Conflating Drinking and Drunk Driving

Why is that every discussion of alcohol use somehow leads to discussions of drunk driving?

Virginia law allows underage drinking.

"You can be 10 years old and drink in Virginia," said Beth Straeten, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

OK, you can give your kid wine for Christmas dinner, or their birthday, in your own home. Big whoop. The law still says I can't buy them a drink at Applebees, or whatever. In the same article -

Last week, however, more than 600 parents and students gathered at Deep Run High School near Short Pump to examine positive ways to erase underage drinking. Sarah Ann Haislip, the 16-year-old charged in the fatal New Year's Day crash, is a Deep Run student.

Now why are these paragraphs in the same article? Why not just remove the word "underage" from the whole article and admit you're trying to ban alcohol? You are not my mommy, nor are you the mommy to my kid. So, please just bleep off.

Sensitivity - It's a Chick Thing

From the Washington Post -

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Friday that she dislikes being "all alone on the court" nearly a year after the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor.

Ginsburg, who spoke to an assembly at Suffolk University Law School, said she sees more women in law school, arguing before the court and sitting as federal judges.

"My consolation is that if you look at the federal courts altogether, you get a much different picture than you do if you look only at the U.S. Supreme Court," she said.

Of herself and O'Connor, the court's first female justice, Ginsburg said: "We have very different backgrounds. We divide on a lot of important questions, but we have had the experience of growing up women and we have certain sensitivities that our male colleagues lack."

Sexist pig.

Standards of Learning

A series of articles at the Wall Street Journal [1, 2, 3]recently discussed our current infatuation with "No Child Left Behind", and how so many, unequipped for it, are being pushed into colleges.

Today in our local paper they more or less illustrate the point taken to its local extreme. On our Virginia Standards of Learning test, kids with dyslexia, unable to figure out the words on the page, have the teachers read the passage to them, and then they answer the multiple choice questions.

In a small classroom at Magruder Elementary School in York County, Marquis Mayo hunched over a reading worksheet, pencil in hand. The fourth-grader listened as teacher Alexis Swanson read aloud the story on the worksheet. Swanson then read aloud questions about the main character, testing whether Marquis understood what she heard and could answer questions about the story.

This is how Marquis studies reading. It's also how teachers test her knowledge. She has a disability that makes translating letters and punctuation into words and sentences difficult. It's as though they are a secret code she struggles to unlock.

But the disability does not keep her from taking exams, such as the state-required Standards of Learning tests that all public school students take each year. Marquis' special education learning plan allows teachers to read aloud passages and questions on tests.

But last fall, the U.S. Department of Education tightened the rules for reading aloud to students. Only students with serious vision problems and those like Marquis, who have a disability that keeps them from decoding text, can be read to on state reading tests.

The change means hundreds of special education students in local public schools who have other disabilities must learn new ways to take the SOL tests. Teachers are scrambling to re-evaluate students' learning plans to see if they still qualify for the read-aloud tool.

I'm sorry folks, but that isn't reading. Call it "verbal comprehension" or something if you want, but it's not reading. You are testing whether the child can understand the words coming from the mouth, not the symbols on the page.

Though, with technological innovation, it may be that long-term this won't matter. There are already programs that will take words on a page and read it back. Mostly these are for the blind, but there's no reason a dyslexic person couldn't use these too. But, it's not reading.

Ethanol vs. Hunger, Part III

The Wall Street Journal also takes note of the problem. -

...the percentage of the U.S. corn crop devoted to ethanol has risen to 20% from 3% in just five years, or about 8.6 million acres of farmland. Reaching the President's target of 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017 would, at present corn yields, require the entire U.S. corn harvest.

No wonder, then, that the price of corn rose nearly 80% in 2006 alone. (See the chart nearby.) Corn growers and their Congressmen love this, and naturally they are planting as much as they can. Look for a cornfield in your neighborhood soon. Yet for those of us who like our corn flakes in the morning, the higher price isn't such good news. It's even worse for cattle, poultry and hog farmers trying to adjust to suddenly exorbitant prices for feed corn--to pick just one industry example. The price of corn is making America's meat-packing industries, which are major exporters, less competitive.

In Mexico, the price of corn tortillas--the dietary staple of the country's poorest--has risen by about 30% in recent months, leading to widespread protests and price controls. In China, the government has put a halt to ethanol-plant construction for the threat it poses to the country's food security. Thus is a Beltway fad translated into Third World woes.

And, even they recognize that this may not do much for energy independence or air pollution, -

As for the environmental impact, well, where do we begin? As an oxygenate, ethanol increases the level of nitrous oxides in the atmosphere and thus causes smog. The scientific literature is also divided about whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says ethanol's net energy output is a marginal improvement of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10 to one.

But what about global warming, where ethanol, as a non-fossil fuel, is supposed to make a positive contribution? Actually, it barely makes a dent. Australian researcher Robert Niven finds that the use of ethanol in gasoline--the standard way in which ethanol is currently used--reduces greenhouse gas emissions by no more than 5%. As Messrs. Taylor and Van Doren observe, "employing ethanol to reduce greenhouse gases is fantastically inefficient," costing as much as 16 times the optimal abatement cost for removing a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.

Ethanol vs. Hunger, Part II

I posted a few days ago about the cost of tortillas going up so that the poor in Mexico can't afford to eat their most basic foodstuff. Now, their President has capped the price.

Mexico is in the grip of the worst tortilla crisis in its modern history. Dramatically rising international corn prices, spurred by demand for the grain-based fuel ethanol, have led to expensive tortillas. That, in turn, has led to lower sales for vendors such as Rosales and angry protests by consumers.

The uproar is exposing this country's outsize dependence on tortillas in its diet -- especially among the poor -- and testing the acumen of the new president, Felipe Calderón. It is also raising questions about the powerful businesses that dominate the Mexican corn market and are suspected by some lawmakers and regulators of unfair speculation and monopoly practices.

Tortilla prices have tripled or quadrupled in some parts of Mexico since last summer. On Jan. 18, Calderón announced an agreement with business leaders capping tortilla prices at 78 cents per kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, less than half the highest reported prices. The president's move was a throwback to a previous era when Mexico controlled prices -- the government subsidized tortillas until 1999, at which point cheap corn imports were rising under the NAFTA trade agreement. It was also a surprise given his carefully crafted image as an avowed supporter of free trade.

Think that's funny?

Poor Mexicans get more than 40 percent of their protein from tortillas, according to Amanda Gálvez, a nutrition expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Gálvez said she believes the price increase is already steering Mexicans toward less nutritious foods. The typical Mexican family of four consumes about one kilo -- 2.2 pounds -- of tortillas each day. In some areas of Mexico, the price per kilo has risen from 63 cents a year ago to between $1.36 and $1.81 earlier this month.

With a minimum wage of $4.60 a day, Mexican families with one wage earner have been faced in recent months with the choice of having to spend as much as a third of their income on tortillas -- or eating less or switching to cheaper alternatives.

Many poor Mexicans, Gálvez said, have been substituting cheap instant noodles, which often sell for as little as 27 cents a cup and are loaded with less nutritious starch and sodium.

Can you imagine living on cups of ramen noodles, long term, as the only thing you can afford. I mean, a couple of days at the end of the month for a college student waiting for a check from Dad is one thing, but when it's all you can afford for your entire family, that's not good.

Laying Your Life Down for Your Kids

Your 16-year old daughter has been led into using hard narcotics by a 24-year old man. What do you do? Would you be ready to pay the price of 10 years in prison to save her?

A Saskatchewan father was guilty of second-degree murder when he fired a volley of shots at his drug-addicted daughter's boyfriend, hitting him at least five times, a jury decided today.

Kim Walker was charged after James Hayward, a 24-year-old convicted drug dealer, bled to death in his home in March 2003. Walker's lawyer said his client was only trying to save his daughter from a life of drug abuse.

His daughter seems quite unconflicted about the whole thing.

"My father is my hero," Walker's daughter, Jadah, said as she left for home without her dad. "I'll swear that until the day that I die. He saved my life. He did what he had to do."

Of course, Mr. Hayward's family has a somewhat different take on this.

Hayward's family tried hard in the past few days to repair the image of their son, who the court heard was a convicted drug dealer, but who relatives say was a good and friendly person.

"Sure he wasn't perfect, but no one really is, so why was he so worthless? The mistakes he made were his."

I say, give him a medal.

Financing Our Transportation Improvements

It sounds like the General Assembly might actually allow this region to tax itself to pay for transportation improvements. Fortunately for me, I live about a mile outside the area they are proposing taxing.

The amount of taxes they are proposing is impressive. They have figured out how to squeeze out $209M per year, but say they need a total of $275M per year. All of this out of a population of about 1.5M people. $180 per person per year. For a period of not less than forever.

Lest that seem excessive, one of the easier projects, rebuilding US 460, is expected to cost not less than $1B.

PETA, KFC, & Kelo

It turns out that KFC was looking for a new warehouse here, and PETA is the owner -

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has made a juicy offer to the owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But Yum Brands Inc., parent company of KFC and Taco Bell, isn't biting.

PETA, which has targeted KFC with one of its vitriolic animal-rights campaigns, saw an unexpected opportunity this month upon learning that Yum wanted to buy its property at 20th Street and Monticello Avenue.

PETA offered to turn over the vacant warehouse, owned by its related Foundation to Support Animal Protection, for free. In exchange, the activist group wanted KFC to implement several improvements to address what PETA calls abusive practices the chain's suppliers use to raise and slaughter 850 million chickens a year.

"I guess it was a karmically good twist of fate," said Matt Prescott, PETA's manager of Factory Farming Campaigns.

Given the recent Kelo decision from the Supreme Court, I think it would be much more a "karmically good twist of fate" if KFC went to the city and explained that their ownership would be much more profitable to the city than having PETA own it, and let the City of Norfolk condem it for them.

Ethanol vs. Hunger

I've wondered if an effect like this would show up. Increasingly, U.S. corn production is being diverted into the production of ethanol. Corn prices have hit a 10 year high. Now Mexico is seeing the effect.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has pledged to intervene to tackle the soaring price of tortillas, the flat corn bread which is a local staple.

The price of tortillas, the main source of calories for many of Mexico's poor, rose by more than 10% last year.

They had been relying on the U.S. -

Under the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico used to get cheap corn imports from the US, but Mexico's Economy Minister Eduardo Sojo said that with more US corn being diverted into ethanol production, supply was dwindling.

I'm wondering if we are going to be seeing even more of this soon. What happens when corn and soybeans surpluses are diverted to biodiesel production? Will this effect U.S. food prices? I take it as a given that the cheap exports to third world countries will end.

It also seems to me that the 'green pioneer' biodiesel makers are going to be up the creek shortly. You know, those garage tinkerers who are turning used french fry oil into fuel? Because if NYC is going to ban the use of trans fats, followed by others, where will the garage-gurus get their free-for-the-taking oil.

I'm guessing that some people will find this change good. Our farmers certainly wouldn't mind collecting record high corn and soybean prices. Which allows us to lower trade barriers to imports from small, poor farmers around the world. And then, ummm, they send their grain to us to turn into automobile fuel rather than selling it cheaply to other poor people in their home country cities. Leading to even more hunger.

Is this what happens when Dr. Malthus meets Murphy? Apparently, some others think so as well.

Always Look for "100% Natural"

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (or as James Taranto likes to say "Intelligent as a Post") has run an editorial bemoaning the (re-)approval of silicone breast implants.

We've never had much faith in the FDA, but its approval of silicone gel-filled breast implants marks an all-time low for the agency.

Restricted since 1992, the implants were deemed unsafe because of the health risks associated with them, such as cancer. The FDA currently recommends that only women over the age of 22 get the implants. It also asks the makers of the implants (which can rupture during a mammogram), Allergan Corp. and Mentor Corp., to carry out a 10-year, 80,000-patient study in order to "fully answer important questions" regarding the products safety. Say what? The approval of the implants is completely backasswards. Clearly, (lobbying) money talks, and in this case, it jiggles for a few years before it hardens and leaks toxins into your lymph nodes, joints, uterus and liver.

Roughly 5 percent of U.S. women likely will get the implants in the next decade.

I wonder where they got their statistics. Five percent of American women will get silicone implants in the next decade? Really? 7.5 million women want these implants?

Brown University did a study of 1998 medical procedures that said there were about 132,000 breast augmentation operations done that year. But those were crappy saline implants. Not the
real thing like you can get anywhere else in the world. Now, demand is going to go up by a factor
of five.

Well, you naysayers, just remember to keep your hands (pun intended) and laws of their bodies! Instead, if you want to discourage this sort of behavior, I suggest shaming them. How about T-Shirts emblazoned with -

100% Organic

100% Natural

0% Artificial Additives

Army Spc. Eric Thomas Caldwell

Gloucester has now recorded its first soldier killed in Iraq.

Specialist E-4 Eric Thomas Caldwell, 22, formerly of Gloucester, was killed in combat Sunday in Iraq. He was scheduled to return home this weekend.

The soldier’s mother, Vanessa Caldwell of Gloucester, said she was notified of her son’s death Sunday evening by casualty officers from Fort Eustis, shortly after she returned from having dinner with family members. She said her son died a hero during a small arms attack, but details of the incident were not yet available and it was still under investigation.

David Beckham

So Beckham is going to play soccer in L.A. on a $250,000,000 contract over 5 years. I'll admit that I don't understand how this works out to be a good deal for the billionaire paying this. Maybe he just likes to watch the games himself. The American public sure doesn't care.

The L.A. team has an average attendance of about 22,000 per game (less last year). Fifty million dollars per year is not going to come out of increased ticket sales. MLS only plays 32 games per year, and season ticket prices in L.A. range from $380 to $3000 per year. Call it an average of $800. I just can't believe that with 16 home games a year that Anschutz is going to sell an extra 62,500 tickets per game. Merchandizing rights should provide soebenefit, but enough to pay for this?

On the other hand, Congress is set to 'regularize' a lot of illegal aliens, which will encourage even more to come, so maybe they can fill the stadium with them.

Darwin Award - Copper gets them again

We have a new award winner. The price of scrap copper has really jumped in the past few years. So, people must steal it. I think this guy even tops the last one I wrote about. I even wrote about one local case here in Gloucester.

Some people are so stupid, you just have to wonder how they live long enough to die bizarrely.

MONTREAL – A would-be thief is dead after breaking into a Hydro-Quebec tower to steal valuable copper wire.

The man in his 40s was electrocuted when he cut the electrical wires atop the tower in the north end of Montreal.

According to city police, such thefts are becoming commonplace with the soaring price of scrap metal, including copper.

Weird Weather

I've always thought the weather here was too warm for my liking, but this is ridiculous.

Yesterday we took the dogs over to the Yorktown Riverwalk. It was 72 degrees, and kids were out wading in the river, people were lying out getting a tan, etc.

Today wasn't quite as warm, but the forsythia and daffodils are blooming. One of my neighbors was mowing his lawn.

Fourmetot

Winnie's French "Lambert" ancestors were from the village of Fourmetot, in Normandy. Here is the village today. It looks like the kind of place, if we ever went there, that we could track down exactly which house they lived in 300 years ago.

Who knows, with someplace like this inn to visit, it might give us a reason (because I like to eat well!). -

Le Manoir de L’Aufragère – the ultimate in gastronomic indulgence!

Le Manoir de L’Aufragère is a lovingly-restored 18th century manor house, offering three-night culinary experiences in eight acres of tranquil countryside in the heart of Normandy, France. Your hosts, Nicky and Régis Dussartre, are both fluent English-speakers passionate about good living.

You’ll cook with Nicky, a cordon bleu chef who’s completely consumed by gastronomy and simply loves anything and everything to do with food. She’ll share her culinary knowledge and expertise with you in a very relaxed atmosphere, making cooking a real, unpretentious, joy. Also joining in the course is her French husband, former goats’ cheese producer, Régis. He looks after your visits to the local market, fromagerie and Calvados distillery, as well as introducing you to homemade cheese and a few cocktails and local tastings along the way.

This image is via the public French government website - GeoPortail.