Honest Question

Are the residents of broken black neighborhoods more fearful of their local police force ... or drive-by shootings by gang bangers?

This is an honest question that deserves an honest answer ...

Modern Nutrition

Our children are once again under assault in the guise of helping them. Despite the constant liberal echo chamber that says it's always about "the children," it is really more often about the nanny state. My eleven-year old granddaughter who is in the sixth grade here in Massachusettes is soon to be surveyed about her nutritional habits .. good intentions, no? But like most things here in this road-to-hell state of a fake-Indian Senator and Indian pudding, this survey from the Massachusetts Office of Food and Nutrition took a left turn in its design ... and now deals with many non-nutritional issues in its daunting 99 questions. For instance, what do the following sample questions from the last survey have to do with food and nutrition?

- A transgender person is someone whose biological sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about themselves. Are you transgender?

- During the last 30 days, on how many days did you carry a weapon such as a gun, knife or club?

- Has anyone ever had sexual contact with you against your will?

- Have you ever tried smoking cigarettes, even one or two puffs?

- During your life, on how many days have you had at least one drink of alcohol?

- During your life, how many times have you used marijuana?

And on and on ... This state agency has used its authority and good intentions to take a can opener to the private lives of Massachusetts families. Yes, this survey says that respondents will remain anonymous and will suffer no repercussions ... but dollars to donuts they are lying and some poor six-grade schlub who believed that his/her parents allowing a sip of wine on a special occasion was OK will now find a posse of do-gooder state-ists putting their family in the parental-abuse docks. And does anyone truly believe that any heads-up gang-banger-to-be is going to answer the weapons question in the affermative? The naïveté of these survey designers is mind-boggling.

For those of you, who are as incensed as my son and I are at this state intrusiveness, please spend some time viewing what my granddaughter is likely to be asked to fess up to about her family life ... see: Youth Risk Behavior Survey. There are many other ways for dealing with the social problems that this survey is trying to address. I suggest that the Massachusetts Office of Food and Nutrition investigate some of these alternatives. And I have also suggested that my granddaughter decline answering any of these neb-nose questions.

What Rules?

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School Shootings

Liberals seem to have but three solutions to damp down gun violence at schools ... universal background checks, compulsory gun registrations and the outlawing of "assault" rifles with large magazines ... as if the gun commits these heinous crimes. All of these constraints would, in my opinion, do little to stop the rash of school shootings we have recently experienced ... and they would do absolutely nothing to retard the criminals and gang bangers from their wild-west mayhem.

The solution to the rash of urban drive-by shootings would be to start or reinstate stop and frisk ... and the discouraging of the "Black Lives Matter" anti-police movement.

But insofar as fixing the school shooting plague our society needs to focus on the shooter ... and this requires a trade-off between individual liberty and societal good. Thus, I have the following suggestions:

- Relax the HIPAA rules that prohibit mental health workers from reporting incidents of patients who have indicated that they want to kill others. This reporting could be done through a panel of mental-health experts who would review the evidence and decide if it met a threshold of sufficient danger that required further action. If so, then the proper authorities would be notified.

- All American social-media systems should be required to have filters in place that identify individuals who issue radical anti-social threats on their postings ... and then provide information to help law enforcement zero in on these possible killers.

- Existing gun registration systems should be scanned to identify individuals or relatives of individuals who are buying large quantities of guns and ammunition in a short period of time.

- School administrators should be asked to place in a database public data on possible nut cases under their authority ... excluding any information which had not been collected under strict formal disciplinary procedures.

A data mining system should then be constructed that melds the information from these four filters to rank threat levels for possible school shooters ... who then would be interviewed further to determine exactly how dangerous they are ... and incarcerated if necessary. Thus, authorities might proactively reduce or eliminate these school-shooting threats.
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