Traffic Troubles

So while I was coming home from work today, traffic exiting the expressway was nearly at a standstill. My first thought was that a motorist was having car trouble - their vehicle had stalled out or a tire had gone flat on the off-ramp. As it turns out, it seems that an automobile was having motorist trouble.

From what I was told, the driver suffered from MS (I presume he was referring to multiple sclerosis), and lost consciousness while driving. I don't know much about MS, but it wouldn't have occurred to me that you could drive with the condition. Perhaps this is because most of the times when we see people suffering from the condition, its for fund-raising purposes, and therefore there is an incentive to portray sufferers in a way designed to trigger pity and giving. I, for my part, was under the impression that people with MS couldn't even walk, let alone manage a vehicle under normal circumstances.


The pickup truck went down an incline into a small ravine (I'm not sure that's quite the right word for it). The driver and his wife were both injured, but were taken out of the vehicle by Woodinville, WA fire and rescue personnel and taken to the hospital without very much trouble. It seems like the most difficult part of it was pulling them back up to street level. I'm presuming that one or both of them were able to speak to rescue personnel, which is how people on the scene had the story of what happened.

If you look just below and to the right of the sandbags, you can see a tire mark where one of the truck's tires struck the curb. The truck then took out the sign for our apartment complex that the sandbags had anchored in place; it wound up on the other side of the exit. Just before the stop line, there is a mark in the pavement where the truck bottomed out. Just beyond that, it took a chunk out of the curb, and you can see two more tire marks. According to witnesses, the truck then went airborne, and effectively climbed the guardrail, taking out the stop sign in the process. The guardrail fared somewhat better, but it will likely need replacing.

It then shot through the gap in the small tree and the light post, and traveled down the incline, coming to rest at the bottom.

Reach For The Sky

Lessons Unlearned

Watching the United States side make the same mistakes over and over again throughout the World Cup (Do these guys understand what the word defense means?), I wonder if it isn't a metaphor for the nation as a whole.

Sometimes I feel that we make the same mistakes over and over again, refusing to take accountability for things constantly blowing up in our faces. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, perhaps the whole country has gone crazy.

Do It My Way

Activists make for poor negotiators. They also make for poor partners to negotiators, as delegates to International Whaling Commission talks are finding out. If you've ever tried to compromise with someone who feels that they have objective Right on their side, I suspect you're familiar with the problem. It's like haggling with a police officer. Agreeing to quit committing grand larceny in favor of petty theft is unlikely to get you anywhere - the officer is still going to arrest you. But the officer has the force of law behind him. All anti-whaling activists have is their love for creatures that they consider to be too majestic and intelligent to be eaten. It's not quite the same.

I suspect that unless the anti-whaling nations kick their activists to the curb, the organization is either a) going to remain a joke or b) become a club of nations that wring their hands about the activities of non-member nations. Australian environment minister Peter Garrett can say that the people of the world's voices against whaling needed to be heard all he wants - but I can hear someone's objections to my doing something, and even listen to them quite carefully - and then go and do it anyway. Worldwide direct democracy, where minority viewpoints are only allowed into the political arena at the sufferance of the majority, doesn't exist - and likely never will. For the simple reason that every group of people on Earth understands that as soon as they cede sovereignty to the populace at large, they place themselves at the mercy of others - who have often shown themselves willing to throw those not sufficiently like them under the bus for their own ends.

This isn't to say that EVERYTHING should be open to negotiations where both sides express a willingness to give something to get something. But if you're unwilling to compromise, you'd better be willing to use whatever means of coercion are at hand. That's why the police don't have to compromise - they can use force to subdue perpetrators if they need to (and sometimes when they don't, but that's for another time). Anti whaling activists are unlikely to get anyone to go to war, trade or shooting, to save the whales. Compromise is the only tool they have.

Punch Drunk

The Root ran a quick blog piece about a recent incident where a Seattle police officer punched a 17-year old girl in the face, while stopping her and another girl for jaywalking. Basically, an altercation started, and the police officer threw a punch. As one might expect, this has sparked a certain amount of controversy. But one of the things about the Root piece is the video it links to. From WTVD news – in Raleigh, North Carolina. Obviously because we don’t have television stations in the Seattle area that could show the footage (and all of it, at that). Or, I don’t know, maybe link to a local news outlet that covered the story?

I suspect that the reason the Root linked to the WTVD story is that the author lives in the Raleigh area, and that’s the television station that they watch. They saw a juicy story about a white policeman punching a black teenager, and it was stop the presses. But the WTVD story shows only a moment of the full video that was shot by the bystander, which is more than two minutes long, and in doing so, completely de-contextualizes the incident. This isn’t helpful journalism, especially when taking a moment to track down the actual video isn’t very hard. But perhaps more importantly it casts African-Americans as whiners who are willing to finely slice an incident to make themselves look good at the expense of the truth of the matter, and the media as listening to the loudest voices, and portraying only their side of the story. (On the other hand, it’s more or less ironclad that whenever you see your local area in the national news: “Oh, crap – what have we done now,” is rarely the wrong response.)