Vandal With a Handle

Overlawyered.com has a comparison of some malpractice insurance situations around the country, including some interesting notes on West Virginia. The same site has an interesting suggestion on why the U. S. diving team did so poorly in Athens. Apparently, liability concerns have about eliminated diving boards from public swimming pools in the States. I remember agonizing as a kid about climbing the ten-foot board at Dreamland Pool in Kenova, WV. It was intimidating but I remember the excitement of conquering my fear and running like an idiot off the end of that high board. Yes, I could have hurt myself, I guess, but I didn't want to and this was a great benefit. Instead, I had a great time learning to dive. It might be that the U. S. might have a problem finding divers for an olympic team if nobody can dive as a kid. Kind of like finding a rifle team in Japan or Great Britain.

Nice to see someone giving the Ohio Valley some credit for being a fun place to visit. Karen De Coster recently took a road trip through the Parkersburg, Marietta, and Sistersville area on her new motorcycle. She posts some nice photography and interesting notes on the area.
While you are at it, you might read her contribution to the discussion on whether a college education is worth it in the present job market. Note: The discussion is not whether being educated is a good and rewarding thing because of the personal rewards and depth of understanding that learning brings to one's life. It is a discussion of whether a college degree will repay in earning power its current cost. If you want to think about it, you will want to go to Gary North's article , which appeared on Lew Rockwell.com last Friday and read what he has to say about it first. An excerpt:

The businessman also wants to hire someone who will not quit the crummy entry-level job. The businessman wants continuity.

He looks for someone who has done boring grunt work without complaining, and has finished the work.

A college graduate has shown that he has been willing to suffer enormous boredom, broken only by weekend parties, for five or six years. (Very few students get through in four years, as their savings-depleted parents will tell you in private.)

Here is someone who has survived years of a system designed by bureaucrats to produce bureaucrats. He has either been subsidized by his parents (50% of college students) or else has paid his own way (that’s the one I want to hire). He has put up with years of academic nonsense spouted by left-wing bureaucrats who could not hold a regular job in industry, let alone run a business.

Here, in short, is a certified drudge. Better yet, he has been certified at someone else’s primary expense: parents, taxpayers, and collegiate donors with more money than sense.

The cost of college education in real dollars has gone up a lot since WWII. A lot more people graduate now with big loans to repay and if they are not professionals of some kind, they may not be able to earn the money to repay the loans in the current job market.

Instapundit has some excellent pictures of Knoxville on Labor Day for those nostalgic for such.

Someone showed me a link to the work of Michael Oakeshott a while back. I think I was trying to learn somethink about Karl Popper and the link came up because Popper and Oakeshott had some correspondence. I copied a an impressive quote:

The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.
--Michael Oakeshott

The quote came to mind this morning when I read One Hand Clapping and found the following poem of T. E. Lawrence:

All people dream: but not equally
Those who dream by night
wake in the day to find it was vanity.
But the dreamers of the day
are dangerous people,
for they may act their dream with open eyes
to make it possible.

Huntington and Cabell County are breaking into national news. Twice in one week. First, a rural Cabell County man dragged a donkey nearly to death behind a fourwheeler. Then someone fired a shot into the Republican headquarters while the inhabitants were watching the President speak on TV. Our little town is hardly accustomed to such scrutiny, and we could just say it has to be good publicity as long as they spell our name right. All of them didn't even do that. I read one report describing the events in "Huntington, Alabama". To make matters worse, a quick google does not reveal the existence of a Huntington, Alabama. Whatever the details, we are not immune to the paradox of human nature. An apparently average gentleman commits a hideous brutality on a helpless animal. A cowardly partisan of some kind terrorizes people persuing peaceful political action. You would probably not find anything unusual about the appearance of either of these folks on the street if you did get a look at them. At the hearing for the donkey-dragger, a companion patted him on the back and told the magistrate that he didn't mean to do it. I think that would have been an excellent opportunity for the magistrate to ask exactly what he did think he was doing. What gets into people? Maybe it doesn't have to get into them. Look at the school abomination in Russia. How far must people have departed from civilization when they can murder children for the sake of an ideology? The crust of civility wears thin.