People With Too Much Money
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney caught criticism for his proposed California home with parking on an upper floor, requiring a car elevator. Much more elaborate elevator access will be available in the new Porsche Design Tower near Miami (opening in 2016 and already 80 percent sold out, according to a December report by www.Slate.com). The 132 ocean-side units (in square footage from 4,300 to 17,000 and in price from $5.3 million to $32.5 million) include glass-walled, elevator-accessed spaces for two or four cars (for people who would rather admire their Bugattis and Maseratis than the Atlantic Ocean).
Can’t Possibly Be True
Equality Under Law: (1) In December, Fort Worth, Texas, judge Jean Boyd sentenced teenager Ethan Couch to probation with no jail time for drunkenly killing four people in a car crash, apparently accepting Couch’s “defense” that his affluent, permissive childhood had taught him irresponsibility. (WFAA-TV turned up a 2012 case in which Judge Boyd sentenced a 14-year-old black kid to prison for punching another boy who then fell, bumped his head and died.) (2) New York City prostitute murderer Rasheen Everett got a 29-year sentence in December, despite his lawyer’s “defense” that the victim was merely a transgendered prostitute: “Shouldn’t (29-year sentences) be reserved for people who are guilty of killing certain (higher) classes of individuals?”…
Many medical professionals are certain that Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, 70, is a quack, treating cancer patients with expensive, FDA-unapproved substances, giving false hope to the terminally ill and in some cases diverting them from better-regarded treatments. However, according to a December USA Today investigation, Dr. Burzynski enjoys enthusiastic support from a small but dedicated group of patients, and neither regulators in Texas (where he is licensed) nor two juries (who turned back indictments against him) have been able to stop him. FDA regulators have been inconsistent toward him but appear to be gaining aggressiveness following recent inspections of his facilities. (Dr. Burzynski manufactures his own proprietary drugs, charging around $10,000 a month to patients who can pay.)
Inexplicable
One Rule Fits All: Jim Howe, father of two children at South Cumberland Elementary School in Crossville, Tenn., was handcuffed and briefly detained by a sheriff’s deputy in November after mistakenly believing that he could walk his kids home when class let out at 2 p.m. Actually, the school allows 2 p.m. departure only for kids being picked up in cars; pupils who leave on foot must wait until 2:35. (Howe assumed that the waiting period was only to protect young pedestrians from pick-up traffic.) Deputy Avery Aytes said a rule is a rule and that if Howe failed to cooperate, he would be jailed.
Perspective
While many educators lament the mediocrity of American universities in encouraging the study of science and engineering, U.S. colleges are surely among world leaders in one area: sensitivity to students questioning their gender. In the current school year, Bellevue (Wash.) College and Mills College (Oakland, Calif.) have offered students unprecedented choices of self-identification. “Male/female” is no longer useful at Bellevue, which offers “feminine, masculine, androgynous, gender neutral, transgender and other.” At Mills, students identify themselves as “agender, bigender, third-gender or gender-fluid” and select the pronoun they wish to be referred to with (he or she or ze or sie or ve, or the agrammatical “they”).
The Continuing Crisis
When a pickpocket shared a taxi ride with him recently in China’s Hunan province and somehow managed to lift Zou Bin’s iPhone, Zou was frightened that he had lost all of his beverage-industry business contacts and began text-messaging desperate pleas to the thief. Several days later, in the postal mail, Zou received a list of his contacts, apparently carefully copied from the phone, totaling 11 handwritten pages of names and numbers, and as the story broke on Chinese social media, the earnest thief was referred to as “the conscience of the (robbery) industry,” and compared to a member of the People’s Liberation Army as the model conscientious citizen that the Chinese should aspire to.
News That Sounds Like a Joke
Iowa lawyer Robert Allan Wright Jr. was suspended for a year by the Attorney Disciplinary Board in December for mishandling client funds. One client had received a “Nigerian inheritance” letter in 2011, and Wright apparently jumped at the opportunity to receive “$18 million,” seemingly unaware of what almost everyone else in the developed world knows about unsolicited Nigerian business deals. By December 2013, Wright had looted accounts of other clients in order to pay the “fees” necessary to free up the $18 million. He was spared a more onerous punishment only because the board concluded that Wright “honestly continues to believe” that the inheritance is real and that “one day a trunk full of one hundred dollar bills is going to appear upon his office doorstep.” CV
