Thursday, February 23, 2012

Nine-Year-Old Murder Victim Savannah Hardin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, PANDAS in New York

Aunt Maria, hello1!!! I've missed you.

My writing tonight is rather random and disjointed. news channels tend to be overwhelmingly negative in their coverage. My viewing tonight was no exception.

Poor nine-year-old Savannah Hardin accepted a candy bar from someone on a school bus. The child supposedly was afflicted with a bladder condition  which was potentially exacerbated by consumption of chocolate. The child's grandmother forced her to run without stopping for over three hours with breaks and no hydration as punishment. The child's stepmother, who was her primary caregiver because the child's father was serving in the military overseas, was present and did nothing to intervene in the child's defense. The child's father was flown back to the U. S. and was with his brain-dead child before making the inevitable decision to take the child off life support. The story sickens me. I usually find nancy Grace to be a bit strident and extreme, but tonight when she suggested that in lieu of lethal injection or whatever method of death penalty employed by the state of Alabama, perhaps the two women should be sentenced to run until they, too, collapse and die.

As for Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum, on one hand, I like the idea that they and their supporters are spending a great deal of money battling one another. To me, a Romney/Santorum ticket would seem like a rather difficult team to defeat in November. The more they fight it out and make outrageous allegations agains one another, the less likely that seems to happen, which is good i my book. As far as newt Gingrich goes, he has some very wealthy supporters, many of whom can drop $500,000 for a TV commercial o his behalf without ever missing the money they donated. This is all fine, but TV commercials concerning presidential elections are seldom relevant and usually contain only a portion of the truth. I know that, and my readers know that, but not all TV-watching voters are as smart as we are. Some, or course, do possess the critical thinking skills necessary to sort the facts from the  smut. It's the others about whom I worry. This election will be decided in part by a lot of TV-watching people who aren't necessarily able to discern the difference between facts and unsubstantiated allegations.

Another news story I found disturbing was about a community in New York where numerous adolescents suffered mysterious symptoms relating either to OCD and/or Tourette's-related tics and behaviors. A pro-active physician was able to treat most of these patients, and all are reported to be improving; some are back to near-normal functioning. The scariest part is that too many of these cases happened within such a short period for it to be any sort of a coincidence, but the common cause has yet to be found.

Does anyone have any good news to share?

1 comment:

  1. Good news. Ummm. Yes. The Wetherspoon pub chain will be staging their real ale festival from March 14 for several weeks.

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