Quick Hitts

Imagine that the parents of an 11 year old child refused to give her medical treatment because they believed the ancient god Moloch would save her. They prayed to Moloch for a month, convinced that he would cure her ills, while the child got sicker and sicker. But alas, the child died of juvenile diabetes. Now imagine that the couple has three other children, and the authorities said it’s just fine and dandy for the kids to stay with their parents. “They are still in the home,” the police chief said. “There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see.”

Stop imagining. It happened, except they prayed to a different god. And since their abuse was religious, they get to keep their other three kids, because, what the hell, their belief was sincere.

What the hell is wrong with the police chief? No signs of abuse? How about one dead kid? Isn’t that abusive enough?

Fortunately, this is fairly uncommon, but it happens several times a year in the US, and almost every time the authorities not only let the parents get away with it, but allow them to keep any of their other kids who have been lucky enough to stay healthy.

While researching this story I came across this blog post, which lead to this link showing Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrating the death of their children.

JW’s use most medical care, but refuse blood transfusions. And now they’ve got the gall to present us with the happy, smiling faces of the children they’ve killed. How about showing their lifeless corpses laid out in coffins, you sick bastards?

I am not a big fan of Child Protective Services, whose goal seems to be breaking up healthy families and keeping violent dysfunctional ones together. In these situations they could actually do some good for a change. Once a parent demonstrates that they are too stupid to provide medical care for a child, their other kids need to be rescued from them immediately. The cause of the stupidity doesn’t matter.

And then, of course, the parents need to spend some time in prison. It doesn’t matter how sincere they were. It doesn’t matter which god they believed in. They killed their kid. They deserve severe punishment.

If you want to go fishing in any of the Great Lakes, be sure to have your passport. And to fax in all your ID info to customs an hour before you leave. And then visit customs afterward to have your photographs taken, along with a sliver of your dignity.

These are new rules to protect us from terrorists. Don’t you feel safer now? Of course you do, comrade.

Sheesh, could our government get any more stupid and incompetent? Probably. Stay tuned.

I recently added StumbleUpon to my browser.  You tell it what kinds of things you’re interested in, and when you’re bored you click the icon on your taskbar and it brings to to a semi-random site that they think will interest you.  You can then rate it thumbs up or thumbs down with a mouse click, and comment on it if you’re so inclined.

It’s OK, but not great.  They repeat too many sites, including ones I’ve thumbed down.  But they also hit some great sites from time to time, ones I probably wouldn’t have found on my own.

One thing it’s taught me, though, is just how many horribly bad comics are on the tubes.  Stupid, poorly drawn, just plain bad comics.  And the worst of all are the stick figure comics.  There are hundreds of them.

You don’t have to be Da Vinci to draw a comic.  No one is expecting brilliant artwork.  But if the best you can do is stick figures: don’t bother!  Stick figure comics are stupid and ridiculous.  If you’re stupid and ridiculous you might want to avoid advertising that to the world.

New York State, faced with a five billon dollar deficit, are turning to their favorite whipping boy: Smokers. After making it illegal to have a smoke in a bar, driving people outside in the weather, and going so far as to make it illegal for business owners to provide any kind of shelter for smokers (even something as simple as an awning) they’re looking to screw smokers even more to finance their nanny state.

If enacted this would give NYS the highest cigarette taxes in the nation. According to this article about a third of NYS smokers take steps to avoid being screwed by buying under taxed cigarettes. This Cato study puts the number at 50%. Nicotine nannies scream that this “costs taxpayers X dollars,” which is complete bullshit. These people are merely keeping a bit more of their own money, money the state has no right to.

The idiots in the NYS legislature have no understanding of basic economics, which runs on incentives. When taxes are low, people have little incentive to evade them. Each time they go up another block of citizens decides to do something about it, personally. They should not be considered criminals. They should be considered patriots.

The Boston Tea party was held over a three percent tax. Three percent. Their act of vandalism is widely considered as patriotic. Today’s smokers are paying taxes of hundreds of percent, and it is truly taxation without representation. (When was the last time any legislator, at any level in the government, did something for smokers?) This article, which I wrote in 2000 about a previous tax hike, suggests we have another tea party – and toss our useless, self serving legislators into the Hudson River. It would, of course, increase the pollution, but it would be well worth it.

Barring that, buy illegally. It’s patriotic.

This just in from the wonderful world of socialized medicine.

The U.K. mandates that anyone who visits an emergency room must be treated within four hours.  Sometimes the demand for “free” heath care is so great a hospital can’t meet that deadline.  Fortunately, they’ve come up with a novel solution.

They leave the patients in the ambulance.

Outside.

For an hour.  Or two.  Or five.

Last year they did this with over 43,000 patients.

And of course, while the sick and injured were being kept in the ambulances, waiting and waiting and waiting, those ambulances were unavailable to anyone else who had called in an emergency.

Isn’t government heath care a great idea?

A couple of years ago I started the Podcast Peer Awards. I was tired of top ten lists that always featured the same shows. I was unhappy that the only other podcast award was structured so that the only winners would be those with huge audiances. I wanted a contest where other podcasters would select the best, a contest the public could trust to recommend the best shows anywhere.

No one else was doing it, so I did. Since then over 500 podcasters have signed up as judges.

Winners can be especially proud of their trophies, because winning a Podcast Peer Award is tough. A show can’t win by having a bunch of friends and listeners swamp some voting site. The first step, getting nominated, is easy, but then a show has to get enough votes to qualify for the finals. Since judges can vote for or against a show, only about a third of the nominees score high enough to qualify. Qualifying is no guarantee, though – only the top five qualifiers become finalists. Then the real difficulty begins. Finalists are competing with the very best shows in their category. At this stage the most common comment among judges is how difficult it is to select the best show.

The judges are five hundred of the best, most prolific podcasters in the world. They are not easily impressed. They only vote for the most entertaining, most informative, and best produced shows.

So a hearty “Congratulations!” to all the winners. There are tens of thousands of awards in the arts. Very few are as hard to win as a Podcast Peer Award. The winners should be extremely proud of their accomplishment.

A high school project in New Jersey asked teens to design public policy.  They designed one that requires Big Brother to punish kids for making incorrect decisions, proving that government schools are doing a fine job of raising the next generation of sheep.

The new bill would fine kids caught possessing tobacco or smoking in public places.

The article quotes Marie Kakogiannis, a junior at Rutherford High School.   “I think it’s a great way for kids not to smoke, but kids are going to find a way to do it. But whatever the government could do to prevent it, they should.”

Only a high school junior, and she’s already a Nicotine Nazi.  Isn’t that cute?