In December, Canada’s supportive organization The Transgender Project released a biographical video of the former Paul Wolscht, 46, and the father of seven children with his ex-wife, Marie, describing his new life as not only a female, but a 6-year-old female, Stephoknee Wolscht. She told the Daily Xtra, a gay and lesbian news site, that not acting her real age — even while doing “adult” things like working a job and driving a car — enables her to escape “depression and suicidal thoughts.” Among the trans-age’s favorite activities are coloring-book coloring, creating a play-like “kingdom,” and wearing “really pretty clothes.” Stephoknee now lives with the couple who adopted her.
Unclear on the concept
American millennials (those aged 18 to 29) continue a “long-standing tradition,” The Washington Post wrote in December, describing a Harvard Institute of Politics poll on their views on war. Following the recent Paris terrorist attacks, about 60 percent of U.S. millennials said additional American troops would be needed to fight the Islamic State, but 85 percent answered, in the next question, that no, they themselves were “probably” or “definitely” not joining the military.
Exceptional Floridians
1.) Police in St. Petersburg reported the December arrest of a 12-year-old boy whose rap sheet listed “more than 20” arrests since age 9. He, on a bicycle, had told an 89-year-old driver at a gas station that the man’s tire was low, and when the man got out to check, the boy hopped in the car and took off. 2.) A driver accidentally plowed through two small businesses in Pensacola in December, creating such destruction that the manager of one said it looked like a bomb had hit, forcing both — a tax service and a casket company — to relocate. The driver told police he was attempting to “travel through time.”
Compelling explanations
1.) Breen Peck, 52, an air traffic controller who has been having career troubles in recent years, was arrested during a traffic stop on New York’s Long Island in December when officers found illegal drugs in his car. “That’s meth,” he said. “I’m an air traffic controller.” “I smoke it to stay awake.” 2.) In a she-said/he-said case, wealthy Saudi businessman Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was acquitted of rape in December in England’s Southwark Crown Court, apparently persuading jurors of “reasonable doubt” about his DNA found in the alleged victim’s vagina. Perhaps, his lawyer said, Abdulaziz was still aroused after sex with the other woman in the apartment and accidentally fell directly upon the alleged victim lying on a sofa.
Ironies
∎ Christopher Manney was fired from the Milwaukee Police Department in 2014 after shooting a black suspect to death in a case bearing some similarity to the 2015 shootings that produced “Black Lives Matter” protests — not fired for the shooting (adjudged “not excessive force”), but for improper actions that preceded the shooting (not announcing a valid reason for a pat down and conducting a not-by-the-book pat down). Two days before the firing, he had filed a disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder from the shooting and aftermath, and in November 2015 the city’s Annuity and Pension Board, following city law, approved the claim. Thus, Manney, despite having been subsequently fired, retired with full disability, with basically the same take-home pay he was receiving when fired.
∎ In November, as anti-Muslim tensions arose in several U.S. cities following the Paris terrorist attack, two chapters of the Satanic Temple church, San Jose, California, and Minneapolis, offered to protect Muslims who feared a backlash. The Minneapolis group offered “just big dudes walking you to where you need to be,” for example, grocery shopping — an offer “of genuine compassion for our fellow human beings.” The offer was subsequently rescinded by the Minneapolis church’s executive ministry, reasoning that they are “not a personal security service.”
Wrong place, wrong time
In November, a 62-year-old customer at Ancient City Shooting Range in St. Augus
