Farewell, farewell

After a year and a half of blogging, it's time for me to move on to other interests.

If you have tried to run a serious issues-oriented blog, you will probably agree that it takes a lot of work (mostly in the form of time investment) to (1) keep such a blog regularly updated, and (2) develop and maintain a reader base. For me, it's far too much time spent on what is essentially a hobby. Some higher-priority areas of my life are pulling me away from this hobby, and I do so without regret.

For those of you who know me in various other web sites and e-mail lists, I'm happy to say that I'll continue to haunt those places; it's easier to drop in and drop out as circumstances warrant.

Thanks to those who helped to push this blog to just over 30,000 page loads...especially to those who actually took time to read what I wrote! Some even had the nerve to comment constructively.

I'll leave the comments feature open for maybe another month, and then I'll make a decision about what to do with the site.

Have a great 2006!

8 Aug 2006 UPDATE: While I do not intend to post any more to this blog, I am frequently updating my "Readworthy" link list. FYI. FWIW. And all that.

1993 WTC case highlights the most egregious shortcoming of our jury system

Remember the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in which Islamist terrorists tried to topple one of the towers into the other in the hopes of killing tens of thousands of people? The bombing, while it did not accomplish its objective, was still quite destructive.

When bad things happen, the legal system immediately swings into action in a quest to find out who is reponsible—not for the purpose of bringing the perpetrators to justice, but for the purpose of opening the floodgates for liability payouts. Because of this, it wouldn't do at all to pin the blame for the bombing on the terrorists themselves. They don't have any money.

So, what to do? Ralph Reiland gives the answer:

Now, after a dozen years of legal maneuvering, a jury in the state Supreme Court of New York has taken the terrorists off the hook for the majority of the blame in their 1993 attack. On October 26, unanimously, the jury said the guys who carried out the bombing were only 32 percent responsible for the damages.

The majority wrongdoer, 68 percent at fault for the death and destruction, said the jury, was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the then-owner of the World Trade Center. This means that the party with the deepest pockets—also known as the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey—will be picking up the tab for most of the losses.

On the day of the 1993 blast, Mario Cuomo, New York's governor at the time, told journalists: “We all have that feeling of being violated. No foreign people or force has ever done this to us. Until now, we were invulnerable.”

Today, playing Monday-morning quarterback more than a decade after the attack, the New York jury has said the Port Authority “should have known” an attack was coming, even if, as Cuomo said, nothing like that had ever happened before. Further, the Port Authority “should have known” to shut down the garage to the public, and to its upstairs tenants, even if, as Cuomo said, no one had felt vulnerable before to a foreign force in the center of Manhattan.

This highlights one of the greatest shortcomings of our country's jury system: It's no secret that jurors are selected not for their intelligence or their reasoning ability, but for the ease in which they can be manipulated by the prosecutor or the defender. In the hands of a competent attorney, a typical jury is Silly Putty.

UK bank takes time to resolve a customer service problem

I'll give this bank a few bonus points for their creative solution:

NATWEST is removing clocks from its branches in a bid to deter customers from complaining about how long they have to queue, according to staff at the bank.

Getting rid of wall clocks is part of a £150m nationwide refurbishment scheme by NatWest, which has more than 10m customers.

Last week, two of the High Street banking giant's employees said that during redevelopment of their branch the clock disappeared and would not be replaced.

'It's been taken down so people won't complain,' said one, who did not wish to be identified. 'It happened over a month ago. If people have been standing in a queue waiting to see a cashier for a long time, they can get very cross.

'When the clock was there, it was difficult for us to disagree with them about how long they'd been waiting. Now it's more difficult for them to complain. I can't believe it, but it seems to be the policy now. Our manager told us.'

Clever, but not clever enough. If NatWest wants to implement this idea more completely, they need to collect wristwatches, cell phones, PDAs, etc. at the door.

Michael Schiavo ready to rampage through D.C.

Well, now we know that the death of Terri Schiavo has been good for Judge Greer's career, but what about grieving husband Michael?  He's been staying busy, and now he appears to have launched the next phase of his new career as the Culture of Death's version of Cindy Sheehan.  Now he's forming a political action committee dedicated to the defeat of all of those monsters in Congress who tried to keep him from having his wife put down.

Schiavo judge honored by local ACLU as "Friend of Civil Liberties"

Proving yet again that the legal culture in Pinellas County, Florida is twisted beyond belief, now we find out that the local chapter of the ACLU has named Judge George Greer as this year's recipient of its "Gardner W. Beckett, Jr., Friend of Civil Liberties Award":

The Pinellas County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union confers this honor upon individuals who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to basic civil liberties, principles, and values inherent in the Bill of Rights. In the footsteps of Gardner Beckett, these recipients exemplify an unflinching commitment to the defense of our constitution and it's guarantees of equal protection, due process, and simple justice.

Of course, "equal protection, due process and simple justice" in Terri Schiavo's case involved Greer doing everything in his power to have her put to death, even if it meant doing so using a technique banned as torture by civilized nations everywhere.

 

(Credit: Life News)

OT: Read This First!

One of my favorites from Dave Barry (maybe because I can identify with it so well):

Congratulations! You have purchased an extremely fine device that would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver. Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS, RIGHT? AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT??? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?

How shall we honor a woman whose misguided philosophy led to the death of millions (so far)?

Let's name a bridge after her!

Rachel Carson, a driving force behind the modern environmental movement, grew up in a modest homestead in Springdale Borough near the Allegheny River. For the budding marine biologist, the river's waters were an early inspiration.

Now, more than four decades after Ms. Carson's death, her presence may return to those waters.

Allegheny County Council tomorrow will consider renaming the Ninth Street Bridge in her honor.

...Ms. Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," criticized the harmful effects of pesticides, sparking a prolonged battle with the chemical industry. In 1970, six years after Ms. Carson's death, the federal government founded the Environmental Protection Agency. Two years later, the government banned the use of the pesticide DDT in the United States.

...and in the thirty-plus years since, millions worldwide have died needlessly from malaria because of this junk-science atrocity. Thanks, Rachel!


UPDATE: JunkScience.com lists "100 things you should know about DDT". (Actually, the list has grown beyond 100)

The Capitol Christmas Tree returns

It's a small victory in the war against political correctness, but we takes 'em where we gets 'em:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has told federal officials that the lighted, decorated tree on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, known in recent years as the "Holiday Tree," should be renamed the "Capitol Christmas Tree."

The name change on Tuesday comes one day after the Engelmann spruce was delivered from New Mexico to Capitol Hill for decorations and displays until Jan. 2.

Hastert will light the tree, referred to as the "People's Tree" by the New Mexico-based committee that delivered it, during a ceremony on Dec. 8.

The re-named tree was called a Christmas Tree until the late 1990s, when it was changed to the name "Holiday Tree." The source of the name change in the 1990s is unclear, but this year's Web site could not be changed and still refers to it as a holiday tree.

Calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree has become a politically charged prospect in jurisdictions across the country, from Boston to Sacramento and in dozens of communities in between. The city of Boston changed the name of its Holiday Tree back to Christmas Tree after being threatened with several lawsuits.

While the political correctness has trapped some communities into taking the Christianity out of Christmas in order to accommodate the minority of Americans who don't celebrate the holiday, the White House continues to call its tree a Christmas Tree.

What is Thanksgiving?

From Tom Briscoe:

(Click image to view full size)

Bird Flu, yet another elaborate hoax of the Bush administration

Really! There's no outbreak! Since Iraq has just about been bled dry of its oil by Halliburton already, the president has moved on to other schemes. It turns out that the so-called Avian Flu (a.k.a. Bird Flu, a.k.a. H5N1) is just a hoax designed to enrich W's good buddy, Donald Rumsfeld! I'm not in the mood to check for myself, but I'm sure the fevered masses of the left (not fevered from the Bird Flu, mind you) are all over this story.

Sigh... Another day, another hot coffee lawsuit

A Staten Island, NY woman wants $10 million from Dunkin Donuts because of burns she received from spilled coffee in her car:

[Plaintiff Sharon] Shea insists the coffee was too hot and the workers didn't fasten the lids tightly enough.

"The [drive-thru] girl had positioned them where they were in the same line [on the tray], they weren't cattycorner," said Shea, 60.

Some observations come to mind here:

• The coffee was too hot—Coffee is made with boiling water. Okay? Everyone understand that now?
• The workers didn't fasten the lids tightly enough—What? You're driving away with cups of boiling-hot liquid on the seat next to you, and you didn't think to make sure the lids were secure?
• They weren't cattycorner—You noticed this, and you knew that wasn't a stable configuration, and yet you did nothing to correct this before driving away?

Here's an idea:

Some brave restaurant chain ought to post a sign saying something to the effect of the following:

Frivolous lawsuits -- both actual and threatened -- account for x% of the cost you pay for food at this establishment.

Gotta do SOMETHING to eliminate popular sympathy for these plaintiffs. It's not a David-and-Goliath thing; nine times out of ten, it's greed (not to mention an utter failure to admit personal responsibility for one's actions).

(Credit: Right Mind)

UPDATE: From Sacred Cow Burgers:

That thing about Microsoft Windows being an elaborate computer virus was supposed to be a joke

Microsoft isn't quite ready to go into the virus business, but it does look like they're considering having your new PC come preinstalled with spyware:

Even as Microsoft readies a host of new ad-supported online services to battle rivals, the software maker has been mulling a plan to offer free, ad-supported versions of some of its desktop products, CNET News.com has learned.

Although no specific plans have been made, executives within Microsoft are examining whether it makes sense to release ad-supported versions of products such as Works, Money, or even the Windows operating system itself, according to internal documents seen by CNET News.com.

"Constructivist math" is making idiots of our kids

Reason to homeschool #271835.

The New York Times reports that parents are finally starting to notice that the latest educational fad, "constructivist" math, is producing kids who are barely able to survive without a calculator. Some excerpts:

LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician.

So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the "constructivist" or "inquiry" program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.

Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization.

"My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program," Jim said recently. "Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us with something to teach us."

[...] The dispute is fundamental. To its advocates, constructivist math applies the subject to the real world, builds critical thinking and rescues classes from numbing repetition.

But to those parents in Penfield and elsewhere - who have children in junior high unable to do long division or multiply two-column numbers, who pay for private tutors or sessions at traditionalist learning centers like Kumon, who wonder why there are so many calculators and so few textbooks - the words of a recent graduate to the Board of Education ring tragically true.

"My biggest fear about going to college," Samantha Meek said at a meeting last spring, "is attending introductory math courses. How am I going to be able to explain to my professors that I do not understand what they are talking about, that I do not have the same math background as the rest of the students, and that I cannot do mental math and can barely do it with pencil and paper?"

The whole article is worth the read. You know the "progressives" have gone too far when the NYT gives favorable coverage to their critics.

Not that they will be deterred by veiled criticism from their media allies. Even if your school hasn't yet embraced the constructivist math fad, bear in mind that the educational elites appear to have thoroughly bought into it, so don't let your guard down.

(Credit: EIA via Right Mind)

Way OT: Coffee mystery solved

Feel free to skip this post if you're looking for something relevant to the purpose of this blog. Extended random thought follows. You have been warned.

In the last few weeks, I've noticed that the stores in our area have been having trouble keeping Folgers instant coffee on the shelves. As much as I love ground coffee, I'm also exceedingly lazy, so I'm the ideal demographic for instant coffee. It's a problem, though, when the stores have absolutely nothing of my favorite brand. So... do I go with Taster's Choice (no, because in addition to being lazy, I'm also stingy) or with the mysterious Store Brand (maybe, but only because I have to have something).

I finally became intrigued enough about the empty shelves that I decided to test the power of the Internet as an investigation tool. I went to Google News, typed the word "Folgers" in the search box, and... what do you know? Something is up:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Procter and Gamble Co. says its Folgers coffee plant in New Orleans is back in full operation.

The plant was shut down by Hurricane Katrina and has slowly resume operations in the weeks since then. Coffee supplies to some stores have been disrupted, and the company had run a national television commercial campaign about the hurricane's impact.

P & G says the New Orleans plant is the largest coffee production plant in the United States.

Folgers says it has notified retailers that supply will return to normal by early December. More than 400 of the company's 554 employees in New Orleans are back at work.

Folgers says it remains strongly committed to New Orleans, where it has had a presence for more than 50 years.

Well, okay, mystery solved. Now I know I have a personal stake in the recovery of New Orleans.

Sign of the times

We live in a time when more and more parents decline to control their kids' behavior in public. One Chicago-area restaurant, concerned that misbehaving kids were negatively affecting the experience of the other customers, decided to post what it thought was a friendly reminder to the kids (and their parents) to please be considerate:

So, did the parents appreciate the reminder? Of course not! The problem isn't that the kids are out of control, the problem is that the restaurant owner hates kids!

Here's an excerpt from a TV station's coverage of this horrible scandal. The wording suggests that the reporter/writer is taking the side of the outraged moms:

But some parents who spoke with NBC5's Natalie Martinez took immediate offense to the sign. The angry mothers said there are plenty of places in the Andersonville neighborhood where they can take their kids, even if they're acting out.

"I've e-mailed friends and said, 'Just so you know, this man has a sign up. I know there are lots of other options, and I'd encourage you not to go there,'" parent Kate Bremmer said.

When she spoke with Martinez, Bremmer and her kids were picking out goodies at a Swedish bakery, where all kids are welcome [a little editorializing from the reporter?].

"Our custom has been to offer a cookie to every child that comes into the store for as long as I can remember," said Kathy Stanton-Cromwell, the co-owner of the bakery, which is just a few doors down from A Taste of Heaven.

Stanton-Cromwell said the cookie serves as "a good calmer" for kids who are acting up.

Bremmer said A Taste of Heaven "is not a five-star restaurant," so she thinks it should cater to kids, not the other way around.

That's right. The obvious solution is to take the kids down the street where they can "act out" without consequence.