More people die in car accidents than from cervical cancer, prostate cancer, terrorist attacks, and homicide, yet we're still allowing people to drive three ton trucks with the same license you need to drive a Geo Metro.
Dateline ran a piece tonight, To Catch a Con Man. They didn't catch him, however, they just videotaped the guys, outted themselves and let the guys go. Never got the cops involved. Who needs law enforcement when you can broadcast video and hope the guys stop trying to steal money?
Oh, and Dateline paid these guys small amounts as "incentive" to maintain the scam.
Maybe next week they'll discover that criminals are cold-calling senior citizens and obtaining personal information and credit card numbers over the phone.
Bill O'Reilly attacks a legal businessman and when the businessman comes on the show to defend himself, Malkin is ruthless and asks his girlfriend why she would date this "loser".
See, this is the problem with being liberal--I accept that I can be wrong so every once in a while I need to waste 4 minutes and 12 seconds to remind myself, "No, you're completely right. Fox News is crap."
I was really interested in the HPV vaccine that's out now...until I heard how few women die in the U.S. from the cervical cancer it can cause. About 3,700 in 2005. The flu kills twenty times more people. Extreme weather kills at least half as many.
We don't know the drawbacks of the vaccine. Long term exposure (and protection) are unknown. To save about 1,000 women a year (a very small gain), this is a large risk. Take the huge amounts of money going to Merck for the most expensive children's vaccine ever and work on the existing methods that have given the U.S.A. some of the lowest rates in the world.
Per Madeline Boscoe of the Canadian Women's Health Network, "[They] die because we don't know what to do, they died because we weren't caring for them. Either they didn't come in for care, or we didn't follow up on them."
First, NBC Dateline wanted To Catch A Predator, so they teamed up with a group of vigilantes who send adults (and some kids) into internet sex chatrooms posing as children and then post the personal information of the "pedophiles" online. It took three tries before Dateline started clueing the cops in.
This past week, Dateline took on the new phenomena of people stealing expensive electronics. It seems that iPods get stolen a lot. I never would have guessed. So Dateline packaged a bunch of iPods to look new, but with a hacked installation disc that sent personal information to NBC, and left them in public places for people to find and "steal". One has to wonder if the install disc is considered criminal malware.
But it gets better. Dateline went to DEFCON to find criminal "hackers" but were exposed by the convention and ran when the DEFCON visitors wanted to take pictures.
People need to accept that a certain amount of unsought contact is going to happen, intentionally and unintentionally, and that's ok. Some of it is kids being kids. Some of it is people being people. Just because you didn't want it doesn't mean it's criminal or even ethically wrong. We're quickly discarding any sense of playfulness or friendliness in attempt to "protect the children".
Were these guys out of line? Probably. Any moreso than if they played "smack the shoulder"? As a kid, I remember guys smacking the back of other kids' necks and yelling "redneck!". Should they have been punished? Sure. But there needs to be a sense of scale. Not every action is criminal and not everything criminal is final--lots of people can learn from their mistakes and it doesn't take a decade in prison. That kind of "tough on crime" helps no one.
Oh, and "sex offenders" have a lower rate of recidividism (repeat offense) than non-"sex offenders". So says the DOJ on more than one occassion.
