Ehlana and Ethan:
We’ve had another long, busy day – in-part thanks to the time phased work we did at the lab or archives tonight after dinner. While the weather is still nicer, Tai Chi remained indoors this morning; we had a standard school day breakfast; and then our academic adventures were fun but not newsworthy. Our four best friends came home with us after school, and we had another practice for Naomi and the Holiday Harmonies to get ready for Friday. We had fun with that; Mom did another group Magi lesson with us; and then our friends went home before we had dinner with Mom and Dad and then headed to the lab for our beakers or books play-work time. I’ll take the blame for staying a bit later than we should have, but we still managed to get home by around eleven o’clock; and now we’re taking care of the usual twin chat and computing wrap-up for our day.
Cassie and Michael have been having a more-exciting day – their Thursday-so-far; and that started with an early flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai; the second-largest city in Thailand. It is a bit cooler there for them, but that is relative; since highs around ninety are still awesome! They’ll be working in the area through to Sunday; and then do one more move to southern Thailand for the last few days in the country before moving on again next week.
There were some news stories that got our attention tonight from awful to weird, and while none of them were major in the grand scheme of the most-serious world events; we’re going to mention them here just for a change in our usual reporting of world news. First up and most serious was a mass shooting at a high school in a small, rural town called Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, Canada. That story hits home in our even-smaller town; since we can’t imagine what will be like for the community. Including the suspected shooter, ten people died and at least twenty-five were injured in the shooting and apparent suicide. Not many details have been released yet, and we don’t want to speculate on the story either. We only want to note that this is yet another story pointing to growing stresses around the world and the unpredictability of consequences for the various stresses on the people of the world at all levels.
In national, economic news, we don’t usually bother with reporting on the monthly jobs report, but this one for January was a good one to use as an example of the games played by our government agencies. In this report, the January jobs news looked awesome – as long as you only looked at the headline number for jobs ‘created’ and didn’t notice the unadjusted numbers or all of the prior month and year revisions! That positive number really was meaningless when that was not just all seasonal adjustments that turned a negative of over two million jobs into a plus-one-hundred-and-thirty thousand! We don’t want to go on about this, but the past-years revisions wiped out all of the supposedly-good numbers that were hyped most months; so there is no reason to believe that this number will be changed in the future when nobody will remember or care. Our point here, though, is that this is a report that nobody should trust or base any plans or decisions on – and that’s true for a lot of the government data that is supposedly used to guide our collective paths into the future!
Finally, the FAA ordered the closing of the airspace over El Paso, Texas early this morning; it was supposed to be for ten days with no real explanation for why; and then the order was rescinded a few hours later with some lame excuses about drug cartel drones and counter-drone measures taken by the military. That is the sort of fear-mongering and stupidity that breeds conspiracy theories, and while we won’t join in on that kind of ‘fun’ too; we also don’t believe that El Paso was in imminent danger from drug cartel drones crossing the border from Mexico! Maybe if the government started getting bills for the true economic costs for every dumb decision; they’d stop doing stupid things!
With that dark little bit of sarcasm-fueled laughter, we’re going to wrap this up; and not get into a rant about the serious world news about the wars or other crises and head off to sleep starting right now.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
