Kingly News

Sometimes we don’t recognize the things that matter until later, looking back on them. This could be just a blip, and frankly, I hope it is. We don’t need another mouth to feed.

Nevertheless: a feral cat had kittens recently underneath our house. One of the kittens, an extrovert, has taken over our front porch, and would love to join us inside. Everyone else is currently outside with the kitten, oohing and ahing, and Janet has her camera out there. I sense a hostile takeover in the offing.

Annie and Angel, meanwhile, are gathered around the open front door, viewing the whole scene with great suspicion.

This is weird. I was just certain I had posted about some of this, but it’s not here. I hope I didn’t delete some stuff from a backup or something.

Anyway.

You’ve seen in separate posts about Hannah’s latest hospitalization. This is some of what’s happening with the rest of us.

Barry is now working for U.S. Cellular—just finished his training, in fact, and he really likes his job, the people he works with, and the company he’s working for.

Amanda has broken up with her boyfriend. She and Barry are finalizing arrangements for them to share an apartment in Knoxville. So it will lead to changes in housing situations for a lot of us.

Caty had her tonsils and adenoids (at one time she told someone she was having her androids removed) taken out on Valentine’s Day. She sounds completely different to me now.

We had a birthday party for my mom on her 84th birthday. It really seemed to be a great surprise to her. We had all of the grandkids there, too. She got a combination VHS/DVD player, and now she’s trying to figure out how to work it.

I need to get back to the hospital, so more news later.

We just had a very nice Christmas celebration. I think this is the first Christmas we have ever all been together. We just missed having the grandparents here.

Amanda, Barry, and Caty spent Christmas Eve morning with their mom and old friends for breakfast, and then Christmas Eve with their mom and maternal grandparents.

We went to church this morning, and everyone came over to our house for the afternoon. We opened presents and enjoyed sharing gifts, and then had a wonderful dinner of ham, Swedish meatballs, homemade mashed potatoes, and biscuits, and then a little later a dessert of Scandinavian fruit soup. Janet really outdid herself. The greatest part of it all, though, was enjoying each others company. We truly are blessed.

God bless us every one!

Dear Friends,

Although much has happened with our family, we haven’t updated the original Kinglynews blog since March. Things have been rather busy. Since there has been such a break, we’ve decided to take care of a couple of things at once. We want to get caught up, and we want to move our blog onto our own site and start using “better” blog software. It’s not that Blogger was unkind to us, or hard to use, or anything, but rather that WordPress (which powers our blog now) is so much easier to use, and is less prone to blog spam, etc.

Over the next few days we’ll put up several posts to try to catch things up, and then blog more regularly. We have also added a link so that those of you who use RSS reader software can subscribe, and then not have to worry about whether there has been an update on the blog or not—you’ll get the update automatically.

Allegation of voting fraud in Ohio have floated around the Internet since Nov. 2. Mainstream media are suddenly picking up on the fact that real indicators support the allegations. Note: this is not Kerry sour grapes, but citizen-driven. Read the complete story at Timberjay.com

One of our writers has posted a good article on his own site that looks at the most brazenly noncommunicative president in history. Check it out.

Wired News has a very useful article that lists a bunch of sites that help us keep an eye on the government, even as they step up their surveillance of all of us while trying to keep their own information secret. Take a look at “Web Won’t Let Government Hide.”

The ABCs of effective writing: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. These are not objective measures, of course, and the practice of the American press illustrates this, according to an analysis in the current Editor & Publisher.

Arguably, the press in general accurately reports casualty figures from the war in Iraq when it reports X number of soldiers killed, X number wounded according to the Pentagon. That is, they accurately report that the Pentagon reports something. Unfortunately, that leaves the impression that the number reported casualties is also accurate.

The Pentagon isn’t lying, either, but then neither are they giving a complete picture, according to E&P. The Pentagon reported on Nov. 24 that 1,230 U.S. troops had been killed, and 9,300 wounded in action. If that’s untrue, it has more to do with problems in information-gathering than any intent to mislead.

On the other hand, the media tend not to report some other numbers that are available, but that take a little more digging. For instance, out of the 9,300 wounded in action, more than 5,000 were wounded badly enough to render them unable to return to duty. Also, as reported by CBS’s “60 Minutes” last Sunday, about 15,000 troops have been sent home from Iraq “with so-called ‘non-battle’ injuries and diseases.” Only 20 percent return to their units in Iraq.

Military analyst John Pike told “60 Minutes” that “the total number of casualties due to wounds, injury, disease would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe 30,000.”

You can’t really expect the Pentagon to be completely open about things that would make them look bad. But it makes you wonder why the professionals who are supposed to be the watchdogs haven’t been keeping up with this.

Of course, some of them are, or I wouldn’t even know about this to pass it on to you. Kudos to E&P and to “60 Minutes.” Let’s hear it for accuracy.

California recently enacted a law that will make it easier to identify felons, but that also will lead to innocent people getting their DNA posted in a database from which they will find it difficult or impossible to get it removed.

This means more than it might seem on the surface. What happens in California has a way of working its way east over the subsequent 15 to 20 years. Get ready!

Wired News is reporting that U.S. airlines have turned over massive amounts of data to Homeland Security after initially protesting the order to do so on the basis of privacy.

Homeland Security wanted the information to test a system called Secure Flight.

This could be a mixed bag. Allegedly, Homeland Security is seeking to replace the idiotic watch list system that so wrongly misidentifies thousands of people and includes no way to get off the watch list, so it could be a good thing. On the other hand, it centralizes power in the federal government to make it easier for them to monitor travel by all citizens, which is a cure that could be worse than the disease.

Just think about it and examine it.