Random Thoughts

(CBS) BELLWOOD, Ill. A UPS driver was savagely beaten by middle school students while delivering packages in the western suburbs Friday. The attack happened in Bellwood along the 3200 block of St. Charles. A teenager was arrested Monday after admitting he was involved in the incident. Another juvenile is expected to turn himself in Tuesday to appear in a line-up. In a CBS 2 excusive, Joanie Lum talked to the man who was savagely beaten just trying to do his job. UPS driver Thomas Murphy says he was beaten by a group of school kids on busy St. Charles Road in Bellwood, the route he has driven for 12 years. He says a teenager walked out in front of his delivery truck Friday at about 3 p.m. When he stopped the truck, 15 to 20 youths surrounded him.

"Somebody clocked me with a pipe. I took kicks from my right. My eyes caked over. I tried to get up and defend myself as best I could," Murphy said. He was beaten from his head to his ankles. "I remember being down on one knee, falling to the ground with kids on top of me," Murphy said. He thinks a passing motorist called for help.

The Bellwood police believe the attackers came from Roosevelt Middle School, located a couple of blocks away. They have stepped up patrols in the area. [More]

From McGuffey Fifth Reader (designed for the ten-year-olds of our American frontier):

Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man. Appetite, knowing no restraint, and suffering, having no solace or hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws. Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked as unmeaning sounds. A sordid self-interest would supplant every feeling; and man would become, in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be--a companion for brutes.

I wonder what things we be like if they still used the old textbooks...

Today should be a day when people remember that America was a racially divided country. We should strive to a society where everyone is on a level playing field, where no one has an advantage based on race. Where it shouldn't matter whether one is white, black, or whatever.

Yet today I came across this on the internet:

Mayor Ray Nagin told a crowd gathered at City Hall on Monday for a march honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that New Orleans will be "chocolate" again.

and this . . .

The mayor of New Orleans is predicting that his city will once again be ''a majority African-American city. In a Martin Luther King Day speech to a crowd at City Hall, Mayor Ray Nagin said, "It's the way God wants it to be." He says you can't have New Orleans any other way.

If New Orleans is primarily black because it just works out that way, it is fine with me, but please New Orleans, elect a new mayor ASAP.

I really like alternative history books, with Harry Turtledove being the best I know of in that genre. What would our history be like if the South had won the civil war? And questions like these are answered in several different books. However what might the future hold? If we project ourself years into the future and look back at today and the year to come what might we want to change on a global scale.

For an interesting take on what might happen with Iran

The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented
By Niall Ferguson
(Filed: 15/01/2006)

Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East:

With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.

The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.

A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure.

This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.

[Read more . . .]

British Woman Marries Dolphin - AP

JERUSALEM, Israel — Sharon Tendler met Cindy 15 years ago. She said it was love at first sight. Last week she finally took the plunge and proposed. The lucky "guy" plunged right back.

In a modest ceremony at Dolphin Reef in the southern Israeli port of Eilat, Tendler, a 41-year-old British citizen, apparently became the world's first person to "marry" a dolphin. Dressed in a white dress, a veil and pink flowers in her hair, Tendler got down on one knee on the dock and gave Cindy a kiss. And a piece of herring. "It's not a perverted thing. I do love this dolphin. He's the love of my life," she said yesterday, upon her return to London.Tendler, who said she imports clothes and promotes rock bands in England, has visited Israel several times a year since first meeting the dolphin.

I thought this was joke when I first heard it, now I know it's just a shame....