cctv, the public safety placebo.

Do more CCTV cameras in public places increase public safety and protect the community from violent nutcases?

Let’s check with our friends in the U.K., which is operating 20% of the world’s public safety CCTV cameras. (Evidence says: Definitely not in this case.)

CCTV cameras don’t prevent crimes, people.  They may make it easier to identify the bad guys after the fact, but there’s no way to monitor all of those cameras 24/7 and dispatch a cop to the scene instantly if the monitor shows a crime in progress.  They’re not there to make people safer, they’re to make the post-crime work of the police easier, and to give the illusion of safety.  Sure, you’re more likely to catch the perpetrator if he was unwise or reckless enough to show his face on camera…but that’s a small consolation if you’re the victim.  When you back up those CCTV cameras with a justice system more concerned with protecting the perp than the victim, they’re actually worse than useless, because then their only raison d’etre is to give the politcritters something to point at and say, “See? We’re doing something!”

the snow gestapo.

In Boston, you can be fined for not clearing the snow off your sidewalk after a storm.  You can also be fined for not clearing the public sidewalk in front of your property. To ensure compliance, the city’s Code Enforcement Police drives around and tickets people for not clearing snow, not clearing the snow in the right manner, or not clearing it to approved city measurements.

Now, regardless of my thoughts on the ordinance in question and the enforcement thereof, what rankled me most about that article was the attitude of the enforcer featured, one Sergeant Steven Tankle.  He’s a perfect example of what happens when a powerful bureaucracy gives a little man a badge, a ticket book, and legal authority to lord it over his fellow citizens.  He doesn’t just do his job impartially; he relishes the power he holds, and he looks forward to using that power as often as he can.

In Germany, they have a derogatory name for people with such a mentality: Blockwart.  The blockwart was the Nazi party member politically responsible for the city block, and usually also the local Gestapo denouncer, ratting out the people in his neighborhood if they were overheard talking critically about the regime.  A Blockwart is the type of unpleasant fellow who will call the cops on neighbors whose hedges are untrimmed, or who park their car half an inch too far away from the curb.

Sergeant Tankle doesn’t care about snow, or how and when you clear it.  People like him are drawn to jobs where you can legally throw your weight around and bark orders at people, because it makes him feel bigger and more important at the end of the day.  If someone told him tomorrow that instead of snow code enforcement, he’d have to bully people over wearing a crucifix (or not wearing one), or drinking coffee left-handed, or walking out of step with your group, or wearing white socks with jeans, he’d cheerfully get out the ticket book, shine his badge, and go to work with a song on his lips.

The next time you wonder how a nation of fastidious, orderly people could turn into the butchers of ten million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables”, think about what would happen if you gave the good Sergeant a machine gun instead of a ticket book, and you told him that an easy-to-identify segment of the population in his city has no human rights, and can be shot without legal penalty for not following orders instantly…

christ, what an asshole.

You might be a douchebag if you walk into a pizza parlor with a Bob Dylan backstage pass, in a town where Bob Dylan just played a concert, and order $4,000 worth of pizzas as a prank, keeping the staff busy making 178 grease pies until half past five in the morning.

As the owner of the pizza joint, would I have my staff crank out four grand of merchandise on a verbal order without so much as a credit card number?  Probably not.  Still, there’s only one douchebag in this particular story.  In the end, the joke is on him as he has to fork over a few grand for a few minutes of yuks with his buddies.

more snowpocalypse reporting.

Yeap. That’s a fair bit of snow theah.

Look! It’s a New Englander in traditional tribal costume.

snowpocalypse!

Two items this morning:

First, we have the obligatory post-Christmas “unwrapping carnage” picture every parent is legally required to inflict on the rest of the world.

Santa stopped by, ate all the expensive imported gingerbread cookies, drank the spiked egg nog, and left a bunch of loot.  The big hit this year were the bed tents for the kids.

Next item: the view from our kitchen window as of ten minutes ago.

Mind you, that’s after the plow guy came through at 2am and cleaned our driveway.  The wind is blowing at 30mph out there, and the snow is sort of blowing horizontally.  Now I get to fire up Mr. Snowblower and put the auger to Gaia, so Robin can make the ill-advised trek into work against my explicit advice.  (And believe me, I was explicit.)

On the bright side, we still have power and Internets, and the kids have a lot of snow to play in this afternoon.  I’m thinking we’ll make a life-sized Snow Cthulhu, towering over nearby Enfield proper.

christmas 2010.

Merry Christmas from the crew and waitstaff here at Castle Frostbite in scenic Upper Cryogenica.  It’s a balmy 7 degrees outside, the presents have been opened, and now we’re going to transition seamlessly to shameless gluttony and hedonism for the rest of the day.  Right after I get some more firewood in, that is.

I wish you all Happy Holidays and a great start into 2011.

pet peeves, part #29911.

One day a week, I get to take a break from parenting and go out on what I call my “Dadcations”.  I usually leave the house after breakfast and stay out until after lunch.  This is when I go to the bookstore to browse for new stuff and sit down in the bookstore’s café to scribble a thousand words or so.

Since I go there on the same day more or less at the same time, I tend to see the same faces in the bookstore café.  One of them is a woman who mildly ticks me off every time I see her.  Without fail, she’ll occupy the same table, set up her humongous laptop, and then proceed to use the café’s free WiFi while eating a bag breakfast she clearly bought somewhere else.  Everyone in the café has at least a $2 coffee in front of them, but this lady has never, to my knowledge, patronized the café where she’s making use of their space, electricity, and bandwidth.  Instead, she carries in a bag from Mickey D’s or Wendy’s, complete with 32-ounce large drink.

Am I somehow unreasonably sensitive about this?  It just strikes me as incredibly rude to be taking up resources of a business without actually subsidizing the availability of those resources with the purchase of at least a stinking two-dollar cup of coffee.

will put hair on chest.

Is cocktail recipe.  You make.

1.) You take lowball glass.

2.) You put in two shots of Bacardi 151.

3.) You add dash of vanilla extract.

4.) You float marshmallow Peep on top of rum.

5.) You light rum on fire, and let flames start caramelize Peep.

6.) You extinguish with vanilla cola, and fill up glass.

7.) You eat warm,  rum-soaked, caramelized Peep.

8.) You wash down Peep with rest of drink, quickly.

9.) You have another.  Or just have one, if you are pussy.

a linguistic PSA.

Dear language-using public:

Using the German umlaut in place of an English vowel may look cool and edgy, but it changes the way the word is pronounced.

The umlaut letters Ä, Ö, and Ü change the sound of the respective vowel from a back to a front vowel.  (To a German speaker, the first part of Motörhead would be pronounced like the French word for motor, moteur.)

Just a quick reminder to let you know that you’re actually making German speakers try and pronounce your word constructs in their heads when you indiscriminately use the Heavy Metal umlaut.  Think of the German speakers, please.

 

…and everyone will be happy as they ride their trabants into the sunset.

There are few experiences more frustrating than debating economics with someone who is illiterate on the subject.  I recently had a discussion with a loose acquaintance from Germany, who has come up with a Really Smart Idea(tm) to achieve social justice and economic equality.  I shall now attempt to relate the main points of his theory without stabbing myself in the ear with a cocktail fork at the pain of the recollection.

His Really Smart Idea:

The government needs to seize all the private cash in the country–bank accounts, savings, and especially corporate assets.  All essential industries and businesses need to be nationalized.  Once that’s accomplished, you’ll have a gigantic pile of cash.  Now you divide up all the money between all the citizens, and give everyone a million Euros each.  (Why a million?  Because our Really Smart theorist considers this “all the money a person could ever need for the rest of his or her life.”)  Bingo!  Everyone has everything they’ll need, and there’s equality all around.

At that point in the discussion, I asked how he thought all that money would influence prices of consumer goods.  I mean, with eighty million people sitting at home with their newly flush bank accounts, what happens when people go on eBay and start bidding on stuff they want?  Say there’s a really nice designer purse.  With a million Euros in everyone’s accounts, where’s the bidding going to stop if there’s only ten of those things on the ‘bay, and three thousand people get into a bidding war?  And never mind luxury goods–what about any consumer good in limited supply?  The money situation is going to adjust itself according to supply and demand, and your million Euros aren’t going to last you very long if your tank of gas costs two thousand, and people buy purses for a hundred grand off eBay.

His Really Smart Solution (and he has one for every scenario I threw at him):  pass a law that makes it illegal for anyone to sell stuff for more than it is worth.  How do we determine what something’s worth?  Easy! The government freezes the prices of raw materials, and people can charge the exact price of the materials that went into the product, plus the exact labor that went into it according to a pre-set hourly wage table.  No more evil profiteering, and those million Euros will once again stretch from cradle to grave.

Then I brought up individual money management skills.  If Citizen A blows his million Euros in his lifetime, and Citizen B saves half a million to pass down to his kids, won’t we have economic inequality starting in the next generation again?

The answer is simple, of course.  His plan: confiscate all personal assets at death, and put that money “back into the pot”.  That way, everyone starts out at the same position in life, and there’ll be no more unfair advantages bestowed on upper-class kids via unearned inheritances.

At that point, I excused myself from the debate, realizing that we were inhabiting separate realities.  I mean, linguistically speaking, we were communicating in the same language, but it felt rather like trying to talk trigonometry with an automated customer service recording.

I don’t know what’s more frightening, though: the fact that this is an adult with full voting rights, that quite a few of his twenty-something college-educated peers think along the same lines, or that I could turn that theory into a lecture and *not* categorically get laughed out of the lecture hall?