Nebraska State Senator Sues God

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In the "You Can’t Make This Stuff Up" category is the story of Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers (Democrat from Omaha) suing God and his followers in an attempt to get them to stop making terrorist threats.  From the Wired Threat Level Blog (found via Boing Boing):

The suit
(.pdf), filed in a Nebraska district court, contends that God, along
with his followers of all persuasions, "has made and continues to make
terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons." Those
threats are credible given God’s history, Chambers’ complaint says.

Chambers, in a fit of alliteration, also accuses God of causing
"fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes,
terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines,
devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like."

Likewise the suit accuses God of having his chroniclers "disseminate
in written form, said admissions, throughout the Earth in order to
inspire fear, dread, anxiety, terror and uncertainty, in order to
coerce obedience to Defendant’s will."

Take that ye proselytizers!  But wait…it gets better:

The senator also wants the court to issue a permanent injunction
prohibiting God from issuing plagues and terrorist threats. It’s
unclear how this could work since God is usually understood to be all
powerful.

Chambers does admit that God is omnipresent and omniscient, however.
Since God is everywhere, the Nebraska court has jurisdiction, Chambers
argues, and since God is all-knowing, Chambers need not serve him with
a notice of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit indicates that Chambers attempted to make God appear in
order to serve him by saying "Come out, come out, wherever you are,"
but the Almight declined, like many defendants, to make it easy for a
plaintiff to serve him with court papers.

In all fairness to Mr. Chambers the story points out that he’s trying to make a point that the state constitution allows lawsuits to be filed for any reason. 

Personally I think Mr. Chambers is also intent on providing us the best entertainment to come out of Omaha since Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Here’s a story line: Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler assisting God with a new ark as the next great flood  bears down on them in response to Mr. Chambers’ blasphemous lawsuit, or maybe it’s punishment for Chambers’ un-godly alliteration.  Either way, it’s a winner.

If you’re another child of the 70s check out the Wild Kingdom boys in action here.   Almost brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.

links for 2007-09-18

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Just Plain Scary

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The Freakonomics blog points to some research done on sexual abuse and highlights some very frightening numbers:

1) 25 percent of victims are 10-14 years old; 23 percent are nine or younger.

2) 22.5 percent of the offenders are family members. Only 8 percent are strangers.

Basically half of the victims are children 14 and younger, and if 22.5 percent are family and 8 percent are strangers then 70% are acquaintances of the victims.  That’s bad enough, but then they write this:

3) 25 percent of sex offenses reported to the police lead to an arrest.

And these are only the offenses reported to the police. Stranger sex
offenses must be much more likely to be reported to the police than
family abuse.

Using this data, I estimate that six out of every 1,000 10- to
14-year-old girls are victims of sex offenses which are reported to the
police each year. The actual victimization rate is surely much higher.

 

Here’s the link to the research piece they are referencing.

Chris Paul on NPR

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NPR taped its show Wait Wait….Don’t Tell Me at, uh, Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University last week and it features a guest appearance by Lewisville native and former West Forsyth H.S. and Wake Forest basketball star, and current NBA standout Chris Paul.  Apparently Paul was the first pro athlete to ever appear on the show and he did a great job.  Listen to it here.

Evening with 8 Plus Smitty

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The week before last I went to Evening with 8 Plus Smitty at the Piedmont Club in the BB&T tower in Winston-Salem.  The speaker was Michael Miller, publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and there were about 30 people in attendance.

Mr. Miller gave a nice presentation and did a nice job answering questions and reacting to criticism of the newspaper, in particular the recent decisions to fold the daily business section into the local section and merge the Sunday Arts and Living sections.  I was lucky enough to sit at his table but to be honest I didn’t get a chance to speak to him because the other prominent person at the table was Phil Hanes, the former CEO of Hanes Corporation.  Let’s just say that Mr. Hanes ain’t shy.

Our table of eight was regaled with stories about Mr. Hanes’ efforts to build the Winston-Salem arts community, his involvement with the re-development of downtown Winston, and even some stories from his childhood growing up in the Hanes family.  The man is refreshingly blunt and earlier in the evening he hadn’t been shy in his criticism of the Journal’s op-ed page.  Essentially he called all of the Journal’s columnists nice people who live in the sticks and don’t ever write about what’s going on in the city.  Mr. Miller couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.

Well, I Googled Mr. Hanes and found that he’d written a book called How to Get Anyone to Do Anything and if you look at the reviews you’ll see that the first is from none other than Harper Lee who calls him an  "old friend."   Now if we were playing the Kevin Bacon game, otherwise known as six degrees of separation, that would put me only one step away from the notoriously reclusive author of one of my all-time favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird.  How cool is that!

I met a lot of other interesting people that evening, but I’ve been so busy lately it’s kind of a blur in my memory now.  The one notable I can mention is Smitty himself.  He’s the publisher of Smitty’s Notes, THE resource for happenings in Winston-Salem and he also does a fine job of putting together some interesting presenters for Evening with 8.  If you’re in the Winston area you should definitely try and attend one (the schedule is here), and I’d join you but unfortunately the rest of the sessions this fall are on Thursday nights and I’m committed to my daughter’s soccer team those evenings.  Maybe I’ll make more in the next session.

links for 2007-09-15

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