I Can Admit When I’m … Wrong?

Here in Florida, we are having a bit of a debate whether Red Light Cameras (RLC) are effective or not.  I have heard everything from privacy issues (there are none, BTW, since once you walk out of your house you have no privacy, by US law/standards) to it’s just another money grab by our government (and so is speeding/running stop signs/tail-gating/etc.).  Actually, $158 violations, via RLCs, start going into effect (in Florida) July 1st, 2010.

My opinion has always been that since I’ve observed an unusual amount of drivers blatantly running red lights that these RLCs must be a good idea.  If you’re in that much of a hurry that you'll run a red and potentially change someone else's life, forever than you deserve to suffer for the rest of your life … or at least pay $158 bucks.

Driving has and will always be a privilege (NOT A RIGHT) that can be taken away if you can't handle the reasonability of such privileges.  And I’m not just some old man screaming from my front porch.  I love all things that go fast.  Motorcycles, cars … pretty much anything with a motor is cool with me … in the appropriate settings (i.e., race tracks, drag strips, organized events, etc.)

But I digress, let me get to the part where I am wrong (sort of).  I’ve decided to actually read some of these studies that people are citing and try to draw an informed conclusion. 

One interesting fact and the main reason for not using RLCs, in Florida, is that “The injury rate from red-light running crashes has dropped by a third in less than a decade, indicating red-light running crashes have been continually declining in Florida without the use of cameras” (USF Health study 2008)

Also, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation issued an extensive evaluation (Safety Evaluation of Red-Light - April 2005) regarding red light running.  Their conclusions are that severity of red light running accidents increase … sometimes … due to people actually speeding up MORE to avoid being in the intersection when the camera engages and rear end accidents increase (more about how I feel about this, later).  This coincides with the views of groups against the use of RLCs.

Of course, insurance companies love to have proof of why they are raising rates, because they will have to be paying out more money in areas that utilize RLCs.

So, there you have it.  Excellent arguments for not having Red Light Cameras.  I wanted them,  now I don’t.  I was wrong … except for … the fact, that … the main reasons why the above arguments are valid … is that … there are still too many people who drive like CRAP!!!!  Accidents are “more severe” because people speed up MORE!  Rear end accidents “increase”, because people drive TOO CLOSE to others, for their speed, to respond appropriately!?!?! … Really?!?  On this one … I don’t blame the insurance companies, at all [that actually hurt to say].

Come on people;

• Nearly 10% of America's drivers couldn't pass a DMV licensing test if they had to take it today. 
• 20% of drivers do not know that a pedestrian has the right of way at a marked or unmarked crosswalk.
• 1 in 3 drivers don't usually stop for pedestrians even if they're in a crosswalk or at a yellow light.
• One-third admit they speed up to make a yellow light even when pedestrians are in the crosswalk.

Some countries that we make fun of (regarding driving) actually have better driver qualifications in place, in order to get a license, than we do.

Next time you are thinking of taking an expensive vacation, consider spending the week-end (week ?) at a resort style driving school, like the Porsche driving school in Birmingham, AL. (I have no affiliation [I WISH] with this school).  Consider other schools like Bob Bondurant, Skip Barber and many others that offer fantastic programs in defensive driving.  All driving age members of your family would get an experience of a lifetime, that could very well save their (and others) lives. 

Low on dough?  How does free sound?  Go to Driver's Edge and check their schedule on when their program comes to your town.  This program is free for teens just starting to drive and uses professional drivers (NOT a bored PE or shop teacher) to give instruction on basic and advanced driving dynamics and accident avoidance techniques.  Kids that start out with strong, REAL, driving foundations have a significantly better chance of surviving their driving lifetime.  [full disclosure: Steven Tepper, President & COO of Driver’s Edge is a dear friend of our family]

Next time you are out buying a book, consider "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" and learn why you act the way you do behind the wheel.

And, people, use your horn.  It may not make your situation any better, but how is anyone going to know they’ve done wrong, if no one tells them.  It’s good for humanity.  Is that so … … wrong?

Please Accept My Apologies Mr. Barlow. I Only Mean to Inform …

I’m taking the easy way out of what seems to be a monthly ritual for me.  I’m re-posting (read: ripping off … though, I am not making any money from this) a treatise of sorts written by John Perry Barlow fourteen years ago. I’m hoping that others who may not be aware of this essay will be exposed to it and continue the outlook it holds.  If his name seems familiar, among other things, he was a lyricist for the “Grateful Dead”. He is also one of the founding members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Born in 1947, Barlow is a cyberlibertarian and since May of 1998, he has been a Fellow at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Again, fourteen years ago …

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

___________________________________________________________

Now, fourteen years later, these words ring truer than ever.  Beware of any regulations, laws, mandates, etc. that tries to “protect” us from all things internet.  Especially, the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)” that is being drafted behind closed doors.  Browse around the EFF and see what they are doing to keep an eye on those that would subvert the internet into a waste land of corporate and government controlled tripe.

Thanks for reading.

Our Looming "Super Sub-Prime" Challenge

[NOTE: The below is an Op-Ed from the The Peter G. Peterson Foundation , Read it, Pass it along, Get active]

If you think the current mortgage-related sub-prime meltdown has been bad, you haven't seen anything yet. The current state of the federal government's finances looks suspiciously like the mortgage sub-prime mess. We need to learn from the lessons of the smaller crisis in order to prevent an even bigger one.

First, the mortgage-related sub-prime problem was caused in part by a disconnect between those who benefited from issuing the loans and those who bore the risk. The same situation exists with the federal government's finances. Today's taxpayers benefit from our current high-spend, low-tax, "mortgage the future" practices. Tomorrow's taxpayers will pay the price and bear the burden.

Second, mortgage sub-prime was facilitated by a lack of transparency about the related risks, both in connection with home borrowers and with investors in mortgage-backed securities. This is also the case with the federal government's finances. The government is in a roughly $56,400,000,000,000 financial hole that is growing by $2 trillion to $3 trillion every year and nothing is done to address it. These are just two of the disturbing statistics in "The State of the Union's Finances", a publication by the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which can be found at www.pgpf.org.

Third, Bear Stearns found out the hard way what price you can pay when you lose the confidence of your lenders and wind up in an escalating negative cash-flow position. Investors in mortgage-backed securities also found out that a AAA rating doesn't mean what it used to. The federal government is already experiencing a negative cash flow for Medicare, and Social Security will go negative within a decade. These negative cash flows will pick up dramatically when "baby boomers" retire in big numbers.

Finally, with mortgage sub-prime, corporate and government risk-management devices failed to kick in and prevent a crisis. Today, too many elected officials are standing by and doing nothing to defuse the ticking time bomb associated with our government's finances. What are they waiting for--a crisis?

When will Washington see the writing on the wall and start taking steps to reverse our deteriorating financial condition? Will our current and next President(s) have the courage to talk straight and make tough choices in order to ensure that our collective future is better than our past?

We can't afford to wait until this super sub-prime challenge boils into a crisis that will result in severe hardship for tens of millions of Americans. Hopefully, we'll get some real leadership on this issue soon.

I Know Where “Assholes” Come From ….

Man, it seems like the more I look around, participate in daily activities and soak in this experience we call life, the more “assholes” I encounter.  By no means am I a perfect human being, but it never used to seem so bad in days past.  Then it struck me, the numbers have increased, the math has worked because now assholes are raising … you got it, more assholes.  Think about it.  If one asshole (let’s say mom was cool) helps raise two asshole children they have become a triple threat.  Those two assholes will raise even more assholes and grandpa is enforcing the behavior.  It’s just like that demonstration of a nuclear reaction that is done with the mouse traps and the ping-pong balls.

Now we are in an age of more assholes than reasonable people.  I mean, who pulls a car into an intersection, during a yellow light, that you can not get through due to heavy traffic, only to be the person who is now blocking the traffic from the “green” side of traffic, now trying to move.  And the only other reason that that asshole drove into the intersection is because there was another asshole honking, from behind him, to do it.  Don’t even get me started on why people are flummoxed on what to do at a stop sign or red light.  Let me give you a hint … STOP!!!!  It’s firkin’ red, bright and in the case of the stop sign, a shape you learned in kindergarten.

All this is learned behavior, learned from other assholes.  At around age four, our children start to absorb what we parents are doing, saying, emoting and everything else that we do in our daily lives that they may and do observe.  Every time we flip someone off (for good or bad reasons).  We scream at someone for slightly inconveniencing us.  We disparage someone just because they are different from us.  Basically, the  intolerance we display of everything that “inconveniences” us.  Life is inconvenient, get over it.  The sooner they learn that it does not bother us and we handle it in a positive manner, the sooner they are on the path of not becoming an asshole.

We have become selfish, boorish and materialistic.  Our children have become unhealthy extensions of ourselves.  We need to guide them to the positive side of civil society, even though a lot of us have not.  Have them say “Thank You” EVERY time the waiter brings something to the table, even though that is their job.  Teach your kids to open doors for others and when doors are opened for them to say “Thank You”.  “Excuse me” is a lost courtesy that needs to be revived.  Teach your kids that all people have value.

And it’s not completely our faults.  The media glorifies assholes.  Popular shows like MTV’s “My Sweet 16”, “Jersey Shore”, WEtv’s “Bridezillas”, Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of [put major city here]”, Oxygen's “Girls Behaving Badly”, “Bad Girls Club” and let us not leave out FOX TV's “Cops”.  Really, who signs a production release form in possibly the worst situation a person can be in.  And the list goes on.  These shows are all popular because their viewership is tremendous.  Just not watching these shows has got to help bring the asshole count down.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about making your kids subservient to the world.  This comes under the heading of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.  Honking your horn at someone for actually doing something wrong may not help you, personally.  It does inform the wrong doer that they erred and that is better for the larger community.  It just does not need to be followed up with the middle finger, a verbal exchange and a car chase.

The statement that your kids are a reflection of you is overwhelmingly true.  If your kids are assholes … so are you.  Or, maybe, I’m just getting old and just need to be yelling at kids to “Get Off My Lawn”! 

Note: I know the word “asshole(s)” is used 17 times in this post.  As in life, there are a lot of them out there.

The End of Christmas … Really?!?!

It seems like during this time, every year, instead of being thankful, thinking of family and friends and helping others less fortunate than us, there is some ludicrous campaign about how there is an “attack on Christmas”.  Really?  Wishing someone “Happy Holidays” is going to destroy the whole fabric of Christianity and therefore the fabric of America? Really!?!

This is a very divisive stance to take and let’s face it … we are not a country that needs anymore division.

The interesting thing about this view is that it is rarely what it seems on the surface.

Steve Kellmeyer writes:

The first holy day to be expunged from the Christian calendar, the first law of prayer to die, was All Holy Eve now known as Halloween. The man who murdered it? Martin Luther. In 1517, he chose All Holy Eve, the vigil of All Saint’s Day, to attack the idea that those who had died deserved any respect or care from those who lived. According to Luther, prayer afforded no one grace. [...]

How many people remember Candlemas? It is the Mass celebrating the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Offered forty days after Christmas, Candlemas marks the end of the Christmas season... By the late 1800’s, Americans had transformed this most ancient feast in honor of the Virgin Mary into Groundhog Day — a signal accomplishment in the continuing Protestant attempt to separate Catholic Church and state.

Michaelmas, the Mass offered on September 29th in celebration of St. Michael’s victory over Satan, became the day to settle rents and collect accounts. By the late 1800’s, it too had been stripped of all the celebratory hospitality that had marked it as a major feast of the Catholic Middle Ages.

Childermas, the December 28th Mass commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents slaughtered by Herod, was not replaced by another event so much as it was simply overcome by the commercialization of the holiday. It slipped into oblivion. America had won the war against nearly every major Mass in the liturgical calendar.

I don’t even like the majority of Mr. Kellmeyer’s (a Catholic/conservative author and speaker) views or politics.  However, his point is that over the past few hundred years (and much more), the Catholics have complained that the Protestants have been stripping out the “mass” in Christmas and the Protestants have been complaining that the “atheists”, “seculars” or who ever will strip out Christmas from the calendar.

Then there is the date, December 25th, representing the birth of Christ.  Biblical description has Jesus born sometime in September, 6 months after Passover.  Pagan origins of Christmas date back to ancient Babylon when, on December 25th, the feast of the Son of Isis (Goddess of Nature) was celebrated with … wait for it … raucous partying,  gluttonous eating/drinking and gift giving were traditions of the feast.

In Rome, many years before Christ was born, the tradition of the Murmmers was born.  The Murmmers were costumed dancers and singers who traveled from house to house entertaining their neighbors with song and dance.  Sound familiar?

It was not until the year 350 that Pope Julius declared that Christ's birthday would be December 25.  This was done to make the conversion to Christianity as painless as possible for the pagan Romans, who where the majority at the time.  The Romans could still have their celebrations, for now, while they “converted” to their new religion.

Even the beloved song, “The 12 Days of Christmas” should give us a clue that Christmas is celebrated over many days, from the evening of December 25th until the morning of January 6th (Epiphany)

If you want to complain about saying/hearing “Happy Holidays” than you should:

• Not put up anything (Christmas trees, lights, etc) or buy gifts until Christmas Eve
  • This is how it was before World War II.  We started to get a jump on Christmas during World War II in order to get gifts to the soldiers on time.
• Put the Mass back in Christmas
  • Protestants compounded the words “Christ’s” “Mass” sometime around 1038, to the dismay of the Catholic church.
• Restore Michaelmas
• Restore Candlemas
• Restore Childermas
• Restore the Feast of the Epiphany
  • Christian feast celebrating the 'shining forth' or revelation of God to mankind in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ.
• Restore the Advent season
  • Historically, Advent is a period of fasting, repentance, and preparation for Christ's second coming and the Day of Judgment.  It begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, which is the Sunday nearest November 30, and ends on Christmas Eve (Dec 24).
• And so on and so forth …

I’m not saying that setting the clock back to different times is the answer to why some are so hard on everyone else for enjoying the “season”.  I just think that we should remind ourselves of our own histories when we hear others bark about what is best for the rest of us.

Besides, if I see one more bumper sticker that says, “Christ Is The Reason for The Season”, I’m chocking somebody.

Cheers Everyone!