Day: April 21, 2018

How Did The Slacker Generation Produce These?

Another Saturday and another weekend begins….

My daughter is what some call Generation X or what others call the Slacker Generation…..recently with the deaths in Florida the students have become activists and have been protesting for better gun laws…..but the question has come out…how did a generation of slackers produce these children dedicated to protest?

Read an article that has tackled this question……

I, for one, welcome our new teenage overlords. Over the past six weeks — since the February 14 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — the generation born in the 2000s has stepped up in new and extraordinary ways. They’ve participated in town halls, they’ve staged walkouts, they’ve marched and they’ve presented action plans for positive, sensible change. If, like me, you’re lucky enough to have teenagers in your life, the passion and and integrity of these adolescent leaders comes as no great surprise. The only real mystery is how the generation that was literally called “slacker” managed to become the parents of these badasses.

The prevailing image of my Gen-X peers is of mumbly, flannel-wearing whatevers. Our cultural influence appears limited to Smashing Pumpkins and the anguished early seasons of “The Real World.” We associate boomers with student protest. We associate millennials with innovation. We associate our own youth with zines and Chanel Vamp. And then we look at our own kids and are dazzled at how motivated they are in their energy and their ability to mobilize.

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/27/how-did-the-slacker-generation-get-these-activist-kids/

As an activist from days gone by…I am proud to see these children stepping up and demanding that society do something about all the deaths, especially deaths of children.

Grand kids of radicals….apparently radicalism is like male pattern baldness….it skips a generation.

Protests And Then Some

Just when you thought the students protests were over……look and there they were yesterday……

A day already painful for gun control activists became even more so Friday when the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school massacre coincided with a shooting at a high school in Florida. One student at Ocala’s Forest High School suffered a non-life-threatening injury; the suspected shooter, identified as a male who is not a student at the school, was in custody, the Ocala Star Banner reports. It’s a scenario students across the country are already rallying against in coordinated walkouts Friday. More:

  • Origins:NPR reports Connecticut teenager Lane Murdock came up with the idea for the walkout upon learning of the deaths in Parkland, Fla. “I thought, originally, it would just be my school but, obviously, it’s grown,” the 16-year-old tells CNN. Students at more than 2,500 schools across the US were taking part. It grew out of this petition.
  • A test: The National School Walkout “will be a test for the staying power of this new wave of activism,” per Vox. Student leaders vow they won’t let fading headlines stop the movement
  • The goals: Unlike school walkouts earlier this year, this one is to last a full day, per the New York Times. One common theme: 13 seconds of silence to honor the 13 killed at Columbine. The walkout’s stated aims are to “hold elected officials accountable,” to advocate “solutions to gun violence,” and to promote political engagement.
  • Celebrity help: The Washington Post reports Robert DeNiro has penned a letter for students who need help getting out of class. “By bringing awareness of the tragic consequences of gun violence, and influencing out leaders to pass sensible gun laws, our communities and schools will become safer,” it reads.
  • Teacher remembers: At NPR, longtime Columbine teacher Paula Reed discusses the 1999 massacre, as well as this year’s school shooting in Parkland. “I came completely freakin’ unhinged,” she says of the Florida rampage. “It was too close to ours.”
  • ‘Enough’: Meanwhile, the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune has arranged the names of people killed on school campuses in the US in the last 20 years to spell “Enough.” “Please take the time to read these 223 names. Be sad. Be outraged,” it says.

The students refuse to do what Congress always does…….they refuse to rollover……..

These students refuse to go away.  Ignore these students at your own peril….these young people are becoming a force to be reckoned with….

Time for me to push away from the PC and do anything else….have a good day my friends…..chuq

Scary Medical News

Saturday and a day of rest and relaxation…..the garden will be the spot for my day’s work……

In the past we have had several different diseases that had the potential of becoming our next world-wide pandemic….Ebola and the Bird Flu are first to come to mind.

There is a theory that our constant trips to the doctor for every little sniffle is causing problems that could be disastrous……

“Nightmare bacteria” with unusual resistance to antibiotics of last resort were found more than 200 times in the US last year in a first-of-a-kind hunt to see how much of a threat these rare cases have become. That’s more than health officials expected to find, and the true number is likely higher as the effort involved only certain labs in each state, per the AP. The problem mostly strikes people in hospitals and nursing homes who need IVs and other contamination-prone tubes. Some 11% of those in close contact with these patients also harbored the superbugs even though they weren’t sick—a risk for more spread. Some of the sick patients had traveled for surgery or other health care to countries where drug-resistant germs are more common, and the superbugs were discovered after they returned to the US. “Essentially, we found nightmare bacteria in your backyard,” said the CDC’s Anne Schuchat.

These verge on untreatable infections” where the only option may be supportive care—fluids and sometimes machines to maintain life to give the patient a chance to recover, Schuchat said. About 2 million Americans get infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year and 23,000 die, Schuchat said. Last year, public health labs around the country were asked to watch for and quickly respond to cases of advanced antibiotic resistance, especially to some last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems. In the first nine months of the year, more than 5,770 samples were tested for these “nightmare bacteria,” as the CDC calls them, and one quarter were found to have genes that make them hard to treat and easy to share their resistance with other types of bacteria. Of these, 221 had unusual genes that conferred resistance. The cases were scattered throughout 27 states.

It is only a matter of time before we have another pandemic like that of the Spanish Flu in the early years of the 20th century…..it killed millions……

Time to get artistic and do something for the woman folk (that is a clever use of words)……have a day my friends.