Before we get to the main thrust of today’s blog, I’d like to share a little political advice my grandmother gave me long ago.
“It is the politician’s job to make you like him. Ignore him and look at the people who support him directly. They will let you know what kind of person he is.”
Of course, when my granny was young there were almost no female politicians so I’d hope you’d cut her some P.C. slack on this one.
Even so, it’s good advice.
That simple amount of research can save you years of anguish. In many other cases the same principle holds true as well. For example, if you’re a nurse, knowing that injecting a patient with coffee instead of blood might be a bad idea is knowledge worth having. It’s a pity that no one told Rejane Moreira Telles that.
A student nurse in Brazil has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after allegedly injecting a patient with coffee, rather than a blood drip.
Rejane Moreira Telles, 23, had been working at a Rio de Janeiro clinic for only three days
when the incident occurred, the New York Daily News reports.“Anyone can get confused,” Telles told TV Globo, pointing out that the blood drip and a feed drip filled with a coffee and milk mixture were right next to each other. She also noted that she had not received training in this particular procedure.
The patient, 80-year-old Palmerina Pires Ribeiro, died last week, hours after the mix-up, according tot he Daily Mail.
Nutritional specialist Dr. Armando Carreir told the network that Ribeiro’s death “would have been as if [she] was suffocating.”
Two nurses and other student at the clinic have also been indicted for manslaughter.
A similar incident occurred in Rio de Janeiro in late September, when a nursing technician allegedly injected a patient with soup.
For the record, soup really is good food. It’s just a lousy blood substitute. See? Knowledge is power
Here’s some more advice; if you rob a bank don’t go back and tell them you were shortchanged.
Going back to a bank you just ripped off to claim you’d been shortchanged isn’t likely to end well.
That’s what police say led to an arrest Monday in upstate New York.
Syracuse police say 28-year-old Arthur Bundrage, of East Syracuse, went into a bank at about 9 a.m. and demanded $20,000. Authorities say a teller initially refused, but relented and gave him some money, even though he never showed a weapon or made a threat.
Investigators say Bundrage left but returned when he found he hadn’t been given $20,000. Officers say they found him at the bank’s locked front door, trying to get back in.
Bundrage is in jail awaiting arraignment Tuesday on a charge of fourth-degree grand larceny. Police say he doesn’t yet have a lawyer.
But these are examples of individual stupidity. Let’s take a look at group stupidity. And we are talking on an epic scale here. The Arizona legislature wants to force the Grand Canyon to secede from the United States and become their personal property.
No, I am not drunk.
When voters in Arizona go to the polls next month, they will be asked to decide a landownership tug of war: Should the Grand Canyon belong to all Americans, or just the residents of Arizona?
A controversial ballot measure backed by Republicans in the state legislature is seeking sovereign control over millions of acres of federal land in the state, including the Grand Canyon.
Proposition 120 would amend the state’s constitution to declare Arizona’s sovereignty and jurisdiction over the “air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within the state’s boundaries.”
The measure is the latest salvo in the so-called “sagebrush revolt” by Republicans in the West aiming to take back control of major swaths of land owned by various federal agencies, much of it by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.
State Senator Sylvia Allen, one of the Republican backers of the measure, argues that federal retention of the land hurts the economy of the Western states and leaves them struggling to fund public education, nurture their economies, and manage their forests and natural resources.
“We do not have the ability in rural Arizona to provide jobs for our citizens due to the fact that the federal government controls all the land,” Allen told Reuters. “It leaves us at a great disadvantage. We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need,” she added.
The exact area of public land targeted by the measure – which excludes American Indian reservations and federal installations such as arsenals – was not immediately clear on the Arizona Secretary of State’s website.
The Sierra Club pegged the area at between 39,000 and 46,700 square miles (101,000 and 121,000 square km) – or 34 percent to 41 percent of the entire state.
BATTLE OVER LAND
The ballot measure is just the latest move in a decades-old federal-state skirmish over control of a wide range of natural resources in Western states, often pitting mining, drilling and logging companies against those seeking to protect the environment.
The efforts have had mixed success. In May, Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed a state bill calling on Washington to relinquish the title to 48,000 square miles (124,000 square km), arguing that it created uncertainty for existing leaseholders on federal lands in difficult economic times.
But similar legislation was signed into law by Governor Gary Herbert in neighbouring Utah in March, despite warnings from state attorneys that it was likely unconstitutional and would trigger a costly and ultimately futile legal battle.
Opponents of the latest drive to assert Arizona’s ownership say that, if successful, the initiative could undermine protections provided by federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and Clean Water Act, and would saddle Arizona with lands for which it would be unable to care.
“They can’t even fund and ensure that their (state) parks are protected, so how they would take on an additional 25 to 30 million acres of land is a big question mark,” Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, told Reuters.
No polls have given a sense of whether Prop 120 will prosper during the November 6 election. But Bahr cautioned that, should it pass, it would inevitably trigger fresh litigation for Arizona, which recently fought a legal battle over its tough 2010 crackdown on illegal immigrants all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This one is just blatantly unconstitutional,” Bahr said of Prop 120. “Does Arizona really need another lawsuit?”
Problem #1; (click this to see a map) The Grand Canyon is also in Nevada.
Nevadans are fun loving people but they might be a bit miffed at seeing a 20th of their state taken away from them.
Problem #2; see the excuse above: “We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need.”
So, to solve that problem they would have to pave over the Grand Canyon. Or use it as a dump. Either way my guess is that people who rely on the Colorado River (whcih flows thorugh it) and Lake Mead (which is entirely in the canyon) for water might be just a touch miffed.
Given the fact that the Southwest is in a state of perpetual drought in even the best of times I could easily see this leading to armed conflict.
Problem #3; Arizona doesn’t even come close to having the resources to poperply manage the thing.
In fact, the state already has millions of acres of unused land. The fact that they have, thus far, used that land to build publicly funded baseball parks and money losing strip malls is not the fault of the federal government.
Nor is it the fault of the Grand Canyon.
Not that I wish to impugn the intelligence of the average Arizonan – well, I guess I do, actually, now that I think about it – I would like to remind them of this bon mot from H.L. Mencken, “People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”
Nyle “Let The Beat Build” from Last Pictures
Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.