The Daily Dose/November 8, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off
Notes from around the human experience…
INSERT OWN TRAGIC LEAD LINE HERE: Funerals for the nine Americans shot to death Monday in a small, remote town in northwest Mexico were held Thursday. Three women and six children were slaughtered. None of this news. Children and foreigners, once more or less off-limits, are now fair game for Mexico’s drug cartels.
Dry, Technical Matter: Mexico has been at war with its drug cartels since 2006, obliged to do so by America’s own drug war, which forces cartels to smuggle in products a lot of Americans want. The profits from smuggling drugs into America are not small, and the fight amongst cartels for control is as violent as it is competitive.
Fly In The Ointment: We have no one to blame but ourselves. A violent America has produced a violent world and our drug war has produced the violence in both countries that attends the importation and of narcotics into America.
Here He Goes: The shootings illustrate one of the reasons to end the drug war, over and above the fact it is not the government’s job to criminalize a personal choice like this: legalize drugs and violence like this disappears.
Oh Crap, He’s Appealing To Logic And Reason: Is the US/Mexican border currently awash in violence over the importation of coffee? Of course it isn’t. Coffee is legal. Legalize drugs and drug lords immediately go from drug smugglers to vendors trying to move some product.
Get Out Your History Books: This week’s shootings reinforce a lesson Prohibition taught us, a lesson America still refuses to heed: morality laws do not work, unless your goal is to make criminals rich, then they work fine. The violence that currently attends trying to smuggle drugs into the US will remain as long as such drugs remain illegal. It’s a lesson America should have learned decades ago.
Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow gets The Wife out the door for her last-minute trip to see her sister. Today’s Diary.
GPS has taken all the fun out of planning trips like this…In the old days, boy, Pa Sparrow, and later yours truly, would, figuratively, be achieving and maintaining states of arousal over having to plan an interstate automotive trip because we both enjoyed reading maps…First, you’d have a map of the United States, for overall, big-picture context…Then a regional map to get your geographic bearings, then the appropriate state and local maps…Everything but a globe.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.
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On This Date
In 1861 – The USS San Jacinto captures, illegally, two Confederate diplomats from the British mail carrier Trent between Cuba and the Bahamas. The diplomats might have gone unnoticed but for the fact they presented themselves to San Jacinto officers who had boarded the Trent because the only other option to get them was seizing the ship, an act of war. President Lincoln didn’t really want another war and, after a few weeks, the envoys were released. They would resume their voyage to Britain, though they failed to gain diplomatic recognition for the Confederacy. History refers to the incident at the Trent Affair.
In 1959 – Elgin Baylor of the Minneapolis Lakers establishes a new NBA record for most points in a game as the Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics 136-115. Baylor broke the record of 63 established by Joe Fulks of the Philadelphia Warriors in 1949 and the record stood until Baylor broke it a year later with 71 points against the New York Knicks, one of the few instances in sports history of a player exceeding his own record. The record, of course, is now held by Wilt Chamberlain, who scored 100 points on March 2, 1962.
In 1975 – Elton John is at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the second of three consecutive weeks with Island Girl. It was the fifth of nine #1 songs for John and his eighth consecutive Top 10 hit and 13th of 27 overall. The song also hit the Top 10 in New Zealand and Canada and peaked at 14 in John’s native Great Britain. Due to its hitting in both the 1975 and 1976 chart periods, the song only ranked 64th in Billboard’s year-end chart for 1976.
Quotebook
So easily do our standards adjust themselves to our circumstances that whereas on her first night at the Vulcan the Greenroom had seemed a blessed haven, her hours of precarious security had bred a longing for a bed and ordered cleanliness, and she began to dread the night.
Ngaio Marsh
Night at the Vulcan
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
John Nance Gardner was FDR’s first vice president, serving from 1933-1941.
Today’s Stumper
Who broke Elgin Baylor’s 1960 NBA record for most points in a game? – Answer next time!
