Here's an idea that I've had in the past, that I was thinking about today while reading a news story.
I've got no problem with compensatory damages. I don't think any reasonable person could. And I understand the idea of punitive damages - that the transgressor should be punished for egregious wrongdoings. Since we're talking about cases tried in civil, rather than criminal, court, prison is not a possibility. The way a civil court punishes is monetarily.
Let's say Person A is wronged by B, Inc., but is then made whole by compensatory damages, potentially including pain and suffering. The judge and/or jury further decide that B, Inc. must, beyond indemnifying Person A, be punished for its wrongs. Punitive damages are then awarded... but why should they go to the plaintiff? According to Douglas Laycock in Modern American Remedies, studies have shown that punitive damages are awarded in 2 percent of civil trials? Why should those 2 percent of plaintiffs get a lottery-like payday which is not offered to 98% of others?
The purpose of the civil court system is to indemnify, to make whole, those who have suffered due to another person's or company's violation of the law. Monetary losses are restored. Physical suffering is compensated (there are tables that have been created which show a decided-upon value of, for example, the loss of a finger, a hand, an arm to the elbow, etc.). Pain and suffering is compensated. This is all as it should be. However, as I see it, once the wronged person has been made whole, they should not be made "more whole" by reaping the benefits of someone's decision to punish the defendant.
I don't think we should do away with punitive damages. I think they should become fines. They should be paid to the government. Kind of like if I were speeding and hit your car. I... well, my insurance... would pay to fix your car. But my fine for speeding wouldn't go to you. It's a fine. It goes to the state. The same should happen with punitive damages in civil trials, as I see it.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Idiosyncrasies (tagged)
I recently did a post with a list of random facts about me. I've gotten the idea since then to do a list of my idiosyncrasies. I'm thinking 10, rather than the 16 from the last list. As before, you're now tagged - if you blog, you should do a similar post on your blog, and feel free to leave a link to it in the comments here.
To the list, then:
1. I keep my money (bills, not coins) in a specific order. I arrange them with the biggest bills on top, so that when they're folded and put in my front pocket (I don't keep my cash in my wallet), the smallest bill is showing. Also, I make sure all the bills are facing the same way - face up, and right side up. I believe that hearkens back to my days of running a cash register at McDonald's, where we were required to keep the bills in the same orientation like that.
2. When I have my CD's arranged - I really haven't had them arranged since my wife and I moved into our house almost 3 years ago - I arrange them alphabetically by artist, then chronologically for each artist. I recall debating with myself whether my John Cougar Mellencamp & John Mellencamp CD's should be filed together under C, together under M, or separately. I went with M, since John never wanted the stage name Cougar.
3. There are seven applications that I have running at all times on my computer at work. I open them in order, so their icons are always in the same place on the task bar. If I have to close something early enough in the work day, I'll reboot so I can open them all fresh. I'm not going to go 6 hours with my Outlook way over on the right.
4. The station pre-set buttons on my car radio are programmed in order, to a certain extent. This is one I've changed a bit over time. There are 6 buttons, but I can toggle through 3 groups of pre-sets, so there are 18 stations I have programmed. Every car I've had before that had a toggling option, each group would be limited to either FM or AM stations. It was always 2 groups of FM and one of AM. Before, I always had my FM's entirely in order - e.g., with the stations I now have programmed, the first group would have been 92.5FM through 100.9FM, the second would have started with 102.9FM, and so on. The last group would have my AM stations in order. My current car's radio doesn't limit each group to AM or FM; they can be intermixed. Since I was intermixing the bands, I also decided to make a further change and arrange the groups so that the 6 stations I listen to most are in the first group, and so on through the second and third. But, within each group, they are still arranged in order, with FM's first (e.g., the first group is 92.5FM, 94.9FM, 104.1FM, 105.7FM, 107.9FM and 950AM - the second group starts at 93.7FM [which would have been {and was} in the first group previously] and goes in order through 4 FM's, finishing with 690 & 1130AM).
5. When I eat M&M's, Smarties or some other candy where you have several pieces of different colors, for each handful I will group them by color and eat all of one color before moving to the next, saving my "favorite" colors for last. This makes a little bit of sense (to me) with Smarties, since the different colors indicate different flavors. I want to save the best for last. There's really no way to justify doing this with, say, M&M's. But I still do it. With no real set pattern. Blue will often, but not always, be last. Brown and tan are likely to go first. But nothing is carved in stone. With Smarties, yellow are second-to-last, white are last, but the rest is just however I feel like going at the time. If there's no particular reason to choose one color before another, I'll usually go with the one with fewer candies first. No real reason, just what I do.
6. Similarly, when I'm eating a handful of chips, I'll often separate the broken ones from the whole ones, and eat the broken ones first. Again, it's a "saving the best for last" thing, I think, yet I could not tell you why whole ones are better than broken ones. If they're flavored chips, and there's one that seems to have more of the flavoring on it than others, that one will likely be kept for last.
7. (Hmmm, lots of these are around food) This one I do not do anymore, but through my childhood and adolescence, when eating a meal, I would always eat all of one item before starting the next, and continue to do that with whatever starch, vegetable(s) and meat I had. The meat was always kept for last. By now, you ought to be able to guess why.
8. The second-t0-last thing I do before I go to bed is to go to the bathroom to floss, brush, whatever. Just before that, third-to-last, I check to make sure that all of the stove's burners are off. After the bathroom, the very last thing I do before I go to bed... I check to make sure that all of the stove's burners are off. Not sure who I think is going to turn one on while I'm in there, but there you have it. I have a real paranoia about that, tho I've never gone to bed and left a burner on. I did a similar thing when I smoked. I couldn't leave the house without checking twice that I hadn't left a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Once day, many moons ago, when I got to work I called home and asked my mother to check the ashtray to see if I'd left a cigarette burning. I hadn't. I never did. Always checked.
9. (Hmmmmm, lots of these are around food) When I eat a sandwich, the cheese has to be underneath the meat. I'll make sure that I pick up the sandwich and put it in my mouth so that the cheese is on bottom (save for a piece of bread, of course). On the rare occasion that I get a cheeseburger from the cafeteria at work, it's presented with the cheese on top. We add the condiments ourselves, and my first step in the process is always to flip my burger over so the cheese is on bottom.
10. Like #7, this is another one I don't do so much anymore. This may have led directly to item #7, in fact. I used to be really hard-core about this. It used to really bother me if different foods on my plate touched each other. Unless they were supposed to - you know, you're eating a stew, a hash, Chinese food, you're going to have different foods all over each other, which is no problem - or in various situation where I would arbitrarily suspend the rule - I had no problem, for example, with mixing corn and mashed potatoes. But for the most part, "no touching" was the rule. For the most part, no problem. But if there was a sauce or a gravy involved, well, that could pose a problem. It would require some attention. Beets were an issue. Hard to control beet juice, and with that bright red color, there wasn't any pretending that it hadn't touched something else on the plate. You may have noticed the qualifier in the first sentence - I don't do this one "so much" anymore. To this day, if I'm having beets, they'll be in a separate bowl. I just can not take beet juice on my other food.
I'm really not as crazy as this list makes me seem. I think.
Remember, you're tagged.
To the list, then:
1. I keep my money (bills, not coins) in a specific order. I arrange them with the biggest bills on top, so that when they're folded and put in my front pocket (I don't keep my cash in my wallet), the smallest bill is showing. Also, I make sure all the bills are facing the same way - face up, and right side up. I believe that hearkens back to my days of running a cash register at McDonald's, where we were required to keep the bills in the same orientation like that.
2. When I have my CD's arranged - I really haven't had them arranged since my wife and I moved into our house almost 3 years ago - I arrange them alphabetically by artist, then chronologically for each artist. I recall debating with myself whether my John Cougar Mellencamp & John Mellencamp CD's should be filed together under C, together under M, or separately. I went with M, since John never wanted the stage name Cougar.
3. There are seven applications that I have running at all times on my computer at work. I open them in order, so their icons are always in the same place on the task bar. If I have to close something early enough in the work day, I'll reboot so I can open them all fresh. I'm not going to go 6 hours with my Outlook way over on the right.
4. The station pre-set buttons on my car radio are programmed in order, to a certain extent. This is one I've changed a bit over time. There are 6 buttons, but I can toggle through 3 groups of pre-sets, so there are 18 stations I have programmed. Every car I've had before that had a toggling option, each group would be limited to either FM or AM stations. It was always 2 groups of FM and one of AM. Before, I always had my FM's entirely in order - e.g., with the stations I now have programmed, the first group would have been 92.5FM through 100.9FM, the second would have started with 102.9FM, and so on. The last group would have my AM stations in order. My current car's radio doesn't limit each group to AM or FM; they can be intermixed. Since I was intermixing the bands, I also decided to make a further change and arrange the groups so that the 6 stations I listen to most are in the first group, and so on through the second and third. But, within each group, they are still arranged in order, with FM's first (e.g., the first group is 92.5FM, 94.9FM, 104.1FM, 105.7FM, 107.9FM and 950AM - the second group starts at 93.7FM [which would have been {and was} in the first group previously] and goes in order through 4 FM's, finishing with 690 & 1130AM).
5. When I eat M&M's, Smarties or some other candy where you have several pieces of different colors, for each handful I will group them by color and eat all of one color before moving to the next, saving my "favorite" colors for last. This makes a little bit of sense (to me) with Smarties, since the different colors indicate different flavors. I want to save the best for last. There's really no way to justify doing this with, say, M&M's. But I still do it. With no real set pattern. Blue will often, but not always, be last. Brown and tan are likely to go first. But nothing is carved in stone. With Smarties, yellow are second-to-last, white are last, but the rest is just however I feel like going at the time. If there's no particular reason to choose one color before another, I'll usually go with the one with fewer candies first. No real reason, just what I do.
6. Similarly, when I'm eating a handful of chips, I'll often separate the broken ones from the whole ones, and eat the broken ones first. Again, it's a "saving the best for last" thing, I think, yet I could not tell you why whole ones are better than broken ones. If they're flavored chips, and there's one that seems to have more of the flavoring on it than others, that one will likely be kept for last.
7. (Hmmm, lots of these are around food) This one I do not do anymore, but through my childhood and adolescence, when eating a meal, I would always eat all of one item before starting the next, and continue to do that with whatever starch, vegetable(s) and meat I had. The meat was always kept for last. By now, you ought to be able to guess why.
8. The second-t0-last thing I do before I go to bed is to go to the bathroom to floss, brush, whatever. Just before that, third-to-last, I check to make sure that all of the stove's burners are off. After the bathroom, the very last thing I do before I go to bed... I check to make sure that all of the stove's burners are off. Not sure who I think is going to turn one on while I'm in there, but there you have it. I have a real paranoia about that, tho I've never gone to bed and left a burner on. I did a similar thing when I smoked. I couldn't leave the house without checking twice that I hadn't left a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Once day, many moons ago, when I got to work I called home and asked my mother to check the ashtray to see if I'd left a cigarette burning. I hadn't. I never did. Always checked.
9. (Hmmmmm, lots of these are around food) When I eat a sandwich, the cheese has to be underneath the meat. I'll make sure that I pick up the sandwich and put it in my mouth so that the cheese is on bottom (save for a piece of bread, of course). On the rare occasion that I get a cheeseburger from the cafeteria at work, it's presented with the cheese on top. We add the condiments ourselves, and my first step in the process is always to flip my burger over so the cheese is on bottom.
10. Like #7, this is another one I don't do so much anymore. This may have led directly to item #7, in fact. I used to be really hard-core about this. It used to really bother me if different foods on my plate touched each other. Unless they were supposed to - you know, you're eating a stew, a hash, Chinese food, you're going to have different foods all over each other, which is no problem - or in various situation where I would arbitrarily suspend the rule - I had no problem, for example, with mixing corn and mashed potatoes. But for the most part, "no touching" was the rule. For the most part, no problem. But if there was a sauce or a gravy involved, well, that could pose a problem. It would require some attention. Beets were an issue. Hard to control beet juice, and with that bright red color, there wasn't any pretending that it hadn't touched something else on the plate. You may have noticed the qualifier in the first sentence - I don't do this one "so much" anymore. To this day, if I'm having beets, they'll be in a separate bowl. I just can not take beet juice on my other food.
I'm really not as crazy as this list makes me seem. I think.
Remember, you're tagged.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Turn me on, dead man
On The Beatles' eponymous 1968 album (the one commonly called "The White Album") there is a track called "Revolution 9." It's not a song by any traditional description; perhaps "sound collage" comes closest to accurately describing it. At various points throughout, you hear British man repeatedly saying, "Number nine." If you play the "number nine" piece backwards, you might think it sounds like, "Turn me on, dead man." It's been kind of hard to play a sound recording backwards at regular speed since vinyl records went away, but I used to have this album on vinyl, and I did listen to that piece of "Revolution 9" backwards. I have to admit that it did sound like, "Turn me on, dead man," to me. The thing is, the reason I tried it was because I was told it would sound like that, so I was listening for it. No small detail, that, if you ask me.
So what's this all about? Why are people finding... or even looking for... such unusual statements backwards on a Beatles album? In late 1969, coinciding with the release of their Abbey Road album, a rumor started circulating that Paul McCartney had died, and that the other Beatles and their management had decided to keep it secret and replace him with the winner of Paul McCartney lookalike contest (a Mr. William Campbell of Canada, so the story went). Part of the legend was that the boys had decided to put some clues as to what had happened into the artwork, and within the lyrics of the songs, on their subsequent albums. "Turn me on, dead man," was alleged to be one such clue.
I don't imagine that there is anyone who believes this story these days. What amazes me is that anyone ever did. The most common version of the story was that Paul died in a car wreck. "He blew his mind out in a car," as John Lennon sang in "A Day in the Life." (John actually wrote that about Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness brewery fortune.) Obviously, a death by car accident is sudden and unexpected. The 3 remaining Beatles would have had to have met, with their management, proposed and agreed to the plan, communicated it to the police and media (they... all of them... were bought off to keep silent, don't you know), and gotten their acceptance --- all before word got out to anyone. Since then, of course, no one involved in the subterfuge ever broke with the plan. And, by sheer luck, the guy they found to be the replacement just happened to be every bit as talented as was Paul, given the success of his contributions to The Beatles remaining albums - "Penny Lane," "Back in the USSR," and "Let It Be," to name just a few - and his post-Beatles solo career.
Clearly, the holes in the story are big enough for Paul to have safely driven his car through that morning --- that morning being Wednesday, November 9, 1966, according to "evidence" presented in and on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album*, which makes the clues people found on singles and albums released before that date quite interesting, if you ask me.
I said before that it surprised me that anyone believed this story. After a little consideration, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I've long been interested in urban legends - interested that people will believe fantastical claims that, when you get right down to it, are based on little more than "Some guy told me." I'm a frequent visitor to snopes.com and enjoy reading some of the patently ridiculous stories that some people apparently believe.
What strikes me the most, I think, about so may of these legends (and the "Paul is dead" one in particular) is that many of them involve large, not realistically possible, conspiracies and pacts of silence. "Paul is dead" is an extreme... maybe the extreme... example. But it's a common theme. You've likely gotten an email, once or a thousand times, warning you that an attacker has injured/raped/killed one or more people in your local mall's parking lot, and that the mall authorities paid off the police and local media to make sure you didn't hear about it. Were there such an attacker, perhaps a mall's management would be interested in keeping the story quiet. But, that's not how the police work, and that sure as hell ain't how the media work. There are, as I see it, 3 basic principles the media live by (it'll be another blog post... eventually [I know]). One of them is, Being First Is More Important Than Being Right. There is no way you could get multiple news outlets to all agree to sit on a story. Somebody would run it, just to be the first to do so... just to be the one that scooped everyone else. I doubt it was much, if at all, different in 1966.
It shouldn't take more than about 5 seconds of consideration to come to the conclusion that both of these stories are not only untrue, but literally impossible. It's theoretically possible that either cover up could have been tried (save for the inconvenient** business of Mr. James Paul McCartney's continuing to live), but there is simply no way either conspiracy could have ever been put in place and agreed to, let alone last for anything more than 10 or 15 minutes before somebody blabbed. And yet, you'll find someone to believe any ridiculous piece of garbage that comes across their inbox. Why? That's the part I've never been able to understand. Why do so many people believe these stories that are so obviously made up? Somebody please explain it to me.
*The date comes from an alleged clue on the album's cover art. If you place a mirror horizontally across the words "LONELY HEARTS" so that you see the top halves of those letters, and the reflections of those top halves (who found these clues?!?), it looks like "1 ONE 1 X HE (a diamond) DIE" - or 11 IX... 11 9... November 9. Except that, to the British Beatles, that date is 9 November, not November 9. 11/9 would be September 11. I once posted a facetious post in an online forum claiming that The Beatles had in fact been predicting the 9/11 attacks. Makes about as much sense as the "Paul is dead" story.
** My suspicion is that Paul himself does not consider this inconvenient.
So what's this all about? Why are people finding... or even looking for... such unusual statements backwards on a Beatles album? In late 1969, coinciding with the release of their Abbey Road album, a rumor started circulating that Paul McCartney had died, and that the other Beatles and their management had decided to keep it secret and replace him with the winner of Paul McCartney lookalike contest (a Mr. William Campbell of Canada, so the story went). Part of the legend was that the boys had decided to put some clues as to what had happened into the artwork, and within the lyrics of the songs, on their subsequent albums. "Turn me on, dead man," was alleged to be one such clue.
I don't imagine that there is anyone who believes this story these days. What amazes me is that anyone ever did. The most common version of the story was that Paul died in a car wreck. "He blew his mind out in a car," as John Lennon sang in "A Day in the Life." (John actually wrote that about Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness brewery fortune.) Obviously, a death by car accident is sudden and unexpected. The 3 remaining Beatles would have had to have met, with their management, proposed and agreed to the plan, communicated it to the police and media (they... all of them... were bought off to keep silent, don't you know), and gotten their acceptance --- all before word got out to anyone. Since then, of course, no one involved in the subterfuge ever broke with the plan. And, by sheer luck, the guy they found to be the replacement just happened to be every bit as talented as was Paul, given the success of his contributions to The Beatles remaining albums - "Penny Lane," "Back in the USSR," and "Let It Be," to name just a few - and his post-Beatles solo career.
Clearly, the holes in the story are big enough for Paul to have safely driven his car through that morning --- that morning being Wednesday, November 9, 1966, according to "evidence" presented in and on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album*, which makes the clues people found on singles and albums released before that date quite interesting, if you ask me.
I said before that it surprised me that anyone believed this story. After a little consideration, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I've long been interested in urban legends - interested that people will believe fantastical claims that, when you get right down to it, are based on little more than "Some guy told me." I'm a frequent visitor to snopes.com and enjoy reading some of the patently ridiculous stories that some people apparently believe.
What strikes me the most, I think, about so may of these legends (and the "Paul is dead" one in particular) is that many of them involve large, not realistically possible, conspiracies and pacts of silence. "Paul is dead" is an extreme... maybe the extreme... example. But it's a common theme. You've likely gotten an email, once or a thousand times, warning you that an attacker has injured/raped/killed one or more people in your local mall's parking lot, and that the mall authorities paid off the police and local media to make sure you didn't hear about it. Were there such an attacker, perhaps a mall's management would be interested in keeping the story quiet. But, that's not how the police work, and that sure as hell ain't how the media work. There are, as I see it, 3 basic principles the media live by (it'll be another blog post... eventually [I know]). One of them is, Being First Is More Important Than Being Right. There is no way you could get multiple news outlets to all agree to sit on a story. Somebody would run it, just to be the first to do so... just to be the one that scooped everyone else. I doubt it was much, if at all, different in 1966.
It shouldn't take more than about 5 seconds of consideration to come to the conclusion that both of these stories are not only untrue, but literally impossible. It's theoretically possible that either cover up could have been tried (save for the inconvenient** business of Mr. James Paul McCartney's continuing to live), but there is simply no way either conspiracy could have ever been put in place and agreed to, let alone last for anything more than 10 or 15 minutes before somebody blabbed. And yet, you'll find someone to believe any ridiculous piece of garbage that comes across their inbox. Why? That's the part I've never been able to understand. Why do so many people believe these stories that are so obviously made up? Somebody please explain it to me.
*The date comes from an alleged clue on the album's cover art. If you place a mirror horizontally across the words "LONELY HEARTS" so that you see the top halves of those letters, and the reflections of those top halves (who found these clues?!?), it looks like "1 ONE 1 X HE (a diamond) DIE" - or 11 IX... 11 9... November 9. Except that, to the British Beatles, that date is 9 November, not November 9. 11/9 would be September 11. I once posted a facetious post in an online forum claiming that The Beatles had in fact been predicting the 9/11 attacks. Makes about as much sense as the "Paul is dead" story.
** My suspicion is that Paul himself does not consider this inconvenient.
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