If we truly care deeply about the death of young children...

... what are the most effective things we can do? There's so much talk about gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, but rather than fixating on the particular device that has fixated our attention, perhaps we should reflect on what actually causes the most fatality in children, particularly since we have so much power to act affirmatively to prevent these deaths.

Here is a chart (PDF) from the National Center for Health Statistics, showing the "10 Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, United States – 2010." Young children's lives are clearly most threatened by accidents.

Here's a chart (PDF) showing "10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group Highlighting Unintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2010." You can see that the greatest threat, by far, is the motor vehicle accident. Second, for 5- to 9-year-olds, is drowning. Third is fire. Homicide by firearm is fourth for this age group.

Go ahead and talk about the problem of murder, but let's remember that one thing we've learned from the Newtown massacre is how much we love and want to protect children. Children are continually dying from crashing cars, drowning, burning, suffocating, and poisoning. There are so many things we could do to be more careful and protective every day. Some of these things are fabulously banal, like keeping your eyes on the road and not walking away from the bathtub. There are no political enemies here to demonize, no legislation to stuff down your stubborn opponent's throat.

We're fixated by violence, and we love remedies for violence that have a frisson of (metaphorical) violence. But if we really care about the death of young children, we could take care.

Engaging in a trend called "Trash the Dress" — "where recent brides playfully destroy their wedding dress"...

... a beautiful woman dies:

The distraught photographer, Louis Pagakis, told CTV Montreal that he did everything he could to save [30-year-old Maria] Pantazopoulos after she got into danger.

She had her wedding dress on and she said, ‘take some pictures of me while I swim a little bit in the lake,’ she went in and her dress got heavy, I tried everything I could to save her,” he told the station, visibly emotional....

'She was doing the photo shoot in about 6 inches or 1-foot of water when part of her wedding dress got soaked and became extremely heavy,' [police spokesman Sgt. Ronald[ McInnis told MailOnline.

She was found 100 feet from the photo spot, sunk to the bottom, dragged down by the wedding dress.

Diana Nyad fails — again — to swim from Cuba to Florida.

But the photos are fabulous (if you love survival).

She was aiming to be the first person to make the 103-mile journey without a shark cage, long rest breaks, or any physical contact from another person. It was her fourth attempt.

She's 62.

Meanwhile, in other swimming news:

A married couple in their 60s drowned while apparently trying to rescue their dog from a pond in Westfield Monday evening....

State Police said preliminary reports indicate the man ­entered the water to retrieve the couple’s small dog after it jumped off the boat.

Then, State Police said, the man became distressed while trying to reach the dog, and the woman entered the water to ­assist him, before she, too, ­became distressed....

The dog survived, Manos said.

"At the end of the day, the biggest impact you can make in anything is through kids."

Said the children's surgeon, who died yesterday in Lake Michigan, saving children.

"Rodney King — the man who was at the center of the infamous Los Angeles riots — was found dead this morning"... at the bottom of a pool.

"He was 47."



"I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Um, can we stop making it, making it all before, for the older people and the, and the kids..."

"This grasping at straws was just the capstone to what even liberal observers admitted was a week of self-immolation..."

I'm annoyed that I can't get into that article — about the SG's argument in the Obamacare case — because I don't have a subscription to the Weekly Standard. Now, I'll never know whether that article contains a funnier mixed metaphor than that.

What are those images?

Self-immolation is deliberately setting oneself on fire. I picture dramatic protests from the Vietnam era, but it's been going on for centuries:

It was Western media coverage of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the South Vietnamese regime in 1963 that introduced the word "self-immolation" to a wide English-speaking audience and gave it a strong association with fire. The alternative name bonzo comes from the same era, because the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves were often referred to by the term bonze in English literature prior to the mid-20th century...

Bonzo! Most Americans think of that Ronald Reagan movie when we hear "Bonzo." Perhaps some think of Led Zeppelin. But fiery suicide, to make a political point? That's new to me.

A capstone is "a stone that caps or crowns." I'm quoting the OED, where we can see the metaphorical use of the word goes back to 1685: "Here is the fair occasion... to put the cap-stone upon his other perfections" (tr. B. Gracián y Morales Courtiers Oracle 150). By the way, the Great Pyramid is missing its capstone. Ever notice? Makes you want to put an eye there:



Okay, now what about grasping at straws? What's the image there? I realize I've always pictured ants trying to get out of water by climbing onto some bit of straw. Focusing on that for the first time, I can see that grasping at straws would probably work for an ant. You're supposed to picture a human being trying to escape drowning and desperately grasping at anything, no matter how absurdly useless it is. Wiktionary tells me that the image goes back Thomas More, "Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation" (1534). More is talking about people who will not seek the "comfort" of God. Some of them are completely lethargic — "so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness." Others are so "testy" and "fuming" that you don't even want to talk to them. Then there are people who do want to be comforted. Some of them "seek for worldly comfort":

He who in tribulation turneth himself unto worldly vanities, to get help and comfort from them, fareth like a man who in peril of drowning catcheth whatsoever cometh next to hand, and that holdeth he fast, be it never so simple a stick. But then that helpeth him not, for he draweth that stick down under the water with him, and there they lie both drowned together. So surely, if we accustom ourselves to put our trust of comfort in the delight of these childish worldly things, God shall for that foul fault suffer our tribulation to grow so great that all the pleasures of this world shall never bear us up, but all our childish pleasure shall drown with us in the depth of tribulation.

You know, that eye on the pyramid, as seen on the Great Seal of the United States dollar bill is the "Eye of Providence":

On the seal, the Eye is surrounded by the words Annuit Cœptis, meaning "He approves (or has approved) [our] undertakings", and Novus Ordo Seclorum, meaning "New Order of the Ages". The Eye is positioned above an unfinished pyramid with thirteen steps, representing the original thirteen states and the future growth of the country. The lowest level of the pyramid shows the year 1776 in Roman numerals. The combined implication is that the Eye, or God, favors the prosperity of the United States.

Have we gone so deeply into the mixed metaphor that it's all coming together somehow?

Why so many deaths in triathlons... nearly all in the swimming phase?

Panic attacks. Officially, drowning, but the root cause may be panic:

“My world is anatomic,” said Steven Shapiro, Vermont’s chief medical examiner, whose office investigated the deaths of two men this year. “I can’t point to the body and say: ‘There’s the panic attack, there’s the arrhythmia.’ Once you’re in my office, there’s no panic and the rhythm is asystole,” he said, using the medical term for cardiac standstill.
Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence strongly points to panic, with the biggest piece of evidence the most obvious. Something is happening in the swim that isn’t happening on the bike or run.

“I was taken by surprise the very first time I did a triathlon,” said James A. Millward, a 50-year-old history professor at Georgetown University. “I swam about 50 yards, I couldn’t get into a breathing rhythm, I felt more and more anxious, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m having a panic attack.’ ”

Millward has done the Nation’s Triathlon four times and has had the sensation each time after jumping into the Potomac River with scores of other racers. The overwhelming urge is to get his head out of the water. 

It's easy to see why the human body may have evolved this response.

"Sure a baby has a swimming reflex but that doesn't mean watching them swim isn't absolutely terrifying."

Says a Metafilter participant, linking to several videos. I watched these videos and didn't find them terrifying at all. These are people teaching babies ISR — Infant Swim Self Rescue. The babies are learning how to save themselves from drowning. Immersed in pools, with supervision, they learn to roll over face up and stabilize themselves in a position where they can breathe. I was inspired by the success of the babies in learning a very specific and highly useful skill. Hooray for the babies!

As for the people on Metafilter (and in the comments at YouTube) who think it's terrible to scare babies and make them cry.... Well, all I can say is maybe they don't know any babies. You don't melt into a pool of sympathy when a baby cries. You deal with whatever the situation is, if you can figure it out. By the way, a drowned baby doesn't cry.

"Two strapping young men who were practicing breath-holding exercises at a Staten Island pool yesterday to prepare for military training..."

"... were pulled out unconscious and one died -- after two lifeguards and 20 swimmers failed to spot them."

... It's not clear if the duo was following an official training program, or if they had devised their own workout, said Lt. Col. Robert Roy, head of Air Force recruiting in New York. 

Either way, the military advises against certain breath-holding exercises or swimming underwater at length to avoid "shallow water blackout," which can lead to drowning.

Very sad!

That reminds me. I wanted to link to this article: "Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning." It begins with an unforgettable anecdote.

"So Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are in a row boat, and it springs a leak and starts to sink. Who gets saved? The American people."

Senator Kyl tells a poor joke and gets "a big laugh" at the National Republican Senatorial Committee retreat.

Kyl's joke is...
	... terrible because it envisions the death of real human beings.
	... terrible because it's either old or it sounds like it's old.
	... okay because who cares what dumb verbiage was used to loosen up a crowd.
	... okay because it conveys a core truth that justifies a little sadism.
pollcode.com free polls

It's Julien Duret, the Frenchman, previously eclipsed by the "heroic father."

He was in fact, first to reach the drowning toddler who fell into the East River.

Here's our earlier (contentious) discussion. We argued about whether the father who instinctively jumped in to save the child ought to be called a hero. In that light, consider Duret's remark:

"I don't really think I'm a hero. Anyone would do the same thing.... I was just happy that I was able to help her, and I am just happy that the family has been reunited."

"A man from France jumped into the water..."

I'm sorry, but the man from France is not getting enough attention in this story about the "heroic father" who jumped in the cold East River to save his own daughter.

"If you are a female about 5 feet 8 inches tall, 140 pounds and willing to stick your head in a toilet..."

"... a northern Wisconsin prosecutor wants your help in proving a high-profile homicide case."

[Douglas] Plude, 42, was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide in 2002. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the conviction last year after learning that an expert witness who conducted the first round of toilet tests exaggerated his credentials....

Prosecutors... say he poisoned her with a migraine drug and pushed her face into the toilet to drown her while she vomited.

Plude says his wife was depressed, committed suicide by taking the pills on her own and then drowned. He claims he found his wife slumped over the vomit-filled toilet and tried to perform CPR to keep her alive.

Prosecutors called on expert witness Saami Shaibani to shoot down Plude's story at the first trial.

Shaibani said that, based on his tests involving volunteers he positioned at a toilet, Plude had to be lying about the positions he claimed to have found his wife in. Genell Plude also could not have inhaled toilet water on her own and someone must have forced her head into the water, he testified.

Defense lawyers from across the country have derided the tests and call them an example of unfair expert testimony. One of them, North Carolina lawyer David Rudolf, who clashed with Shaibani in another case, laughed about the tests in an interview last year.

"He had women sticking their heads in toilets!" he said. "That's just not science. How do you peer review that? How do you test his conclusions?"

Is it impossible to drown in a toilet? How would you prove it?

"Five of the pirates who hijacked a Saudi supertanker drowned with their share of a $3 million ransom...."

How terribly not sad.

"If the sea rises quickly enough, and there is not time for the waves to do their work, landscapes may be drowned entire."

"Only a few meters beneath sea level, and what was the land now lies below the destructive surf zone. A hundred meters below sea level, and even the most violent storm waves can scarcely be felt. So, let the sea flood in, with its level jumping by meters over centuries or decades – or perhaps even years – and there simply will not be time for this wave energy to erode the landscape."

See the up side of rapid global warming and rising seas? Beautifully fossilized archeology sites for the aliens to excavate millions of years from when we've destroyed ourselves.

Secondary drowning: Did you know you could drown after you get out of the water?

A little boy drowned during his nap after he got out of the pool and walked to bed:

Johnny would have only had to inhale four ounces of water -- about six teaspoons -- to drown, and even less to injure his lung enough to become a victim of secondary drowning...

"If your child comes out of the pool and seems sleepy or lethargic, watch them very, very closely... Rush them to the hospital or call 9-1-1 immediately."

ADDED: There are actually 24 teaspoons in 4 fluid ounces.

IN THE COMMENTS: Read what Pogo says. He's a doctor.

"Painful physical and psychological tactics, including head slapping, simulated drowning, and frigid temperatures."

The White House admits today that it approved the use of "painful physical and psychological tactics, including head slapping, simulated drowning, and frigid temperatures" for terrorism suspects in CIA custody. It denies that these things constitute torture, which it calls "abhorrent." Whether or not it is torture, is it not abhorrent?

The polar-bears-on-the-melting-ice-cap photo.

You've all seen it. This photo atop all the articles about the new report on global warming.



(Go to the article to see the larger size.)

Here's my question. How many people look at that picture and think the polar bears were living on some ice and it melted around them and now they are stuck?

And, yes, I realize a polar bear can drown... if, say, it's exhausted and swimming over 50 miles. But basically, these things can swim 15 miles easily, at a speed of 6 miles an hour, and they use the edge of an ice floe as a platform from which to hunt. Where's the photograph of the bear chomping down on a cute baby seal?

And, no, I'm not denying that there's global warming, even as I sit here a double pane of glass away from minus 12° air. I'm just amused at human behavior, such as the way it is possible to feel arguments at us. In particular, we are susceptible to argument by animal. We love the animal, if it's pictured right, in a way that pulls our heartstrings.

There is a sharper edge, voiced by a great director in his movie about bears and man: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder."

ADDED: I just remembered that last night I had a dream in which I was carrying around a stuffed-toy polar bear! And I saw this picture yesterday. See? This is how to get into people's heads! This is how opinion is really formed.



With bears!

"Tracy should never have had children. Tracy didn't like children. She didn't like no one. Tracy wasn't affectionate with nobody."

The words of a member of Tracina Vaughn's family.

[P]rosecutors say... that Ms. Vaughn put her two boys in the bath on Sunday night and wandered off to another room to play CD's. Her current companion, Gary Young, poked his head in after 15 or 20 minutes and, though he did not see Dahquay, assumed the boy had tucked himself behind the shower curtain and then went out for diapers and some beer.

Twenty minutes later, give or take a few, Ms. Vaughn checked on the boys herself.

The boys were 3 years old and 16 months old. The younger child, Dahquay, drowned.

I SHOULD ADD: The linked article, which is quite long, is an effort to portray the mother in a sympathetic light.