Accident Or Opportunity? Experiments can bring about the most amazing results, especially when you're a kid - or at least, they did when our staff members were kids.
Even considering the scientific studies on kids over the past few decades - like the recent findings tying brain damage in adults to injuries suffered from playing football as a kid or teenager - many American parents today often seem a bit overprotective to us. As one of our staff members has a highly intelligent and somewhat precocious youngster running around the office, we regularly get to experience that mix of instant terror and instant thrill that parents enjoy, that otherwise is reserved for experiences like roller coasters.
The American - and international - media got to experience a similar feeling on Monday, thanks in part to Secretary of State John Kerry, in what some members of the media have termed an accidental solution to the ongoing debate over Syria.
In a nutshell, Secretary Kerry was at a news conference in London on Monday when he was asked what, if anything, Syria's President Assad could do to avoid military action. Kerry, in what some reporters initially called a gaffe, said that if Syria's Assad were to surrender his stockpile of chemical weapons to an international commission, within a week, Assad and Syria could almost certainly avoid U.S. military action.
In less time than it takes a resourceful child to take an accident-prone death-trap of an idea and turn it into a fantastic opportunity, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov offered a plan to do almost exactly what Secretary Kerry had suggested... |