14 year old excels at Masters

Two years ago, I was playing eighth grade basketball and soccer. I would come home and finish whatever homework I had been assigned that I had yet to finish. I'd play some Playstation. My point is, when I was 14 I was doing nothing remarkably different than any of you. And I certainly wasn't golfing in the most prestigious event in the entire sports, sharing a course with professionals.

Tianlang Guan did. Over this past weekend, the 14 year old Chinese teenager golfed 72 holes, and never hit worse than bogey on any one of them. He made the cut midway through the tournament, and finished a respectable 12 over. And he's excited to be here, excited with how well he did, and excited with the idea of how well he could do. When asked about whether or not he wanted to become more involved in local tournaments and become a professional golfer, Guan said, "It won't be too early because there's still a lot of things to learn, to improve. So nothing to rush." This attitude is often not the case with American college athletes, where becoming a professional and earning millions of dollars is often more important than earning a degree and finishing their education.

But I'd prefer that this doesn't become about Chinese or American superiority complex, because this is not a feat of Chinese greatness so much as it is a feat of human greatness. This young man is the best that anyone has ever been at the age of 14, and should be commended on it. I for one look forward to what should surely be a great career for Guan.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/golf/2013/04/14/14-year-old-guan-tianlang-finishes-masters-12-over/2081789/?sf11658398=1

Can we stop the campaign against violent video games?

I mean, I get it. Violent shootings happen far too often, and parents need a scapegoat. This article picks the same industry everyone else blames: video games. After all, youth play a lot of video games, and the most popular video games are usually violent. The article claims that video games can dull a child's sensitivity to violence, and that video games have an effect on children's thoughts and actions. It goes on to say that exposing the future members of society to violence at such a young age is not in our best interests, making comparisons to the recent Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings, and of course the notorious Columbine High School massacre over 15 years ago. The article points to a CNN list of the top ten video games of 2012, and how 9 of them involve shooting or guns.

It's time to stop blaming the video game industry for failures in parenting. To say children lose a sense of what's a game and what's a reality from playing hours of Call of Duty is absurd. The massive popularity of series based around war and fighting such as Halo, Call of Duty, or the Elder Scrolls does not cause children to go out and shoot up a school. Primarily, it is the parents' responsibility to know what their children can and cannot handle. All the series I just mentioned are rated M for Mature, which means stores aren't even allowed to sell them to anyone under eighteen without a parent present. So the industry does plenty to say who their games are intended for, yet parents continue to buy the games anyway. And if aiming a cursor at pixels on a screen is enough to make someone a murderer, I'd wager that person is already significantly messed up already without video games.

I'll leave it with a joke. We should stop the campaign against violent video games, because multiplayer mode is better anyway.

Parents, Students want to ban gays from prom

 http://mywabashvalley.com/fulltext?nxd_id=292862

The United Kingdom toppled a major social barrier last week in making gay marriage legal, but hate continues in the United States, where a group of students and their parents in Sullivan, Indiana want a prom that bans same sex couples. The group of high school students and their parents, who meet in the Sullivan Christian Church on Sundays, are requesting a separate, "traditional" prom with only heterosexual couples. They call homosexuality "offensive to them". While the Sullivan High School has explicitly stated that there is nothing legally they can do to allow the group to ostracize homosexual students from the annual dance, yet the team continues to fight against it.

I know Mrs. Hake said no swearing but... "What the heck?!" Culturally, it's this kind of backwardness and bigotry that prevents us from going forward. This is homophobia, clear as day. Some citizens of the town have spoken out, and rightfully so, because this kind of hatred should not be acceptable in America. "Love them as a person. The feeling of being loved and belonging is universal," said local man Jim Davis. I can respect this philosophy. You don't have to understand people who are different, and you don't have to agree with the people they are, but it's wrong to treat them any different than any human being.

Alabama Boy Kidnapped and Held Hostage in Bunker

65 year old Jimmy Lee Dykes boarded a bus last Tuesday, shot the 66 year old bus driver and grabbed a 5 year old boy, taking him back to his underground bunker in Midland City, Alabama. The boy and the man have remained barricaded four feet underground for the past week. Dykes' neighbors described him as anti-government, and survivalists, yet no connection exists between him and the young boy he kidnapped. Authorities say the bunkers has blankets, heaters, and electricity. Medicine and toys have been delivered through a 60 foot ventilation pipe to the boy who has Asperger's syndrome and attention deficit disorder.

When will this terrible ordeal be resolved? It's been six days and negotiations through the pipe have led nowhere. Dykes has made no demands, and is trying to make the boy feel as comfortable as possible. One has to wonder the reason Dykes grabbed the young boy, or if he had different plans before killing the bus driver. It's clearly a delicate situation, though, as the authorities can't enter the bunker without a potential standoff with the armed Dykes. How should the FBI attempt to handle this dangerous situation? Sound off in the comments.

US ends ban of women in combat

On Wednesday, military officials announced that the United States will formally lift the ban on women serving in front line combat. Women have served in hostile combat before, but this announcement tears down another societal military barrier, especially following the Pentagon's decision to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and allow openly gay people to serve in the military. According to the article, 84 women have died in combat in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 11 years, accounting for two percent of all casualties. A few countries have allowed women to serve on the front lines, such as Canada and Israel, but the need for women to fill these roles is apparently marginal.

I feel that if women do well in their training exercises and perform well in all the categories their superiors will be comparing them to other soldiers, then they should be allowed to fight in more hostile, combat situations, provided they want to. I think more monumental changes like this and the scrapping of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will continue to open up job opportunities and break down discriminatory boundaries. How do you feel about the Pentagon's most recent announcement?

Albuquerque shooting leaves five dead

In New Mexico, five people are dead in what appears to be a family shooting. Just two months removed from the Sandy Hook massacre, an assault rifle is involved in another deadly shooting. Five people, including three elementary school age children, were found dead in their home outside Albuquerque on Sunday. The sheriff of Bernalillo County, Dan Houston, believes the main suspect to be a 15 year old boy who may or may not be a family member.

To me, it sounds like a teenager killing his two younger brothers and one younger sister, and then both of his parents. I have to wonder how somebody his age was able to acquire such a high caliber weapon. Assault rifles have been at the forefront of the argument against gun control lately, so this could be another example of why they need to be made much harder to get. Perhaps the gun was his father's. Either way, it seems like the problem here was that the boy had some serious issues with his family, and I think that schools, pediatricians, and especially parents need to make sure kids like this don't fall into this same dangerous path. Perhaps conversation and nonviolent conflict resolution should be stressed more in America's schools. On the other hand, we often see murders like this where people who knew the killer said he or she never showed any signs of being disturbed or being unstable in any way. It appears we need to diagnose troubled children, teens, and young adults sooner so we can more quickly get them the help they need to prevent more senseless violent crimes like the one in this article.

Do you think the problem is the availability of guns to teenagers, or adults close to the shooter not being able to get him help soon enough? Let me know in the comments.

All about me

I was born in Omaha in 1997 and grew up here. In my childhood, I went to Saint Pius X elementary school. My family owns a cabin on a lake roughly 45 minutes away from Omaha in Cedar Creek. When I was younger we would spend the weekends out at the cabin, but for the past year or so we’ve been essentially living out there full time. I love the lake, for swimming and waterskiing and boating. Several years back my dad and I built a waterslide using a lot of lumber from Menards and kitchen linoleum. Its length exceeds 150 feet and you can get some pretty serious speed on it. When it’s really cold in the winter like it is presently, the lake freezes over and the ice can get pretty thick. That’s when the waterslide transforms into a luge track for sledding on. A lot of people know that I’m pretty knowledgeable about football, particularly college. What people don’t know is that when I was a kid, I didn’t even like football. I never watched it or understood the rules, much to the dismay of my football-loving dad. One day, my dad rented Madden Football 2004 for GameCube from Blockbuster, and when I first played it, I couldn’t get enough. I played hours as the Seattle Seahawks, who would soon become my favorite team. Eventually, I began to watch more football on Saturdays and Sundays and learned the basic rules, and my dad and I would watch college football and he’d point out some of the subtler and less common rules. My focus shifted from professional to collegiate football, and these days I watch, probably unhealthy, amounts of college football each weekend. I guess that's pretty much it.