More proof that the terrorists won

In the news yesterday is an alarmist article titled “People on terrorist watch list allowed to buy guns”. It should, more accurately, read “Innocent people allowed to buy guns”. Today CNN is running a poll asking if we think people on the watch list should be allowed to buy guns. Overwhelmingly (89%-11%) the answer is no. This is the wrong answer. A senator is introducing legislation to remove the right of these people to buy guns. But these people haven’t done anything wrong. They are not terrorists. They are suspects, but they are not even suspects of crimes committed, they are suspects of possible future crime. They are being denied their rights because of what they might do.

To put it in context: let’s say you are put on a list of those likely to have a fatal car accident, so you are forbidden to get a driver’s license, or buy a car. Is that right? Would that be acceptable if the list was 95% accurate? What if it was 50% accurate? How about 5% accurate? What percentage of the people on the terrorist watch list have actually committed or attempted to commit terrorism? I doubt those figures are public, but I can assure you the number is closer to 5 than 95. And for the record: car accidents kill far more Americans than either terrorists or guns do.

The ban would make no sense at any rate. Who is committing terrorism with guns? Planes, yes. Bombs, yes. Guns? Not so much. Guns are not the weapons of terror. Well, unless one is pointed right at you. But the point of terrorism is to scare people who are nowhere near the scene of the actual event. So clearly, if we’re taking freedoms away from innocent people in the name of fighting terror… the terrorists have succeeded. We are literally terrified beyond reason.

People on the list are an interesting group. As Bruce Schneier sums it up: They are too dangerous to let fly in an airplane, but too innocent to prosecute in a court of law. Where is the sense in that? Even some of our elected politicians have wound up with their names on the terrorist watch list. Of course, being well connected as they are, their names don’t stay there long. What about yours? And did you know that simply speaking out against the government can get you labeled a terrorist?

A penny for your thoughts

Here are mine, for free

On my way in to work this morning, I was briefly stuck behind a Geo (Metro? Prizm?), and I remembered back when I was in college, and these cars were new. And tiny. And affordable. And not so fast with their 3-cylinder engines. We called them Penny Racers.

Which made me think about pennies, and how useless they are, and how I’ve heard that it costs more than a penny to make a penny, which is just plain dumb. I also thought briefly about Making Money, which makes hilarious fun of this (and which I haven’t finished reading yet).

In fact, older pennies (when they were mostly copper) are worth more if you melt them down into a chunk of metal than if you keep them in penny form. Which is why the government forbids people to melt 1-cent or 5-cent coins.

So I came across an article, because I can’t give this up now, stating that the price of zinc is rising, and soon the material cost of modern pennies will also be in excess of 1 cent. And it still costs more than a penny to make a penny because of all the non-material costs (equipment, man-hours, energy, distribution…). This article gives reasons for not discontinuing the penny, and the most absurd reason is this:

eliminating pennies would increase our reliance on nickels, which now
cost almost ten cents to manufacture and so generate even more negative
seigniorage, per coin, than pennies do

OK. Bear with me here a moment. It’s not rocket science. A 1-cent piece costs 1.7 cents to make. A 5-cent piece costs 10 cents to make. So here’s what you do: Discontinue the manufacture of 5-cent pieces. Declare that all current 1-cent pieces are now worth 5 cents. Retool the 1-cent dies so that they say “5 cents” instead of “1 cent”. Congratualtions! You no longer have a 1-cent piece, and your 5-cent piece now only costs 1.7 cents to manufacture! Genius!

Why should we stop using 1-cent pieces? We already don’t use them for the most part. I’ve seen people throw them away. I’ve seen people drop them by mistake and not bother picking them up because it isn’t worth the time and effort (and because we are fat, lazy Americans). The frugal among us have a penny jar, and we take it when it gets near full and either roll the pennies and sell them to the bank, or we (as fat, lazy Americans) pay 7% to Coinstar to have them do it for us. Or we leave them in the “have a penny, leave a penny” trays at convenience stores and gas stations. Which is really, in effect, saying “we don’t want pennies to exist”. So it’s time for the government to quit wasting fifty million dollars a year on making pennies.

Nice work if you can get it

How would you like a job where all you have to do is get out of bed in the morning? Actually, you wouldn’t technically have to do that, either. Can’t beat the commute. Or the hours. And your daily grind includes doing whatever the hell you want, but you can’t play professional baseball for the Detroit Tigers. How much would you expect to be paid for that job?

I’d be happy to have that job at a sustenance income. Gary Sheffield, (former) designated hitter for the Detroit Tigers, has that job for 1 year, at a pleasant little $14,000,000. Which, in normal-people terms, is enough money to never have to work again. Fourteen million with a job description of “don’t play for the Detroit Tigers”. Damn. I’m qualified to not play for them. I’d happily do it for 500 grand. They’d be getting a bargain, because I’ve demonstrated that I’m much better at not playing for them than Sheffield is. Though I imagine he’ll adjust.

Zero tolerance, 100% stupidity

This is an old story, I know, but it’s resurfacing because the case is now going to the United States Supreme Court. Can the school really strip-search your 13-year old daughter, looking for Ibuprofen?

The United States Court of Appeals has already ruled, correctly, that the school was in the wrong. The majority opinion in the case (it wasn’t unanimous???) included some rather obvious points:

“It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights.” “More than that,” Judge Wardlaw added, “it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity.”

The minority opinion is baffling:

“I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students.”

They weren’t looking for guns, or bombs. They didn’t have a shred of credible evidence. I just don’t understand how any judge could draw that conclusion.

Unfortunately, somebody has decided to waste more tax dollars fighting the inevitable, and the case has been appealed. I’m not aware of what earlier court rulings have been, but I find it difficult to believe any judge would ever side with the school on this.

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”

Professor Arum and I obviously have different definitions of “reasonable people”.

Zero tolerance is zero intelligence. That’s really what this boils down to. Somebody told the assistant principal that this girl had (*gasp!*) prescription-strength Ibuprofen on her. And on the basis of this testimony (of a girl who was caught with the same drug, and was obviously trying to shift blame and/or take somebody down with her), a strip search was ordered. On a 13 year old girl. To look for Ibuprofen.

Oh, and one last juicy quote on the subject of the student’s spotless disciplinary record:

The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant. “Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.”

There you have it. Students are guilty until proven innocent. If you’ve never been disciplined before, it’s not because you’re a good kid, it’s because they never caught you being bad. Gotta love it.

I might also point out that if the strip search wasn’t government (school) sanctioned, the person conducting it would likely be on trial for sexual assault of a minor. Does the fact that the school scarred her for life make it magically OK?

Priorities

Gay marriage would help the economy. Or, at the very least, it wouldn’t hurt it. But marriage is a huge industry, so it’s rather obvious that allowing more people to get married will create additional revenue. Not to mention money directly to the government in the form of marriage licenses.
Sadly, one openly gay senator (Republican, of course!) disagrees. But he won’t come right out and say it’s a bad idea. He just says it isn’t the right time.

“you have to understand how politics … works,” [Sen. Paul] Koering says. “The electorate will say, ‘My goodness … What’s wrong with these people? Why are they talking about this issue (gay marriage) now?’ “

Right. Because there’s so many more pressing issues for lawmakers to attend to. Like declaring Pluto to be a planet whenever it’s visible in the Illinois sky. Yes, politicians definitely are too busy to address something as frivolous as equal rights in these urgent times.

Yes, Senator Koering… we unfortunately know all too well how politics works. You people lie to us and waste taxpayer money by the boatload, and blow us off when we ask you to do the right thing.

Just mummify your kids with bubble wrap and stick them in the corner.

This is disgusting. Absolutely repulsive, on the part of the parents, their lawyer, and the Michigan Court of Appeals.

The Woodmans contracted with “Bounce Party” to use their inflatable play equipment facilities for their son’s fifth birthday party. Before the party, Mr. Woodman signed a waiver on behalf of his son, releasing Bounce Party from any liability for personal injury, property damage, or wrongful death caused by playing on the play equipment, an activity Bounce Party characterized as containing “some element of personal risk.”

During the party, the Woodmans’ son jumped from the top of a slide and broke his leg. The Woodmans sued, alleging among other things, negligence on the part of Bounce Party.

Sounds like an open and shut case to me… They were made aware that the activity contained risk of injury (possibly even death), they signed a waiver, the kid stupidly jumped off the top of the slide, which Bounce Party couldn’t possibly have stopped him from doing…

And when the case went to court, the judge agreed with me. Unfortunately, the family and/or lawyer decided to appeal. The Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the decision.

a parent “has no authority merely by virtue of the parental relation to waive, release, or compromise claims of his or her child.” The court opined that public policy dictated that the need to protect the rights of a minor child is greater than the rights of a child’s parent to take action on behalf of the child. In so finding, the Michigan Court of Appeals held that “pre-injury waivers effectuated by parents on behalf of their minor children are not presumptively enforceable.”

So what’s this, then? If a child ever gets hurt, the child can sue. Which means nobody in their right mind will ever let a child do something potentially harmful, such as get on a swing set, monkey bars, or bouncey castle. Children can’t sign waivers because they aren’t of legal age, and now parents can’t sign them either. I’m getting real tired of our society’s tendency to “protect the children, at all costs”. The human race has gotten along fine for centuries without this kind of insanity.

(edited to insert link to source)

Can’t we all just get along?

Ah, yes… the joyous Christmas season. A time to trample Wal-Mart employees to death, shoot your fellow shoppers, and engage in religious pissing contests. The one that caught my eye and prompted a response today is this story about an atheist group putting signs up in Washington (state) and Washington, D.C.

Normally I side with the atheists whole-heartedly, but in this case I think both opposing sides are being jerks.

First up:

The placard is often turned around so the message can’t be seen, and
one year, someone threw acid on it, forcing the group to encase it in
Plexiglas.

Come on. Grow up. We don’t go around throwing acid on religious billboards or nativity scenes…

“Although a number of humanists and atheists continue to attempt to rid God and Christmas from the public square,
the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to such efforts,”
Roberta Combs, the group’s president said in a press release.

Please. They are putting up their own signs, expressing their own views. They are not trying to remove anything of yours (this time). They are as entitled to their beliefs as you are to yours.

But being a jerk isn’t limited to the faithful:

Edwords maintains the campaign began in December mostly because the
group had extra money left over for the year. The connection to
Christmas is a coincidence, he said.

A sign featuring Santa Claus and invoking the words of a Christmas carol is only coincidentally connected to Christmas? And Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction. Go ahead, pull the other one.

“When people ask us, ‘Why are you hateful? Why are you putting up
something critical of people’s holidays? — we respond that we kind of
feel that the Christian message is the hate message,” he said. “On that
Nativity scene, there is this threat of internal violence if we don’t
submit to that master.”

The nativity scene is about domination and submission (and hate)?!? OMGWTFBBQ! Just shut the hell up, okay? You’re an idiot.

*sigh*

I just need to quit reading the news between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

You’ve got to be shitting me…

Robert Jordan wanted to become a police officer. He applied to the New London, Connecticut police force. They administered an I.Q. test to Mr. Jordan. Based on the score of his I.Q. test, the police force denied his application. So far, so good, right? The problem being that he didn’t score too low. He scored too high. Yes, you heard me correctly. He’s too smart to be a cop (despite wanting to be one).

Mr. Jordan filed a lawsuit claiming discrimination. The court ruled that the police force is within their rights to only accept stupid people so long as the test is applied equally to all races and genders. I can accept that it isn’t discrimination under the guidelines of current law, but… WTF?!? What possible reason could the city have for refusing to let smart people be cops?

footnote: It’s curious that this comes out in the July 20 NYT with a small note under the headline that says “published September 9, 1999″. Slow news day?

Tastes like chicken..

An Aussie was hospitalized while playing “chicken” in his underwear. Playing against motor vehicles. I think the name of the game should be changed. We didn’t find out who was chicken, we found out who was stupid. Sadly, the vehicle that hit him did not survive (though the occupants were unhurt).

Note to defense attorney:

Allowing your defendant to plead “I thought they’d get out of my way.” when she is charged with 2nd degree murder for running people down with her car just makes the both of you look stupid.