born live love die

After getting nicked for $124 last night by John Law for expired plate tabs, I was pretty steamed. I’m not a scofflaw, it was just one of the bits of detail that I manage that didn’t get managed. The reminder came in the mail at the time that I was preparing to go on vacation and get the kids back in school. I tried to do it over the web, but there was a problem, so I intended to do it at the licensing office, which is a few hundred yards from my work office. So damned convenient, but that bit of detail slipped through the cracks. I thought that $124 was a bit steep, so I went looked up the fee for expired tags and, by state law, the penalty is $42. It looks like the city of Bellevue, or Hellview, as my friend calls it, is adding on $82 in court costs. That is what had me steamed.
But then I read this article about people who were slipping through the regulatory cracks to sell machines and medical services to unsuspecting customers who were at their wits end.

A young mother in Los Angeles was desperate. A rare form of cancer was ravaging her 5-month-old son. Their doctor said chemotherapy offered the best hope for survival, a 1-in-4 chance.

Natalia Campos watched as her baby, Antonio, struggled in pain through the first few treatments. Then she learned of an alternative-therapy clinic that promised a cure, without pain, using a machine called a PAP-IMI.

Twice a day at the Bio-Energy Services clinic, Campos held Antonio while the 260-pound machine pulsed powerful electromagnetic waves into the tumor bulging from his neck. The treatments failed, and Antonio died — the victim not only of his cancer, but of what one health official later called a “major national health fraud.”

Who was behind it?

Pappas, 60, a Greek scientist, invented the Pap-Ion Magnetic Inductor, or the PAP-IMI, a medical device he describes as a rapid healing machine. It pulses the body with electromagnetic waves that he says repair damaged cells.

Charles “Chuck” Wallach made a living for 20 years selling insurance, private club memberships, even T-shirts.

A mathematician and a t-shirt salesman have a miracle medical device.  Right.

I was reminded that there are services that the government provides that are worthwhile. The article is almost a case study in the nature of rights of citizens in a modern world, as the charlatans exploit every regulatory loophole available and government employees are hamstrung by rules and laws designed to protect individual liberties and privacy. The article is long, but a worthy read.

$124 does seem like more than it should cost to keep the public safe from expired license tabs (renewal was $78). But if that is the cost of keeping scumbags like Wallach and Pappas from killing people, I think I can handle it.

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times wants to be the paper of record for America.  But Pravda Fox News and their fans call it a liberal rag.  They get their ammo from things like this article about capital punishment.  The article is a survey of recent studies

For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.

and contains comments pro

“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”

and con

The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

But then the author, Adam Liptak, slipped in this gem:

A single capital litigation can cost more than $1 million. It is at least possible that devoting that money to crime prevention would prevent more murders than whatever number, if any, an execution would deter.

At least possible?  It is at least possible to shine a sunbeam up my anus, but not very damned likely.

Stick to reporting, Liptak.

World Textile Federation?

Jesus General calls it.

Dear Mr. Lyman

Congratulations on your Ron Paul fundraising event. Last time I looked, you were closing in on the $3.5 million mark. That’s a huge haul for a single day.

I have to wonder, however, if it’s sustainable. Although I’m sure the good Aryans who frequent Stormfront will continue to give what they can, they’ll have to cook up a hell of a lot of meth to generate that kind of funding on an ongoing basis.

God knows you’re not going to get it elsewhere. The banksters behind the International Episcopalian Banking Conspiracy are going to do all they can to scare off potential donors. And you’ll lose even more support when the International Episcopalian Media Conspiracy begins painting Paul as being some kind of nut.

You need another funding source. That’s why I’m asking you to consider marching into the Sudetenland and invading Poland. With their treasuries in the Paul campaign coffers, Ron will be able to outspend all of his opponents combined. And let’s not overlook the side benefit of having a captive campaign worker force numbering in the millions to lick all those envelopes.

I hope you’ll give it some thought.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

This isn’t exactly like yelling ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater.  Actually, it’s nothing like that.

A man in Sweden who was angry with his daughter’s husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI that the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported on Friday.

The man, who admitted sending the email, said he did not think the US authorities would stupid enough to believe him.

The 40-year-old son-in-law and his wife were in the process of divorcing when the husband had to travel to the United States for business.

The wife didn’t want him to travel since she was sick and wanted him to help care for their children, regional daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet said without disclosing the couple’s names.

When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.

He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.

The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.

The FBI contacted Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, which discovered that the email tipping off the FBI had been sent from the father-in-law’s computer.

The father-in-law has been charged with aggravated libel.

He has admitted sending the email, but said he didn’t think “the authorities were so stupid that they would believe anything. But apparently they are.”

He said he “couldn’t help the US authorities’ paranoid reaction”.

We’re halfway there.  In countries that were under Stalin’s influence, when people were denounced, they were arrested and then shot.  Once we start shooting these people, we will have completed the trip to the dark side.

Here is the lede from a story on Yahoo/AFP:

Sixty percent of all Americans strongly want the country to change direction after nearly seven years of President George W. Bush’s rule, according to a new opinion poll released late Sunday.

That gets it about right. Bush and his cohort never wanted to govern. They wanted to rule. This madness of King George is one that our children’s children will still be paying for at the end of this century.

Here in the Seattle ‘burbs, people are buying up lots and building monster houses. I drove by this one on Sunday and stopped to take a few pictures because it seems so inhuman.  I took these with my iPhone.

These pictures do not convey well the architectural dreams that have been rendered in oriented strand board (OSB).  Chimney flues for chimneys that will hold ornamental fireplaces.  Turrets without battlements.  A gatehouse for a nonexistent castle.

What these pictures do not convey at all is the street that is less than a beer bottle toss away and the lack of a yard around the house.  This house will consume almost the entire platted yard.  I think this house comes in at over 12,000 square feet of floor space.

This house is on 132nd in the Bridal Trails area.  This road has McMansions galore.  This is not the most offensive of them.   Conspicuous consumption is alive and well.

monster house

I have been busy with other projects, but the news media has been hitting the meme that troop deaths and violence in Iraq are down. The conclusion they have collectively reached is that the surge is working.

With a dissenting view: Brandon Friedman at Daily Kos.

Then, barely three weeks after the New York Times article ran, 50 Muslim pilgrims were slaughtered in sectarian fighting in Karbala. In response, Muqtada al-Sadr announced that he had

ordered his militia to suspend offensive operations for six months.

To do the piece cut & paste justice, I would have to cut and paste the whole thing.

Read the whole thing.

I stopped writing last night and turned on the telly and surfed until I found a documentary about The Who.  They have been making documentaries about The Who since there were four of them.  Now there are only two.  One of them died at 32, one at 54.

I was thinking about that while reading this longish piece about Anthony Flew in the New York Times.

Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments at a series of decent regional universities — Aberdeen, Keele, Reading — and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics, from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists.

Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. “There Is a God” is an intellectual’s bildungsroman written in simple language for a mass audience. It’s the first-person account of a preacher’s son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford, spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his old age, embracing the truth of a higher power.

Oh, really?  There is more to the story than meets the eye.  Read the whole thing.

I hope I die before I give in to fairy tales as anything other than a literary device for talking about human behavior.