As a result, the average mailbag page should have 6 or 8 or 10 mails, all with comments from me, all about things that weren't beaten to death on the main page, and all on interesting subjects.  Enjoy May's offerings.

Mails are arranged in chronological order, with the earliest on top.

Date: May 2, 2004
From: Stephen
Subject: Blog Comments

Regarding today's blog and the part about that guy killing someone while being drunk. Does the U.S. (or Canada in that case) do have a zero tolerance policy regarding alcohol while driving?

Furthermore I don't think that people, while under the influence of alcohol, do give any second thoughts about what they're doing. They just become indifferent and just don't care, so I doubt they even get that far to actually evaluate possible consequences. This shouldn't save them from being punished to the fully extent however.

I think I quoted and commented on this one when it first came in, but that's the beauty (and curse) of compiling the mailbags months and months after the fact; I never really know if a mail has been posted before.  Looking back at the May 1, 2004 blog entry, I see that I ranted pretty fiercely about drunk driving, and really, that there's not much to add to what I said then.

As for Stephen's question, I don't know what he means by "zero tolerance policy regarding alcohol while driving?" I guess he's asking about how much you can drink and still legally drive, but he might be asking how many times you can get busted DUI without losing your license forever. To answer, belatedly, there is no zero tolerance in either case.

This is, of course, completely variable from person to person. Lightweights who hardly ever drink, like Malaya or me, feel buzzed after a single strong drink, while seasoned alcoholics can put away a 12-pack of beer without even feeling it.

Also, cops can give you a ticket and get your license taken away without you being drunk; if you're at 0.05% and weaving across four lanes at midnight with no lights on, they can nail you for reckless driving, speeding, failure to signal lane change, etc, and just because you blog the DUI-o-meter at something lower than the illegal cut off doesn't mean you won't get busted for drunk driving. You might fight it and win in court if you could argue that you had an allergic reaction to cold medicine or something, but you'd still be on the hook for the reckless driving and other stuff, since that's your word against the cop's, and he's probably going to win that one.

As for the other interpretation of Stephen's question; how many times you can be busted DUI before you lose your license and/or go to jail, I dunno. It varies from state to state, but I do know that in California it's very expensive. The wife of one of my dad's friends got popped speeding on the way home from a big dinner with lots of wine, and when she blew 0.10% she was arrested, her car was towed and impounded, and she was hit with huge fines.  In addition, to avoid jail time and license suspension she's got to go to like a week of driver's training classes and lectures, pay huge fines and penalties, her insurance is going up, and more. I don't have the total figures, but it's costing her something like $7000 in total expenses, just for that one ticket and DUI, which is probably a better way to prevent repeat offenses than mandatory jail time.

The problem is that she's a real person with a job and a home and responsibilities, so she's got to stay on the right side of the law and pay all the fines and go to school and all of that. Lower class people, or people in other states with less strict laws than California, spend the night in jail, get their car out of impound the next day, and blow off their court dates, blow off the drunk driving classes and community service, and keep on drinking, keep on driving, and hope for the best.

Even if you do get busted several times and lose your license, there's nothing in a car that keeps you from starting it up if you don't have a valid driver's license. Plenty of people with suspended licenses or no licenses at all drive every day, since they simply have to to get to work, or since they just don't give a fuck. And as overcrowded as our jails are now (mostly from ridiculous drug laws) there's not room to put people away for drunk driving, nor is there political will to do so if they haven't actually killed or maimed anyone while driving drunk. Society tends to still look at it as a largely-victimless crime, and unless/until that changes I don't see things changing too much.

_________________

Date: May 5, 2004
From: Elsha-of-IEL 
Subject: stupid TV shows

stupid tv shows!

crappy TV shows are always funny to watch even though it's so stupid :D not so much for the show itself than for the people and just the ridiculousness of it all. normally i'd never be caught dead watching reality TV or most game shows and the battle dome rubbish or anything else stupid, but if i come across it while surfing channels i'll occasionally watch it for a while until i get sick of it and tell myself "wtpudge new channel plz." 99% of it is so obviously a publicity stunt and is sounds so scripted that it's extremely difficult to believe the network when they claim the shows aren't scripted.

Springer in particular annoys and amuses me greatly on several levels. firstly, the annoying bits. all the knobbers who appear on the show are all just looking to be on TV and to let off steam about something that really doesn't mean anything to them. not to mention all the "oh so angsty relationship problems we have" and the ridiculous people who go on to scream "look at me look at me" to the US of A are all laughably insensitive and ungenuine in a lot of their sayings. sure they get pissed when they get into fights (or try to as the security people run around preventing people's heads from being removed from shoulders), but if they -really- cared about said relationships, they'd do it in private, not in front of millions of viewers (who also don't give a rat's ass about the couple(s)/people on the show either). not to mention Jerry tries to be all sympathetic but all he does is make snarky and (sometimes) funny comments.

ah well. despite all the stupidity it's funny to see how people try to defend themselves with dumb arguments or just have (far too) obvious publicity stunters running around.

i'm also rather fond of watching shows like the Bachelor or Paradise Hotel (Paradise Island? don't remember the name) for the sole reason o see how many cliched/overused/classic/etc lines the people can sprout. things like "i really feel like this woman is the one i'm looking for" or "i really connect with him" and "he's so perfect for me!" and so on.

for the Bachelor, the way i see things, it's just a show for some horny guy to be with several women and finally pick someone to marry while ending up getting a divorce in a few years or so. well, maybe not that bluntly, but heh. it's a lame show :/ i'm of the school where women are to be treated with respect and chivalry and all, and courting several women at once is a huge nono in my book ;o

There are two types of people in the world. Those who admit to enjoying some really bad reality TV shows, those who watch really bad reality TV shows without admitting it, and those who have never refused to watch a second of the shows and have therefore never gotten hooked. Oh, and those who can't count.

I am currently in the first group, and I speak with authority, since I used to be in the second group, until I came to live with Malaya and was reluctantly roped into watching some reality TV. Predictably enough, the shows grew on me like mildew in a serial killer's basement, and while I don't watch many of those shows, I do enjoy The Amazing Race, occasional bits of Survivor, and the daily trash TV dosages of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. All on tape, of course, so we can skip the sappy bits and commercials, a viewing habit that makes every program more enjoyable.

_________________

Date: May 23, 2004
From: Kai
Subject: Concerning Troy

A reader far more knowledgeable than I mailed in with some comments on the actual historical (at least as best we know from mythic retellings) information about the siege of Troy. Thanks to Kai for the following, which I've broken up into paragraphs, with my comments throughout. Kai's mail is in indented purple, my comments are in black.

I'm not going to argue his facts, since I don't know them, and I don't care enough to go back and read the legend and historical books on the subject. So my comments here are just from common sense, rather than any historical knowledge. Also, keep in mind that my comments in the review were mostly about how events were presented in the movie; not how they are told in the legend, or how they may or may not have actually occurred, if any of this actually occurred in the first place.

I've been a site reader for some time now, and finally gathered
the guts to email back about a topic. Anyway, I mostly disagree
about the your views of the military siege, or lack thereof, for
Troy.

Recall that the Trojan War was fought well over 2500 years ago, where siege machines were non-existant, written by a blind poet who, by all accounts, never participated in any battles. Ergo, his
stories are mostly for entertainment, and nothing remotely resembling military tactics. However, you brought up certain points that weren't exactly true.

They could build 80-foot ships with multiple decks, a 50-foot tall/long wooden horse that was hollow inside and had a concealed trap door, but they couldn't build a few 30 foot towers and roll them up to the walls?

Firstly, the Greeks did have a whole bunch of ships sail. That number was greatly exaggerated to 1000, since Achilles himself brought somewhere in the vicinity of 40, and Odysseus, another great leader, brought only 3. So it is completely possible for the ships to have landed on a 1 mile strip long beach. And due to the time, there wasn't such a thing as doctors ... Hippocrates wasn't born yet. Blacksmiths - none either. All weapons and armor are either magically forged or plundered.

Well of course it wasn't that many boats in real life, but in the movie they showed 1000ish, so we're going with that, and it was the basis for my comments on how silly the spacing was on the beach. As for the medicine, it just seems like common sense to put all of the men who were too injured to fight in the same place; men must have taken injury in battle and survived after healing constantly back then; it wasn't like they just left everyone with a cut to die in the field.  Also, someone had to make the weapons in the first place, I mean they weren't dropped by aliens or anything.

Which brings up the second point. Troy, one country by itself, could not hope to stand up against the entire Greek juggernaut.  Logically, she had allies as well. The Greeks spent the first 9 years of engagement raiding and sacking the outlying provinces and cities of Troy, hoping to erode the support. Didn't work. So finally they tried to besiege Troy, and due to the supporting hinterlands, Troy managed to stay sufficient. And if one reads the Illiad literally, Troy itself was besieged for less than 3 weeks. So no starvation, desperation, etc. Furthermore, siege equipment was nonexistent at that point. About the best weapon they had versus a fortified city would be fire.

Now this is the sort of interesting stuff I wish the movie had contained, though it's well outside the scope of the movie. Everyone with any familiarity with the legend of Troy has heard the "10 year siege" story, so when it takes about 2 weeks in the movie the audience is like, "Huh?" Also, who needs siege weaponry if they've got enough numbers to block every exit from the city and keep food from flowing in? The besiegers can scour the countryside while the people in Troy are eating grain, and then rats.  Even a small castle was basically impregnable for centuries, until gunpowder enabled weapons to be powerful enough to blast holes in stone walls. That's the point in a siege; to starve them out until they're too weak to keep fighting off basic "over the wall on ladder" siege technology.

About the fortifications, as well. It is said that Poseidon himself laid the walls of Troy. I'd doubt that any mortal engineering would take down such a wall. Which begs the question, why the hell didn't the Trojans just wait in their city and ignore the Greeks? Pride and honor, it seems. In those days, morale was a huge part of the army. If a great warrior was wounded, his entire side would retreat from an otherwise victorious attack. Or if he was defending, his legions would fall back in disarray even if the opposing army wasn't making any headway. Or at least that's what happened in Homer's world.

This is something else that's interesting to know, and would have benefited the average moviegoer. I saw lots of reviews from people wondering why the entire war stopped to watch Hector kill Achilles' cousin in Achilles' armor, and why they all stopped fighting when they thought Achilles was dead. It really was all about individual combat and heroes and champions back then. After all, if you're some normal foot soldier and you don't want to die, why risk it when you can triumph by rooting on your best fighter against their best?

And thus, the Trojans were forced to meet the Greeks in open battle on a plain (which evolved into 1v1 matches a good portion of the time), and not shoot behind their walls. In fact, there was only a single instance in which the Trojans retreated behind their walls during a battle (when Achilles stopped sulking) and even then, Hector stood before the gate and refused to retreat. And was summarily slaughtered by Achilles.

Kai

I think a very good article could be written comparing Troy the movie to the version of the story in legend to what we know about historical battles of that time. What legend says happened, how much sense that makes in warfare terms, what war was really like back then, etc.  Unfortunately I lack 90% of the knowledge required to write that article, so I'm just speculating on it, for now.

_________________

After posting a string of news items on mad cow disease in the American beef industry (see them collected here), and frequently-stating that the intentionally-inadequate efforts of the USDA are allowing BSE-infected cows into the food supply, a libertarian reader wrote in to offer his opinion.

Date: May 26, 2004
From: Aahz
Subject: Why I still eat yummy beef

I know it's a fun topic for your blog, but you might want to hold off on future predictions:

http://www.cato.org/research/articles/milloy-040102.html

-Aahz

I replied to his mail, he replied to my mail, and graciously granted me the final comment, which I'll include below the quotes. The following double-indented black text is my email and the purple is his reply.

Interesting theory, and blog-worthy, but was there some scientific proof there, or did I miss it?

No, you didn't miss it. The point of the article was that there was no scientific proof that eating BSE-infected beef leads to humans developing CJD. What kind of burden are we setting if we don't allow things that can't be 100% proven to be safe?

Dueling experts can be found in any field, with one side usually the more or less unified scientific opinion (which is sometimes wrong, but not usually) while the other side is industry-funded or ideologically motivated.

Yes but let's keep in mind that the people (like yourself) that are claiming that there is causation are also ideologically motivated. I think the point of the article is to point out that until there is more objective evidence, it should not become public policy to ban beef.

It may not currently be 100% proven (or disproven) that eating cows with CJD leads to mad cow disease in humans, but even if it doesn't kill us, can it be good to eat?

Of course it can. Isn't that what we're admitting when say that it's not 100% proven? Maybe I'm just getting hung up on the "can" in your sentence. Based on the number of people who have consumed beef worldwide and the low incidence of the disease, I would say there's at least a good chance that consuming BSE-contaminated beef is no worse than normal beef. How much BSE-contaminated beef does one have to consume before one is at risk of contracting CJD? Life is about managing risk versus happiness, right? I still feel comfortable eating beef. 

And wouldn't USDA adequately enforcing current health requirements for the slaughter of livestock be a good place to start?

It's that "adequately enforcing" part that concerns me. How much is enough? I am afraid that there would never be enough regulations for people like you, and the price would simply continue to climb without any actual benefits gained. Plus we "gain" the types of efficiencies we have now where the USDA doesn't even allow private companies that WANT to test to do so. I would prefer private, independent agencies to set guidelines and do testing, then allow people to choose between regulated, non-regulated, or heavy-regulated beef. My question to you is, why do you favor the current system where special interests have so much clout to influence things their way?

Aahz

P.S. I don't think this is as good as my first response, but Yahoo ate that one. Oh well.

P.P.S. I hereby grant you permission to laugh at me if I develop holes in my brain from beef consumption in ten years.

Is, "America has the laxest public food safety regulations in the industrialized world!" something we should be proud of?

Flux

His argument is interesting, as it mostly goes right around the end of the common perception, and what I was commenting on in my blog entries. I'm not a doctor and I don't know anything about BSE, why it kills cows, how it shows up in them, why it kills people, if it does, what sort of dosage you need to ingest to get it, etc. And I'm not about to go and do research on it myself, since it's way too far outside of my field of expertise, and there's no way to apply general knowledge to the subject. What I can apply general knowledge to is news reports of what are clearly dangerous beef slaughtering practices, things that aren't allowed in any other developed nation, but are defended by the beef industry in the US since they are cheaper than doing things the way other nations do them. Separating the brain and spinal cord from the animal before processing, not feeding ground up cow back to living cows in their feed, etc.

As for BSE and what it does to humans, I don't know. I don't know that cigarettes and asbestos cause cancer either, for that matter. Almost all of the scientists say they do, and there are tons of studies that prove a casualty causality, but for decades there were plenty of industry scientists who could "prove" that cigarette smoke wasn't harmful at all. Beef industry spokesmen and anti-government regulation groups (like the libertarian CATO Institute Aahz cites) now say that not only is the US beef supply safe, but that BSE in cows isn't proven to lead to the very rare BSE disease in humans anyway. And while I think they're delusional or indifferent to public health in the first instance, they may well be correct about the disease-link. As I admitted earlier, I'm not an expert to comment on that aspect of it. Conventional wisdom about scientific issues is sometimes completely wrong, though not usually when it errs on the side of caution: DDT was a miracle chemical until time proved it devastating to the ecosystem, asbestos was safe until everyone started getting cancer from breathing it, and so on. There have probably been chemicals and medical things that were thought dangerous until time and experimentation proved that they actually weren't dangerous, but I can't think of any off hand.

I bet a libertarian like Aahz could though.

As for his last question:

My question to you is, why do you favor the current system where special interests have so much clout to influence things their way?

This question perfectly illustrates why people get into arguments; different views of the world. In the American I see, special interests have virtually no clout in most issues, with monolithic, profits-first corporations in almost total control of almost everything, especially the government. They just give lip service to special interest groups who value things like public health, and those groups might get into the news from time to time, but they've got almost no weight when it comes to what actually gets done.

In the American Aahz sees, (generalizing here, obviously) businesses are the best source of economic prosperity and they're doing all that needs to be done for the public health and welfare, and if only intrusive government and ideological special interest groups would quit bugging them and cutting into their profit margins the world would be a far better place.

When it comes to the BSE issue... what special interests have any sway here? As far as I can see, the beef industry is doing pretty much whatever they want to do, the toothless USDA is completely in their pocket, and aside from occasional news articles that I think will be prominently quoted when the Mad Cow Disease epidemic begins to break out in the US in 10 or 15 or 20 years, no one is saying much about it.

As for BSE health issues, we know that people get a disease that eats holes in their brains, can't be cured, and sometimes proves fatal. Most scientists say that disease is very similar (for medical reasons I lack the scientific expertise to comment on) to a disease cows get, and those same scientists say it can be transmitted to humans who eat infected cows. Where's the debate there?

As for the "who do you believe" issue... people who don't agree that Mad Cow in humans in the US is a burgeoning problem mostly seem to be affiliated with the beef industry, which automatically gets them categorized in the "tobacco industry lung cancer scientist" group. That's probably not quite fair, but that's just the way it goes with industry-funded scientists. As for the scientists on the other side, I'm sure some are ideologically-opposed to the US agribusiness industry, or they're radical vegan PETA members, or maybe they're paid by KFC and the tofu industry to sabotage beef consumption ... but other than that, what's their axe to grind? What do they get out of issuing Mad Cow warnings, other than harassment by the USDA and beef industry? Internet fame? Denial of funding at their Ag-school when the beef industry puts pressure on the president to deny them tenure?

_________________

 

Date: May 28, 2004
From: Sprad
Subject: Nice page, mana, and Norweigans

Hi,

I've been a regular reader of diabloii.net for the last three and a half years. So first of all; thanks for your contributions to my enjoyment of the game. I also take a look at your blog about weekly. But to get to the point...

A couple of months ago, walking through the local grocery, I found a new and interesting variety of juice called mana. For obvious reason I had to buy it.

I have to say my repect for my sorc' who has to drink a lot of the stuff has risen to new hights when I tasted it... Gawd!
The flavour (described directly under "mana" on the carton) is blueberry and "aronia". I have no idea what "aronia" is, but seeing blueberries taste nice and mana tasts horrible, I would expect "aronia" to be something that gives mana it's awful taste. Probably to make sure you are a true hero if you are going to drink a potion of it.

As far as I know "mana" means nothing special for the average Norwegian (where I'm from), but probably for a lucky few...

Anyway. Have been thinking of sending you the photo for a while, so here it finally is.

Oh, and your assumtions of how Europeans look at "dubya" is spot on! Hopefully your elections will sort that out... Good luck!

Keep up the good blog!

I've got little to add to this; I just thought it was a cute mail and if sharing cute mails isn't what mailbags are for... that is not a world in which I wish to live.

That's it for the May mails. If you would like to be included in a future mail bag, give it a try.

<-- April 2004 -- June 2004 -->
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