Lawsuit Happy.

If you believe all of your emails, the nation is a lawsuit happy place.

Fortunately, most frivolous lawsuits are either entirely fake or missing a few key facts that show that yes, someone was criminally negligent and should have paid for it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are frivolous lawsuits. The judge in DC suing a dry cleaner for $54 million because they lost his pants. Some criminal named Jonathan Lee Riches suing things such as the Eiffel Tower, Pluto (the dwarf-planet), and the book Mein Kampf.

But I would not be surprised to see so many lawsuits, or threats of lawsuits, as it is the only way to get anything done.

In the sixth grade, my father did not want my sister and me to ride the school bus that serviced our neighborhood because of a few problems with our neighbors. (My sister was threatened by an asshole her freshman year on the bus. The school did nothing because I guess it wasn’t in their jurisdiction or some BS. We went to the cops and filed a complaint but nothing came from it as they misfiled the paperwork and dropped the case without informing us). My father requested that another school bus that went by our neighborhood to pick us up so we didn’t have to deal with all of the idiots. My father asked the district about a week before school started. By the first day, no response. He took us to school. Second day, no response. He took us to school. On the third day, my father wouldn’t be able to take us to school because of work. He told them that if they didn’t get us a bus for the next day, he would bring his lawyer. Sure enough, they arranged a bus for us for the third day. (To be honest, the bus that did pick us up was filled with equally as big dicks and when I rode the local neighborhood bus as a freshman, there were no problems).

More recently, my coworker that used to give me a ride into work was having some family problems. Her sister’s daughter was seeing an asshole skinhead and she had the guts to leave him. He started leaving messages on their phone like “I will kill your family in their sleep” and “I will burn your house down”. Now, most people would consider these messages as threatening as he has a past history of violence and his racist little buddies may be involved with the disappearance of another person. The mother instinctively saved all of the messages and took them to the police.

“Sorry, there’s nothing we can do” said the local police.

The mother being a very smart and strong woman told the police officers if there was any way that they could document their meeting, so that if something bad happened, she would have proof that she tried to contact the police and they refused to help her.

The police immediately put a detective on the case and the detective said there was more than enough evidence to arrest the little asshole.

Why are so many police officers so lazy that they will not do their jobs unless they are sued, threatened to be sued, or are given bad press because they did nothing? What do you mean there is “nothing we can do?” You can do plenty! You have evidence! This person is clearly violating a law!

My family got this a lot when people would ride their ATV’s on the street or in the field behind our house (clearly against the law) and we tried to call the police. The police had to catch them in the act. I guess if a burglar fled into the night after stealing some stuff, there was “nothing they could do”, as they hadn’t caught him in the act. I guess opening a file is out of the question.

Also, we got the same response when kids would ride their bikes on private property. The police told us to get proof. When my father got a camera and got pictures of them trespassing, they called the cops on my father claiming he was taking pornographic pictures of minors (even though they were fully clothed and were not in any sexual position). Fortunately, my father was not home and my mother explained to the police officer why he was taking those pictures (the police TOLD him to!) and that they weren’t sexually explicit. Of course, the kids didn’t get in trouble for calling the cops for a false report.

Looking back, all that ATV and bike trespassing crap seems so stupid and not worth the energy to get angry over. The ATV’s were annoying, but who cares? The fact that the police kept giving us excuses for why they can’t do anything was probably the worst part of the experience. It didn’t seem fair when we got in trouble for not displaying a building permit for a fence and that our fence was against the building code because you couldn’t see through it and that might lead to all sorts of illegal happenings behind the fence while another person had a fence you couldn’t see through! (Of course it doesn’t matter if you can see something happening as the police have to catch you in the act of committing a crime!). I don’t think our town knows what the purpose of a fence is.

Free Pass

Should we ever give someone a free pass on something just because of who they are?

I’ve seen some scathing attacks on the movie Transformers 3. The most common response to these negative reviews is,

“It’s Michael Bay, what did you expect? It isn’t going to win an Oscar. It’s not Citizen Kane for crying out loud!!!”

Should Michael Bay be given a free pass to make a lousy movie just because he can’t make a better movie? If Spielberg or Scorsese made a bad movie, people would be up in arms. We shouldn’t expect something great, but we should at least expect a decent story with decent characters that focus on the title characters. Movies like Die Hard, The Dark Knight, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, were all good action movies. It wasn’t just about shit blowing up; there was an actual plot with characters.

Yes, we shouldn’t expect Citizen Kane, no one ever did. But should we lower the bar?

While I’m on the topic of defending bad movies, The Hangover: Part 2, is another movie in which fans and critics disagree. Fans say, “What did you expect? It’s The Hangover! It was as funny as the first one!” (Apparently, fans think all critics expect movies to be really good and compared to the classics) Critics point out that IT WAS A CARBON COPY OF THE FIRST MOVIE. What should critics and fans expect? Something a little different; not a blatant attempt to milk more money out of the first movie. Of course the jokes were funny; they were the same ones from the first, which means they shouldn’t be as funny. As Eric Melin said,

The reason [the first one] worked so well was because of the unique concept and the mystery structure. Now the concept is familiar and the mystery isn't engaging. [This is] the very definition of a lazy, pointless sequel.

The first movie relied on the element of surprise. Seeing how this is the first movie, there are no surprises.

If we stop watching bad movies, they will stop making bad movies.

Organizing

I’m not in a very festive mood this holiday due to the budget impasse. And now we have less than a month to raise our debt ceiling and prevent a major financial problem from occurring (or a minor inconvenience which will allow us to be free from evil big government according to Republicans). I really REALLY want to discuss this but I can’t coherently write down my frustrations. All I can say is that I think Republicans are acting like dicks because of some narrow/rigid ideology of insane paranoia against government and they are using this crisis to forcibly shrink government because they have misinterpreted the results of the 2010 midterm elections. If I continue to think about this, I will go crazy.

So moving on, sometimes I think Middle and High School conspired to ruin my grades. Yes, I was a slacker at times and procrastinated on assignments. That ultimately prevented me from getting the best grade that I could. Unless of course it was math and no amount of effort could make me good at it (except for 7^th grade in which I somehow was really good at it).

What bothered me the most was when teachers graded us on organization. Every stupid paper handed out during the quarter (or trimester/hexmester in 8^th grade. I’ll go into more detail on that later…) had to be put in order in your binder. You had to hold up the binder and shake it; if any papers fell out, you failed. Or you had to surrender you binder at the end of the quarter and the teacher would go through every page of every student’s binder and check off which ones you had. Or they would just come around to your desk and look through your binder asking you where each handout was in each divider. Those yellow dividers with plastic tabs used to separate your papers? They told you what to label them and in what order (i.e. in French class: Verbs, Culture, Homework, Nouns, and one section never used, etc.)

I am not an organized person. I was always very messy. When I got a paper, I threw it into my backpack. I would always end up with a huge stack of papers from every subject in my backpack. I would always struggle to find the right handout or homework assignment, causing me to freak out.

Why did they need to grade us on organization? What does that have to do with my knowledge of science, math, French, English, etc.? It was a pain for teachers to have to grade about 100 stupid binders, on top of all the other work we were doing.

This is one of the few times in which I think applying “Free Market Principles” is the right approach. I am a messy person, but I have limits. When my room gets too messy, I start to clean it. When I get frustrated that I can’t find my homework for the hundredth time, I start organizing. If my grades are suffering because I am losing my assignments, I will take some personal initiative to fix the problem, or my parents will notice my report card and force me to start organizing. Of course I was told in study hall (or one of the many stupid alternate names they kept giving it) that I was not doing real work by going through my papers and separating them by class and should stop organizing and do real work. You know what? If I am going to be graded for my organization, then it is ‘real’ work. Don’t complain that I am not organized and then yell at me for organizing.

Also, why did they dictate HOW we should organize things? What if I or someone else wanted to organize things by date not subject? WRONG!

This brings up something on a related note. When we had to do research, we had to do it their way. I’m not talking about online only research versus book research. I’m talking about how we took notes. We HAD to do it their way AND we were graded on it. In one class, we had to write the bibliographical information of one of our sources on a note card and give it a number, making it a “source card”. On another card, we would actually write the notes on it (i.e. “The industrial capacity of the US grew rapidly between X and Y”) and put the number of the source card on it, meaning that note/information came from source 1.

I hated it. It may sound complicated, but I just suck at describing things. It wasn’t hard, but knowing me, I would misplace the source card. Why couldn’t we just take notes our own way? I like writing in a notebook. I place the bibliographical information on the top, write notes below it and beside each note, I write the page number. Nope. Their way or the highway.

I thought the purpose of education was to learn, learning to do things one way. Maybe in China, but not here. (Stop comparing us to China. China forces facts into the heads of their students through memorization, but the kids have no idea how to do anything if they are not taught how to do it. There is no thinking.) People are different. People learn differently (supposedly. I thought I heard that was BS but I’m not sure). Allow kids to learn their own way and find their own path at learning. Don’t force one method on kids and tell them it is the only right way of doing something.

On a side note, how many writing no-no’s were shoved down our throats in school are practiced by successful writers? Incomplete sentences, sentences starting with ‘and’, passive voice? I remember learning how one word sentences were bad, then immediately meeting the author of a book we were reading who used them a lot.

It's just another manic Friday.

As a kid I the late 1990s and early 2000s, my family had a certain ritual. Nearly every Friday during the school year that my father was off, we would go to the Mall and have dinner at Friday’s. We would then go up and down the Mall going through the bookstores, toy stores, and video game stores. If it was rainy and I had just bought the most recent Sims expansion pack, it was the best Friday ever. It could only have gotten better if it was the Friday before a long weekend or vacation.

Things changed. Friday’s went downhill. For some reason, they changed their menu. I guess the popular meals were too popular so they wanted to give other meals a chance. My sister always got a honey mustard chicken sandwich, but they got rid of it. She needed to order a slightly similar meal but add and subtract many things in order for it to be the same. Being Friday’s, that was really hard. As per my understanding, the meals are premade and are heated up when ordered. I imagine a burger in a block of ice, plate included. Again, I do not know this for a fact.

The next time we went to the restaurant, most of the new items in the menu were “forced into early retirement”. No really, that is what was said in the menu. A sticker covered up the name of the meal with the words “forced into early retirement” written on it. I think over half of the items on the menu, were no longer on the menu. I think most people were disappointed as the restaurant was at half capacity for a normal Friday night. We no longer went as a family after that and it would be years before I went to another Friday’s again. It was sad as we had been such loyal patrons. My father had a Friday’s Reward card-thing that gave you rewards for eating there. We were probably close to getting the cruise (not really).

I guess we’ll have to go to other named-for-a-day-of-the-week restaurants.

It’s only been recently that I have been back there to eat. I really don’t care for it. As per most restaurants, I can never find anything I like so I get the appetizer chicken tenders or chicken wings. It’s usually chicken.

Understanding that I might need a little bit more to eat, I ask for a side of French fries.

No can do.

This might have to do with the meals-frozen-in-a-block-of-ice-thing or billing issues, but I could not receive French fries with my appetizer.

The solution? The waiter could “accidentally” bring French fries to the table and quickly walk away and hope he wasn’t seen.

Seriously, that is what he told me. I guess it didn’t matter though as he never brought me any during the meal.

What the Hell? If I go to Chili’s or Applebee’s, they would ask me if I wanted something extra, like French fries. “Are you sure you just want the Boneless Buffalo wings? You can get more to eat if you want. It’s not against the law.” But if I go to Friday’s, it’s like asking them if I could sacrifice a virgin on their table.

Although I’m sure there are laws against suicide. Zing!

Scientific Experiments? Who needs that?

I understand why people believe in crap. Television programs whose intention is to properly inform us…don’t properly inform us.

I made a comment on Facebook about the History Channel and how they don’t objectively look at an issue (the Mayan calendar and 2012) and just perpetuate stupid beliefs.

OMG! 9/11 occurred on the day for “change”! The war in Iraq started on the day for “retribution” or “justice” or “some crap”! What kind of stupid conclusion is that to make, big events happened on randomly ascribed days?

Also the program stated that each 5,125 year cycle ended in catastrophe. We are nearing the last of five cycles (December 21, 2012…if you didn’t already know that). Were the Mayans even around for each of those cycles? How do they know that the cycles WILL end in mass destruction? They were thought to have been established between 2000 BCE to 200 CE, which means they were not around when any of the previous cycles ended. Why doesn’t the History Channel just explain to us that these are just MYTHS and that the calendar just predicts the alignment of the planets?

The worst offender was a show on Discovery Science (I think that was the name of the channel). It was about ninjas and their abilities. I caught the last part of the show discussing clairvoyance. For a channel with ‘science’ in the title, they were really bad at it. To ‘test’ this and to see if ninjas could possess such ability, they had ten people in a room. A mock raid was being conducted (used for an earlier part of the show) and they wanted to see if the participants could find the person hiding in the building. The only information they were given was a basic outline of the building with no details of the inner layout. They put them under optimal conditions for remote viewing (really quiet and really dark) and had them draw details about the hiding man, where he was, and what the building looked like.

It goes downhill from there.

The show mentioned how the Military spent millions on researching clairvoyance and remote viewing. They failed to mention that they WASTED millions of dollars and that the “psychics” had a horrible time locating things that could have easily been found using satellite imagery. Leaving out that part is a little deceptive to the audience.

They made a big deal out of the fact that half of the people knew the correct location of the guy in hiding. And by that, half the people knew the correct half section of the building he was located in.

The “+” was where people thought he was. The red “+” was where a person correctly located the man in hiding.

It’s really easy to say you had a 50% success rate when you start dividing up the building. 50% were right between two areas of possibility? Sounds like chance.

One person was spot on, but seeing how nine other people gave nine other locations, that sounds like chance again. They COULD run the experiment again multiple times, like a REAL scientific experiment, but one time is good enough for them.

 

Look! They were 90% correct!

Then they also made a big deal when some of the people knew he had “some sort of facial hair”.

The man had facial hair like this:

One person drew facial hair like this:

That is not similar at all. If the man had a handle-bar mustache and a person said he had only a soul patch, this show would probably make a big deal out of how correct they were. And is it really that far-fetched that a middle aged man would have facial hair? Of course not all people knew that he had facial hair. In fact, I think only about a third of the people guessed (yes I am using the word ‘guessed’ to describe this) that he had facial hair.

Oh, and at the end of that segment, a historian said that ninjas made up those abilities to make them appear more bad-ass. Gee, funny how that was crammed into the last five seconds of the segment.

This is why people believe in super-natural stuff like this. These programs deceive the audience so much by omitting certain facts and making conclusions based on chance and probability. They don’t do any real scientific experiment. They already came to a conclusion before their little experiment and brushed off that historian who actually knows what he was talking about. People, stop watching this crap. TV, stop producing this crap.

The Canadian Mother problem.

About a month ago I had a discussion on Facebook about a statement my father used to argue against illegal immigration and “anchor babies”. He gave an example of a Canadian woman who came to the US pregnant and gave birth in this country and then goes back to Canada. Should her child become a citizen? I posted on Facebook (you think I would disagree with him to his face?) that I thought it would be dumb to cross international borders if you were that pregnant and you wanted your child born in your country. A friend disagreed with me stating that her pregnancy shouldn’t have to interfere with her travel plans. After all, emergencies come up and funerals and weddings occur that you can’t miss. I didn’t think of that and she gave some good points. However, I still disagree with some of what she said.

There are three things I want to discuss about these arguments.

One, I still think it is stupid for a woman to cross an international border nine months pregnant for a silly reason. I can accept emergencies and funerals. I think people might understand why you can’t travel to these occasions, but if it is that important to you, I guess you can go. I don’t agree on frivolous things like vacations. If you did plan a vacation before getting pregnant and you become pregnant, cancel it. Travel locally. From what I got from my father’s example is that this woman has no intention of living in this country and she really wants her son born in her native land. Why would she risk that by going on an unnecessary vacation so far along in her pregnancy?

Plus, traveling while pregnant looks like a hassle. Also the health of the mother does come into play.

Point is, don’t cross international borders if you want your kid born in your country.

Two, there is a simple fix to this problem. All the mother needs to do is bring her child back to Canada and have them become a citizen. According to the official Canadian Government Website, a child under 18 can apply to become a citizen; if it is done by a parent or legal guardian, the child is a permanent resident, and one parent is a Canadian citizen. On the US side, I believe the child will lose their citizenship when they turn 18 and declare no intention of keeping their American citizenship. All the US has is a birth certificate on file and an unused Social Security number (which they can probably reuse). The child is not draining any resources from the government.

Finally, this argument has nothing to do with illegal immigration or “anchor babies”. Like I said before, this woman has no intention of living in this country. Immigrants DO want to live in this country and contribute. This woman will take her child back to Canada and will not drain resources from the US Government. An “anchor baby” is a child born in this country to immigrants with the intention of “anchoring” the family down in this country and make it harder to deport them. Again, this woman has no intention of living in this country, the child will not be a drain on resources, and the child will eventually lose their citizenship.

I don’t mind a debate on the 14^th Amendment and if we should make exceptions to the “natural born citizenship” (to the example above). But don’t use the Canadian mother as an example of an anchor baby. It’s not.

International EVIL Fund!

I already posted a response like this to my friend on Facebook, but I want to go into a little more detail.

My friend posted an article critical of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although most of the criticism is valid, I disagreed with the author’s interpretation of the IMF’s motives. What I got from the article was that the IMF was founded by evil white guys whose only motivation was racism, greed and evilness. First world nations are trying to screw third world nations and keep them down. I think that’s a little over the top. Don’t get me wrong, there are evil organizations in the world; the KKK, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Nazis (historic and modern). So, it is not outside the realm of possibility to have organizations whose motivations are evil. But I don’t think the IMF is one of them.

One of my main problems with this article is this paragraph:

To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils…They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured they received the lion's share of the planet's money and resources. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

One, the “countries that were poised to win the Second World War” included these nations:

 (Light and Dark Green: Allies. Yellow: Axis. Grey: Neutral.)

Or in other terms, 90% of the world. The article goes on to explain how the IMF has been harming multiple third world nations. Well, according to the article, the IMF was designed by the Allies to harm the non-Allies. Seeing how those third world nations didn’t exist yet and were at the time part of the Allied powers (mostly France and the UK), I don’t see how they were planning to screw them.

“So we the Allies, trying to screw the non-Allies, are going to harm the Allies”. That doesn’t make much sense.

The European colonial powers didn’t see themselves giving up their colonies any time soon (with the possible exception of India, which had a large independence movement dating back decades). Trying to set up an organization to harm countries not yet in existence seemed a little forward thinking for them.

Second, according to the article and its definition of ‘they’ being ‘victors of World War II’, the only nations the IMF were trying to screw were Germany and Japan (and a few minor nations like Bulgaria and Thailand). How did that work out? Oh, Japan and Germany are two of the three largest/most powerful members in the IMF.

It’s things like this that really bug me. Comments like this ruin any legitimacy this article had. If they can’t bother to pick up a book or look online to get their history right, they probably don’t understand this issue or are just heavily biased. Rereading that, I’m still in disbelief of what was said.

With that out of the way, my other problem has to deal with the supposed motivations of the IMF. To me, it looks like the IMF was created to get the World economy back on track after the war. Also, to help nations get on their feet and expand.

According to the author, they are evil.

I don’t think that is fair. Looking at all of the problems listed by the author, it looks like the IMF is incompetent. Like I said to my friend, organizations like this are run by bureaucrats with college degrees with no real world experience. Look at every friggin “Think Tank” in Washington. Six figured idiots with no basis in reality and politicians choose to listen to (and take money from) the ones they want to hear. They stick to some rigid ideology and make their decisions based on what looks good on paper. They don’t know anything about the nations they are trying to help and thus make uninformed decisions that end up hurting those they thought they were helping. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. They are not evil, they are just incompetent.

With that said, the IMF deserves to be criticized. The author of the article points out many instances in which the IMF made things worse for a country. No matter how much they are trying to help, good intentions are not enough. They need to do more to work with the country they are trying to help to better understand the problem. They have to stop demanding so many conditions and terms in order to help a nation. THEY NEED TO REALIZE PEOPLE NEED FOOD TO EAT!

The problem is when people portray them as some James Bond villain organization. When you talk of evil conspiracies, you turn off most people who want a rational argument. This is why Newt Gingrich can’t be President; he makes up enemies (Gay fascists? Really???) and claims they are this close to destroying everything you hold dear. Yes, criticize the IMF for their bad decisions and demand that they reform. Just don’t turn them into Skynet.