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There is a new post which you might find slightly entertaining entitled:
Best,
Gil
Apparently a new one going around.
It comes from the “Award Verification Center” in North Richland Hills, Tx and has quite a spiel on the backside (click the thumbnail on the right). Do a little online searching and you’ll find a LOT of squaking about these dudes. The lure of vacations, a Benz, a BMW (gotta admit, that had MY attention for a sec), etc. Beware.
In the recent baseball game where pitcher Armando Galarraga was cheated of a perfect game due to a blown call (YouTube video here), the baseball commissioner had a chance to “do what’s right” … and he blew it. In his own bottom of the 9th, Bud Selig missed the pitch. He didn’t strike, didn’t take a ball, wasn’t even at the plate as the pitch came to him.
There is much discussion about resisting instant replay in baseball but that begs the question. Firstly, there could be limited replays, certainly not including a review of balls and strikes. But it would be feasible to allow limited review of events such as this.
Secondly, this was an extraordinary event and without creating a precedence and without moving to instituting instant replays, Selig could have simply repaired the record. But he didn’t … he struck out without even stepping up to the plate. Shame on him. I’m a very casual fan of this national sport of ours, not a fanatic, but I know what’s right. This isn’t.
Click on the link to see the YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=WUQYJ77qa50
It’s entertaining and the message is super. Show your kids!
I dare you to watch this entire video and then continue to be part of the silent majority. It’s a video of Judge Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey state judge who sat on that state’s highest trial bench. His main topic is healthcare and the idea that regulation of that activity (and many others) is not within the constitutional powers of Congress. He is well-studied, articulate, and correct in that opinion. He also talks a great deal about the tremendous abuse of power of our entire federal government.
I agree, and agree in particular with his comment from which my title is derived. Only a few generations get the opportunity to defend their country, to defend the freedom of their country from enemies who would take it down. My father’s generation had that opportunity and rose to the occasion in World War II. That was the Greatest Generation. Our — your — opportunity is now. This is the hour when your generation has the opportunity, I say the obligation, to defend the country from the onslaught of a government run-amuck. Heady with the feeling of power, there seems to be no limit to what this government will attempt to ram down our throats. I’m not some radical nut, and neither are you or you would not be reading this far. I’ve taken an oath (many times) to defend the constitution and laws of this state and of the United States. The Constitution takes precedence and citizens of patriotic good faith must speak out.
Click here to view the YouTube video. (you may need to enable popups in your browser)
Andrew P. Napolitano joined FOX News Channel FNC in January 1998 and currently serves as the senior judicial analyst. He provides legal analysis on both FNC and FOX Business Network FBN . He is also a fill in co-host for FOX & Friends regularly and co-hosts FOX News Radio s Brian and The Judge show daily.
Judge Napolitano is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey. While on the bench from 1987 to 1995, Judge Napolitano tried more than 150 jury trials and sat in all parts of the Superior Court – criminal, civil, equity and family. He has handled thousands of sentencings, motions, hearings and divorces. For 11 years, he served as an adjunct professor of constitutional law at Seton Hall Law School, where he provided instruction in constitutional law and jurisprudence.
Judge Napolitano returned to private law practice in 1995 and began television broadcasting in the same year. Judge Napolitano has written three books: Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws ; a New York Times bestseller, The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land ; and A Nation of Sheep. His writings have also been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Sun, The Baltimore Sun, The New London Day, The Seton Hall Law Review, The New Jersey Law Journal and The Newark Star-Ledger. He lectures nationally on the Constitution and human freedom.
Judge Napolitano received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1972, and received his Juris Doctor from University of Notre Dame in 1975.
I have a few courthouse photos and hope to add those to my Flickr site, and to add to the collection. I just wish I’d had the idea of a book of Texas courthouses before someone else did it. Actually I did think of it, while a senior in high school! Should have worked on that instead of wasting time in college.
So here’s one for starters: San Saba County, Texas.
APRS, the Automated Packet Reporting System is a mystery to many — hams and “civilians” alike — and continues to be to me as well. It is often used for community events such as marathons and I thought this set of tracks from the 2010 Austin Marathon was interesting:
APRS tracks at the 2010 Austin Marathon
You can see several APRS units having been tracked here. This view was captured about 1pm with a 6 hour window looking backwards so what you see is virtually the entire APRS support for the marathon. I’m not sure what the AMDOWN-1 tracker was, but I’m suspecting it was a mobile digipeater to give better access into the APRS-IS system, i.e. feed the tracks into the internet.
These type events are done as a public service and also to drill the skills that may be needed for emergency communications.
A major goal of law enforcement and our entire criminal justice system is to separate driving from the person under the influence of drugs or alcohol. There are two dynamics at work in dealing with this type of offender: (1) the goals of criminal justice (punishment, protection of the public, deterrence and rehabilitation), and (2) re-socialization.
The classic DWI offender is not basically a criminal at heart (though more than a few are) but they commit a crime that can be as far-reaching as any crime short of serial-murder can be. So the criminal justice system has to take over and carry out its goals.
But it can’t stop there. The rehabilitative/re-socialization goals must be met as well if recidivism is to be minimized. I say “minimized” because it is naive to think it will ever be reduced to zero, especially with this class of offenders. Many folks feel that any rehab for DUI (I’ll use that acronym because it encompasses drugs as well as alcohol) is just some sort of “touchy-feely” stuff. I say otherwise. Anything at all that can reduce recidivism is worthwhile and to call it simply “touchy-feely” is to demean the process, the people working the process, and the offenders being helped by it.
There are many aspects to rehabilitating a DUI offender. Some “get it” right away and don’t repeat. Most repeat eventually. While I don’t agree with everything MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) does, they assist in one program that obviously has touched one person. That’s the Victim Impact Panel to which all DUI offenders in Texas are subject to being ordered to attend. MADD puts on the VIP in my jurisdiction and here is what one attendee had to say:
I am looking back on a MADD meeting I attended in Austin Texas this past Wed Jan 21st and reflect upon the lesson I have learned. Terri spoke about losing a son, Justin to a drunk driver, Clay, and we watched a video about a Mother that lost her daughter 14yo to a drunk driver. I have taken my required DWI classes and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) this past week. I learned a lot in the past few months and changed my driving habits so that I never have anything to drink when I drive. Instead I will take a taxi or have a designated driver. It is misleading to think you can drink a few beers and then drive, the reality is that the Texas Legislature needs to change the law to .00, because you don't know when .08 has come and gone. In addition, once you start drinking it is really easy to lose track or have one too many. In our DWI class we learned that at .05 most everyone becomes impaired and someone with a commercial driver's license is considered intoxicated at this level. Why should we even allow a person to drink and drive after one beer when it leads to impairment and affects our motor skills? If we are allowed to drink anything we should all be equipped with a breathalyzer in our car to check our BAC(Blood Alcohol Concentration) before we start driving. I am not saying the Breathalyzer Ignition Lock system should be in place for everyone's car to start, rather that the car manufacture should include mechanism to read BAC (Blood Alcohol Concentration) with the car when it is purchased and kept in the glove box to prevent people from driving intoxicated. After all our instructor, Jennifer came up with the slogan "DWI, You can't afford it." Why not have another sign saying "Test your breath before you drive to save a breath". Thank you for all that you do and changing my life also saving many countless others. With gratitude, (name withheld).
Hell yeah! And what a trip it’s been getting here (in another month or so, for me). I unashamedly quote from an email by my friend Don who set out exactly what it means to the group now reaching the mid-sixties. I could not have said it better — even if I could have remembered it all!
Hummmm, 64 years? Some of us are even older… 65 (not me, at least not yet).
Wow… what a time we have lived through and maybe even helped shape.
One more month and the Republic of Texas will be one year older. For those of us who have wandered off into other interesting places, beyond the reach of undocumented immigration,… if you start today you may be able to round up the ingredients for a good pot of Four Alarm Chile in time to celebrate. Getting a Lone Star Long Neck may require a trip to eBay or some more specialized venue.
Perhaps Terry has a ‘1958 vintage bomb shelter out back, all stocked up with long necks, but true longnecks, with returnable bottles are now a great rarity, so I doubt he will share them with us. I guess maybe we were “greener” back then than today, what with returnable bottles and all…
We have, like generations before us witnessed change, some good, some maybe less so.
The Bomb. A war was ended abruptly, many lives including perhaps my own father who was fighting in the pacific when Truman unleashed two bombs and virtually destroyed two large Japanese cites with substantial military production centered in them. One war terrible global war was snuffed out in the style of Red Adair using explosives to snuff out an oil well fire, but the world in which we were to live was changed. The world still changing as a result of “The Bomb”, as we watch rogue regimes gain access to this weapon while “diplomats” demonstrate mass dipsomania as they realize that nothing they, or even the military, can do will prevent this proliferation.
We did not see the first powered flight, but we were here when man first broke the sound barrier and lived to tell what Good Stuff it took to do that. Then we saw, however briefly, the first supersonic airliner.
We did not see Lindberg cross the Atlantic, but we saw the first space flight, lunar landing, amazing unmanned landings and explorations of Mars, fly-bys of other planets and their moons, and the stu8nning beauty of the cosmos revealed by the Hubble Telescope. Some of maybe even worked on one or more of these achievements directly or indirectly.
We did not see the first TV (1923!) but saw, and some of us maybe even helped along, “the chip”, the personal computer, the internet, and the worldwide web.
Perhaps in preparation for our own generation getting old, our generation has created a whole industry (now under threat of the final bureaucratizion… so our grandchildren are unlikely to benefit from a continued vitality of invention in this area) which has created an astounding array of medical diagnostic tools, therapeutic technologies, and (hopefully) beneficial pharmaceutical products. Several of our group have played a part in this area of achievement.
We have seen being an engineer, scientist, or mathematician, in America, become “totally geeky” and have vast increases in young people pursuing degrees in “Political Science” ( which insults the word “science” and does not auger well for our grandchildren seeing the explosion of beneficial advances to sustain the ever growing population of our planet. But not to worry, China, India, and Russia are cranking out those skills, so they will be able to sell to us, those products and services which we have chosen to devalue and attack… if we can find a way to afford them.
I think we, the class of ’62, have lived in a true Golden Age. We had all those things, plus Buddy Holly (I actually married a Peggy Sue!), Roy Orbison (anyone remember him playing in the gym for a sock hop after a basketball game), The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Willie Nelson, the TV Series “Route 66”, The Jet Drive-In, … Heck, they made movies about us and the experiences that influenced our adult lives ( perhaps American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show, The Groove Tube, Apocalypse Now, and Midnight Cowboy were particularly relevant for our gang). What a run we have had!
64? No big deal. Making it this far without someone killing me… amazing. What a life.
Don
Thanks, Don. Quite a trip down memory lane. I share your proud appreciation for where we are and how we got here. With all of the talk of the “greatest generation” (the only thing I ever agreed with Tom Brokaw over) there is an oft-overlooked fact. We, the “not-quite-baby-boomers” generation (I don’t think our group has a clear-cut tag), are the direct progeny of the “greatest” and I wonder how we will be remembered. Did we fail them in not passing along the best traits of the best? Or did we accomplish it? Many of us (not including self) are as fine as that “greatest generation” and I know that some of our children are as well. But as a generational appelation how will we or our children be remembered and viewed by history?
Of course, just as facts make a difference in the courtroom they make a difference here. The circumstances of WWII were unique in American history. Were those “finest” Americans defined by the circumstances, or did they define the circumstances themselves. It seems that Americans have always risen to the instant occasion to an unsurpassable level, especially in crisis. WWII was certainly a crisis and whereas in the present day we tend to not be able to sustain that crisis mode level of intensity, the “greatest generation” did so, in spades. That attribute, sustainability of purpose, may be the single most distinguishing factor between that generation and ours.
Yes, still alive at 65 and there remains work to do.
Implicit in buying up the bad loans from banks is that the borrowers skate. It’s impossible to think that the entity buying the loans will then foreclose, they’ll just do workouts. If anything at all. It’s possible the loans will just sit in a dormant portfolio locked away in a Washington hole somewhere.
What about the borrowers? This entire “subprime loan crisis” has ignored the fact that many people took out loans who surely knew they could not afford them. Come on, can we believe that masses of people were totally duped by unscrupulous lended goaded on by an unscrupulous congressional policy? Certainly, some fall into that category. But do we treat that entire population as a victim and ignore their own responsibility?
Personal responsibility has to surface again in this country, somewhere, sometime, somehow. If we continue on the path we’re on, it’s the “handout path to to societal armageddon.” Yeah, I just made up that phrase. It’s NOT the “economy stupid.” It’s the wrecking of all of our traditional (and previously highly successful) values in American society that the victimology/entitlement approach of government is causing.
And letting subprime borrowers, as an entire class, skate is another example.
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