With the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) almost upon us we dfind ourselves out of time to write an editorial.

So we lend our space to our good friend Janine Hansen.

By Janine Hansen

Every county in Nevada has been teaching sex education since the 1980’s.  The State formula has been particularly suited to this sensitive subject.  Local elected County School Boards select an Advisory Committee made up of local parents and people from medicine, nursing, counseling, religion, teaching and pupils in the district to design and continually update the curriculum.

Sex Ed is taught by a teacher or school nurse who works for the district and whose qualifications have been approved by the School Board. This has worked well because those teaching are accountable to the School District. More importantly, teen pregnancy rates in Nevada have been going down.

Parents have been involved not only on the Advisory Committee, but also because they are required to “opt in” their children to the program. This maintains the important presumption that parents have the right to decide. I am sure this has initiated many engaging conversations around the dinner table. Most parents, 95-98%, have opted to have their children participate, so apparently they have been satisfied with the program.

AB230 Planned Parenthood’s Sex Education bill changes all of that.  AB230 takes the program out of the hands of local elected School Boards and parents and mandates that the “course of instruction must comply with the standards of content and performance…established by the Council to Establish Academic Standards for Public Schools.”  I doubt any local parent has ever attended one of these state meetings. Many parents have attended their local Advisory Committee meetings. It does however make it easier to mandate PP’s agenda.

AB230 makes the local parents and the Advisory Committees superfluous and irrelevant.  It changes local control into an illusion as it mandates a “comprehensive” (sex A to Z) course of instruction based on Planned Parenthood’s agenda. And make no mistake, it is Planned Parenthood’s agenda in AB230.

Planned Parenthood is the largest single abortion provider in the nation.  In 2009, PP performed 332,278 abortions deriving $164,154,000 or 15% of its revenue from abortions.  In contrast, PP provided prenatal care to only 31,098 women and referred only 841 women to adoption agencies. The statistics are startling.  Of the pregnant women PP saw in 2010, 91.2% got abortions.

Planned Parenthood’s annual report for 2010 reveals that 46% of their revenue comes from taxpayers funding at the national, state or local level, to the tune of $350 million.   Contraceptives accounts for 35% of PP’s services.

SB230 opens a wide door allowing outside “providers of health care” into the classroom including Advocates of Planned Parenthood.  It writes the PP agenda into state law and then mandates it to local districts. But perhaps worst of all, SB230 provides for the “identification and explanation of available counseling and legal and medical information concerning health services…without limitation”. AB230 is a gold mine for Planned Parenthood and allows them to mine our schools for new clients.

We ought to be honest with our children and tell them that behavior has consequences. Contraceptive devices and abortions won’t protect our children from broken hearts, epidemic Sexually Transmitted Infections, and the lifelong consequences of premature sexual activity. Do not open our children to further exploitation by passing AB230.

Howard Copelan, Publisher

(Editors note: We wrote this editorial back in 2005 a year after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. Since then hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent and the number of new gay marriages have either remained the same or have declined.)

Something in the style section of the New York times caught our eye this week.

It was a piece on gay marriage and the fact that lesbians seem to be tying the not a lot more than gay men.

“Although women have served at the front lines of litigation efforts in the emotional debate over same-sex marriage, the issue’s most vocal opinion leaders have been men, often leaving the impression that marriage is the preoccupying goal of one sex more than the other. Yet of the close to 5,400 couples who have married in Massachusetts since last May, a figure that represents nearly a third of all same-sex partner households in the state identified by the census, almost two-thirds of the couples have been women. Boston was one of the few cities and towns in the state where male marriages outnumbered female ones.”

What caught our eye was not the fact that lesbians were getting married at a greater rate than men but the raw number of 5,400 couples or 10,800 people.

Now there are just under seven million people living in Massachusetts. Yes that is seven followed by six zeros. The number of gay married people in the Bay State is less than two tenths of one percent. 30,000 people the number of “gay households” derived from article is less than six tenths of one percent.

That really isn’t a whole lot of people.

The total population of Elko County for example is close to 50,000 and no one says Elko County is populous.

Now while it is true that not everyone who is gay wants to get married just as not every heterosexual ties the knot but a quick check of Massachusetts demographics revealed there are about 1.5 million married people out there.

Now that’s a lot of people.

Now opponents of gay marriage or civil unions say that those unions threaten the basic building blocks of society.

Proponents say that homosexuals should have the basic right to marry.

But considering all the time money and effort that is being spent on a tiny, tiny part of the population aren’t both sides grandstanding just a little bit?

Aren’t there more important things to be fighting about rather than the nuptial of less than two people out of a thousand?

Howard Copelan, Publisher

We often hear how boring it is in Wendover, especially for teenagers.

We try to keep a straight face, we try to be polite but sometimes we lose patience.

We raised three kids here and are finishing raising a fourth and yes we have heard from our darlings’ own lips that there is nothing to do here.

We heard it before and we said it ourselves.

We grew up in Boise, Idaho and apart from everything to do there back in the 1970’s there was nothing to do.

We had an epiphany about 20 years ago when we visited our in-laws in Paris. One fine spring morning we woke up and saw our two nephews 15 and 13 laying on the floor watching cartoons and moaning about how bored they were in French.

Logically there is absolutely no possible way anyone can be bored in Paris.

It’s Paris!!!

24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, one is literally less than five minutes away from something exciting  going on.

Yet there they were with Thunder Cats dubbed in French on the television complaining they had nothing to do and nowhere to go on one of the most beautiful mornings in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

We apologized to Boise then and there.

It wasn’t the little City of Trees that was tedious, it was ourselves.

Perhaps there is something in the teenage brain that seething mass of matter, chemicals and hormones that prevents the adolescent from enjoying being young and alive.

Maybe it is because being a young adult is so frightening,  middle age is such a downer and old age is down right depressing that having too good of a time as a teenager would simply be unfair. Perhaps it is a psychological survival mechanism.

What ever the reason only a teenager can feel bored in a riot.

Does Paris have more things to do than Boise?

Yes.

Does Boise have more things than Wendover

Yes.

But one can do only so many things at once.

And having raised three kids and finishing raising a fourth we know that there is plenty here to keep a kid busy.

We are still driving our last around from activity to activity and he goes out with his friends.

Does he still get bored?

Duh!!

He is supposed to.

That does not mean he is a bad kid. It means he is a kid.

It also does not mean feeling bored leads directly to doing drugs or committing crime.

There is simply no study scientific or otherwise that found a correlation between ennui and felony.

It does not exist. So please stop telling us the kids get in trouble because they had nothing better to do.

Good kids get bored.

Bad kids get bored.

It is a democratic as acne and as common for teenagers.

And it is easy to fix.

In fact it fixes itself.

Give or take five years teenagers stop feeling bored.

But between the ages of 12 and 17 there is literally nothing short of imminent danger that will shake the boredom off a teenager.

It simply cannot be done.

But here is the marvelous thing. Being bored has absolutely nothing to do with how a teenager is going to turn out.

Our nephews became a doctor and a banker respectively.

Our kids turned out nicely themselves.

And we personally know dozens if not 100 of kids who grew up in boring old Wendover that are successful.

And yes they too were bored now and again.

Howard Copelan, Publisher

And once again we are hearing the plaintive cries that Islam is a religion of peace and that the mass murder of innocents be a few deranged bad apples should not spoil the bunch.

Once again non-Muslim mass murderers such as Adam Lanza, Timothy McVeigh and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are being trotted out as proof that we in the west are just as bad as them in the Middle East.

To a certain point the apologists for Islamic terrorism are right. There are enough loonies of all religions and colors to fill several bins. But that point stops on a wall, thousands of walls actually from Morocco to Gaza to Riyadh to Grozni and all points in between the Middle East and Central Asia where the smiling portraits of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev martyrs to the cause are springing up.

And that is the difference.

While the West is by no means free of evil men who commit evil deeds we do not laud their ‘achievements’ much less name our children after them.

70 years after World War II the names of Adolph and Benito still are hard to find in the birth announcements, yet Osama is one of the most popular name for a baby boy in the West Bank and has been in dozen years after 9/11.

And that is a big difference. We cannot blame a people for the atrocities committed by a few but we can blame a culture for celebrating them.

No we are not calling for pogroms against Muslims.

Americans are too decent a people for that.

What would be nice is that instead of gleefully posting of the “great victory “ in Boston, Muslims take a look at the eight old bomb victim and feel a sense of shame.

We aren’t holding our breath.

Newspaper founder Harry Copelan reviews first edition of the High Desert Advocate

…in a separate accounting of our ten years included herein, more of the details and our trials and tribulations are covered.

What it is important for us to acknowledge here is how we have grown over the years through not just our failures and our successes, but, also through the mistakes we made.

We learned it serves no good when we go pick a fight with some one. Those fights come to us often enough.

We learned also to be less sensitive to criticism, though mindful of constructive

We also learned that, like Winston Churchill said when he exhorted Londoners to have courage during the London blitz, that “The only thing to fear is fear, itself.”  

So we took on the big boys when we felt we had to, when it became apparent that our readers needed that kind of support: Sierra Pacific Power, Mt. Wheeler Power, Gallagher Ford, the Tooele County School Board and their Wendover High School Administration, the Elko County Clerk, a bond election in White Pine County, the Elko County District Attorney, Wendover, Utah City government, the State Line Hotel/Casino, the list goes on.

We discovered how good it felt to take up a just cause, even if we didn’t win, and we won most of them.

Our whole ten years have been an uplifting freeing of the spirit and for it we are more than grateful “For whatever gods may be for our unconquerable soul.” 

 Through all of this decade we have forever, it seems, just barely made it, financially.

And though we are more confident of our future now than ever before, we shall always be glad we have done what we have with our newspaper.

Editorial marking the 10th anniversary of 

The High Desert Advocate 

by Harry Copelan

Howard Copelan, Publisher

We have a sense of deep satisfaction marking this 30th year milestone.

In going through edition after edition we smiled, with the memories of our parents of course, but also that the character of our newspaper has not changed.

Every thing else has.

Cutting edge 30 years ago was typing out a story on an electric type writer, setting type on something called a comp setter. It used photographic paper, that was then dried, waxed and pasted up on large inclined tables, kind of like a jig saw puzzle.

Ad artwork was contained in volumes and volumes of ready printed slick pages. It was cut out with razor blades and slapped on the pages.

The completed pages were then photographed, developed as negatives and driven to whoever happened to be our printer.

Ten years later we were still using paste up but we trashed the comp setter and used computers to write, edit and print the stories.

Another ten years later laser printers and digital cameras closed the dark room altogether. A year ago we gave an old enlarger to our niece whose mother worked on Advocate, she was interested in obsolete technology.

This edition like about 600 which have preceded it has been completely prepared electronically and is being transmitted to our printer via ftp.

A version of it will also be on the internet on our website, a thing 30 years ago not even imagined.

All in all the new technology has been good. We can put our newspaper faster, cheaper and better looking than the product 30 years ago.

We are also more accessible to our readers. Post a story and the reaction can be immediate rather than having to rely on the mail.

We think it is important to note that we also weren’t around when the Advocate was born. We came three years later with a two year old girl and another baby on the way. It was boy by the way and we had two more sons after him.

Raising a family while running a newspaper gave us a valuable perspective on our home town.

Many of our friends and acquaintances we met through our children either as parents of friends or as teachers of our children.

And as for those children they turned out pretty good. Pretty damned good if you forgive us our boast.

While putting out a good newspaper is rewarding nothing can compare with the joy of seeing children succeed.

This being a small town our joy is shared and freely given to all and so is sorrow.

And we grieve when we report on a tragedy that befalls any resident of our home town.

What pains us most of all is when a child our children’s age commits a crime. More often than not we knew that brooding face in the mug shot as a happy go lucky boy without a care in the world and the future at his feet.

There is nothing more tragic as a wasted life and we have seen too many.

But we have also seen triumphs not only athletic or political victories but triumphs of the spirit.

Forgive us if we celebrate a bit too loud but achievements in our little corner of the world should be trumpeted as loud as we can.

If too loud we suggest ear plugs, because we will never lower the volume.

Another thing we will never stop doing is reporting the news.

Yes we have made mistakes in the past and will almost certainly make mistakes in the future. But the errors we have committed and will commit are those of the heart.

We will also never stop finding the humor in those in authority complaining when they are taken to task.

Some of those who have freely and arrogantly wield their power are taken aback, driven to tears when they are criticized. It gives us a tremendous satisfaction.

The early 20th century humorist  Peter Dunne  said “A newspaper comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”

From the first issue of the High Desert Advocate to this one upholding that mission has been our privilege.

And it is you dear readers who every week shell out three quarters at a time who have allowed us to fulfill it.

So thank you.

Thank you all.

Our Pissed Off Parent does raise some very valid points in the missive about the new proposed education plan.

The biggest of which is why is the elko county school board playing a kind of Three Card Monty, moving students here and there when just building a separate Junior High School seems so much simpler?

If it made sense in Elko and Spring Creek why is West Wendover being subjected to this building legerdemain?

Clearly the new plan demands a second look and a second look with a little more local input at the beginning of the process rather than at the end of the done deal.

We are friends with conservative fire brand Janine Hansen.

We like the lady a lot even though some of her ideas we consider a little extreme.

A couple of years ago we shared with her an article, “The return of the Patriarchy”, whose authors suggested that because of high fertility among religious women and the very low birth rate of liberal women old fashioned conservatism would be making a big comeback in a generation or so.

She agreed that was a possibility but only if the liberals didn’t steal our children.

We scoffed at her then convinced that she was being paranoid.

This week we saw that MSNBC editorial about how our children actually belonged to everybody.

We aren’t scoffing now.

While we still doubt a plan has been written down on how best to make our children the property of the state we are uncomfortable.

Fertility rates being what they are we are producing the biggest population of single never married no children middle aged and elderly people in history.

Who is going to take care of them, 10 or 20 years from now?

There is a very good reason why armies recruit young men between the ages of 16 and 23.

While a 30 or even 40 year old can do most everything a young soldier does only a young soldier can convince himself he likes it.

Silly and stupid one might say.

And one could be right.

Only a fool would do it and only a stupid fool would enjoy it.

But those silly stupid fools are the only ones who stand between us and the evil monsters who love death more than life and misery more than happiness.

It is our young men our valiant young men who once again clean their weapons check their gear and gird their loins and say to the tyrant of northeast Asia “Not on my watch!”

It is a proven fact that the judgement center of a man’s brain actually shrinks from the onset of puberty until around the age of 25.

They measured,

And for the rest of us it is a good thing it does.

Because soon, perhaps very soon our young men could be asked again to risk life and limb for country.

If they could think about the risks as a mother or father does they would shrink back.

We know several of them.

We are privileged to know several of them.

They will put themselves in harm’s way to protect us.

In a way we envy them.

To have such a clear mission. To be the good against such an obvious evil is a wonderful and glorious thing.

And we pray for them and beg the Almighty to protect them.

They are the best of us.

They are heros.

“We invoke your blessings upon the members of our American military forces, those brave men and women whose courage and commitment to that for which this country stands protects us all.

Whether by air, land or sea, wherever their orders take them, we ask, dear God, that they be protected within your sheltering presence. Shield them from harm and from pain, assuage their loneliness, and sustain their faith in the face of the formidable enemies that they confront on a daily basis. May all of their efforts be crowned with victory, and the assurance that we who depend on their courage appreciate and understand the great difficulty of their work.

Most of all, we pray what for all soldiers is the ultimate prayer- that they be privileged to return to the loving arms of their families and a grateful country safely, speedily, and in good health. Because of their courage, may we all be privileged to know and savor the blessings of true peace and security.

Amen.”

Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik

Howard Copelan

This is  quick note to any parents of future murderers, rapists or child molesters out there.

We really, really, really don’t care how you feel, really.

And we mean that in the coldest possible way.

Your kid commits a crime against an innocent we will report it.

Indeed we will go to town on the story and we could care less how you feel.

And if that bothers you say more than having a kid in your house that is already exhibiting antisocial and violent tendencies then maybe you should be getting outside help like NOW!!!!.

There are a whole lot worse things than being publicly embarrassed about a son’s or a daughter’s criminal behavior.

Being a parent of a victim, visiting a grave, trying to mend a broken soul in a violated body are horrors we cannot even imagine. The parents of murderers, rapists or child molesters got it easy compared to that.

So don’t waste our time or your bile.

You raised monsters, just say you are sorry and deal with it.

This week we celebrate the 110 anniversary of Centra Com.

While they are new t Wendover 110 years in operation is something that should be remarked on and saluted.

We found out we were dealing with a different kind of company a couple of years ago when we lost internet at 3 am.

We called up the hotline and got a live person in their offices!!!!!!

It was a miracle!!!

Not only were they there in person the techs carefully worked us through our problem and 15 minutes later we were back on line!!!

We didn’t even have to go to their back up plan which would have meant waking their local tech to come out to our office and fix things or failing that them moving our operation to a place where we could continue working.

Since then we can count on just one hand the number of times our service went out and it has always been restored within the hour if not in minutes.

That kind of service is probably why they have been in business so long.

There might be some providers in town who are cheaper (though we doubt it) but what is the point of getting a great deal on tv, phone or internet service if it doesn’t work and you have to wait till tomorrow or the next day or week to get it fixed?

Thus we say very proudly that we are customers of Centra Com and we would not have it any other way.

Congratulations on 110!!!

We were relieved Tuesday that the West Wendover City Council avoided throwing good money  after bad when it upheld the kibosh on the Wendover Gas buy out.

One thing that has us still scratching our head is why was the bad money spent in the first place?

The reasons Roy Briggs gave for not wanting to go forward made a lot of sense: the city should not undertake a massive spending project with so many unknowns and little expertise.

They also made sense last summer when given by then Mayor Donnie Andersen when he vetoed the project and when Mr. Briggs helped over ride.

While David Serafini’s critique of the feasibility study was enlightening and thoughtful. It was a nuts and bolts criticism.

The numbers did not add up or at least were massaged.

Briggs’ reason was philosophical and while we welcome a convert to common sense we wish he had converted before the city spent $24,000.

Now that the deal is off, the $24,000 must be considered either a mistake or wasted money.

Yes we know that someone will try to justify the waste insisting that the city had to have done its due diligence.

Try wasting $24,000 in the real world and see how far that excuse will go.

The city of West Wendover doesn’t have $24,000 to waste. No small business does and no large business would tolerate it.

So who is to blame?

City Manager Chris Melville for one. Not for being frivolous with the people’s money but rather for not reading the signs from the Peppermill that this project was too big to swallow.

After working hand in glove with the casino for well over a decade Melville should have picked up on the mood coming from the bosses of his councilmen and that mood was grumpy.

But Briggs’ and his partners in crime Johnny Gorum and Emily Carter bear the brunt of the blame.

Carter for pushing this idiocy through while she bought her gas from someone else and Gorum who appears to have embraced socialism as an economic model.

Profit is evidently a bad thing for our erstwhile councilman. We wonder how his employer would think about that?

Cut backs in postal service have come and more will probably be coming to rural Nevada.

A lot of the problems of our postal service can be blamed on technology. Who sends birthday cards these days except middle aged mothers to adult children. In 20 years those children won’t at least not on a regular basis.

But while technology may doom the postal service it didn’t have to.

Instead of being mail only the US Postal Service could have become the center for communication back in the 1980’s. Just as European postal services were the first to offer international phone service, fax machines and telex the American could have followed suit or even have lead the way.

The US Postal Service might have even set up computer rooms for customers to try that new fangled internet.

It didn’t and instead sold commemorative stamps.

We imagine it will muddle through but as it cuts back it will become less and less important.

When he was running for president back in 2004, ridicule was heaped on Joe Biden for suggesting that Iraq be partitioned so that Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab would have states of their own.

Ten years after the start of the Iraq war that seems to be happening all by itself.

In fact the canonization is spreading beyond Iraq into almost every country of the Arab world.

Far from a monolithic Arab nation which speaks in one language with one voice cracks if not rifts are forming from Morocco to Bahrain as well they should.

France and Britain drew the maps of the modern middle east after World War I to better manage their interests.

They are being redrawn today in blood.

Mayor Emily Carter wants an explanation why some councilmen stabbed Nancy Green in the back.

She won’t get it or at least won’t get a true one.

At least not from them.

Cowards almost never admit their lack of manhood especially to a woman.

But whatever excuse Roy Briggs and Saul Andrade come up with should be entertaining.

Almost as enternaining as Andrade in the last meeting.

If it wasn’t so funny we would almost feel sorry for him chickening out on not seconding the motion to buy and then voting against the motion to kill.

We think it might have been a desrate attempt to preserve some dignity but going both ways on an issue doesn’t indicate an independent mind as it affirms a non entity.

As for Roy “company man” Briggs, he once again proved that no matter how low one can go in public there is always lower.

We have argued long enough so that people know our opinion on the gas company purchase.

We have put forth our reasons, enumerated our obections.

We know there are people who hold a different one.

they have put forth their reasons and enumerated their positions.

We think they are wrong.

We may even think they are stupid.

But at least they have an opinion.

What is shameful is that at least two of our decision makers have no opinion.

They will vote how they are told.

Whether it is a good vote or a bad vote makes not whit of difference.

They obey.

Great quality in a dog or a slave.

In a councilman, in a man it is despicable.

And as for Nancy Green she put her trust in the wrong set of friends.

A decent human beings would have balked at stringing her along for a year, watching her destroy any chance her company had to make it and then just when all that is left is signing on the dotted line– Never mind.

For the record we don’t believe the council started this process in bad faith.

Faith, good or bad requires a belief system.

They don’t have one.

We have often wondered just how can they look at themselves in the mirror.

We think the answer is that when one has their moral sense removed it is pretty damned easy.