American Blind Justice

An affluenza swimmer who attends Stanford gets 6 months for sexual assault (I suppose because he only managed to penetrate her with a foreign object and didn't accomplish same with his own genitals.)

Meanwhile we're sending people away for years to life for growing marijuana for their own use.

The asshat father of the sexual predator bemoans how his "20 minutes of action" shouldn't carry such harsh consequences. He obviously suffers from severe cranio-rectal inversion and hasn't stopped to consider the impact of his son's "20 minutes of action" on the young lady he assaulted.

Her sentence is for life, and she didn't break any laws.

America will be great when our laws are fair, just, and based more on logic than on the false morality of the ruling party and justice isn't for sale to the highest bidder.

Another Flawed Premise

A recent CNN article asserts that the airlines will continue raising fees until the customers start to revolt. “Airline Baggage Fees Top $2.5 billion” The author fails to realize that in many markets the consumer doesn’t have a choice with respect to such fees and, therefore, is coerced into paying if they want to travel. Sure, you can carry your luggage on-board, but then you have to jump through the TSA maze of how much of this and that you carry (such luxury items as deodorant and toothpaste…) and make a choice about getting a close shave while on the road (some of us don’t do well with electrics and I’d rather use sandpaper than a hotel disposable.) So what choice do we have other than to take the abuse? The agents at the ticket counter have no input (they just get to endure the wrath of the annoyed customers) and the poor flight attendants now get to play baggage handler.

Rest assured that if Southwest Airlines served my local airport they would earn the majority of my business; they don’t abuse their customers with baggage fees or gouge them with unreasonable change fees. Apparently they still value their customers while all the other airlines merely give lip service to the value they place on their customers. One day the airlines will wake up and find themselves facing certain bankruptcy, not because they have bypassed an opportunity to bilk every available dime from their customers, but because they have consumed every ounce of goodwill that they have ever generated with their customers. Several times a year I travel to areas that I can only reach by flying Delta. I recently got a Delta credit card for the sole purpose of avoiding baggage fees. A quick calculation indicates that I’ll recover many times the annual fee (free the first year) even if I travel alone.

I’m really stunned that such a large group of alleged intelligent people such as the people who manage our airline industry can be so horribly short-sighted to believe that there will be no consequences for their abusive behavior. If they are that inept then their collective boards of directors must even be worse.

Here We Go!

Carnac predicts:

1. Much slicing and dicing of the healthcare legislation in the “reconciliation” process.
2. Constitutional challenge to the participation mandate contained in the legislation (assuming it survives reconciliation)
3. A massive purging of the Senate and House in the mid-terms
4. A single term for Obama.

None of this has to do with my personal feelings on the legislation itself, it’s how I’m reading the public reaction.

Just as ‘W’ insured the election of anything that the Dems nominated, through his short-sighted strong-arm tactics, Ms. Pelosi has just returned the favor and given the GOP an early gift.

 As my Razorback, Yalie, Pinko Kalifornia brother pointed out – FDR didn’t get accolades in his time, he was often accused of being a Commie.  The negative perception of health care reform (does it have an official name that is less than 20 words long?) on top of the struggle for positive spin over the past year means that Obama will get covered up by the fallout.  Everyone who is not in lock-step with the administration now has fodder to carry them well past the mid-terms.  The mid-term fallout will overshadow the beginning of the 2012 Presidential campaign season and Obama will be fighting an uphill battle to clinch a second term.

As usual, the public reaction is unfettered backlash that is lacking in thoughtful examination of the reality of the proposed program.  A monumental amount of work has gone in to the legislation, and anything this large and complex is going to have warts and blemishes.  Along with the rough spots there are some sections that give much-needed relief to people with genetic diseases. 

We’re on the brink of a system that will allow people, regardless of their genetic predisposition for (pick a disease) to be screened at an earlier stage without fear of jeopardizing their future health care coverage.  How many lives will we save or improve from this single aspect of the program?

At first glance my biggest problems with the plan are:

1. Mandatory participation
2. Any involvement of the IRS in the enforcement of participation

The IRS is marginally competent (at best) at managing our tax system, they need to stay far away from our health care system or we’ll all be signing up for the death squads to put us out of our misery.

The last election gave the Dems the opportunity to bring things to the center and hold power for at least 2-3 Presidential terms, but by all accounts they have replicated the failings of the GOP and overestimated their popularity, ultimately to their own detriment. Term limits, anyone?

Common sense is certainly dead within the halls of Congress – time for that change that Obama promised….

Exceptional Customer Service (NOT!)

So, for my wife’s birthday I gave her a gift certificate to a local spa for a massage and facial.  We’ve been going to this spa off-and-on for almost ten years, the frequency fluctuating with where we happened to be living and our travel schedules.  However, any way you slice it, we’re fairly established customers.

She went in a few weeks ago to redeem part of her gift and while she was there she scheduled a massage to consume the remainder of her certificate.  Since we were driving from Oklahoma City to Wilmington (1300+ miles) she thought it would be a good idea to have a massage the day after our return.

Much to her surprise, the day she was scheduled to fly to Oklahoma City to meet me, she recieved a call from the spa to reconfirm her appointment that afternoon.  Obviously the person making the appointment made a simple mistake – why on earth would she schedule a massage for 2:00 when she had to be at the airport at 3:00?  The spa nazi was insistent that the computer was never wrong and informed my wife that if she cancelled there would be a penalty fee of 50% of the service.  After much debate (spa nazi was sorry my wife was upset…) she offered to only charge half of the normal penalty.  When my wife requested to speak to the manager or owner she was rebuffed; spa nazi insisted that this was her job and she could take care of it.

I haven’t called them yet; rest assured that when I do the spa nazi will regret not handling things properly with my wife in the first place.  Regardless of the outcome we will never spend another penny at Ki Spa & Salon (Wilmington, NC) and I suggest that you do the same – unless you happen to derive pleasure from abusive customer service policies.

Say What?

OK, either I'm confused or we've discovered another rip int he space-time continuum.

OK, either I’m confused or we’ve discovered another rip in the space-time continuum.

 As I was driving to the post office this morning (has anyone noticed that a lot of my epiphanies start this way?) I found myself faced with a multi-layered oxymoron.  The situation is so befuddling in so many ways I’m not sure which end I should start from, so I’ll just let it roll.

I was behind a vehicle with a license tag supporting a wildlife organization.  I fancy myself a bit of an outdoorsman (I count SCUBA diving, snow skiing, hunting, fishing and riding horses among my leisure activities) so I immediately felt a bit of comraderie with the driver of this vehicle.  Then I noticed it was a big, shiny, never-seen-anything-but-the-pavement Hummer.  What’s up with that?  In the interest of disclosure I drive a Ford F-250 (BIG pickup) with a diesel engine that I usually feed a steady diet of Biodiesel as opposed to Petroleum based diesel.  I’ll not belabor the environmental benefits of Biodiesel, I’ll leave that to others.  To be concise, he’s way below me on the Mother Nature karma scale.  So, to summarize, we’ve got someone driving one of the most environmentally un-friendly vehicles available with a license tag supporting a wildlife organization.

Now, the real puzzler.

Here’s the license plate;          

Notice that this is, in fact, a North Carolina license plate.

Now, here’s the range of the Elk in North America;

The relevant point to notice here is that NC is conspicuously absent from the shaded area. There is a small area in Tennessee, but not North Carolina.

To further illustrate the point, here’s the area commonly known as the “Rocky Mountains”

Now, to complete the picture for those of you who may be geographically challenged with respect to the United States, here’s North Carolina;

Enough said.

Children's Movie Warning!

I received this in email the other day.  It represents precisely what I consider the lobotomization of society.  Don’t bother to actually educate yourself on the topic, merely regurgitate whatever other people tell you. 

Subject: children’s movie warning Be prepared for this one:Received the followed post from another loop. This is  important since the marketing for this movie has already started. It looks a lot like “Narnia” but is so far from it. BEWARE! There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronical’s of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot.This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.Pullman, a prominent British atheist, has acknowledged that this is in fact his goal. He has claimed that “it is my goal to go after Christianity, I want God to be dead in my works. I want to undermine Christianity”

While the overall content of the message is accurate the quote at the bottom is a bit strong compared to what I’ve found attributed to Pullman.  Of course many people will make a big stink if the content isn’t strictly “biblical” in nature (you can fill a library, and many are, with books that have gathered similar criticism over the years.)  My opinion is that knowledge and understanding can’t be achieved in a vacuum – how can you ever really understand a two-sided concept if you are only ever given one side of the story?

Does “hot” have much meaning without understanding the concept of “cold?” Frankly I never gave a moment’s thought in the first book that amounted to “hey, they aren’t very Christian here.”  It’s a work of fiction and is clearly not an accurate representation of our world.  Bears that talk that wear armor ought to be enough for most people to figure it out, but I guess others need it spelled out in simpler terms. The theme of the first book is a little girl exhibiting great courage and common sense to right a wrong that she eventually discovers is being perpetrated by her absentee father.  In the meantime she learns a lot of other things that are difficult to accept for anyone, but she deals with it.

Along the road she learns about the dangers of stereotypes and the importance of cooperation, honesty and loyalty.

Yep, a direct ticket to hell, this one is.

I can’t comment on the second book since I’ve only managed to read the first couple of chapters so far.  When I finish it I’ll certainly let you know it follows the map to spiritual demise. 

Oh, and did I mention that in the universe described by the book humans all have a little critter of some form that runs around with them?   They’re called daemons and they’re connected to their people telepathically.  Yep, that’s something you see on the street every day, surely this alone will result in the collapse of civilization as we know it!

In short, I’m sure we could find all kinds of things to object to if we wanted to distance ourselves from specific components of society.  What if we only wanted to read authors who were vegans?   The same “moral” argument could just as easily be made on that front.  Harry Potter got the same hype and negative press, people just need to get over themselves and quit trying to come across as pseudo-intellectuals.  That should be left to the pseudo-professional-pseudo-intellectuals, like yours truly.  If they haven’t even bothered to read the book I have no interest in entertaining further discussion with them.

That would be tantamount to asking  a nun or a monk for advice about sex.

No, they’re not bible stories.  Most things aren’t.

See you at the movie, I’ll be the one with the jumbo popcorn.