Category: ZT & PC

That’s the only explanation — or at least charitable explanation — for the idea that a family would sue Ford and Firestone for wrongful death. Not, as you might think, because a Firestone tire blew out and led to an auto accident that killed someone. No, the family was suing Firestone and Ford because their daughter got a flat, and then was killed by the man who gave her a ride.

Prosecutors said Richard Cook, 36, of Omaha picked up Stahlecker and later shot her. Cook was convicted of first-degree murder, and is serving a life sentence. He remains the only defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit.
The woman’s parents, Susan and Dale Stahlecker of Fremont, claimed in the suit that a Firestone Wilderness AT tire on their daughter’s 1997 Ford Explorer failed, setting off the chain of events that resulted in her death.
The lawsuit claimed Firestone was negligent in making the defective tire and Ford was negligent in putting it on one of its vehicles. The high court said the companies could not have foreseen Cook’s criminal acts.

To say the least.

What’s even more, um, tragic is that the current ruling was from the Nebraska Supreme Court, upholding a lower court ruling. Which means that not only did the parents sue, but they appealed.

Nashville, Tenn.-based Bridgestone/Firestone has recalled millions of ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT tires since August 2000 after federal safety officials found they were prone to losing their tread while traveling at high speeds.
At least 271 U.S. traffic deaths have been linked to the failed tires, most of which were sold with the Ford Explorer.
The Stahlecker’s lawyer, Richard Rensch, said Amy might not have ventured out in the early morning had she known the tires were prone to blowing up.

I suspect she would not have. Of course, then she would have been at home when a meteor crashed into it, meaning Ford and Firestone would still have been on the hook …

(via Ipse Dixit)

Keeping the holy in holy matrimony — that’s the important thing, right?

I’m not a blushing prude, and neither, I sense, is our dear Marn. But, slippery slopes notwithstanding, that doesn’t mean that anything goes.

I think there’s a time and place for erotica and porn. What any of us does in the privacy of our own homes is between us and our browser caches. But oh man, when I don’t know you and I’m sitting in your place of business at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning, the last thing I want to learn about you is that lesbian threesomes turn your crank.

Read all about the art of improper interior decoration in a place of business. It is, as Marn usually is, tremendous fun.

Dean Esmay notes folks critiquing his spelling of the Muslim holy book as Koran, when the current preferred spelling is Qur’an (or just plain Quran, if you want to be slightly simpler but less preferred).

That then provoked Dean to point to an interesting article by John Derbyshire on what the author calls “The Onomastic Cringe,” the push in the West to use (approximations of, sometimes vague ones) the “local” names for geography — countries, cities, etc. — and enthnonymy (what people call themselves). (The article gets a bit screwball in places, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.)

So, for example, one doesn’t call them Gypsies any more, but Roma. It’s not Peking, it’s Beijing. Mt. McKinley becomes Denali. Burma is now Myanmar. And the Koran is the Qu’ran.

I wonder how much of this is a combination of post-colonial guilt and Third World muscle-flexing. Certainly there seems to be no widespread move among English-speakers to refer to Deutschland instead of Germany — nor are the Germans bugging us (or the French with their Allemagne) about it, either.

Maybe the Europeans are innured to it. After all, most cities in Europe have undergone a myriad of spelling changes (Danzig, Gdansk), depending on who owned them that decade, let alone wholesale name changes (St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and back to the beginning again).

That might explain why nobody in England cares that the Chinese show Oxford as Niujin on their maps.

One might wonder whether this trend will lead to the end of people criticizing citizens of the US from calling themselves Americans (to the chagrin, rumor has it, of folks in Canada and Mexico and elsewhere on the North and South American continents). After all, if that’s what we call ourselves, that trumps other claims, right?

Well, probably not.

I’m of mixed minds on this (as with so much else). On the one hand, yeah, I feel the need to respect the language and self-identification of others.

On the other hand, chaos pretty quickly can ensue from this, especially when ownership of a name or locale or people comes into dispute, particularly over historical periods. Is it Yerushalayim or Al-Quds — or do we respect several centuries of our own language and just call it Jerusalem, torquing everyone off?

Or, to quote an earlier post of mine on the subject, whose claims do we respect for Mt. Everest’s “real” name? The Tibetan name Qomolangma. as proposed by Tibetan scholars working in Beijing? Or maybe Chomolungma, as other Tibetans call it? Or Sagarmatha. as it is named by the Nepalese?

Maybe we should just give it a lat-long coordinate and leave it at that. Or return to its pre-surveying days of “Peak 15.”

How do you spell Moammar Gaddafi’s name, anyway? Has anyone asked him? Does that matter?

Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a debate that lends itself to a straightforward answer, being tied to history, politics, religion, and emotion — not to mention orthographies and alphabets that don’t match our own. I’ve referred to the Muslim holy book hereabouts as the Qur’an for quite some time.

But, then, I think it’s cool being pedantic, so don’t pay me any attention.

(with a nod toward Adam for the title)

I won’t go into all the details here, just go read Brian’s post about New York’s new “gay high school.”

A well-meaning but very misguided (in my opinion) attempt to deal with the very real harrassment of gay teens, for reasons which Brian elucidates and which are added to in the comments. Though my summary is, Dealing with intolerant thugs by secluding their victims in a separate school seems to be a generally bad idea to me.

A group of parents in Oberlin, Ohio are fighting the assignment of a teacher based on race.

That’s what it really comes down to, as various black parents are arguing against the scheduling of a white teacher to teach a black history class.

Because of a scheduling conflict, the black teacher who has taught the course for the past several years may not be able to this year.

Phyllis Yarber Hogan, a member of the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, said a white teacher wouldn’t be well-suited to teaching students about subjects like slavery. “When you talk about slavery, students need to understand it is not our fault,” she said. “Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved.
“How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?”

Right. White people can’t teach black history (or about slavery) because slavery was done by white people, not black people.

Never mind that there was a flourishing slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa, managed and participated in by blacks, who found white slavers to be just another market, along with Arabs and other blacks.

And never mind that the argument seems to say that African-Americans have more in common with their black slave ancestors, and white Americans have more in common with white slavers of the past, than they have in common with each other. Is that the lesson we really want to teach?

May we conclude that only women should teach women’s history, only poets should teach poetry, and only robots should teach computer science? Would my Italian background make be better suited to teach the history of Rome?

Or, more pointedly, would my white skin make me more appropriate able to teach US history as a whole — what with all its white Presidents and white generals and white historical figures, let alone all those white Founding Fathers (hmmm, better be male, too) — than a black teacher?

Michael Williams, interim director of Cleveland State University’s black studies program, said schools should choose a black teacher if that person is most qualified, not just because the teacher happens to be black.
If two teachers are equally qualified, Williams gives the edge to the black teacher. “That person still has the advantage of the culture,” said Williams, who is black. “They understand the nuances of the culture.”

I guess the answer would be “Yes,” then. Obviously I “understand the nuances of the [white] culture” better than a black teacher could — and the “nuances of the [male] culture” better than a woman. I clearly understand the “nuances of the [US] culture” better than any foreign-born teacher could. Being of British descent, too, I would obviously be better qualified to understand the “nuances of [British] culture” in teaching English Lit than, say, an African American, a Japanese American, or a Hispanic American.

Is that really the path we want to be going down?

(via David Bernstein)

Meanwhile, over across the pond, the EU is looking at imposing safety gear on circus workers, based on stepladder height regulations. Yes, that means trapeze artists with hard hats.

Obviously the EU needs to catch up with the US. Instead of passing a regulation, they should just have legal groups send threatening letters to circus owners, requiring them to post warning signs to their employees about exactly how dangerous high wire work is …

(More commentary on this here.)

And next on the hit parade: ice cream.

Trial lawyers and a consumer health group are teaming up to go after America’s ice cream, sending out legal notices to six major chains this week as the group released a study criticizing ice cream’s nutritional value.
They sent letters to Baskin-Robbins Inc., Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc., Cold Stone Creamery, the Haagen-Dazs Shoppes Inc., TCBY and Friendly Ice Cream Corp., telling the chains to add healthier alternatives and put nutritional facts on their store menu boards or face potential litigation.
“Your failure to disclose such obviously material information as unusually large calorie and saturated-fat loads may violate state consumer-protection laws and/or your common-law duty to disclose material facts, and may invite lawsuits from concerned consumers, legal-action organizations, or even state officials,” read one letter addressed to Haagen-Dazs President David Keil.

News flash: Ice cream, particularly premium ice cream, is full of milk fat. It tastes really good — in fact, the more fat it has, the better it tastes, in general — but it’s not healthy for you. If you think it is healthy for you, you are wrong. If you are interested in finding out how unhealthy for you it is, look it up.

There, now that we have that out of the way, can I discuss a law suit against litigious lawyers groups and busy-body health advocates? Seems that they push my blood pressure up to dangerous levels …

See the man.

See the man irritated by something. (That it was relatively trivial is not meaningful, but makes the whole story even more mind-boggling.)

See the man decide to protest said thing on his lunch hour.

See the man go eat his lunch, as usual, on a bench in the Independence National Historical Park, just outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

See his protest, comprised of one large piece of corrugated cardboard with a three-word inoffensive message scrawled on it, propped against the bench as he eats, on the day after Independence Day. See the man not shout, not march, not talk or interfere with anyone in the park.

See the park rangers not only tell him he can’t do that, not only that the park is a “First-Amendment-Free Zone,” but that if he doesn’t keep the cardboard sign turned around, they’ll arrest him.

Yeesh.

And never mind that the park, as a whole, is under a decades-old federal judge’s injunction against suppressing free assembly and protest.

The rangers, we are told, were “new to the park,” and didn’t understand its history — in particular, the 1988 injunction, but, clearly, the whole history the site commemorates.

Again, yeesh.

(via Ipse Dixit)

It’s a (small) comfort that, no matter how threateningly goofball some of the homeland security sorts of proposals may seem these days, we can always count on the EUrocrats to come up with something even more chilling.

A leaked draft initiative from the office of by the European Commission’s Social Affairs Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou suggests that all those annoyingly demeaning sexual stereotypes of men and women in European advertising and media could be easily defined, and thus permitted or banned, by EU law and courts.

That’s right — if someone decided that the ever-popular (in Europe) Baywatch was demeaning to women, there would be an EU legal and judicial mechanism to ban it from the airwaves.

Through a source, I obtained Diamantopoulou’s detailed and secret, single-spaced, 26-page draft. The document is well thought out, indicating a sizable amount of work had progressed within the European Commission to advance to this late stage. It was not the work of an aberrant or idle commissioner. Apparently, no member of the European media knew of its existence as it passed through the EC labyrinth of bureaucratic offices, reviewers and officials.
Article 4 of Diamantopolu’s proposal is simple but sweeping. It attempts to censor all mass media and advertising in the Continent. The Greek socialist commissioner said her office is seeking to “avoid throughout all forms of mass media notably all stereotypical portrayals of women and men as well as any projection of unacceptable images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements.”

None of those terms of “stereotype” and “nacceptable” are actually defined — that would be done later by further regulation and the courts.

Swell. Benny Hill must be spinning (in sped-up fashiong) in his grave.

After mismanaging sexual assault and rape cases at the US Air Force Academy for years, then mismanaging the reaction to a sudden flurry of media coverage of same, the Air Force is bending over backwards to try and show that it’s taking the matter seriously — new cadet rules, new leadership at the AFA, and so forth.

But the first actual legal action taken in the matter — the case being prosecuted against cadet Douglas Meester — gives every indication of being much more to demonstrate a general air of toughness than an attempt to see true justice done. Despite the advice of the hearing officer that the evidence did not make it likely a guilty verdict would be returned on the worst charges, recommending those charges be dropped and the other charges handled non-judicially, the current AFA interim commander has taken the unusual step of overriding the hearing officer and pushing the case forward anyway.

Rarely, when the pendulum swings in one direction, does it fail to swing too far back in the other — especially when there’s politics involved. I’d hate to think a culture of cover-up could only be swapped out for a culture of show trials.

Despite the Lawrence v. Texas ruling, some jurisdictions are still trying to draw a law enforcement distinction between gay and straight sex.

The following comes from a memo from HQ to police in Charlotte, NC, a jurisdiction that has been more actively prosecuting sodomy cases under the state’s Crime Against Nature law (“If any person shall commit a crime against nature, with mankind or beast, he shall be punished as a Class I felon.”):

However, [Lawrence] did not directly address the solicitation of a crime against nature (SOLCAN). For the time being and until a court tells us otherwise, we are of the following opinion: 1.) a SOLCAN charge wherein a subject offers to commit a crime against nature for money in either a private or public place is a valid charge; 2.) a SOLCAN charge wherein the subject offers to commit a crime against nature for no money in public or at an unspecified location is a valid charge; and 3.) a SOLCAN charge wherein the subject offers to commit a crime against nature for no money or consideration at a private place is no longer a valid charge.
We have spoken with the D.A.’s office who has agreed to continue to accept these charges ….

(Emphasis mine.)

Reading between the lines here is interesting. #1 seems straightforward — solicitation of sex for money is a felony — but is solicitation of straight sex is also considered a Class I felony?

#3 reflects the Lawrence case. If a “crime against nature” (under that statute) occurs inside a private residence, it’s not a crime against the law; thus, solicitation of such cannot be considered a felony.

It’s #2 that I find most interesting. Public sex of any kind is presumably illegal in Charlotte. I have to wonder if solicatation of public straight sex is also treated as a Class I felony.

More important, I have to wonder if “straight” solicitation laws include the “at an unspecified location” clause.

In other words, if I lean over to someone I consider cute — let’s say, my wife — and say, “Hey, let’s go have sex,” without specifying where, I seriously doubt that a Charlotte police officer would do anything about it. If I said the same thing to my gay lover, though — would I, since I didn’t specify “… at our private residence,” be charged under #2 for SOLCAN?

(The same applies, of course, and perhaps more commonly, for where someone picks up someone cute at the bar who turns out to be an undercover cop. I suspect a straight propositioner will not be prosecuted for solicitation unless they offer money, or perhaps even explicitly suggest ducking outside into the alleyway; a gay propositioner would seem to be in felonious trouble if s/he did not explicitly specify “Let’s go back to my place” along with the proposition.)

Granted the memo does note that if a judge has a different interpretation, they might have to decide to prosecute these charges differently. But I find it greatly irksome that various folks are trying to maintain “business as usual” in prosecuting gay sex differently from prosecuting straight sex, Lawrence notwithstanding.

Jerks.

Okay, if you want to build shallower public swimming pools — or even rennovate old ones to not have a shallow end — so that kids and families can wade all over the place, and other positive reasons in response to public demand for more fun stuff, that’s great.

But don’t do it to save us from ourselves, for God’s sake. Because it won’t.

(via Andrea)