"Alleviate the problem" - issue more tickets

Lexington [Kentucky] police have increased patrols and ticketing around Fayette Mall and Hamburg Pavilion, where traffic problems persist throughout the shopping season.

The biggest problem is cars blocking traffic as drivers attempt to turn... Police have been handing out tickets for the offense, which will set drivers back $150 in court costs and a $20 fine.

"It's just one small thing we can do to alleviate the problem there," he [Lexington police Lt. J.J. Lombardi] said. – Lexington Herald-Leader

What about telling your officers to get their butts out of their squad cars and direct some traffic?

Via: Instapundit

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 19:38:19 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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J.K. Rowling and the gay character

(Here I demonstrate my ignorance of every aspect of this discussion: I have never written fiction, am totally clueless about the process of character creation, and have not read any of the Harry Potter books.)

My annoyances about Rowling’s revelation^[1] are (1) that it comes (too) late and (2) seems gratuitous.

I suppose it’s possible that Dumbledore’s gayness was a fundamental part of his character as envisioned by Rowling from the beginning. (It’s possible that he was patterned after someone she knew.) Perhaps Rowling thought she had left clues in the text for those who would find them, and now, with the series finished, she is surprised and disappointed that nobody got the message. Perhaps.

But it’s my impression that she created a plot in which Dumbledore’s sexuality was of no moment. Readers had no reason to care about it one way or the other, and so did not. If Rowling seriously believed that it was that vital to understanding the character or to the development of the story, then she should have found a (better, more explicit) way to work it in.

So why this revelation– after everything is concluded? If his sexuality turned out to be of no concern to the readers, then why make an issue out of it now, except in the spirit of political correctness? It reminds me of all those “revolutionary, groundbreaking” 1970s authors who set out to write stories built around black (or indian native American, or whatever…) characters, stories that so often neglected the backgrounds and cultures inherent in such characters that they turned out to be about white people in appropriate costume.

And by waiting until after the books were sold and the movies were made, she avoided the consequences (whatever they might have been) of revealing Dumbledore's gayness earlier. Which was a smart move commercially, but it leaves me thinking less of Rowling as a person. It’s sort of, “Oh, by the way, now that I’ve got my money, I meant this all along.” Which shows minimal respect for her character, let alone the public.

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Crossposted at Daily Pundit, where there's more discussion.

^[1] Reuters, October 20, 2007: J.K. Rowling says wizard Dumbledore is gay

J.K. Rowling has outed one of the main characters of her best-selling Harry Potter series, telling fans in New York that the wizard Albus Dumbledore, head of Hogwarts school, is gay.

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"Intelligent guess" becomes policy, excuse for raising taxes. Who'd-a thunk it?

Neoprohibitionists in England make it up, get caught:

Guidelines on safe alcohol consumption limits that have shaped health policy in Britain for 20 years were “plucked out of the air” as an “intelligent guess”.

A “guess,” huh? How “scientific!”

The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever.
...
The disclosure that the 1987 recommendation was prompted by “a feeling that you had to say something” came from Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party that produced it.

(sings:)“Feelings! Yo-oh-oh...” Oops, sorry!

He told The Times that the committee’s epidemiologist had confessed that “it’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t” because “we don’t really have any data whatsoever”.

Mr Smith, a former Editor of the British Medical Journal, said that members of the working party were so concerned by growing evidence of the chronic damage caused by heavy, long-term drinking that they felt obliged to produce guidelines. “Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee,” he said.

And what about that data?

...Subsequent studies found evidence which suggested that the safety limits should be raised, but they were ignored by a succession of health ministers.

By then it's “policy, right?

One found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rate in Britain. Another concluded that a man would have to drink 63 units a week, or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller.

And all this is of interest because...?

Mr Smith’s disclosure casts doubt on the accuracy of a report published this week that blamed middle-class wine drinkers for placing some of Britain’s most affluent towns at the top of the “hazardous drinking” list.

The study, commissioned by the Government, relied on the 1987 guidelines...

erm... “intelligent guesses?”

...when it suggested that men drinking more than 21 units a week and women consuming more than 14 units put their health “at significant risk”.

And... DRUMROLL!!!!

In a further attack on Britain’s drinkers, it was revealed yesterday that a coalition of health organisations is mounting a campaign to force a 10 per cent increase in alcohol taxation.

Aha!



The story in The Times:

• Drink Limits 'useless'
• How 'safe drinking' experts let a bottle or two go to their heads^[1]
• It's impossible to create a guide that suits all

  "No one has refuted the findings that have shown there is a J shaped curve graph that plots alcohol consumption against survival. The teetotallers don’t do as well as the modest drinkers and the heavy drinkers do considerably worse than teetotallers."

• Jane MacQuitty: Cheers! Let killjoys learn the bitter taste of defeat

  "For the Prime Minister and the Department of Health to descend to nanny and police state tactics, ostensibly to protect us from ourselves, but to further their own political agenda, is as risible as it is dangerous."

Elsewhere:

• The Register: Safe drinking guidelines "plucked out of the air"

  "But stick it to them anyway, alright?"

Via: Teresa

-------
^[1] Good summary of subsequent research findings in this article.

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"How many lawyers does it take to rescue an American soldier?"

Answer: Don't be silly. Lawyers don't rescue soldiers.

Starting at 10 a.m. on May 15, according to a timeline provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence, lawyers for the National Security Agency met and determined that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.

For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the "probable cause" necessary for the attorney general to grant such "emergency" permission. -- New York Post

This astonishing story will be fodder for arguments on all sides of the wiretap issue. But it makes one thing clear: Nobody is taking this war seriously.

Faced with a soldier in enemy custody, the commanders, the Pentagon, the NSA lawyers, and the rest of the "intelligence community" all played cover-your-ass. No one said, "Run the damn tap. I'll take responsibility." After all, it might have been a "career limiting move."

Of course, getting killed by your al-Quada kidnappers is a career limiting move, too. Nice to know that if you get captured, the whole force of the United States government will be right behind you-- provided the lawyers say it's OK.


Via: IP

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Why web design isn't easy: Case study- Campbell Soup product recall

While on the way in to work this morning, I caught the tail end of a radio news item about a product recall of Campbell's Chunky soup.  Since I frequently wind up cooking for "just me," my pantry is stocked with enough Campbell's soup to outfit a small convenience store.  And though the report didn't give any details, being the internet-savvy geek that I am, I knew it'd be a cinch to find complete details on the Campbell's website.  Silly me!

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American Academy of Pediatrics - turning your kids into spies

Michael Graham:

“The doctor wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it’s too much,” my daughter told us afterward, rolling her eyes in that exasperated 13-year-old way. “She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house.”

“What!” I yelped. “Who told her about my stasher, I mean, ‘It’s an outrage!’”

I turned to my wife. “You took her to the doctor. Why didn’t you say something?”

She couldn’t, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife’s knowledge or consent.

“The doctor wanted to know how we get along,” my daughter continued. Then she paused. “And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable.”

Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she’s fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.

We’re not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.

We used to be proud parents. Now, thanks to the AAP, we’re “persons of interest.”

The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement^[1]” and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get. [Highlighting mine - O.G.]

Communist playbook 101: Use the kids to spy on their parents.
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Welcome to the Peoples Republic of Colorado. Your papers, please.

From Declan McCullagh/PoliTech:

The Gilpin County Sheriff's Office in Colorado, a rural area not that far west of Denver, recently set up a highway checkpoint where motorists were stopped and, at least in some cases, not allowed to leave until they gave breath, blood, and saliva samples for the benefit of a private research firm. A report by Ernie Hancock says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was involved as well. [highlighting mine - o.g.]

The "private research firm" turns out to be a not-for-profit neo-prohibitionist QUANGO and major federal contractor called "Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation," which is located not on the west coast, but in the beltway town of Calverton, Maryland.

It specializes in funneling over $35 million of taxpayer money a year into its own coffers through law enforcement contracts of dubious utility, mostly dealing with drugs and alcohol, from sources including the U.S. Department of Justice. 100 percent of its budget appears to come from government contracts or grants.

Although PIRE pretends to be a "nonprofit" organization -- at least that label helps to collect those fat taxpayer-funded checks from the DOJ -- in reality it spends about $1.35 million a year on lobbyists. Not a bad 30-fold return on investment. And [several of] its employees are paid six-figure salaries that would be handsome even by for-profit standards.

It gets worse. Read the whole thing.

First Issue: There's been a lot of discussion^[1] in recent days about the authority of police in their interactions with the average citizen, especially in cases where the average citizen may be doing nothing wrong. The "legal establishment" consensus appears to be

You cannot resist arrest - period. You get a hearing later to determine the facts (was the arrest lawful, etc.) but you must comply with the officer’s orders. Any other rule would be a invitation to anarchy - with every prospective arrestee free to decide whether the officer’s actions are lawful. - "Brian," in DP comments thread

Okay, that's arrests.  But what about "refusing to obey an illegal order, when failure to obey is implied as a cause for arrest?"  Hey Beldar, got anything to say about this one?

Second Issue:  Ain't it great that our government spends $35 million a year to fund a neo-prohibitionist group?

Naming names: If you're upset about this and want to let someone know, Declan's report has a lot of helpful contact information.

Previously:  Your Tax Dollars At Work

Footnotes:
^[1] Some of the discussions:

• ColtCCO: I Love the Taste of Concrete In the Evening
• View From the Porch: Serving and Protecting (update)
  
• Daily Pundit: Come on, Michelle
  
• Daily Pundit: Cop Slapped on Wrist For Assault and Battery
• or just search Radley Balko's site for "botched raid"
  

-----
HT to Tamara. And thanks for ruining my Sunday evening

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Man, you've got to watch them EVERY MINUTE!

I swear, I want to revise "legalpad's" quote to include the whole damn federal government!

ONE:

Nearly 10,000 people from countries designated as sponsors of terrorism have entered the United States under an immigration diversity program with relatively few restrictions, a report released on Friday said.

The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the State Department's inspector general warned in 2003 that the Diversity Visa Program posed a significant risk to national security and recommended it be closed to people from countries on the U.S. list of state terrorism sponsors.

But four years later, the program remains open to people from those nations and little is known about what becomes of them once they enter the United States, the GAO said.
...
The GAO said the State Department expressed disappointment with the report's findings and rejected recommendations that the department compile more comprehensive data on fraud activity and formulate a new strategy for combating it.-- Reuters, September 21, 2007 [highlighting mine - o.g.]

Ah yes, the State Department: "Looking out for everybody's interests except America's."

TWO: It's amnesty! And it's alive! Again!:

The problem with this bill is not just that it's apparently been drafted as a stealth mechanism to allow lots of illegal immigrants to claim they qualify and thereby achieve legal status, although it has... [But that] it would inherently create an incentive for further illegal border crossing (namely by telling potential illegals to bring their kids across the border when they are young)... Now that the government is finally (seemingly, at least temporarily) trying to remove the "jobs magnet" for continuing illegal immigration, this is not the time to activate an alternative "kids magnet." -- Mickey Kaus [bolding and link in the original - o.g.]

Sigh! Time to write our Senile Senators AGAIN! The bill number is S.774.

THREE: Various corporate weasels^[1] want to screw up our chocolate!

The current legal standard to call something "Chocolate" is that it be made of:

1. Chocolate Liquor*
2. Cocoa Butter**
3. Real Sugar
4. Real Milk solids (for Milk Chocolate)
   

*Chocolate Liquor (or unsweetened baking chocolate) is the meat or nib of the cocoa bean which has been ground into a smooth paste. It contains more than 50% cocoa butter.

**Cocoa Butter is the vegetable fat found in cocoa beans which is released when Chocolate Liquor is pressed.
...
Today, whenever you see the ingredient "chocolate" on a package, it MUST be made of these, and only these ingredients.

The proposed, lower standards would allow for cheaper, non-cocoa-bean vegetable fats to be substituted for cocoa butter, and still allow manufacturers to call the resulting brown stuff "Chocolate".
...
Basically, they want to make the chocolate equivalent of Velveeta...but not be required to call it "processed [chocolate] food". [highlighting mine - o.g.]

The Food and Drug Administration is the agency involved in this mess. Address, fax number, and sample letter here. (It's Docket 2007P-0085.)

Hattips:

• #1 from Traction Control, via Daily Pundit.
• #2 from all over, most recently DP.
• #3 from Technicalities.
  

------
Footnote:
^[1] The weasels: American Frozen Food Institute, American Meat Institute, Chocolate Manufacturers Association, Food Products Association, International Dairy Foods Association, Juice Products Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Fisheries Institute, National Meat Canners Association, North American Millers’ Association, and Snack Food Association, along with the Grocery Manufacturers Association. I'm not going to chase links to all of these, but if anyone has some spare time, it might be interesting to find out why the various "meat" associations have signed on to something involving chocolate? Hmmm?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 23:45:17 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Republican suicide watch

Another political stumble by the Bush administration. This idea should have strangled in its cradle:

In a move that has stunned New York, the Bloomberg administration is in discussions to escort the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to ground zero during his visit to New York next week, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said today. -- New York Sun

(And yes, I know that as of now Bloomberg is "not Republican." That's not the point.)

UPDATE 070920 14:18: NYC police rejected the request, but...

A law enforcement source says the Iranian mission to the United Nations has informed the Secret Service that the Iranian president intends to visit Ground Zero Monday at 10 a.m.

The source says regardless of the NYPD's rejection of the request for a Ground Zero tour, Iran's president and his entourage will be accompanied by a Secret Service protective detail, a detail provided to all heads of state when they visit the United States. -- WABC report

(ABC link from Michelle, who is reporting on efforts to organize a protest demonstration.)
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Naming names:
City of New York, Mayor's Office:

• (212) NEW-YORK (inside NYC, dial 311)
  
• http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html

U.S. State Department: phone 202-647-4000

Via: LGF and Hot Air

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9/11 + Six Years + One Day: Myths and Hopes

Well, I spent a good deal of Tuesday reading various 9/11 posts, all the while trying to organize my thoughts for a post of my own. Things never did gel, so a day late, instead of a "here's how I feel this year" post, a look at some myths that have grown up around 9/11, some hopes that never materialized, and some lessons learned.  
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