Category Archives: Stupid People

Is Ford Really This Stupid?

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I think
most businesses would love to have a little word of mouth advertising,
but it seems that the folks at Ford (or at least their law firm) are
more interested in protecting their trademark than cultivating a
relationship with some of their most avid supporters.  From Boing Boing:

Josh sez, "The folks at BMC (Black Mustang Club) automotive forum
wanted to put together a calendar featuring members’ cars, and print it
through CafePress. Photos were submitted, the layout was set, and…
CafePress notifies the site admin that pictures of Ford cars cannot be
printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a
whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without
permission.
So even though Ford has a lineup of enthusiasts who want to show off
their Ford cars, the company is bent on alienating them…

"I got some more info from the folks at cafepress and according to them,
a law firm representing Ford contacted them saying that our calendar
pics (and our club’s event logos – anything with one of our cars in it)
infringes on Ford’s trademarks which include the use of images of THEIR
vehicles. Also, Ford claims that all the images, logos and designs OUR
graphics team made for the BMC events using Danni are theirs as well.
Funny, I thought Danni’s title had my name on it … and I thought you
guys owned your cars … and, well … I’m not even going to get into
how wrong and unfair I feel this whole thing is as I’d be typing for
hours, but I wholeheartedly echo everything you guys have been saying
all afternoon. I’m not letting this go un-addressed and I’ll keep you
guys posted as I get to work on this.

I’m sorry, but at this point we will not be producing the 2008 BMC
Calendar, featuring our 2007 Members of the Month, solely due to Ford
Motor Company’s claim that THEY own all rights to the photos YOU take
of YOUR car."

You can read the predictably irate comments of club members on the BMCForum here.

Cross posted at Lowder Enterprises.

How to Define Schadendouche

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From Boing Boing comes the tale of a guy who allegedly steals some computers and inadvertently posts pictures of himself on flickr for the world to see.  From the post:

"Last week a number of computers were stolen from our office in
Vancouver, BC. One of those computers was a shared iMac with
Flickrbooth, an app that automatically uploads photo booth shots to our
flickr account, installed on it.
Just this morning a friend called to tell us that there are photos of
whoever has the computer now in our flickr stream! Obviously the guy
didn’t know he was uploading images of himself and his awesome tattoos."

Here’s a link to the shots on the company’s flickr account. Do you know who this guy is? The theft victims and the Vancouver police would love to hear about it. Looks like the SomethingAwful forums are all over the case, too.

Update: A gem in the comments thread:
"There should be a word for this, thinking you’re getting away with
something on the sly while the world laughs at you, anticipating your
inevitable demise — schadendouche?" [beatnik]

To help us understand this exquisite new term (schadendouche) let’s explore its roots.

First we have schadenfreude: a German word meaning ‘pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune’.

Then we have douche: Douche bag, or simply douche, are considered pejorative terms in Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The slang usage of the term dates back to the 1960s.[4]
The term may be used in a phrase such as "that guy is such a douche
bag!"

Yes, I think we have a winner and I also imagine that we’ve all had our moments of schadendouche-ism…or would it be schadendouche-ity?

Stupid Preacher

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I’m not going to mince words: I think that if this letter to the editor in the Winston-Salem Journal from Robert L. Hutchens, Pastor of Meadowview Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, is any indication of his intellect then he’s about as poor a leader of a flock as you’re going to find. His letter is written, I think, to support the Forsyth County Commissioners’ decision to fight the ACLU’s effort to stop the practice of sectarian prayers before commission meetings. Here’s what he wrote:

While militant
Muslims attempt to overthrow world governments with violence, some
local governments continue to claim that we can’t pray in Jesus’ name
in government meetings. This controversy separates those who are
Christian in name only from Christ’s true disciples who obey God before
men.

The Danbury
Baptists wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who assured them that government
would stay out of churches’ business because of separation of church
and state. It’s meant to keep government out of the church, not
vice-versa. That same week Thomas Jefferson attended Christian worship
in the Capitol, and at his request, military service bands played
Christian hymns.

Atheists are free
not to believe, and should thank the Baptists, for Baptists have always
stood for soul liberty, whether choosing Christ or not. During the
Middle Ages, apostate Roman Catholicism murdered millions of
Anabaptists and atheists with power from a corrupt union of religion
and government. During our nation’s infancy, European Protestants
continued to persecute Baptists attempting to unionize church and
state. Only those ignoring historical facts pervert this separation and
attempt to limit our right to Biblical prayer before government
meetings.

Thankfully some other readers of the Journal didn’t hesitate to call him on his, uh, creative historical perspective. On August 4, Rudy Diamond of Lewisville wrote to the Journal:

A letter to the
editor (“In Jesus’ Name,” July 28) says that Thomas Jefferson’s
wall-of-separation letter to the Danbury Baptists is “meant to keep
government out of the church, not vice versa.” I beg to differ. Nothing
in Jefferson’s writings supports a one-way wall of separation of church
and state.

Jefferson
distrusted the clergy. In a letter to Jeremiah Moor in 1800, Jefferson
wrote, “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and
ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable
engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”

Not only did
Jefferson distrust the clergy, but his view of Christianity also
differed from the views held by today’s religious right. In an April
11, 1823, letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “The day will come
when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his
father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the
generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

An accurate reading of history will fully support the concept of a separation of church and state that is not just one way.

RUDY DIAMOND

Lewisville

And on August 5 Mel Henderson wrote a letter to the editor in response to Pastor Hutchens:

The writer of the
letter “In Jesus’ Name” (July 28) claims that when Thomas Jefferson
wrote of the wall of separation between church and state, he only meant
it to be a one-way wall, preventing the state from influencing the
church.

Jefferson was a
brilliant man, and I think he knew full well the difference between a
wall and a funnel. His letter to the Danbury Baptists is quite clear.

This “one-way wall” is not only a science-fiction device; it is an attempt to make something say the opposite of what it says.

The whole point of
this minister’s letter seems to be “we Baptists will humor you
separatists and let you have your religious liberty — even though you
have no right to it.” As American citizens, we do.

MEL H. HENDERSON

I owe Rudy and Mel a debt of gratitude because their responses prevented me from getting my panties in a bunch and did a much better job of putting the disingenuous Pastor Hutchens in his place.

Foxx in the Glass House

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Ed Cone has a nice little post about my US Rep., Virginia Foxx, and points out that those who live in glass houses should be very careful of the rocks they throw.  Below is the video of Rep. Foxx deriding some of the bills she sees as a waste of Congress’ time and here’s the link to some of the resolutions that Rep. Foxx has sponsored, including a resolution to recognize the Christmas tree industry and my favorite, H.CON.RES.205: Recognizing the spirit of Jacob Mock Doub and his contribution to
encouraging youth to be physically active and fit and expressing the
sense of Congress that "National Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day" should
be established in Jacob Mock Doub’s honor.

In all fairness I should point out that I’m not a fan of Rep. Foxx and have made that clear.  I also think that she’s sponsored some good bills (Example: H.R.1499 :
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow members of the
Armed
Forces serving in a combat zone to make contributions to their
individual retirement plans even if the compensation on which such
contribution is based is excluded from gross income.)  That said, I also think Ed’s right that she’s being a little hypocritical in this case.

BTW, Rep. Foxx and another junior NC Rep., Patrick McHenry, are part of a Republican effort to get the Democrats to air the earmarks on the pending Homeland Security bill now, before it goes to conference with the Senate, and not after it goes to conference.  Basically they’re calling the Democrats out on campaign promises to make the legislative process more transparent.  Of course when their party was in power they were calling for no such thing, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.

Stupid Lawyers. Oxymoron?

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I recently stumbled upon a cool new web service called Stumble Upon (hat tip to Sean Coon for pointing it out) which is a little browser tool you can download and use for free. Here’s how it’s described by BBCWorld:

"Stumbleupon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and
gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been
stumbled upon by other web-users"

So I was using my little new procrastinating tool and I found this page of funny quotes from courtroom transcripts.  Here’s a small sample, but then you really should check out the whole thing:

Lawyer:  "How far apart were the vehicles at the time of the
collision?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you alone or by yourself?"

and,

Lawyer:  "I show you Exhibit 3 and ask you if you recognize
that picture."

Witness:  "That’s me."

Lawyer:  "Were you present when that picture was taken?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Doctor, did you say he was shot in the woods?"

Witness:  "No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region."

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you acquainted with the deceased?"

Witness:  "Yes sir."

Lawyer:  "Before or after he died?"

and,

 

Lawyer:  "What is your relationship with the plaintiff?"

Witness:  "She is my daughter."

Lawyer:  "Was she your daughter on February 13, 1979?"
   

 

and finally,

Lawyer:  "Now, doctor, isn’t it true that when a person
dies in his sleep, in most cases he just passes quietly away and
doesn’t know anything about it until the next morning?"

Testing, Testing. Law of Unintended Consequences

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Anyone with kids in public schools knows about the rise in prominence of standardized tests.  Thanks to No Child Left Behind much school funding is put at risk when schools don’t have enough students pass the mandated tests.  On top of that school administrators can lose their jobs if their students don’t pass at appropriate levels, so you can imagine the "learning atmosphere" that this might create.

One consequence of the increased emphasis on testing is that you have teachers teaching to the test.  Our kids now come home with syllabi that clearly indicate when test preparations begin, which is usually one month before the test is administered.  And test preparation doesn’t just mean covering the subject matter, it also means test taking strategy.  Imagine spending a whole month getting ready for tests, and think about the ripple effect it has on the rest of the curriculum.

Another consequence of the new testing regime is that you have administrators and teachers fighting for their professional lives, and that leads them to do some rather strange things.  Exhibit A is the principal in Washington state who suspended a fourth grade student for five days because he refused to answer an essay question on the state exam.  You can read about it here.  The kid didn’t want to write the essay because he was worried that it would offend the principal (the same one who ended up suspending him) and he couldn’t be convinced that it was okay to write the essay.  The principal was so worried about the effect of his refusal to answer on the school’s average that she suspended him for "blatant defiance and insubordination."   Simply put, she’s off her rocker.

Given the atmosphere that school administrators are working in these days it’s no wonder you have a few whackos going too far.  In an effort to bring accountability to education what No Child Left Behind has actually done is change a learning environment into a test factory producing Scantron-completing robots (our kids).  I’m all for making sure our teachers and school administrators are held responsible for doing their jobs, but there has to be a better way than this.

Heckuvajob Rummy

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How is it that the one guy who can be held directly responsible for much of what’s gone wrong in Iraq still has his job?  "Heckuvajob Rummy" is still the Secretary of Defense, still getting his panties in a twist whenever someone questions him and still putting our military in a lose-lose position.  The worst part is that there was information out there, war game results from 1999 (Desert Crossing), that should have warned him that he needed to think twice about the invasion and to plan very carefully for the after-action occupation.  These war games were conducted by US Central Command (CENTCOM) under Marine General Anthony Zinni who even called CENTCOM in 2002, when it was apparent we were going to war, to remind them of the existence of the Desert Crossing report. 

Among other things the report found that there would need to be a minimum of 400,000 troops in Iraq and even then things would be messy.  Army General Tommy Franks, who took over CENTCOM after Zinni’s retirement, proposed 385,000 troops for Iraq in his original operational plan for the war but Rumsfeld insisted on a sharply reduced number and approved only 160,000.

Even with the 400,000 troops that the war game report recommended the authors anticipated many of the problems we have in Iraq today.

The results of Desert Crossing, however, drew pessimistic conclusions            regarding the immediate possible outcomes of such action. Some of these conclusions are interestingly similar to the events
which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown. (Note
1) The report forewarned that regime change may cause regional
   instability by opening the doors to "rival forces bidding for power" which, in turn, could cause societal "fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines" and antagonize "aggressive neighbors." Further, the report illuminated worries that secure borders and a restoration of civil order may not be enough to stabilize Iraq if the replacement government were perceived as weak, subservient to outside powers, or out of touch with other regional governments. An exit strategy, the report said, would also be complicated by differing visions for a post-Saddam Iraq among those involved in the conflict.

The war game findings were declassified in 2004 and became public as a result of a FOIA request by George Washington University’s National Security Archive and their posting of the document on their website on November 4, 2006. 

The full report can be found here.

It’s one thing to screw the pooch, but when you do it even after the pooch has growled a warning you deserve a special medal of incompetence.  What’s the opposite of a Silver Star?  Whatever it is we should give it to "Heckuvajob Rummy".

**Update 11/8/06** Rummy’s resigning. President Bush thought he was great until the House was lost to the Dems and the specter of Congressional investigations loomed.  I doubt Bush even had to push very hard to get Rummy to the end of the plank.

Stupid Lawyer

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Budvase
I know, I know, many of you will probably find the title of this post redundant, but I’ve known at least one really fine lawyer in my day.  Maybe one and a half.  Anyway, here’s a post on bookofjoe about a cease and desist letter he, Joe, received from a lawyer who was supposedly defending the patent of one of her clients.  In the letter she insists that bookofjoe immediately stop manufacturing or selling the product pictured to the left.  Small problem:  Joe didn’t manufacture or sell the vase, he simply wrote about it. 

Maybe ten seconds of due-diligence by the attorney or one of her paralegals would have prevented this waste of time. But wait, maybe that’s the point.  Ten seconds of due-diligence doesn’t rack up the billable hours that penning a carefully crafted cease and desist form letter does.  Ironically the ten seconds of due-diligence might have actually led to more billable hours since Joe conveniently supplied a link to the seller of the patent-offending device. 

Ah, lawyers.