Eyeopening TV solutions for campus mass shootings

From watching television coverage of the Virginia Tech mass shootings two possible solutions would appear to follow:

A) Maximal:
Ban all born in South Korea from becoming college students; bar all those with a history of mental illness from becoming college students; and ban all handguns.

B) Minimal:
Ban all South Koreans who own handguns and who have a history of mental illness from becoming college students.

The second would be easier to implement, although possibly controversial to enact. Still, one of these alternatives should make sense.

We all know South Koreans CAN be violent; handguns CAN be fatal; and those with a history of mental illness CAN be dangerous. Why not just get rid of them all?

Are there other possible "solutions?" Of course, but you will rarely find them watching television.

The "EXCEPTION WHICH PROVES THE RULE" is CSPAN2's April 23 coverage of hearings on campus security held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

Click here for audio visual streaming and .pdf downloads of this EYEOPENING testimony of experts on campus security, mental health, and student counseling.

As the world turns: it's time to take a snooze

The intracacies of politics in Washington, in Bagdad; climate change; poison pet food. Where will it end?

Words, so many words. Time to take a snooze --- and read a good book, written way back in the 1980's.

A recent Chinese television series has spotlighted this book to encourage discussion on how China's emerging power can avoid the traps other great nations, such as the United States, have fallen into.

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From The New York Times:

Date: January 10, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk
Byline: By MICHAEL HOWARD; Michael Howard is the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS

Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000. By Paul Kennedy. Maps and tables. 677 pp. New York: Random House. $24.95.....


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"Paul Kennedy of Yale University has broken ranks with his colleagues. In a work of almost Toynbeean sweep he describes a pattern of past development that is not only directly relevant to our times but is clearly intended to be read by policy makers, particularly American policy makers....

"He expands his thesis in the introduction and epilogue. It can be easily summarized: The more states increase their power, the larger the proportion of their resources they devote to maintaining it. If too large a proportion of national resources is diverted to military purposes, this in the long run leads to a weakening of power....

"The capacity to sustain a conflict with a comparable state or coalition of states ultimately depends on economic strength; but states apparently at the zenith of their political power are usually already in a condition of comparative economic decline, and the United States is no exception to this rule.

"Power can be maintained only by a prudent balance between the creation of wealth and military expenditure, and great powers in decline almost always hasten their demise by shifting expenditure from the former to the latter. Spain, the Netherlands, France and Britain did exactly that. Now it is the turn of the Soviet Union and the United States.

"THE over-extension of American commitments and the baroque gigantism of the American defense budget have been a matter of such general concern over the last few years that Mr. Kennedy may be accused of the fault against which historians warn their pupils: seeing the past through the perspective of the present.

"It is none the less true that contemporary concerns often alert us to aspects of the past that previous historians have overlooked; and indeed it is this very accumulation of perspectives that keeps the past continuously alive.

"In the hands of a political pamphleteer seeking evidence to prove a case such an approach is a corruption of history, but when a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to re-examine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding and a fresh enlightenment of the problems of our own time."