Thursday, March 31, 2011

What did Virginia Tech do wrong?

March 31, 2011
BRUCE A. BRENNAN BLOG FROM THE WORLD AND MY MIND
The news as I see it and the views as I want them.
March 31 is … Bunsen Burner Day and National Clams On The Half Shell Day

Wednesday afternoon my daughter, a student at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, had a particularly tough, long day. She was up at 5:00 a. m., had to work, go to class, write a paper and run a service project function last night. Around 4:00 p. m. she sent my wife a text explaining her day and ending with; “Been a tough day but all is well with the world, I am sitting at a U of I baseball game.” It was just a reminder to me , my wife and all of us to to enjoy the little things in life.

Slaughter in America revisited. I wrote about this in December, 2010. Authorities are investigating possible human remains found on a Long Island barrier beach where the bodies of four online escorts were discovered late last year, police sources tell FoxNews.com. A Suffolk County police spokeswoman said the remains were found Tuesday east of the area where the original remains were discovered during a day-long search of the area using helicopters and dogs. "We have not confirmed whether or not they are human," a police source said. Investigators from Suffolk County were searching the area Tuesday for 24-year-old Shannon Gilbert of New Jersey, who was last seen in May 2010 in a shorefront community nearby. Gilbert was not among the four bodies found on a Long Island beach in December. The bodies, all wrapped in burlap bags, were identified as 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes, of Norwich, Conn.; 24-year-old Melissa Barthelmey, of Bronx, New York; 27-year-old Amber Lynn Costello, of Long Island, N.Y.; and 22-year-old Megan Waterman of Maine. All four women were escorts who advertised themselves on the Craigslist website. Police theorize a serial killer may have been responsible for the deaths. No suspects have been identified in the deaths of the women. The medical examiner's office is working to determine whether the remains found Tuesday are human.

I know my mother and father loved me but I don’t know if they loved me this much. Of course, I never put them in the situation where they had to make the choice these Ohio parents made. According to a story written by the Aol crime reporter; the body of a missing mother of three has been recovered from an underground septic system behind a rural Ohio church after the woman's mother-in-law told authorities where to find the corpse, according to police.

Authorities had been searching for 25-year-oldAuthorities  Summer Inman since March 22. She was in an alleyway behind a bank that she was cleaning when two men forced her into a car, police in the town of Logan said. Authorities in Ohio have recovered the body of Summer Inman from inside an underground septic system behind a rural church. "The body was very much intact [and] we're very comfortable with the identification," Logan Police Chief Aaron Miller told reporters during a news conference on Wednesday. Police investigated the incident as an apparent kidnapping and focused on Inman's estranged husband, William Inman II, 26. The couple, who were married in 2004, had been separated for about a year. Summer Inman had filed for divorce and obtained an order of protection. According to court documents obtained by a local TV station, 10TV News, she said her husband had "threatened to kill" her. Police last week filed kidnapping charges against Inman and his parents, William Inman, 47, and Sandra Inman, 46. According to Miller, authorities recently conducted a search of the parents' Jackson County home, during which they said they found "significant evidence" of their involvement in the crime. Miller said Sandra Inman came forward Tuesday with information in the case. "[She] asked to speak with her attorney," Miller said. "Shortly thereafter, [she] revealed the location of Summer Inman's body. Officers arrived at the location at about 8:50" Tuesday night. Miller said police were led to an underground septic tank at Faith Tabernacle Church, off U.S. 33 in Nelsonville. "Her body was in a septic system at the rear of the church," he said. Police say they have received information indicating that the Inmans may have been members of the church at some point.

I hope this is an internet rumor. Even if is not, President Obama and his people will spin it so it does not appear to be what it is. Obama made has a policy that NO U.S. SERVICEMAN CAN SPEAK AT ANY FAITH-BASED PUBLIC EVENTS ANYMORE. So much for Freedom of Speech; where’s the ACLU on this one? Why do military personnel give up Constitutional Rights even though they are the ones doing the real fighting to preserve them for United States citizens?

To the City of Lights we go, down the beautiful streets of Paris, under the Arc de Triumphe and there, before us, the site of one of the world’s most photographed and well-known landmarks, the Eiffel Tower. It was on this day in 1889 that the structure opened in Gay Paree. A beautiful sight, no? Well, not so to writers, Guy deMaupassant and Alexandre Dumas, who condemned the Eiffel Tower as a “horrid nightmare.” Well, no pleasing some people, we guess... The Eiffel Tower was named after its designer, architect, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel who built the structure for the Paris Exhibition of 1889.

You heard the old joke:

Why did the French plant shade trees to line street that passes under the Arc de Triumphe?

So invading Armies can march into Paris in the shade.

A woman turned a few heads when she walked into a rural Virginia courthouse with a tiny monkey clad in a pink-and-white dress tucked in her bra. The woman brought the palm-sized marmoset to Amherst County Courthouse on Thursday for a hearing in Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. Officials apparently didn't notice the monkey until the woman went to an office to complete some paperwork. In an interview with The News & Advance of Lynchburg, the woman says the marmoset is 7 weeks old and requires constant attention. The woman tells the newspaper she bought the animal on an online auction site and had its clothes specially made in West Virginia.

While that was going on, the government has found another way to avoid doing its job while passing the buck and charging a few bucks also. Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the 2007 shooting rampage, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday. Department officials said in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for the school's slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech's two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus. "While Virginia Tech's violations warrant a fine far in excess of what is currently permissible under the statute, the Department's fine authority is limited," wrote Mary Gust, director of a department panel that dictated what punishment the school would receive for the violation. The university could have lost some of its $98 million in federal student aid. The department has never stripped a school of federal funding for such a violation.

A university spokesman said Virginia Tech would appeal the decision. "We believe that Virginia Tech administrators acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them at the time," spokesman Larry Hincker said in a statement. Sponsored LinksThe department issued its final report in December, finding that Virginia Tech failed to issue a timely warning to the Blacksburg campus after student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed two students in a dormitory early on the morning of April 16, 2007. The university sent out an e-mail to the campus more than two hours later, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty, then himself.

The report also determined that the school failed to follow its own procedures for providing such notification. The report said Tech's failure to issue timely warnings "deprived its students and employees of vital, time-sensitive information and denied them the opportunity to take adequate steps to provide for their own safety."

We pay a lot of taxes. One of the primary obligations of the government, one of the primary reason we pay the government taxes, is for it to provide security and National Defense. Why pay the government the tax dollars if all they are going to do is make laws that pass the buck to private or public entities not designed for that purpose?

The shooter in the Virginia Tech Massacre was not an American or a citizen. Born in South Korea, Cho arrived in the United States at the age of 8 with his family. He became a US permanent resident as a South Korean national. Virginia Tech is a university providing high quality post high school education. It is not in the security business. Even though the shooter was not a citizen, he had Constitutional Rights the university could not infringe upon. The government should not either but regularly does. Virginia Tech did not authorize this mass murderer to live in the United States, the federal government did. Now, after a tragic crime, the government blames the university and imposes a fine. What sanctions will be imposed on the government for failure to do its job and keep us citizens safe? Who will impose these sanctions? We all know the answer to those questions. How can we keep the United States citizens in the United States safe while we are fighting three wars we started to safeguard others rights and safety and while we are busy arming the Mexican drug cartels so they have the modern weapons needed to kill innocent people and drug agents?

BRUCE A. BRENNAN
DEKALB, IL 60115
COPYRIGHT 2011

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"Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." - William James