The Bigsibling Blog

I find this such and incredible story. It boggles the mind. Like that bill that was proposed in Mississippi that would have made it illegal for a restaurant to serve fat people, there is currently a bill before the state legislature in Arizona that would hold businesses liable for civil damage if they distribute obscene or dangerous stuff.

Bookstores, news organizations, cable companies and other businesses are strongly opposed to legislation that would make an individual or a company liable for civil damages if they produce, publish or distribute any dangerous or obscene materials that causes someone to commit an act of terrorism or a felony.

Are these guys for real? So a bookseller sells a book, and someone buys it, and they go and kill some poor schmuck, and then claim that reading the book made them do it. So the bookseller is now on the hook, civilly, for the crime? Well, I suppose it worked for the tobacco industry. People smoke, don’t like that they made poor choices, and therefore sue the tobacco company for their poor decisions.

It works for bars. If a bartender serves an already drunk person more, then he goes out and runs over some little old lady, killing her and mangling her walker, the bartender can be held liable for that. It sucks I know. But it’s just one more way to remove responsibility from the offender, to make the offender the victim. It’s not Johnny’s fault he took a rifle and shot up the mall, he just listened to Helter Skelter 500 times in the last two days. That’s why we killed all those people, it wasn’t Johnny’s fault, it was that evil, evil music.

Although…thinking about this just a little more…that would mean that booksellers could no longer sell the Koran. That can even go so far as to make so that Koran’s can’t even be given away. I wonder if that is possibly the true reason for this stupid bill? It would be interesting to see if any religious groups will express outrage or opposition to this bill.

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The darned government. They get in your face and business all the time. It isn’t enough to have smoking bans, forbidding people to engage in a legal activity.

Mississippi legislators this week introduced a bill that would make it illegal for state-licensed restaurants to serve obese patrons. Bill No. 282, is the brainchild of three members of the state’s House of Representatives, Republicans W. T. Mayhall, Jr. and John Read, and Democrat Bobby Shows. The bill, which is likely dead on arrival, proposes that the state’s Department of Health establish weight criteria after consultation with Mississippi’s Council on Obesity. It does not detail what penalties an eatery would face if its grub was served to someone with an excessive body mass index.

*sigh*

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h/t to Military Mom and SoHos

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Photo of Greensburg aftermath stolen from the Associated Press (thanks in advance or not suing me!)

Greensburg, Kansas. For those who have had their heads in a hole, this was the town that, on Friday night, was wiped off the face of the earth by a 1.7 mile wide category EF-5 tornado with reported winds of over 200 miles per hour. That is faster than most NASCAR drivers travel.

Yesterday Kathleen Sebelius, the governer of Kansas was complaining about how there aren’t enough National Guard troops and equipment in Kansas to send proper aid to the folks in Greensburg because they are all in Iraq and Afganistan.

This morning on CNN, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) said that the state is missing vital National Guard equipment because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Usually the state has approximately 70-80 percent of its equipment at any given time, but it currently has just 40-50 percent. She added that these shortages “will just make it [recovery] that much slower.”

This sounds horrendous - unless you hear from the folks of Greensburg themselves.

Only hours after the town was flattened, [state senator Tim] Huelskamp said, people were already griping - not because the government wasn’t there with its porta-potties, but because they were there and in the way.

In Greensburg, the ‘first responders’ were not the federal government, or the state government, or the Red Cross, or Salvation Army or anyone else. In Greensburg, the ‘first-responders’ were the citizens of Greensburg, and those from neighboring towns, farms and ranches.

By the time any official government response was sent, the streets of Greensburg were already cleared. People were already being moved and cared for. The neighboring towns sent buses and cars and trucks with winches. They cleared the streets and accounted for everyone. Then the official first responders showed up and kept the good townsfolk of Greensburg et al. from doing what needed to be done.

“It’s a very unique situation,” she [Sharon Watson of the Kansas Emergency Management Office] explained. “It’s not like Katrina. The scale is smaller, but with Katrina, you still had something left. Here - it’s hard to comprehend, but here there is nothing. It’s a complete loss. So we have to make sure it’s safe.”

Well, just what would we do without the government around to protect us from ourselves? It seems to me the good folks of Greensburg had a handle on the situation, and the KEMO people should have sat back and watched and taken notes so they would know what to do in the future.

Yes, Greensburg, Kansas will be rebuilt. And it will cost the tax payers of the United States much less per capita than it would had this happened on either of the coasts. This is because the people who live in Greensburg are Kansans. They built the town the first time without any assistance from good ol’ Uncle Sam, and they’ll do it again. The folks of Greensburg still maintain the independent pioneer spirit that built this nation. The folks of Greensburg still buy into the John Wayne spirit. The rest of the nation could take a lesson from the good people of Greensburg, Kansas.

sources:
Netscape News - Sebelius: Iraq War Is Slowing National Guard’s Tornado Response
National Review Online - Blown Away?

Technorati Tags: Greensburg, Kansas, Tornado, Government, Response, Citizens, Neighbors

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Ever since a couple of weeks ago when Kathy Sierra was “cyber-bullied” into canceling an appearance, people have been debating on how to combat this type of activity. I even heard a PSA on the radio yesterday about cyber bullying.

Now Tim O’Reilly is creating what he calls a “Blogger’s Code of Conduct“.
I’m not going to go into it’s nuts and bolts. There are plenty of places around the web - both for and against - which dissect the code.

This is a knee-jerk reaction to someone getting their feelings hurt and being afraid. Seriously. I feel for Ms. Sierra. I am not a woman, so I could never imagine what it would be like to receive the kind of threats she has had to deal with. And I am in no way meaning to diminish what she has had to go through in this ordeal.

How can anyone really believe that this code of conduct thing would prevent this from happening in the future? How will a blogger subscribing to this code of conduct keep the blogger, or anyone else for that matter, safe and sound? Bloggers have the ability to moderate, edit and delete comments on their own sites.

Some of these comments were on Ms. Sierra’s own blog. She would have had to read these things if she moderated her comments anyway. Just because they don’t make it out into the general public, does not mean that they were not made.

Of course, what do I know? I’m just a bloke in fly-over country with a couple of readers and an opinion. But it does sound to me that a blogger handing control of their content over to a third party is rather…anti-American.

Technorati Tags: Kathy Sierra, Tim O’Reilly, Code of Conduct, Blogs, Bloggers

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A new policy proposed by the Blair government over there in Great Britain wants to mandate that all children are checked an monitored to see if they are at risk of committing crimes later in life.

The Government’s plan to prevent crime said: “Establish universal
checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to
identify those most at risk of offending.

What would society do without the State to protect us from ourselves? Is there no longer any personal responsibility? With this type of program, not only is it extremely invasive, but criminals of the future can shirk their responsibility claiming that the State itself has determined that he would be a criminal. With a sentence like that hanging over one’s head, what is one expected to do?

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Technorati Tags: Great Britain, nanny state, personal responsibility, crime

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I was watching the ABC morning show while walking my 1.5 mile treadmill walk at the gym this morning, and a segment came on that caught my interest. I can’t be 100% certain what all was said because I have trouble reading whatever language those transcribers type in for the closed captions, but it was about how restaurant food contains high calories.

Well…duh! It’s a restaurant for crying out loud. They were picking on a national chain, something like Red Robin or TGI Fridays or somewhere like that. They were reporting on how the chicken and broccoli pasta dish (which sounds healthy) contained 2100 calories while the gigantic monster burger had only 1950 calories.

This whole exercise was geared toward a movement to have nutritional information on restaurant menus. Because, as one might guess, people go to restaurants for their low-calorie fair, and not for good food and service.

This is just more nanny-stateism. And yes, I can fully and proudly state that I am an Anti-NannyStateist. It is more of this whole movement to remove personal responsibility from the individual person and shift it somewhere else. “It isn’t my fault I spilled coffee on my lap, it was the restaurant I bought the coffee at.” “It isn’t my fault I shot someone dead, it is the gun manufacturers’ fault.” “It isn’t my fault I drove drunk, Chevy knows that people drink and drive, and yet they make cars anyway.”

Once we as a people abolish individual responsibility for our own actions, we start on a dark and doomed path. The pendulum has got to start swinging the other way, and soon, or I truly fear for what kind of sissification will be indoctrinated into my grandchildren.

Thanks for visiting.

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