Because you can have the website, just by asking for it politely.  Or paying $922, if you’re still inclined to be that way.

Of course you still had to go and lose your temper.  You could have had the site with just a polite email.  But nooooo, that’s not the Bob Fletcher, Sheriff of Ramsey County Minnesota way.  You had to get all angry, and all huff and puff, and try to bloooooow the site down!

When you could have just ignored the site.  Simmer down Bob! Who was going to read it, after all?  Nobody.

Until now anyway.  What are you going to do next, Bob?  Are you going to lawyer up?  Are you going to get all legal on this poor sap?  Is he going to get beaten up for resisting arrest because he was abusive to a trusted and decorated deputy when he was caught, alone on a desolate highway at midnight, with a broken taillight?

I guess that’s up to you, Bob.  Don’t lose that famous temper, Bob.

For our readers, especially those who have blogs of any sort and there are a couple of you, I’d encourage you to read this site now, and tell your friends, before Bob Fletcher, Sheriff of Ramsey County, Minnesota, calms himself and politely asks the owner of the site to take it down.

Of course, knowing Bob, that could take a while.

Thanks to JDog for the tip.

Raise your child bilingual, but pick the right second language:

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction.

By 7 years old, a child who speaks the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr knows north from south from east from west, wherever he is, every moment of his life.  Because he uses these terms to describe the relations of objects to other objects.  He doesn’t refer to his left hand.  He refers to his north hand, or his east hand, which could be either hand depending on which way he’s facing.

While we don’t know what languages the people who originally settled Australia and Polynesia spoke, a tongue like Guugu Yimithirr would be a positive boon to people migrating from Asia to, say, New Guinea, or even in stages to Hawaii.

On the other hand, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, literally, don’t know left from right.  And of course epic feats of navigation have been undertaken by relatively primitive people, like the Vikings, whose languages didn’t require them to develop a built-in compass.

What I quoted above is just a tidbit from a longer article by Guy Deutscher, whose book “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” will be published this month.  The article is well worth your time, and I look forward to the book.

A North Carolina mortician is in jeopardy of losing his license because no one would tell him what to do with a corpse:

[The mortician] was waiting for authorization to have 37-year-old [LW]’s body cremated. [LW], of Carrboro, died alone in her apartment from a medical condition in early August and by the time the Carrboro Police Department learned of her death, officials think she was dead for almost a week and her body was already decomposing.

[The mortician] was contacted Aug. 11 to handle the body. [His] Mortuary was one of several funeral homes on a rotating list that the Carrboro Police Department uses. Police struggled to find next of kin so [the mortician] was unable to get her cremated immediately.

So he left the already decomposing body in a hearse.

In North Carolina.

In August.

But he parked the hearse under a shade tree!

Unfortunately for the mortician, he’d agreed to be on a list used by the police to place unclaimed bodies once the police are finished with whatever godawful things it is that police do to corpses.  Probably for a little extra money.  After all most corpses are claimed pretty quickly, especially in a small community like Graham, North Carolina, which resembles Mayberry even if Carrboro, where the body died, is a small-town Sodom.

And then the comedy of errors began.  The mortician didn’t have the sort of refrigeration this already badly decomposed corpse needed, or the space.  The police wouldn’t tell him what to do.  The state board, which is now investigating him, wouldn’t tell him what to do (he asked).  And it’s likely, according to the board itself, that if he’d embalmed or burned the body without authorization and a relative showed up to complain, he’d be sued and face disciplinary action from the state board for mishandling a corpse.

And of course, no one would take the body back.  No one wanted that hot potato, or rather, that hot, decomposing, gas-bloated potato.

So under a tree it sat, for 11 days until the Orange County Board of Social Services, a county away, authorized ending the thing with fire.

This is a grimly humorous story, involving a rural funeral director out of his depth, bureaucracy, and a stinking dead body.  It could have been written by Poe, or perhaps H. P. Lovecraft. But it may say something about our society that we’re so regulated, and so afraid of lawsuits, that no one will do the obvious thing without a permit from the proper government agency or for fear of lawsuits, even when it involves something as obvious as burning a 20 day old old corpse, in a coastal southern state, in August.

(Note:  I removed all personal references from this post, because I  feel some pity for the mortician, and a lot for the woman who died alone without family.  And because this site has a higher page rank than the newspaper in question, which is kind of cool because I grew up in that small town and I used to read that paper, back in the days before concepts like “page rank” existed.)

Liberal judges run amok?  “Pro-Life” trojan horse in our courts?

It doesn’t matter.  The entire Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, judges, clerks, courthouse and all, must be quarantined.  Everyone in the area must be tested for infection, and if necessary, they must be SHOT!

The Minneapolis city attorney’s office has decided to pay seven zombies and their attorney $165,000.

The payout, approved by the City Council on Friday, settles a federal lawsuit the seven filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days …

In the head!

This is what it’s come to.  Not only do we have a police force so woefully incompetent, NO! SUICIDAL! that they merely arrest and jail the living dead…

(And while this site is generally PRO-SECOND AMENDMENT, and PRO-POLICE! (In the words of brother John Birch, “Support your local police department, and keep it independent!”) I can’t muster an ounce of sympathy for the dozens of officers who were undoubtedly devoured in the attempt to “arrest” these creatures.  I can only pray to a loving God that they were devoured entirely, or were shot in their turn by local militias, who it seems are America’s only hope in the battle for survival)…

No, the courts actually set them free, and give them money.  Not that one of these walking corpses would know what to do with a dollar, much less a hundred sixty-five thousand of them.  All they care about is the flesh of the living.

THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS IS A GANG OF NIHILISTIC QUISLINGS, WHO WILL DIE SCREAMING AS THEY ARE DEVOURED BY THE HUNGRY DEAD! AND THEN WILL RISE IN THEIR TURN AS MINDLESS ZOMBIES, DOOMED TO WALK THE EARTH IN SEARCH OF LIVING VICTIMS TO KILL!!!

But they’re not the only traitors:  Let’s look at Minneapolis city attorney Susan L. Segal, who, rather than manning a barricade with a dozen molotov cocktails and a rifle in hand, surrenders to the living dead!

Minneapolis City Attorney Susan L. Segal said it was in the best interests of the city to settle. “We believe the police acted reasonably, but you never know what a jury is going to do with a case,” she said.

If a jury had concluded that the seven plaintiffs’ constitutional rights had been violated and awarded $50,000 to each, plus defense attorney’s fees, “it could have been quite substantial,” Segal said.

GOD DAMN, WOMAN!  Your city is infested with living corpses, and you’re worried about their constitutional rights?

This is what the Constitution has to say about the horror that descended on Minneapolis:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The Constitution talks about PERSONS, and LIFE!  A zombie is not a PERSON, nor does it have LIFE!  At most it has a horrible semblance of life, driven by nothing but reptilian instinct, to feed until no one is left.  It has no conscience, and it has no mind.

It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop! EVER! Until you are dead!

Fortunately, though there hasn’t been any news coverage (they never report on these things) of mass shootings and burnings in Minneapolis, the outbreak appears to have been checked.  If this is how the Minneapolis Police Department treats zombies, I’d hate to think of how they treat citizens accused of crimes.

We sophisticates, in discussions about oil spills and the like, throw around terms like  “fifty billion dollars” as though we had any idea of what that actually means.   In fact, no one knows what it means.  The only person that I know in a position to discuss money in terms of billions works for a large central bank, and while he’s the first to make fun of Tim Geithner, who can’t figure out his own taxes, he admits that’s the norm even in very rarefied air.

In fact, a million dollars is more than most of us will have at one time in our lives.  A hundred million dollars?  It’s an almost abstract amount of money, like the number of Quatloos bet by the gamesters of Triskelion on whether Kirk can beat Spock in hand-to-hand combat.

A hundred million dollars is more money than Blizzard put into the initial development of World of Warcraft.  Leaving WoW aside, a hundred million dollars is more than it cost to develop Civilization, Quake, Half Life, The Sims, and the Atari 2600, all put together.  It’s a lot of money.

So how did the developers of All Points Bulletin, a game that sold perhaps as few as 10,000 units, get their hands on a hundred million dollars to develop it in the first place?

In a depression? 

The world may never know:

Lovell analyzes APB’s sales numbers and comes to the jarring conclusion that APB sold less than 10,000 units, which would, given its budget, easily make it the most ridiculously disastrous MMO launch of all time. Adam Martin, in his post on the subject, believes the number to be closer to 100,000 based on his sources, which brings it from “ridiculous disaster” to “unsustainable disappointment”

If the game sold 10,000 units at $50 a pop, it will make a positive return in the year 3,473.  Assuming that the world enters a period of massive deflation, for over a thousand years.  Assuming that each buyer passes on his copy of All Points Bulletin to his heirs, who continue to play it, like serfs bound to a feudal estate.

All Points Bulletin is the worst failure in the history of gaming, even if it sold 100,000 copies.  Worse than Daikatana, worse than Horizons, worse than any anything by Derek Smart, who actually makes money on his games through the magic of a tiny, rabid fanbase, and low overhead.

Via Kill Ten Rats, which has an alternative theory about where the money came from.  (It involves hermaphrodite furries and Mel Brooks.)

Why is it that the only people, seemingly in America, who oppose judging schoolteachers by the performance of their students, are … teachers?

Or at least their unions, who have declared war on the Los Angeles Times for daring to measure teacher effectiveness, and to name names:

The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.

“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.

Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.

Forgive me, as I’m not a teacher, and I’m childless, but if I’m asked to judge the quality of a teacher at all, by what metric should I judge if not by student performance? By how nice a teacher is during parent-teacher conferences?  By whether she’s a union delegate?  By her students’ self-esteem, even if they can’t multiply 11 by 12?

The Times study allows for, and takes into account, that teachers in different schools are given students of varying preparation and ability, by measuring teachers within individual schools and by using student improvement, as opposed to simple scores, to gauge effectiveness.

But it’s war between the Los Angeles teachers union and the Times.  I believe I’ll walk down to the local big newsstand tomorrow and buy a copy of the Times just to reward the paper for publishing this.

As Alex Tabarrok points out, the Los Angeles school district could derive the same or similar conclusions from the same data, but refuses to do so.  That the Times is doing it should place the paper front and center for a Pulitzer.  Effective teachers deserve to be recognized.  As for ineffective teachers, the right of the taxpayers and parents of Los Angeles to know trumps the right of drones to put in time until the pension vests.

The actual report may be read here.

This is what the Christian Science Monitor writes about the petition by Star Wars fans for NASA to develop a working hyperdrive:

“We need better propulsion systems. Right now I’d say that would be the one invention that would really help us out a lot,” said Joseph Tellado, a logistics manager for the International Space Station. “It’d be great if our astronauts could go at hyperspeed.”

This is how I’d have written it, and how it probably was said:

“We need,” said Jeff Tellado, a logistics manager for the International Space Station, with a dramatic pause, “better propulsion systems!” Chuckling loudly, Tellado rolled his eyes. “Right now I’d say that would be the one invention that would really help us out a lot. [LOL!]”

As he said this, Tellado lifted his right arm and began rotating the forearm at the elbow in a sort of “helicopter” motion.  With his left arm, Tellado formed a hollow fist and began jerking the fist up and down, furiously.  Then, Tellado put his right thumb and forefinger together, lifted them to his mouth, and slowly pulled them away, making a choking noise. “It’d be great if our astronauts could go at hyperspeed,” Tellado said in a high, nasal tone, which struck this reporter as reminiscent of that used by Sean Penn, playing Jeff Spicoli in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

As for me, I’ll be content when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign delivers that Heuristic ALgorithm 9000 machine I’ve been waiting for since 1997.  I’ll bet it has better graphics and runs games a lot faster than the stupid laptop I’m using to write this post.

Via

Audit concludes 230 cases investigated by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation were tainted.

The North Carolina justice system shook Wednesday as an audit commissioned by Attorney General Roy Cooper revealed that the State Bureau of Investigation withheld or distorted evidence in more than 200 cases at the expense of potentially innocent men and women.

The full impact of the disclosure will reverberate for years to come as prosecutors and defense attorneys re-examine cases as much as two decades old to figure out whether these errors robbed defendants of justice. Some of the injustices can be addressed as attorneys bring old cases back to court. For others, it’s too late: Three of the defendants in botched cases have been executed.

As an example, defendants were routinely given the results of unsophisticated (A, B, O, AB) blood tests, but as a matter of Bureau policy, they were not given the results of more sophisticated tests that might have led to exoneration.  The SBI held onto those results because, well, who needed them anyway?

Of course there’s no evidence that any of the three men who’ve already been executed and whose cases are mentioned in the audit, weren’t actually guilty.  We aren’t going to be given the findings in their specific cases.  Because they’re dead.  What good would clearing a dead man do?  He’s still dead.  Finality of judgments is an important procedural value.  The United States Supreme Court has said so.

And anyway, they were guilty of something.  Probably murder, or something like it.  Thanks to the institutional safeguards already in place, we know that no innocent man has been executed since 1977.

And it’s not as though most of the defendants involved were convicted of important crimes, like murder.  While the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation doesn’t handle petty crimes, there are plenty of non-capital felonies, which are simply punished by years of imprisonment, that the SBI routinely handles.

But in the words of a great policeman, “There’s just … one more thing that’s bothering me.”

The News & Observer reported this month in a series, “Agents’ Secrets,” that analysts across the laboratory push past the accepted bounds of science to deliver results pleasing to prosecutors. They are out of step with the larger scientific community and have fought defense attorneys’ requests for additional information needed to review the SBI’s work. Cooper last month dismissed SBI Director Robin Pendergraft after she struggled to answer questions about SBI cases and policies.

This audit focused only on the SBI’s record of handing over exonerative evidence.  The scientific methodology its crime lab employs wasn’t the the topic of the audit.  That will have to wait for another day.

Still, they were probably all guilty, of something.

I’m simply going to suggest, with a hung jury on 23 of 24 counts against Rod Blagojevich, and a lone conviction on the penny ante charge of lying to the FBI, that the millions spent prosecuting him could have been put to better use.

What if the Justice Department had just released the tapes, allowed Blagojevich’s impeachment to go forward, and then done nothing? He’d still be ruined, but he wouldn’t look like a martyr (which he does now, in an odd way), and the FBI and the Justice Department wouldn’t look like a gang of incompetent fools.

What if all that money had gone into solar powered windmills?

Mind you, I think that Blagojevich is guilty as sin. But that isn’t why he was prosecuted. Most politicians are guilty as sin.  Blagojevich was prosecuted for being stupid.

… “the wise lord Hassan preserved his people and his cult by bringing the art of assassination to esthetic perfection.  With just a few daggers strategically placed in the right throats, he found Wisdom’s alternative to war, and preserved the peoples by killing their leaders.  Truly, his was a most exemplary life of grandmotherly kindness.”

I’d never have read that passage if not for Ray Bradbury, who introduced me to science fiction and made me a lifelong fan.

Sometimes science fiction, at its best, has said things to a mass audience that could not be said in respectable books and periodicals.

So I found it interesting to read that Bradbury, the last of SF’s three grand old men, believes that America is ripe for revolution. Only I don’t believe he means it as metaphor.  I quote the passage above in hopes that the revolution, when it comes, won’t be too bloody.

Thanks to TJIC, who appreciates a good science fiction reference as much as I do, for the pointer.

This is genuinely subversive art:

To me it doesn’t matter that Serrano, when he shot the insipidly stupid Piss Christ, intended, in his low cunning way, to provoke controversy, and perhaps even thought among Roman Catholics and the Orthodox about the practice of using cruciform sculptures to invoke the Deity, while Rachel Stieringer was just playing a stupid Facebook joke.

Serrano sought to get rich from his photograph, and he succeeded.  It was a commercial effort from start to finish, produced on the understanding that museums, and millionaires, will buy anything that halfwit art critics tell them is important because it’s transgressive.

Rachel Stieringer, on the other hand, created her art, which is a thousand times more transgressive than anything Andres Serrano ever dreamed of, with no hope of commercial gain.  She’s suffering for her art.  And she will continue to suffer.

I pass no judgment on whether Rachel Stieringer should be jailed for her art.  I leave that judgment to the viewer, and to posterity.

Thanks to Reid Sartin for the pointer.

What should I do?  Should I call attention to her error and hand back ten dollars, or should I pocket the money and get out of the store?

I’ll be honest, at various times in my life, I’ve done both.  On the one hand, we have the thrill of getting ten dollars! Beating the man!  And perhaps a gnawing guilt…

On the other, if we give the money back, we have the feeling, “I’ve been a sucker.”  And the pain of losing ten dollars.  But no guilt – we did the right thing.  Perhaps even a small satisfaction for having done so.  I know which of these two courses I’d rather follow the next time someone gives me too much change.

Fortunately the government hasn’t the slightest bit of conscience.  It keeps the money.  As soon as it leaves the store, it laughs at the cashier:

Dear Unnamed Insurance Company:

I appreciate the two subrogation referrals you sent to me this month, in which you asked me to recover blood money from teens who had attempted suicide in other people’s homes.  Unfortunately, I must decline to represent you in these matters.  I shall return the files under separate cover.

My concerns are twofold, and fact-specific.  In claim #1, Tommy Tortfeasor came into possession of a pistol owned by your insured, from an unlocked cabinet.  While playing with the pistol, Tommy shot himself in the chest.  Fortunately Tommy’s shot did not strike the heart, but it appears he lost about five pints of blood before EMTs arrived.  Miraculously, Tommy is alive.

In claim #2, Bill Badboyfriend got into an argument with your insured’s daughter, his girlfriend, on prom night.  Bill (who carried a knife) slashed his wrists in the home, and while he didn’t lose as much blood as Tommy, he was hospitalized for several days and then transferred to what I’ll call, in my callousness, a mental institution.

In each of these claims, you wish me to recover moneys spent on replacement of carpets, drywall, and subflooring, as each of these young men managed, somehow, to turn himself into a geyser of blood.

I appreciate that times are tight, that your policyholders are counting on you to recover funds needlessly spent, and believe me I could use the money too.  Both kids have insured parents, and their insurance companies would be liable to pay for any negligently caused property damage, such as blood fountains.  Both boys were probably old enough to know that suicide is not reasonable, yet they attempted it anyway.

And yet, my first concern remains a strong one:  ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?  You want to sue a kid who tried to kill himself, and it wasn’t of the “cry for help – give me attention!” variety, but the OCEANS OF BLOOD SPRAYED ALL OVER THE HOUSE variety.  Don’t you think he might try to kill himself again, when he gets sued for spewing blood all over your policyholder’s house?  I know your policyholder doesn’t want you to sue him.  It says so in the file.

My second concern is less strong, but still pertinent:  What do you think is going to happen when this gets out on the web, or a newspaper picks it up?  Do you think the damage to your company’s good name, and its slogan [NOT REVEALED HERE BUT IT IMPLIES RELIABILITY AND KINDNESS] is worth five grand spent on a floor scrubber?  Sure, there’s probably only a 10% chance of that happening, as the defense attorney won’t want to publicize his young client’s attempted suicide, but you never know.

On a personal note, I won’t be the lawyer who has “no comment” when asked about this suit.

Please feel free to call me should you have questions or wish to discuss these matters further.  Again, I appreciate your referral, and regret that I will be unable to assist you with these claims.

Sincerely,

Me

if this had happened on an American flight.

Unfortunately for the French, German, and Israeli passengers aboard this June Lufthansa flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, they seem not to appreciate the dangers inherent in pillow fights. They’ll find out, one day, that air travel must be as unpleasant as possible, for everyone’s safety.

Gennady Osipovich was most upset to hear that he would die in prison.  So he attacked the gypsy fortune teller who’d foretold his fate, and killed two innocent bystanders in the process.

Osipovich was sentenced to 22 years in maximum security prison this week.

Fortunately, the fortune teller escaped serious injury.  We should give this woman a visa and put her in charge of something important, today.

Via the Twitter feed of the Browser, a site you should visit often.