Lee.org

[written 9-25-02 updated 1-24-03]

I wrote to Governor James McGreevey on 8-29-02 about this. I wrote:

Please do not rename Newark International Airport “Liberty International Airport at Newark”.

– Newark Airport had nothing to do with the attack. They’ll name the new World Trade Center after the attack, that is enough of a scar for it to leave.
– It’s a bland name that doesn’t identify the purpose for it’s naming.
– The reason for it’s naming will be completely moot (and mocked) the next time a terrorist attacks the US. And that will happen, sooner or later.
– It’s an ungainly name that doesn’t indicate where it is. The word “Newark” got tagged on at the end like the name of a shopping mall…. “The Mall at Short Hills”.

“Newark Liberty International Airport” is a slightly better choice but it still sucks.

Please don’t.

As you may know, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey recently approved changing the name of the facility from Newark Airport to Newark Liberty International Airport. Through the new name, Newark Liberty International honors the memory of the heroes of September 11, 2001, and reminds us all of the principles upon which our nation is founded.

Great, let’s go on a renaming spree… Jersey Truth City, Hudson Freedom River, New Liberty York City, The Empire Justice State Building….

Also, after I thought about this a while, I really really don’t want to use an airport named after an airline disaster! Would you want to sail on Norwegian Cruise Line’s Iceberg Princess? Or how about working in the Towering Inferno Towers? Or working in the McVey Towers office complex? This is so sick, it’s funny! No, it’s just sick.

1-24-03 I recently got an email from a total stranger (now I suppose he’s an “acquaintance” :-) about this Rant. He gave permission for me to repost his comments here:

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed your website. What prompts me to write, however, is your Rant about the renaming of EWK. I’m from Jersey, born in Elizabeth, lived there for 22 years. Now I’m in Northern Virginia. Down here, the GOP recently re-named Washington National Airport, Reagan National Airport in honor of the Conqueror of Genada, the Pasha of Panama, and the B’wana of Bedtime for Bonzo, his imperial excellency, Mister Nancy Reagan. (Personally, I can’t wait ’til they re-re-name it Reagan Memorial Airport.) Courageously, our Metro system refused to budget money for new signs for the airport MetroRail station, and they remained unchanged until Congress provided emergency funding money to make the alterations. No one here (except political appointees) calls it Reagan Airport. In the people’s eyes, it will always be Washington National. But I know how you feel about the issue. Actually, “Newark Liberty” isn’t half-bad. Beats “Reagan”.

Winch

And here is my response to him about this:

That stupid Reagan airport thing too! Ugh! I followed that in congress while it was happening. I had to turn off CSPAN, it made me so angry! The argument was that he was a “great” president and should be honored as such. But there is no way that anyone could tell if his legacy would be “great” until 10 or 20 years after he left office! By their reckoning, a president that printed money and gave it to the people would be “great”… until the currency devaluation catches up with everyone. Oh wait, that’s what happened.

To followup on this story just a little more… Yes, the Governor renamed Newark Airport. The question is, will anyone acknowledge the name change? A quick search on Google.com on 1-24-03 is enlightening.

After a year, no one has changed their websites to match the name change.

After 10 years, the old name is still more popular than the new one!

10-9-02

Everyone keeps talking about the “two party system” in the United States… Democrats and Republicans… Well, it’s not a two party system, it’s a multi-party system. Political parties are NOT (despite what they would like you to believe) a part of the government. So the next time a party manages to bend or break the rules or laws of the US government, know that corruption took place. (For instance, Lautenberg replaced Toricelli on the Democratic ticket for the NJ Senate race in November 2002. The law clearly forbade the switch but since Toricelli’s brother got in some trouble with the law, it looked like his name was tarnished enough that he’d lose…. so they were allowed to switch. Huh?)

The next time a candidate gets bumped from running merely because of it party affiliation, know that corruption took place; of course, if a candidate’s views are unpopular on their own, then he deserves to get bumped.

Why is it that so few of my friends put even a single photo of themselves on their homepage? Are they all -that- shy? Phoey on them!

I’m moving my Rants over from it’s old home on my site into my blog. I’ll release them gradually, offering time for comments.

You can tell it’s a rant by it being in the Rants Category.

Although these rants appeared before my WordPress blog started, I’m dating them appropriately. So for the time being, you’ll find all my Rants in a pile as the very oldest blog entries. I have not changed the text from the original. I may feel differently now but I haven’t updated them yet… all in the fullness of time…

Don’t take these rants too seriously but don’t dismiss them either. Rants are, by their nature, usually a topic for (heated) debate.

R?nt:
noun:
– Violent or extravagant speech or writing.
– A speech or piece of writing that incites anger or violence
– (Chiefly British) Wild or uproarious merriment
verb:
– To speak in a loud, pompous, or prolonged manner

[Written 3-23-03]

It’s true.

Megan’s murderer, Jesse Timmendequas’ prior criminal history would not have put him on the Megan’s Law sexual predator list.

Megan’s Law created a sex offender registry. The idea is that if a community knows about a sex-offender in their midst, they can protect themselves against the person. To protect people like Megan, they probably should have created a pedophile registry. But they didn’t.

[Unfinished Rant]

Find:
O’Brien, Tim. 1996. Would Megan’s Law Have Saved Megan. New Jersey Law Journal 8 July, 1, 24-25.

The Brady Gun Law wouldn’t have saved Brady
The Brady Law forces waiting periods for handguns and background checks for potential purchasers. Although he has serious psychological problems, that wasn’t medically recorded until after the incident. John Hinckley wouldn’t have been stopped or even slowed down by these restrictions.

Jenna’s Law probably wouldn’t have saved Jenna
Jenna’s Law (1998) in New York State reduces the amount of “time off for good behavior” that a violent criminal can receive. It increases the actual time served from 66% of the sentence to 85% of the sentence. Her murderer, Nicholas Pryor had served 2/3 of his 14 year sentence (9.3 years) and was released on parole. During that parole, he killed Jenna Grieshaber. Jenna’s Law reasons that if he had served that extra 2.6 years, Jenna would be alive today.

Eh, I don’t buy it.

Sean’s Law would have saved Sean
Sean’s Law (enacted in NY in 2003) revokes the driver’s license or permit of a junior driver upon their first appearance in court… not at the arraignment 3 weeks later. It seems reasonable that a young driver might not have a handle on the whole “don’t drink and drive” thing. Phew, at least some of the laws are reasonable.

Kendra’s Law wouldn’t have saved Kendra (or Edgar)
This NY state law enacted in 2000 requires that people with a history of not taking their mental illness medication be forced into treatment. Unfortunately, her killer, Andrew Goldstein wasn’t resisting treatment. (reference: USA Today article) A few months after Kendra was killed, Edgar Rivera was killed by Julio Perez. Julio hadn’t resisted treatment either. Actually, he was begging for treatment. Read this snippet from Mcmanweb.

Two weeks before the subway incident, Julio called a friend, panic-stricken because he needed medicine and his Medicaid card had been canceled. Two days before the attack, he again called his friend, saying he wanted to go into a hospital, but he failed to make a planned rendezvous. On the day of the attack, he actually presented himself in the emergency room of a VA hospital, and later that day appeared at a police station and a courthouse to file a complaint against his “enemies”.

The Jeanne Clery Act probably wouldn’t have saved Jeanne Clery
(though I think disclosure is a very good thing)

The website says

Jeanne’s parents, Connie and Howard, discovered that students hadn’t been told about 38 violent crimes on the Lehigh campus in the three years before her murder.

By using the Jeanne Clery Disclosure website, I can see that in 2001 through 2003, there were 41 violent crimes involving students (including “non-campus” incidents).

By snagging some numbers , it looks like the national average of violent crimes in college in 1999 was (roughly) around 50 per 100,000 students per year. Lehigh’s crime rate was about 38/3 / 6,800 students = roughly 100 per 100,000 students per year. I haven’t researched this fully but it looks like Lehigh was “a bit more” dangerous than the average school. Would she have still gone to the school if she had known? I’d argue “probably”.

What Jeanne didn’t Know

Her killer was a drug and alcohol abuser, a Lehigh student whom Jeanne had never met. He gained access to her room by proceeding, unopposed, through three propped-open doors, each of which should have been locked. He was convicted and sentenced to death.
…
After learning that Lehigh had unilaterally absolved itself of blame in Jeanne’s death, we had no choice but to turn to the courts, suing the college for negligent failure of security and failure to warn of foreseeable dangers on campus. In 1988 Lehigh settled with us and agreed to materially enhance security on its campus….

Through my limited crime statistics info on the Lehigh campus, it unfortunately don’t seem like the security enhancements have done any good. I only know what’s been said on their website but it would seem tremendously difficult to prevent a smart, murderous Lehigh University student from entering a small suburban dorm (The Centenial II Complex) like the one Jeanne lived in.

The following is a very startling statement:
A recent survey, cited by the U.S. House of representatives, reported that thirty-eight percent of college women questioned had either been raped or were victims of felony sexual assaults.

But that doesn’t make sense… From 1998 to 2000, there were 5,500 “Forcible Sex Offenses” and “Nonforcible Sex Offenses”. Divide that by 3 for 1,833 per year. There are approximately 9 million college students in America. That means you have a 1,800 in 9 million chance of being a sex offense victim per year. 1,800 * 5 years in college / 9 million = 0.1% chance of being a victim in college. Lets take a wild guess and say that fully 3/4 of those 9 million aren’t undergraduates. that changes it to a 0.4% chance of being a victim… these numbers aren’t adding up.

I fear and loathe random crimes like this one as much as her parents did. The steps her parents took were, I believe very positive ones and will likely reduce college crime. But sadly, it probably would not have saved Jeanne Clery.

The Protect Act would not have saved Amber. Though AMBER Alert very well might have saved Amber

AMBER Alert is a good idea. It has saved lives. One should note that no laws needed to be created to enact the AMBER system. The “Protect Act” which President Bush signed in 2003 supposedly in support of the AMBER Alert is by and large a pile of horse shit. It enacts a pile of worthless, expensive, rights violating laws supposedly in the name of Amber Hagerman.

I will show you what the Protect Act does (according to Wikipedia). Take a moment and ask if any of these laws would have prevented or protected Amber Hagerman from being kidnapped and killed. (note that her murder is still unsolved)

* Provides for mandatory life imprisonment of sex offenses against a minor if the offender has had a prior conviction of abuse against a minor, with some exceptions.
* Establishes a program to obtain criminal history background checks for volunteer organizations.
* Authorizes wiretapping and monitoring of other communications in all cases related to child abuse or kidnapping.
* Eliminates statutes of limitations for child abduction or child abuse.
* Bars pretrial release of persons charged with specified offenses against or involving children.
* Assigns a national AMBER Alert Coordinator.
* Implemented Suzanne’s Law. Named after Suzanne Lyall, a missing college student of the University of New York at Albany, the law eliminates waiting periods before law enforcement agencies will investigate reports of missing persons ages 18-21. These reports are also filed with the NCIC.
* Prohibits computer-generated child pornography.
* Prohibits drawings, sculptures, and pictures of such drawings and sculptures depicting minors in (Miller test) obscene OR engaged in sex acts.
* Maximum sentence of 5 years for possession, 10 years for distribution.
* Authorizes fines and/or imprisonment for up to 30 years for U.S. citizens or residents who engage in illicit sexual conduct abroad.
* Does not include drawings, anime, cartoons, and/or comic satire.

[Written 3-20-03]

Which are you more afraid of, being killed by a nuclear power plant accident or being killed in a car accident?

Fact: In 2001, 40,000 Americans, 0.01% of the US population was killed in car accidents. Reference. About 40,000 per year have been killed in cars every year since at least 1957… That’s 1.8 million people IN AMERICA ALONE.

Fact: In the history of nuclear power, less than 1,000 people have been killed worldwide. Reference. Now go ahead and add to that the roughly 200,000 people killed by nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

Let’s do some wildly rough estimates….

Let’s assume that automotive deaths are similar per capita around the world. Let’s conservatively assume that 1 billion out of the 6 billion people in the world are subject to cars in a similarly life threatening way. The US has 270 million, or roughly 1/4 of the auto deaths.

1.8 million deaths * 4 = 7.2 million auto deaths worldwide since 1957.

Compare that to 200 thousand deaths due to nuclear power and explosives combined since it’s invention in 1945.

For the last 50 years, it’s been the case that you’re 30 times more likely to be killed by a car than any form of nuclear power, including bombs. If you exclude bombs, that figure changes just a little. You’d have been 7,200 times more likely to be killed by a car than a nuclear power accident.

Of course I’m skipping over a lot of details. But the point of this exercise is to point out the generalities, not the specifics. It’s likely that if you cared to do careful examination, many of the details fall away.

Here are some of the details I skimped on:

* Who is inside the study and who is outside… IE what about the other 5 billion people?
* 1 nuclear bomb can screw up all these numbers. My rant here is about public policy not international diplomacy.
* Many of the stats on nuclear power are probably artificially low. Adding on an order of magnitude or two to those numbers doesn’t make much statistical difference
* What about auto deaths before 1957? Hey, those are all the numbers I could come up with with a quick Google search.

Now which are you more afraid of?

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll tell you how this is related to my Megan’s Law rant. People only act on things that are dramatic and sitting right in front of them. Car crashes happen every day… boring. Nuclear accidents make headlines… excitement! Megan’s killer getting the chair… excitement! Smoking yourself to a 1 in 3 chance at lung cancer… boring. Terminal obesity… boring.

[written 2-28-03]

On 2-25-03, some 55 web sites that sold “drug paraphernalia” like water pipes and bongs were shut down by the DEA.

I went to check out a couple of the sites that had been shut down, among them AHeadCase.com and SmokeLab.com. The sites have been replaced by this absolutely ridiculous government page. It reads:

By application of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, the website you are attempting to visit has been restrained by the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania pursuant to Title 21, United States Code, Section 853(e)(1)(A).

Dude, I was so stoned, it felt like my head was this big!

I noticed that these pages loaded peculiarly slowly so I took a look at the source of the pages… It’s such an obscene waste of HTML that it’s not even funny! They took the 40 word sentence, 230 characters in all and governmentalized the HTML. Take a guess how many characters are in the actual HTML? Think about it for a second… you need some header info, some font info… image referrer… maybe another 10 lines of code right? WRONG. They puffed this single sentence into 15,312 characters… That’s 15 kilobytes of information… 66 times the actual document size! How did they manage to vomit such a quantity of red tape on the internet?!?! They should be arrested for such an obscene display of code!

In case those pages aren’t up anymore, I’ve archived one here. The document is actually so fucked up, they couldn’t fit it in one .html file. There’s an index.html and a header.htm. And the big kicker is, they dicked around with 15 K of worthless HTML and then used the lowest quality background image of the American flag they possibly could. The image is only 10K! It feels like they are burning the flag!

Here I am, foaming at the mouth about this, and I haven’t even gotten to the part about our own federal government shutting down legitimate, profitable businesses!

[written 2-27-03]

It is possible that the phrase, “under God” will be removed from the pledge of allegiance shortly. I believe that to be appropriate. From today’s (2-28-03) online NY Times, “…a federal appeals court Friday refused to reconsider its ruling that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional because of the words ‘under God.'”

All 24 Circuit Court judges were asked if they thought the case should be reheard, but only 9 thought they should. So it’ll either go to the US Supreme Court or the 9th Circuit, most of the west coast, will be removing “under god” from their pledge time.

I remember wondering why the heck “under god” was in the pledge when I was saying it in 5th grade. It never felt right. I even recall muttering those two words under my breath in high school home-room in an attempt to lessen it’s hold on me. And I went to a catholic high school. I’m glad they’re putting that phrase down.

I wrote to my Senators and Rep about this in June, 2002. Over a year later, a senator wrote back to me about it. So I responded. Here’s the exchange:

* My original letter to Senators and Representative
* Senator Corzine’s response
* My followup (I also wrote similar letters to my other Senator and Rep)

If you’re not up for reading the exchange, my two points are:

1. About 15% of adult Americans are insulted by the phrase “under God”, either because they are non-religious or practice a religion that does not believe to be under one god. For 15% of adult Americans, the phrase “under God” is a direct affront to their religious sensibilities.
2. The phrase was added to the Pledge in 1954, in defiance of the “godless” communist threat. Well, the Cold War is over. In the current political and terrorist climate, one could easily argue that “God” is causing more problems for the U.S. government than he is solving.

update 9-14-05
Update

[written 5-9-02 updated 1-24-03]

People habitually use the term “RSVP” incorrectly.

It is a French acronym for “Répondez s’il vous plaît”. Translated into English, that’s “Respond if you please”.

So, when one puts that on a letter, one means to say, “Tell me whether you are coming or not.”. If you are coming, tell me. If you are not coming, tell me. Etiquette demands that you respond one way or the other. A non-response is an insult.

Many people think that it just means, “Call me back if (and only if) you are coming.” That is wrong wrong wrong.
————–

1-24-03

A friend of mine throws these big parties with long lead times. One thing that he does, that I really really like is a graduated RSVP list. He writes:

I. Send me email and let me know whether you are
1) Definitely attending
2) Probably attending
3) Maybe attending
4) Probably not attending
or 5) Not attending

If your response is 1), 2), 3) or 4), you will receive all the followup mailings until you tell me to stop.

A few weeks later, we all get a list with the RSVP list of who will Definitely be there, Probably… etc. It works out very well..

or
Airline Safety

[written 1-24-03]

Well, the obvious answer is to make sure that I’m not a terrorist intending to crash the plane or some such. But wouldn’t a better strategy be to make sure that I didn’t bring anything onto the plane that I could use to crash the plane? Isn’t that what those slow and invasive X-ray and body search lines already do at the airport?

Let’s say Usama Bin Ladin’s brother walks into Newark Airport on his way to LA. Of course, the feds might be interested in asking about his brother, but if he isn’t carrying anything dangerous (not even dreaded nail clippers), then why -shouldn’t- he be let on the plane? If he was worried about being detained by the police merely for his travel plans, he could take a bus, train or (most securely of all) a private car. Of course, if he had a bomb in his luggage, he should be arrested, but if the government has nothing on a person, they should let him go about his business!

You want airline safety? Here are some suggestions.

* Install those controversial bullet-proof cockpit doors in American planes. You know, there isn’t actually any real controversy about them except for what they cost the airline to install, which is about $50k per plane. That’s 1 quarter of 1 percent of the cost of a 747. reference. They would have prevented the 9/11/01 disaster.
* Fix the US airline scheduling system so there is a higher on-time percentage… and when they’re not on-time, the passengers should know about it! I saw a congressional hearing on CPAN in 2002 where a news reporter had access to the current FAA radar. They showed up at the airport and were told that the plane would arrive 30 minutes late. But a quick check on the radar (viewed by a layman-reporter) showed the plane was going to be 2 hrs late. Guess when the plane showed up? This scenario repeats itself 100 times per day, every day, week after week, year after year. And it wouldn’t take too much to fix it. Oh wait, this isn’t a safety issue… we were talking about safety issues. Well, dammit, it’s my rant and I’ll scream about what I want to!
* Improve the checking system. Have you ever heard of someone getting killed by toenail clippers? EVER? Ok, I’ll even give that to you…… then how about you force passengers to put their (deadly!) toenail clippers in the plane’s safe?
* Train more dogs to sniff for bombs in luggage. Getting machines to do it is good too, but they’re very expensive ($1 mil each), slow, and error prone. And dogs make good pets. (then I wonder, what if a bomber encases their explosives in glass. I’ll bet I could smuggle a firecracker in a sealed test tube in my luggage….. No, I’d rather not make that bet with you.
* Install non-disable-able auto-pilot systems in planes. If the pilot pushes a panic button, the auto-pilot takes control and doesn’t let go until just shy of the airport. A hijacker is less likely to take a plane if it won’t go where he demands it to, not even at gun-point. This might have prevented the 9/11/01 disaster.

The original inspiration for this rant comes from John Gilmore’s “Free to Travel” site. I highly recommend you check it out. He is really out there on the libertarian cutting edge. He is currently (as of January 18th, 2003) in the middle of an important lawsuit whereby he refused to show his ID at an airport before boarding a plane. He demanded to know the law that required it… and of course the airport attendants couldn’t quote one because there isn’t one. I’ve said before that I wouldn’t want to live in a “hard” libertarian’s world but the examples hard libertarians present are very important. I want to get the bad guys just as much as you do, but it has to be done in such a way that we don’t create a place in our own government that breeds bad guys.

I’m very worried that this terrorism thing is going to spawn a new Mccarthyism in America. To a small extent, it already has and it’s on track for getting much worse. Just look where we’ve come

* Department of Homeland Security (doesn’t it remind you of Babylon 5’s Nightwatch, complete with xenophobic potentate!) As a side note, you may want to read J. Michael Straczynski’s comments on the Point of No Return episode of Babylon 5.
* The Patriot Act (good b/c it cuts out some gov. red tape, bad b/c appropriate checks and balances (like search warrants!) are often removed)
* new (unconstitutional) travel monitoring could easily become travel restrictions.
* Everyone’s reactionary “for God and Country” attitude. See my God Bless America Rant.

Here’s funny… well, not so funny… snippet from an article I read recently. I’m 100% in agreement with this guy.

Taken from Airport Insecurity by Tim O’Brien

A few weeks ago I found myself at the Tampa airport more than four hours ahead of the scheduled departure time for my return flight to Detroit. After checking my luggage through, I went in search of one of those temporary lockers to safely stow my two cumbersome carry-ons until boarding time. After ten or fifteen minutes of wandering through various wings and levels of the terminal, I finally asked a security guard where I might find the self-serve lockers.

“Oh, we don’t have those anymore,” he answered.

“What?” I was incredulous. “Why not?”

“Terrorism,” he responded matter-of-factly.

“Terrorism?” I asked innocently. “Was there a terrorist incident here?” I continued, feigning naivete.

A look of puzzlement spread over his face. “Well, no.” This was clearly the first time that it ever even occurred to him that the question might be relevant. “But,” he added triumphantly, “someone might put a bomb in one of those lockers.”

“Right,” I said with barely concealed exasperation. “Tell me, has anyone ever put a bomb at any airport anywhere in the United States?”

Just as he was beginning to get the hapless expression of someone unavoidably confronted by his own unthinking assumptions I decided to let him off the hook. Mumbling something about the fact that there was, on the other hand, someone standing right in front of him with an obvious need for a temporary locker, I took my discomforting questions and my carry-on luggage and went in quest of some place to while away the next four hours.