Personal Narrative

Jesse Jackson, Ambulance Chaser, and the Shores of Western Michigan

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I had to admit, a month or so ago when the protests were in full swing here in Madison I was surprised to see Jesse Jackson show up. Then I thought about it, and I wasn’t surprised at all. Jesse always shows up to events such as the protests to get his face on TV. Does anyone really listen to him anymore?

Once again, I saw Jesse on the news today. The city of Benton Harbor has had its mayor (or is it city manager) and the entire city council tossed on its ear in the name of a financial emergency. The state of Michigan has empowered an emergency financial manager to run the place until it can get back on its feet. So who showed up? Jesse Jackson, imploring the people of Benton Harbor to sue the state (rather than showing up five years ago and imploring the people to fix the mess, but that is besides the point).

On a personal note, I have vacationed with my family for the past decade on the shores of western Michigan and we absolutely love it. Every community there has cashed in on the warm summer waters of the Lake and developed their shores, and held nice festivals for the tourists such as myself and my family and the hordes from Chicago. Every community, that is, except Benton Harbor.

We have stayed in neighboring St. Joseph, a tiny community just to the south of Benton Harbor, many times. Once we got lost and were driving through Benton Harbor and we all of a sudden had to lock the doors and zip through there. What an absolute dump. We could hardly believe that every small city we had visited was so nice, and Benton Harbor was so trashed. Something was clearly amiss, but we didn’t know what it was – we just wanted to get out of there.

I am not surprised that Benton Harbor is in financial straits, nor that Jesse Jackson showed up to lead the “fight” to save their elected government that Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm declared to be such a basketcase that she had to appoint the emergency representative to rescue. I read a few documents on the situation and they didn’t even have basic accounting principles employed.

Who Needs Infrastructure? (II)

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Commenters on the earlier post having raised several good points, I decided to write a follow-up rather than attempt to provide individual responses.

I should first say something general about technological advance and prediction horizons. Due to the immense effects of nanomachinery, as hazardous as near-future speculation may be, it becomes extraordinarily difficult more than about 20 years out. What interests me in this context is what can be done with “bulk technology” before the transition to nanotech, and how many of the developments forecast by Drexler et al may occur relatively gradually and in unlikely places, rather than swiftly and obviously emanating from North America or some other high-technology region. Jim notes the potential of the combination of desktop fabricators and satellite links. I believe that few people on Earth will see more change in the next generation than young Haitians.

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Who Needs Infrastructure?

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Last month I went to Haiti to help out with an IT project in Petit-Goâve, a medium-sized town about seventy kilometers west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, on the northern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula, opposite ÃŽle de la Gonâve on the Canal de Sud. The project’s objective is to create, or rather restore, a computer lab at “College” Harry Brakeman (actually a primary and secondary school, hereafter “CHB”), and provide greatly improved internet access, via wireless links, at five sites (including CHB) in Petit-Goâve owned by L’Eglise Methodiste d’Haiti (EMH). The epicenter of one of the larger aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake was directly beneath Petit-Goâve.

Numerous ongoing projects for the EMH throughout Haiti are being funded by United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) and staffed by United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM), but my personal involvement is not occurring as a result of direct involvement with any of those organizations. I have for many years been attending an informal Friday lunch group that for the past decade or so has included Clif Guy, who is the CIO of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, generally known as “COR” throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area, in which it is by several measures the largest single church big enough to have its own IT department (larger than most church staffs altogether) and a CIO.

In mid-January I returned from a solitary and somewhat monastic sojourn in New Mexico and the trans-Pecos region of Texas to 1) get back to work at Sprint; 2) bury my just-deceased 18-year-old cat; and 3) talk to Clif about opportunities in Haiti, which he had mentioned several times over the previous year. Two months of frantic preparation later, which included among many other tasks the filling out of a “Mission Trip Notification of Death” to specify the disposition of my corpse, I was landing at Toussaint Louverture International Airport.

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First Winter Down

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We have been operating our hobby farm in full force for a whole year now and MAN have we learned a lot. Honestly, it is my wife who is out there every day doing the daily chores, which she admittedly enjoys.

We now have a skillset that might be valuable someday, and it might not. We learned that in our situation live barn cats are better than poison or traps. There was a mice problem in our barn last year. We got two cats from the feral cat humane society here. Yes, I know it sounds silly to actually pay $25 ea. for cats but we wanted them for a couple of reasons. We wanted them to kill. Domesticated cats do kill, but don’t have as good survival instincts as our “little tigers” as I like to call them. We have seen evidence of nary a mouse all winter – last year we couldn’t reset the traps fast enough. Now that it is warmer the rodents will head outside for food and we won’t have to deal with that problem for a little while.

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Unsung American Hero: Cadet Matthew Joseph La Porte

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Ed Beakley of Project White Horse alerted me to the untold story of Mathew Joseph La Porte, Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets:

The story of Cadet La Porte on the morning of 16 April, 2007 is tragic and short.   It is not based on eyewitness account but rather on physical evidence.   Given the magnitude of the tragedy, and the seriousness of trying to understand how to prevent further similar events, his story has almost been lost. And that’s just not right…
 

The basic story

 
In the early morning of Monday, 16 April 2007, 23-year old Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho entered a dormitory room and killed two students. Sometime later he then entered the Norris Hall engineering building and began to systematically attack five classrooms on the second floor, ultimately killing 30 students and professors and wounding or causing injury of an additional two dozen. As police officers approached classroom 211, Cho took his own life. These premeditated attacks represent the worst mass-murder shooting to ever take place in an American school.
 

The final act

 
Around 9:52 the police entry teams move up the stairways shouting “Police, Police!” Cho has returned to room 211 where he had previously attacked and killed several students. There is about a half minute of silence with no shots fired by Cho, then a final two shots, the last being the one turned on himself. Evidence indicates that the next to last shot would have been into Cadet La Porte who would have been dead for some time from the previous attack to the classroom.
 

From evidentiary photographs…

 
The body position and the wounds of Matt La Porte indicate that he had maneuvered around the room from his desk in the rear right of the classroom and attempted to attack Cho across the front of the classroom. Attired in his uniform, he fell just short of the door, lying next to the blackboard facing where Cho would have been standing while shooting. Matt’s arms were outstretched in a classic football tackling position. He had eight bullet entry wounds fingers, thumb, arms and shoulders and to the front of his head that could only have been sustained while moving forward on the shooter in the very position he fell.
 
The Archangel team believes there is no other conclusion that can be drawn from the physical evidence other than that Cadet Matthew Joseph La Porte died in a charging attack on Seung-Hui Cho.

His story has not been told:

Note that nothing of the above is mentioned on any of the available reports or recounting of the incident, and I cannot find anything indicating this story has ever been told, or that this young man’s bravery has ever been recognized…
 
As to why this story has never been told, I can only speculate.   Recognizing the magnitude of the tragedy, the necessary crime scene investigation, and the intense desire to understand how this could ever happen and thus translate into prevention of future occurrences in our schools, I can appreciate why key aspects may not have been released for some period of time…
 
But to not recognize this act of valor above and beyond just strikes me as if not wrong certainly just not right…while there might be an issue of the media presenting a model of student fighting back, the evidence seemed clear of his attempt to stop the killer and dying in the process. Was he not a military serviceman in uniform, who fought to save others under heavy fire at close quarters?   Should Cadet La Porte not be recognized as a national hero?
 
There is no axe to grind here on “why” no recognition or award.   My assumption is that within the magnitude of the tragedy and the nature of the investigation, Cadet La Porte’s actions got lost if for no other reason there were no witnesses.  It is indeed only the physical evidence that supports this where he sat, vice where he died, his posture, and where his wounds were…It just doesn’t appear that you can draw any other conclusion other than that this young man “gave all valiantly.”
 
[…]
 
Sometimes it is impossible not to be a victim, but I don’t think Cadet La porte died as a victim at all- when challenged, he acted.
 
To me, seems he died like a fighter pilot  “spirit of attack, born of a brave heart.”