This Story Stinks

Lots of things the government does stinks to high heaven, but a story I read today on Dan Mitchell's excellent blog, International Liberty, sets a new standard on the "malodorous" scale. It's a story about farting, of all things.

This is a polite blog for the most part, but you'll have to beg our pardon for releasing this story. (Pun intended) It's really a story about how goofy, and even dangerous, it gets when government employees - in this case teachers - over-react to the kind of thing that wouldn't even get the disciplinarian involved back when I was in school. Teachers used to handle this kind of stuff with a dunce cap in those days, but I digress.

It seems that a student used some "country" nomenclature to describe what he had done in the library when nature called and it resulted in eleven different government agencies responding to the "emergency" and his arrest for his doodling about "dropping a bomb" among the books. Here is the way the tale appears on Dan's site:

"Harold Wayne Hadley, Jr., 19, was arrested at a Mississippi junior college after he allegedly wrote a note on a piece of toilet paper on Tuesday, containing the word ‘bomb,’ according to Weirdnews.net. The note prompted 11 emergency agencies to respond to the school, but there was no bomb. Hadley and his family contend that he was only explaining the joy of flatulating in the library. “He was in the restroom doodling on some toilet paper … we are from the country, and he calls passing gas, bombs,” said Hadley’s aunt, who wouldn’t give her name to WDAM. ”[He] put ‘I passed a bomb in the library,’ talking about passing gas, and somebody came in and found it, gave it to a teacher that recognized his hand writing and it blew all out of proportion.” …Hadley was arrested and held on $20,000 bail. If convicted of threatening to blow up the school, he faces 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine,according to WAPT."

I'm guessing he won't get a guilty verdict or even face trial once the authorities smell the coffee instead of the gaseous stupidity of their over-reaction. In his piece, Dan goes on to address a lot of very valid questions about the actual issues this whole mess brings up, so I'll let him raise a stink about it over at his blog and I suggest you read the rest of it because like all the of his posts, it's terrific.

Which brings up a perfect segue for my next request. Although many of you already know, for those you who drop by here only occasionally, I have started a new blog and invite you to click on the link and help me launch it. It's called Cheeky History and if you enjoyed the style I wrote this article with you might enjoy it. It's a non-political spot where you can spend about thirty seconds a day learning some tidbits about "what happened on this day in history" with my own cheeky spin on them.

I'm having some fun writing the blurbs and I'm hoping folks might enjoy reading them. If you do, by all means leave a comment and let me know. If you think it stinks as much as what happened in the story above, well, just do what you usually do when you are in the library and someone "drops a bomb", make a squinchy face and leave as fast as you can.