Everything I Know Is Wrong

Lance Armstrong Wins Seventh Straight Tour de France!

Lance Armstrong is the best athlete of any kind, in any sport.

Ever.

Update: Image Gallery

If you love good wine, you gotta love this ruling.

Court lets stand ruling that Napa name requires Napa grapes.

Pajamahadeen?

I don't think so.

Smoking is bad for you.

When I was in high school a friend of mine tried to throw a half-finished McDonald's chocolate shake out the window of my car. The window was up.

Man Tries to Toss Cigarette, SUV Ignites
A man barely escaped serious injury Thursday after a lit cigarette he tried to toss out the window while driving across the Bay Bridge blew back in and ignited the vehicle, according to the California Highway Patrol.

The shake didn't catch fire.

Update: This post was just for fun, but I'm already starting to get search engine hits from people who are truly looking for reasons not to smoke. Here are some links:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Health/Specific_Substances/Tobacco/Effects/

I can't believe it.

I agr... I agre... I agree with Susan Estrich.

Real Clear Politics
Mary Kay Letourneau, 43, and her former sixth-grade student, Vili Fualaau, 22, are planning to marry in April. Letourneau was convicted in 1997 of statutory rape and served seven-and-a-half years in prison for the crime.

"It's going to be fabulous seeing them get hitched finally," one of their friends told the Seattle paper. "It's long overdue."

Would he be saying that if a 33-year-old male sixth-grade teacher had raped and impregnated a 12-year-old girl?

Okay, but I only agree with her because, well, she's right.

Boys Arrested Over 'Violent' Stick Figure Drawings'

You can legislate behavior, but you can't legislate thought. 

The latest effort to undermine this basic principle is not, as so many have been, a "hate crime" issue. No, this time the focus is not on the unknowable thoughts of the perpetrators of a crime; this time the "feelings" of a potential victim are being used to determine if a felony has been committed; indeed the feelings are being used to determine if there was any crime at all.

Two boys, special ed students in Florida, one nine, the other ten years old, have been charged with "making a written threat to kill or harm another person, a second-degree felony." They are alleged to have made violent stick figure drawings which, in and of themselves, are nothing special; my son and his friends have made countless drawings with similar content.

 

The police, who are standing by their arrest of the boys , admit that it's not the drawings themselves that are criminal.

local6
"When an adult or even myself look at the picture looked at it at first I was thinking there is really not much to the picture or I would not be that scared by the picture those children drew," Ocala police spokesman Russ Kearn said.

But they don't stop there. They make a startling leap to the idea that the feelings of a person seeing the pictures, determines whether a crime has been committed.

"However, we have to put ourselves in his mind and that's the bottom line here. It is his well-being and the way he perceived that picture to be. It actually put him in extreme fear and he was in fear for his life." [Emphasis mine - Ed.]

Obviously no one can put themselves in another persons mind. Nor can the perceptions of a person who might or might not be a victim, depending on how he feels at the time, be used to judge whether a crime has been committed, or if one has, gauge it's severity. There must be an objective measure.

By the standard they are using to charge the two boys, anyone could be arrested for anything. If I made a sandwich for lunch and you were for some reason frightened by it, I could be arrested. If you said "pudding" and I felt threatened by it, you could be arrested. This is no basis for a legal system.

To be sure, if the boys were bullying a classmate they should be punished and shown how their behavior was wrong. But to charge them with a felony is absurd.

Perhaps a time-out would be better; or no TV for a couple of days.

Detention?

Update: After reading this post, Mr. Bob at The Daily Blogster wrote the Ocala Police Department to express his frustration. To his surprise he got a prompt response.

Here is what Greg Graham, Deputy Chief of Police said;

Thanks for your thoughts and email. Yes we did in fact arrest two children for threatening to kill another child. What is not being reported is the fact that the victim child had been bullied by these two children and verbally threatening him. The children then drew a picture depicting this child being stabbed by both of them with a pool of blood under the victim One of the defendant children had committed a violent act against another child in the past.

Could this have been handled a different way? Absolutely. Should it have been handled a different way? Maybe. But what would have happened if we took no action and at some point later the child was harmed by these two, I wonder what would be said about us then.

I'm sorry that you feel this way. I hope that I have answered your question.


Greg Graham
Deputy Chief of Police
Ocala Police Department

Mr. Bob also e-mailed me; he feels their response shows that they deserve a little extra slack. He's probably right, most people deserve a little more slack. Their intentions seem to be good, and the need for adult intervention seems obvious enough. Like Mr. Bob, I have no problem with the fact that they took action -- it's the action they chose I have a problem with. The police did the right thing by protecting the child. It's the person who decided to charge the boys with a felony, because of the childs feelings, that made an error.

Notice that I said "their intentions seem to be good." I really don't doubt that they are good, but there is no way that I could know what their intentions really are -- in exactly the same way that they can't tell whether a crime has been committed by reading the mind of a boy.

Good job calling the police Mr. Bob.

Isn't it strange?

I liked thinking that Johnny Carson was still here. With us, but unseen; living out his retirement happily.

Last week I heard a rumor that Johnny was writing jokes for one of the big late shows, maybe Letterman. I didn't follow it up or anything, but I liked the idea. It pleased me that the man I'd grown up watching was still at it, behind the scenes where he was more comfortable. Carson took over the Tonite Show when I was three years old. I watched him for a long time.

The world seems just a little different, that's all.

Three Good Things

Need a lift? Here are excerpts from three articles about good things happening in the news right now:

Productivity Soars at 3.8 Percent Annual Rate; Jobless Claims Drop Again
WASHINGTON – The productivity of America's workers in the opening quarter of 2004 grew at a brisk 3.8 percent annual rate, faster than previously thought. Labor costs moved up. The increase in productivity, the amount an employee produces for every hour on the job, was up from an initial estimate of a 3.5 percent growth rate for the January-to-March quarter and exceeded the 2.5 percent pace registered in the final quarter of 2003, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The new reading on first-quarter productivity was slightly better than the 3.7 percent growth rate that some economists were predicting. It marked the best showing since the third quarter of 2003.

A one-time Bush skeptic admits his error
George W. Bush's approval ratings are at a low. Some liberals, reports New Republic Editor Jonathan Chait, find Bush's very existence to be "a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche." Now even conservatives — such as columnists George Will, David Brooks and Robert Kagan — are pouring forth despair over the president's Iraq policies.

But my admiration for the man — for whom I refused to vote in year 2000 — grows ever higher.

A sovereign Iraq
Yesterday, in defiance of all pessimists, Iraq resumed its life as a sovereign country, in a manner no one outside Iraq has the right to gainsay. We have a secular Shia prime minister (Iyad Alawi), and a ceremonial Sunni President (Ghazi al-Yawar). Both are acceptable to all reasonable parties, including the United States. We have a ministry of all the talents, such as they are: with every available regional, ethnic, and religious affiliation.

The formal transfer of power from Paul Bremer's occupation authority to the new Iraqi government waits till the end of the month, but with the self-dissolution of the interim Iraqi Governing Council, we have witnessed an effective transfer. From now on, American advisers won't be running Iraqi ministries -- won't dare try -- and allied troops on the ground will be consulting Iraqis before launching new raids on assorted bad guys. Best of all, the region's governments, including nefarious Iran and Syria (up to their eyeballs fomenting trouble within Iraq), will know it's too late to sabotage the hand-off -- because it has already occurred, by surprise, ahead of deadline.

It is sometimes hard to remember, when confronted daily with a media for whom good news is no news, that the world, and the U.S. in particular, is doing extremely well. Read these articles in their entirety, they'll help you remember.