LIVING HERE

The Green Bay Packers lost to the NFL Referees this last Sunday.
None of the media outlets want to deal with the issue of terrible, if not fixed, refereeing going on in professional football.  Three bad calls were made against the Packers, one, an interception made by the Packers was called in the last two and a half minutes of the game.  No sane person able to watch the slow-motion video of the play could have concluded anything other than that the Packer player caught the ball and definitively had possession of it before falling to the ground.  That call alone cost the Packers the game, handing not only a score to Minnesota but also ripping out any spirit remaining in the Packer team.

And what has happened to sports announcing?  The announcers were such ecstatic supporters of the Vikings, and that kind of behavior has also been growing around the league.  How did the Packers come to be seen in such a negative light?  Totally coincidentally the gamblers in Vegas predicted that the Vikings would win by three points. What a shock that the Packers lost by three.

Snowplowing policy.
The city snow policy procedure is being looked over with the goal of providing the best possible service for residents and businesses alike. Every year snow removal is an issue, and someone is always complaining and unhappy with the job. Lake Geneva is not big on calling snow emergencies but maybe it should be. Tom Earle head of the public works department has been trying to tweak the policy to make everyone happy, but some things are out of his control.

The timing of a snowfall, when it starts and how long it lasts (and therefore how deep), and how long the limited staff can legally drive to complete the plowing are just some of the moving parts of this complex and controversial issue. A snow emergency is the active response plan when a snowstorm severely impacts a city and may help control some of the moving parts. The Lake Chief of Police and the Lake Geneva Mayor attended the last staff meeting and after talking to different municipalities that declare snow emergencies more frequently the city may copy that procedure.

The emergency manager Chief Rasmussen (Lake Geneva’s terrific police chief) is the one who typically calls it, but if he is not available his designee and/ or the mayor would decide. A declared snow emergency can be called ahead of time or at any point and allows the snow removal process to be a bit more efficient as it requires the absence or departure of parked vehicles and other obstructions on snow routes to facilitate plowing and traffic flow. This winter is predicted to be a cold snowy one and the city wants to be ready.  Tom Earle seems well placed and well experienced to be able to accomplish this tough, delicate, and hard mission.

The Rittenhouse nightmare moves from the courts into real effects in social and cultural life.
He was acquitted or forgiven for everything.  That the judge who managed the affair is stark raving nuts had almost no coverage, other than videos showing that his comments during the trial were stark raving nuts.  Rittenhouse walks, and he’s now got about a couple of million to play with following contributions from right-wing wealthy idiots.  The problems that have been created by lead being used to build drinking-water pipes will not be affected or taken care of until a new generation of water-drinkers is born.  All of us must live with the effects that much of the population, drinking this intellectually damaging poison water has created.

The Rittenhouse decision, and the conduct of the judge sitting on the case, are great illustrations indicating just why such intellectually damaged decisions are being made. Violence walks among us.  Danger becomes much more evident, and around each and every corner, as idiots like the mentally damaged Rittenhouse are now given more reign to claim the ‘I was afraid, so I killed them’ kind of excuse for committing murder.  How is it that the conservatives, the republicans, and those who wave the flag so wildly as patriots, are encouraging and supporting the maniacs of our society to run loose and wild?

The true failure of the court case to be responsive to the general public, however, is not the fault of the justice system…it is the fault of a society that turned away from accepting mental illness as a medical condition that needed to be treated instead of punished.  Rittenhouse is quite obviously mentally ill, and the signs are all there about that.  There should have been no court case and this whacked-out kid would be getting treatment instead of being honored by a part of the society that’s also beginning to look like it needs treatment.