessed up and apologized for his irresponsibility.  May we hope that nobody caught anything, or else an apology may not be enough.

Before I continue, I’d like to point you to the change in the logo.  I added a ribbon to commemorate the victims of the horrible Virginia Tech shooting last Monday.  Another site I frequent added it, and released the image for public use.  If anybody would like to use it for their site, click this link for the full-sized image.

In other news, however, it is Earth Day, meaning I should make the obligatory post about it (and the fact that I have material I feel strongly about helps).  I didn’t do anything last year, but this year I will.

As everybody know (though not everybody accepts), humans are changing the Earth’s climate at a drastic rate.  Chiefly through our use of fossil fuels, we our adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate that is unprecedented in human, and probably Earth, history.  Now, before I continue, I’m not one of those people who think we can completely stop global warming, because we can’t.  The fact is that global warming is a natural process.  It happens after every global cooling that leads to an ice age.  The problem, however, is that it’s not meant to go this fast.  If you look at charts of carbon dioxide variations over the last 400,000 years, you can see that since 1850 or so, the amount of CO2 added to air is astronomical.  And with these amounts of CO2 comes the increase in global temperature.

From what I’ve seen, things are only going to get worse as less developed countries become more developed.  The third world won’t stay that way forever.  They will industrialize, and the demand for fossil fuels will rise.  This will add to amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere every year, and will only serve to make the planet hotter.

So, what can we do?  Well, in my opinion, I don’t think there is one single-shot fix, as a lot of people seem to think.  We can’t simply rely on the government to regulate, and we can’t just rely on the corporations to change their ways.  We also can’t just reply on humans to change their energy consumption patterns.  Instead, we need a combination of all three.  Governments, companies, and people must work together to bring about the change.  We can’t start with the government and companies working together to provide a path to success.  It may take some government subsidizing to do it, and I think that if this is required, they should do it (all of them mind you, not just the U.S.).  Companies and the government then need to research the issue on how we can reduce our CO2 footprint, find the best way, or combination of ways, and then implement it.  I think it will take a combination of these two to start things off.

Forgive me for saying so, but except for the “econerds, (and I say that in the nicest way possible, by the way)” people generally are not going to change their methods or call for it.  So, once the corporations and governments have taken the lead, people should catch on.  Also, it would probably help if a celebrity econerd were to get out there and lobby the public, since people love celebrities.  So, eventually, the public interest will rise.  There will be a structure in place to get people going.  In the end, people, corporations, and governments will work hand in hand in hand to lessen our dependence on CO2 emitting products.

Now, in the area of gasoline for cars, I think the big corps need to get their act together.  We’ve already seen Ford and others get into the game.  However, I don’t think I’ve seen a big fuel company like ExxonMobile do anything.  I believe they need to do something.  It’ll only be a matter of time before people are clamoring for a solution, and if they gas companies don’t start changing their attitudes toward all of this, they’ll come crashing as someone else steps in to meet the demand.  So, wise up ExxonMobile and others.  Get into the game before it’s too late!  It may cost in the short run (but, with your profits, you can afford it), but it’ll only help in the long run.

Now, everybody always says that we need to care for the planet.  I’m not saying I disagree, but they say it in a way that makes it sound like that if we don’t slow global warming (which is all we can do), that Earth is going to blow up.  Definitely not going to happen.  Some species of plant and animal may die, but others will thrive in the heat.  It may take some time before the Earth gets cooler again if it gets too bad, but short of a supernova, the planet’s not going anywhere.  Instead, what I think people really mean when they thing the Earth is in trouble is that humans are in trouble.  In trouble we will be if we change our attitudes toward global climate change.  We can’t stop global warming (you need that lesson, *Ahnold*) , and we probably will never completely go back to natural global warming, but we can slow it.  Now is the time to act, not when it becomes a critical problem.  One arm of society alone will not fix it, we need three: government, corporation, human.  Working together, a solution can be found.