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An amazing conflict of interest
Family of Red Sox fan sues gun maker
In May, the city of Boston settled a lawsuit by Snelgrove’s family for $5 million. As part of the settlement, the city cooperated in the suit against the gun maker and will receive half of any damage award, up to $2 million.
Is it me, or switching sides like that a monumental conflict of interests?
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Things that currently annoy me
- Ebay is having some sort of malfunction with one of their DNS servers and I can’t up a bid on a cool tripod
- This article
An air purifier helped suck up some of the errant smoke, but not all of it. Newly pregnant, Kump began thinking about a story told to her by a pregnant co-worker at the Tides: After her first visit to her obstetrician, the doctor was convinced that Kump’s co-worker was a smoker, when in fact she had never touched a cigarette in her life.
Kump began eyeing those ashtrays more perilously, concerned about her exposure to secondhand smoke and the consequences to her health and that of her unborn child.
It actually uses an unnamed friend of someone as a source, and it uses the phrase “began eyeing those ashtrays more perilously”? Have these people no respect for the English language?
- This article “Katrina raises Hillary Clinton’s profile” in the Houston Chronicle. It contains 11 paragraphs and 11 sentences.
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Low expectations
From the article Palestinians Celebrate Freedom in Gaza
Palestinians torched empty synagogues in the Morag, Kfar Darom and Netzarim settlements, as well as a Jewish seminary in Neve Dekalim. Later, a Palestinian bulldozer knocked down the walls of the Netzarim synagogue.
In Netzarim, two young Palestinians waving flags stomped on the smoldering debris outside the synagogue, and others took turns hitting the building with a large hammer.
“They (Israelis) destroyed our homes and our mosques. Today it is our turn to destroy theirs,” said a man in Neve Dekalim who gave his name only as Abu Ahmed.
Israel removed some 8,500 Gaza settlers from their homes in 21 settlements last month, and razed homes and most buildings in the communities. However, the Israeli Cabinet decided Sunday to leave 19 synagogue buildings intact, drawing complaints from the Palestinians and criticism from the United States.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Israeli decision “puts the Palestinian Authority into a situation where it may be criticized for whatever it does.”
So this behavior was expected and excused before the fact.
As Tom Palmer remarked about Chechnya, what do you do when it’s too late to do the right thing?
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Althouse says it better
When did you stop watching “The Daily Show”?
This week’s show, the first post-Katrina coverage, has been just blatantly telegraphing from the very first moment that the whole point of the show is to slam Bush. I’m upset about the hurricane and find it very off-putting to see political ideologues salivating over a chance to get Bush over this. I’m not even sure that’s what the show goes on to do. I just can’t bear to watch it. Instinctively, I don’t want to watch.
I’ve found that I mostly Tivo through most of it to get to some of the interviews and sketches. It’s also a bit strange that they’ve cut down on the sketches (they’ve gone from every episode to less than half) in favor of Stewart holding forth on some topic or another.
To quote Greg Geraldo on the late and lamented Tough Crowd
Most comics, they just go for the laugh, but you, you like to tell a story….
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Sunday rapid fire
- Big Lebowski Fest – I peruse Wikipedia trying to find the population of Louisville and find their entry on the annual Big Lebowski festival.
- A fine post by Dave Kopel on the current gun grabbing in New Orleans.
- And would you believe that a Hot Brown isn’t a term for some vile act?
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Jane Galt at her best
From one of several posts recently about poverty and culture
In other words, middle class culture is such that bad long-term decision making also has painful short-term consequences. This does not, obviously, stop many middle class people from becoming addicted to drugs, flagrantly screwing up at work, having children they can’t take care of, and so forth. But on the margin, it prevents a lot of people from taking steps that might lead to bankruptcy and deprivation. We like to think that it’s just us being the intrinsically worthy humans that we are, but honestly, how many of my nice middle class readers had the courage to drop out of high school and steal cars for a living?
I’m not really kidding. I mean, I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.
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Friday rapid fire
- The Laws of Cartoon Physics
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Do you believe that no one can voice support of the IRAQ war UNLESS they are willing to serve in it?
YET when it came to the flood, you readily assumed an expertise in crisis management within hours of the disaster? - Interesting post on the previous strife between the NO mayor and the LA govenor.
- Useful post on disaster preparedness.
- This is bad
- Commercial geo-coding of photographs makes it’s first appearance.
- Very good article in the NYT on the legal issues of using the National Guard and regular army troops in disasters.
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Water bleg
Do any of my vast legions of readers have any thoughts on water purifiers? Comments are open. To my knowledge there is the Pur filter system and one other brand, but I don’t really know anything about the topic.
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Quotes of the moment
“Credit you give yourself is not worth having”
Irving Thalberg“We don’t’ want our slickness and professionalism to overwhelm you.”
Norman Blake. -
Reactions to Katrina
A person’s reaction to Katrina seems to vary in direct proportion to their average daily time spent with people. The more time with people, the more likely one will see it as a human problem, either with Bush or the N.O. Residents. The less time one spends with people, the more likely to see it as an engineering (both physical and social) problem.
Oddly, I’ve been hearing the idea that we should not rebuild New Orleans (at least nowhere near as it was) from some surprising quarters, including me. For a good summation of the main argument, see Josh Trevino’s article.
For more literal reactions, see the Agitator’s post on what WalMart has done so far. It’s quite staggering. The business community has done a great deal already.