The personal responsibility—product liability Gap

Tragically, according to this in The Salinas Californian, greed and personal injury lawyers (spit, spit) still run rampant across the golden state. Whew! For a brief moment there one might have believed they were either in hibernation or dying off. Apparently not!

Six months after a 19-year-old San Jose woman died from “huffing” in a Salinas residence, her parents are suing its owner - as well as the manufacturer and retailer of the aerosol dust remover she used.

And further on:

“You have kids out there abusing these products and putting themselves in harm’s ways,” (a lawyer for the parents) said.

Lets see now. A 19 year old “kid” (old enough to vote, drive and serve on a jury) in an “adult” residential recreational setting was negligently exposed to a dangerous chemical marketed as a household cleaning product because she chose to inhale large amounts of the product’s aerosol vapors while attempting to “get high”. After which she passed out and died. Oh, yeah! In my view, she’s a victim. ‘Someone’s’ gotta pay!

What a sad legacy for such a tragic young lady.

Maybe it’s all Bush’s fault? On another front, however, thankfully there’s still enough work going around for certain types of lawyers (spit, spit) to keep them off the ‘dole’.

Cheers

The Gap beyond weird and past bizarre

An account that a personal injury attorney (spit, spit), finding himself apparently dangerously infected with a rare and highly contagious respiratory disease, would travel overseas to keep wedding slash honeymoon plans seems odd.

Other news that an apparently dangerously infected (with a highly contagious rare respiratory disease) personal injury attorney (spit, spit), finding himself overseas and being warned to avoid long air flights, opted to travel by air instead to a really, really friendly neighboring country about the same distance away as his native land seems weird.

An account that a border control agent opted to ignore a grave warning popping up on his screen whilst an apparently dangerously infected (with a highly contagious rare respiratory disease) personal injury attorney (spit, spit) was crossing the border ‘twixt a neighboring really, really friendly country and his native land, thus waiving (or in this case was it ‘waving’?) through the medically barred individual, seems bizarre.

And now an item that the brand new father-in-law of a newly married (yes, that is redundant) apparently dangerously infected (with a highly contagious rare respiratory disease) personal injury attorney (spit, spit) is himself (the father-in-law, that is) a medical specialist in respiratory illnesses on the staff of a national medical organization that has been on the forefront of, or involved with, presenting information on most of the above stories to the public, seems just plain spooky.

If all this wasn’t so unbelievable, and if there hadn’t been too many personal injury attorneys (spit, spit) mentioned, or if any of these articles had been factual, a competent author would have provided links. As it is, for legal reasons these are merely ’story lines’.

Certainly none of them would actually ‘make it’ if pitched to the major networks as proposed movies or series. There is too wide a Gap in them between reality and possibility. Too far-fetched. So just have fun with it.

Next someone will try to tell us some foreign power may try to kill off a double agent somewhere by exposing the agent to dangerous radioactive materials. No way!

Cheers

Fixing what’s broke

Even before the race is run, Robin Miller of SpeedTV suggests for Fox Sports on the MSN home page eight ways to ‘fix’ the Indy 500.

He discusses the purse, the cars (both their boring single-sourced body design and their equally boring single-sourced engines), practice day formats, other driver/owner incentives, the date of the race and the race’s preliminary events. His piece makes good reading, and I commend it to anyone interested in open wheel racing. But the big Gap in the story is Miller’s strange silence on the very best way to rapidly “fix” the historic event. Change owners.

For all his so-called business acumen Tony George has too often done the short-term right thing for his pocketbook and the long-term wrong thing for racing. In the mid 90’s instead of working from the inside with CART, he chose to go into competition with them and formed IRL - all because he didn’t like road races. Thus weakened, eventually CART failed.

So what does George end up doing a decade later? Builds a ticky-tacky road course in the infield at IMS. Meanwhile, events he set in motion after he took over the helm of his family-owned speedway have whittled away at the international fan interest. The last few years the annual event has become b-o-r-i-n-g, so much so that the ‘big story’ this year is that maybe this will be the first year a woman wins! Big deal.

For many years women have been quite capable of outracing men. Gender plays virtually no role when the RPM’s are red-lined. The old saying, “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?” holds true no matter what chromosomes are behind the wheel. The only reason this is news in 2007 is because everything else about the race is old news - and boring and - oh, I don’t know, maybe characterless, colorless, commonplace, drab, drudging, dull, humdrum, insipid, interminable, monotonous, repetitious, routine, stale, stuffy, tame, tedious, tiresome, tiring, trite, unexciting, unvaried, vapid, wearisome, well-worn, and uninteresting might be the best way to put it.

But I could be wrong. Except, when the noise of 33 finely tuned mechanical devices spinning as fast as they are capable of, all coming thundering down the front straightaway, each with umpteen thousand mini-explosions going off in their ‘innards’ every second or so, it should be an exciting moment - and maybe even a significant moment for some. The last few years, it hasn’t.

Unfortunately, in the past 18 years Tony George has frittered away his family’s business and good will, leaving the Indy 500 a prime example on how NOT to run an annual racing event.

Sad.

The Gap between what’s said and what’s meant

“Or, the shame of cheapening and eventually trashing perfectly good words, eventually causing them to become worthless and unusable.”

The Belmont Club’s Wretchard discusses a post from The Smoking Gun (careful, some images therein may be crude and shocking) describing the content of documents allegedly recently captured from al-qaeda in Iraq. The problem with the subject matter is that in former years it could have reasonably be called a “torture manual”. But alas, that term no longer seems to work.

The world is apparently no longer interested in hearing about “torture”, probably because we dirty rotten Yanks are hands down the acknowledged leaders at “torturing” large quantities of prisoners taken in warfare, and the topic is no longer of international interest - unless, of course, more US troops are thought to be caught up in it again. Then it becomes important to discuss.

The problem is quite simple. The rest of us permitted the warm-hearted fuzzy thinkers of the world to misuse and misapply a perfectly good word, “torture”. They were describing - for the most part - torment or humiliation, but were overstating the case - as seems to be the wont of certain overly-liberal wonks - as if what was occurring was actually harming or maybe even permanently disfiguring the subjects of the interrogations and so-called “torture”. I hold that in all but a few rare cases, it wasn’t.

Was it fun to undergo? No! Was it nice and polite? No! Was it reasonably applied? Can’t tell! Has it worked? Probably pretty well! Was it actually “torture”? With few exceptions, No!

The question I have for my liberal friends - the same ones who “tsked, tsked” over Abu Ghraib prison and the camp at Guantanamo Bay - how are they going to respond to (and classify) what is being done by AQ per the “manuals” referenced in The Smoking Gun ? What should they (or we) call that level of interrogation? Or do they even care?

Looking up the word “maim” in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006, shows the following synonyms and explanations:
“—1. Maim, lacerate, mangle, mutilate indicate the infliction of painful and severe injuries on the body. To maim is to injure by giving a disabling wound, or by depriving a person of one or more members or their use: maimed in an accident. To lacerate is to inflict severe cuts and tears on the flesh or skin: to lacerate an arm. To mangle is to chop undiscriminatingly or to crush or rend by blows or pressure, as if by machinery: bodies mangled in a train wreck. To mutilate is to injure the completeness or beauty of a body, esp. by cutting off an important member: to mutilate a statue, a tree, a person. 2. injure, disable, deface, mar.” In my view that is what is being proposed by the found documents.

So my question again is., “What do we call torture when it mains, lacerates, mangles or mutilates its subject”? It certainly cannot be considered merely “torment”, can it? And yet that’s what the sloppy and over-reaching politicalization of certain English language terms has seemed to have brought about.

As ever, I await correction and rebuke. Cheers