Busy; Off to Africa

Pretty busy today, so not much blogging time. We had a really good Crack practice last night. Unfortunately, I screwed up, and it didn't get recorded. There seems to be some kind of inverse relationship between the quality of a practice and the probability that it will be successfully recorded.
My mom is off to Kenya today for her second trip to work in an optometry clinic with members of her church. Once again, I love her and I'm proud of her and I hope the trip is a big success!
Well that's all for today. Have a good one!

Happy Veteran's Day!!

Happy Veteran's Day!! I'm not a veteran, myself, of course, but a number of people people in the Steans family have served in the armed forces, several of them having served combat duty during wars. My own dad, Rick Steans, was in the air force during Vietnam, grandpa Ross served in the army during World War II, serving in campaigns from North Africa to Italy to D-Day (he did a landing in an unpowered glider during D-Day). My uncle, Robert Steans, served in the Air Force for a number of years, and then worked as a civilian with the air force for a number of years. Even now, retired from government service, he continues to work closely with the military, although in a private capacity.
Anyway, I want to wish a happy Veteran's Day not only to the veterans in my own family, but to all of the people out there who have served our country through military service. I'm not going to wax poetic or anything, but I really do feel a genuine debt of gratitude to the people who have been willing to serve our country in the armed forces.
Hats off to you guys (and ladies!).

Cell Phone Brain Cancer; Fort Hood Memorial

Hello! How's everybody doing?
Nice dinner last night with Ryan and Jamie. We just went to Cherry Creek for some shrimp and catfish, but it was good. I also played some guitar and tried to work on some new songs. It kept me entertained, but I didn't come up with anything very exciting.
Headline on CNN today asking questions about whether cell phones cause brain cancer. Even though I use my cell phone as much as anyone, I've had some nagging doubts about this issue for a long time. As we've increasingly moved toward wireless technoologies, it's just seemed like there's eventually got to be some kind of consequence for filling the air around us with all of this additional radiation. I read an article somewhere about a month or two back reporting on some kind of study claiming that smartphones (iPhones and Blackberries and so forth) give off even more radiation than regular phones, and that because of this they pose an even greater risk to our health than regular mobile phones.
Arrgh. It's all kind of scary. One more thing to worry about, I guess. Hope I happen to have a cancer resistant head.
Also, today was the memorial service at Fort Hood for the people killed in the recent shootings. I feel really bad for them. I'm still confused and really saddened by that whole thing.
Well, I don't have very much to say, and it's been a busy day.
Travis County is shut down tomorrow for Veteran's Day. I'll probably/maybe still post something tomorrow, but I just wanted to say a happy Veteran's Day ahead of time in case I don't end up posting tomorrow!

Weekend Update; House Passes Health Care Reform Bill; Paranormal Activity

Hola! Happy Monday! (it could happen...)
I had a pretty good weekend. I went to the Texas-Central Florida game on Saturday with Mom and Dad. Texas won that game pretty decisively, but still somehow managed to slip into the number three spot behind Alabama. Arrgh. Well, Alabama and Florida still have to play each other, so if Texas remains undefeated (which is by no means a sure thing- has anyone else noticed that A&M is starting to come alive? They lost to Colorado this weekend, but they played a good game and barely lost- and this is after having won the two games prior), a loss by either one of those teams should just about guarantee Texas a spot in the top 2.
Anyway, after the game I went with my folks and Ryan and Jamie to Brick Oven for some pizza.
I spent most of our rainy, dreary sunday just hanging out around the house. I read about half of Blood Meridian (The Pope has recommended this book to me at least twice now, so I figured I better get around to it), and last night I had band practice with Mono Ensemble (or is it Mono Quartet when only four of us show up?). We practiced with Jim, Frank, Reed, and myself, and we mostly played covers, but we sounded okay. We haven't been playing on a regular basis for a few months, we're playing some new material, and we're playing without our usual band leader, so we're a little rusty, but things are clicking along. It's good to be making music on some kind of semiregular basis with the guys again.


Over the weekend, the House of Representatives managed to pass a health care reform bill that contained many cost control measures, put restrictions on cases where coverage could be curtailed or denied, and included provisions for a public option. The Republicans immediately went on the offensive, decrying the bill as expansion of big government and wasteful government spending. (no word on how those sentiments gel with their pro-war positions on Iraq and their defense of expensive, failed military initiatives like an unproven missile shield program in Poland and the continued production of the F-22 fighters, which were initially costing $339 million per aircraft, but which were predicted to eventually drop to the bargain basement price of $138 million per plane [sorry, Dad. I'll admit that it is a really cool plane, but oh, so expensive]).
Anyway, as I understand it, the passage of a fairly strong House Bill was never really in doubt. There are simply enough Democrats in the House to get things passed despite Republican opposition (even if a few Democrats go off the reservation and don't support a bill). The Senate is where the real battle is going to take place, and that makes me nervous. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just doesn't seem to have a lot of forcefulness or charisma in him, and I think he could probably learn a few things from Nancy Pelosi about how to get the troops in line (although, admittedly, Reid has a tougher job ahead of him). As I've said before, I think The white House also needs to just unleash Rahm Emanuel to go do some arm twisting of these "Blue Dog" Democrats who've been taking buy offs from the health care lobby for years. I think a few not-so-veiled threats about well-funded primary opponents and possible vetoes of pet projects for their respective constituencies could probably help get these guys in line. the Democrats love the idea of having a tent that's big enough to contain many different points of view, but when you're consistently facing unified opposition, the lack of a unified front means that it's very hard to ever get anything accomplished. The Democratic Party probably contains more diversity of ideology than the Republican camp, but there are still certain principles that should be at the core of being a Democrat. The right to a certain basic, essential, human standard of living is at the core of the Democratic belief system, in my mind, and I think that if a person wants to claim party membership and affiliation as a Democrat, then this is one of the times when I think they should be pressured to step up to the plate and support the party position. I wouldn't feel bad at all about pressuring Democratic Senators on this issue. The Republicans lean on their membership in this sort of way on almost every issue, and while I don't think the Democrats should really go that direction (even though it makes for a more efficient legisaltive body) I do think there are critical moments when it's important to be able to get the troops in line.


What else? I went and saw scary movie Paranormal Activity this weekend. It was pretty good. Pretty much exactly what I expected, I guess. There's not a lot of depth to the movie, but it does a good job of slowly, incrementally building up suspense, and it manages to accomplish the somewhat difficult task of presenting a "realistic" ghost/demon story (by realistic, I mean that the thing starts with the sorts of bumps and mysterious noises that we all occasionally hear in the night, but then the spookiness escalates from there). Anyway, I enjoyed the movie. It managed to be scary and filled with tension, despite a lack of blood and gore (well, a relative lack, anyway). When I walked out of the movie, I was actually wondering if it would keep me up that night. No dice, though. Apparently my own laziness and sleepiness outweighs any sense of creepiness or fear of the supernatural that might keep me up at night. (and this despite the fact that my house was actually reported to be haunted by the lady who sold it to me. Her grandmother passed away in my house, and I was told that the previous occupants occasionally heard the sounds of her ghost roaming around. Personally, if the lady is still around, I hope she's doing okay, and Cassidy and I wish her the best. I've never heard anything supernatural, though.)

Anyway, that's about it. Maybe more later. I sort of doubt it, but maybe.

Bit More on Ft. Hood

The more I read about the Ft. Hood shootings, the more it sounds like they were politically/religiously motivated and premeditated- not the act of someone who psychologically "snapped". That makes the whole thing that much more troubling, in my mind. Hasan had his med school paid for by the army and treated soldiers for years before doing this. I understand that he had major ideoogical conflicts with the military, but, of course, that does little or nothing to explain the shootings (going AWOL or suffering a dishonorable discharge aren't great ideas, but they sure trump a massacre any day). Now I'm wondering if Hasan was talking to or working with someone else when he planned this thing. I'm betting he didn't go from choosing a life in the U.S. military to becoming a violent Muslim extremist by forming his views in a vacuum...

Kitten Mittens

Hey, guys.
Happy Friday.
Last night I went over to Ryan and Jamie's to have dinner with them along with Heather, Matt, and Nicole. Jamie made a nice dinner with jambalya and salad. We also watched the latest episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.




I think I may have posted that clip before, but it's a classic.

I just wrote the other post about the Fort Hood shootings, so I'm going to leave it at that. Maybe more later.

Have a great weekend!

Fort Hood Shootings and Nidal Malik Hassan

I have to admit that I've been watching some of the coverage regarding this shooting spree that took place at Fort Hood in Killeen. It's a terrible, tragic event, no doubt. I can't get my head around the fact that Nidal Malik Hasan, the shooter, was a psychiatrist.
It's sort of common wisdom that people in the mental health field don't and shouldn't diagnose and treat themselves as patients. Given the obvious problems with objectivity and so forth, I get all of that. Still, I guess I'm pretty shocked that a psychiatrist didn't have enough self awareness and insight to seek help when he began to feel the sort of rage building up in himself that led to this sort of rampage.
Hasan dealt every day, apparently, with soldiers who were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other significant mental health issues, and surely one of his primary pieces of advice for those patients must have been for them to try to remain very aware of their own emotions and to seek immediate help if they began to feel an inclination toward harming themselves or others. I'm pretty sure that sort of advice has got to be pretty fundamental when dealing with people suffering from PTSD and/or depression.
Anyway, it just really floors me that someone could spend their professional career trying to help people overcome the psychological trauma inflicted they'd suffered in a war zone, and then turn around and violently, horribly attack people from that same population.
Ready for my ten cent, bullsh*t analysis of the situation? (and I readily admit that I might end up being way off base- I'm just making guesses based off the little info I've read so far)
Hasan, as the media has already seized upon, was a Muslim, and told friends and family that he had serious reservations about an upcoming deployment to Iraq where he might be called upon to fight fellow Muslims. I have a feeling that this issue of Islamic allegiance was probably part of the story, but not all of it. Hasan also spent an awful lot of time talking to soldiers with PTSD and hearing story after story about the violence and carnage that these soldiers had witnessed in war zones. I would imagine that this not only contributed to his apprehension regarding his upcoming deployment, but that the experience of constantly hearing these horrible stories (and seeing the accompanying emotional and physical damage which they inflicted) probably had a significant impact upon Hasan as well. In order to actually receive a PTSD diagnosis, my understanding is that a person has to actually be present to witness a traumatic (usually violent) event. Hasan didn't have PTSD, but I still have to wonder what effect there must be upon a person who constantly hears these sorts of gruesome stories in vivid, excrutiating detail from people who lived through them. I would imagine that eventually, repeatedly going through these sorts of horrifying stories with suffering soldiers would begin to have some sort of impact on the care provider. The fact that many of these stories involved people who were Muslim, a population which Hasan apparently claimed to share an affinity toward, probably only aggravated the experience of repeatedly hearing these tales. If nothing else, Iraq and/or Afghanistan would start to literally sound like the stuff of nightmares- some kind of hellish, violent place that kept producing the emotional and mental devastation that Hasan was dealing with on a daily basis back here in the states. Hasan had been hearing terrible, awful stories about the war zone for years, and then he was told that he was going to have to go over there.
And, as mentioned, on top of the horror of hearing all of these stories, Hasan had an additional horror to contend with. The enemy that he was supposed to be fighting in Iraq were people who shared (at least on some level) his own religious beliefs. Hasan had made comments to a number of people, apparently, that he was very uncomfortable with the idea of fighting (and possibly killing) fellow Muslims.
I'm not sure exactly how much or how often Hasan had tried to protest his deployment (the military culture surely frowns upon complaints about such things, so I'm not sure how much he might have publicly expressed his reservations), but I think most of us assume that the military probably isn't very flexible when it comes to entertaining complaints about having to go to a war zone. Understandably, the military really can't afford to pay a whole bunch of sympathy to soldiers who simply decide that they don't want to go to war. If we let soldiers say that they'd rather not go to war, we would probably be short a soldier or two.
But Hasan, having already spent an inordinate amount of time hearing about the horrors of Iraq and Afganistan and also having strong religious reservations about going to fight against fellow Muslims may have been in a position where his anxiety and resentment just turned into an emotional pressure cooker. With his protestations falling on deaf ears, his animosity toward the seemingly indifferent military may have grown until he finally just sort of lost it and exploded. I think Hasan sort of came unlgued because he didn't feel like the military was taking him seriously when he protested his deployment. (and things like a recent negative performance review and other unknown factors may have contributed to the resentment)
Who knows? I could easily be totally wrong about all of this stuff. Maybe it was more of a traditional workplace rage thing where he couldn't get along with people in his workplace, and he just went postal.
At any rate, I'm not making excuses for Hasan. I'm just trying to understand what happened. As I said, it truly shocks me that a psychiatrist would do such a thing.
My deep, sincere sympathy goes out to all of the victims and their families.

The Ongoing Saga of the Murder of Jennifer Cave

Hello.
Well, I'm not going to blog much today. I didn't get around to writing anything last night, I haven't had time to write anything today, and I don't have all that much to say, anyway.
There's an article in the Austin American Statesman today that talks about a new appeal for Colton Pitonyak. (for those who don't keep track of grisly Austin crime stories, Pitonyaak was convicted of killing and dismembering a young woman named Jennifer Cave before fleeing to Mexico with a different woman named Laura Hall. He was captured in Mexico with the help of Mexican authorities. Hall was convicted of felony evidence tampering for helping Pitonyak try to clean up the crime scene, including possibly helping to chop up Cave's body). Apparently Pitonyak's new lawyers, Joe Turner and Chris Perri (whom I know pretty well) are now claiming that Laura Hall was the person who actually murdered Jennifer Cave, and they've provided statements from women who were in group therapy with Hall in jail who say that Hall admitted during group therapy sessions to killing Cave.
I don't believe that Pitonyak is innocent in this murder, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if Hall played a substantial part in the killing. Having seen her interviews on TV, watched a bit of her trial, and having watched her scream at her parents out in front of the courthouse (who were just about the only friends that she had left in the world at the time), I have to say that I just find that woman really creepy.