Peter Krupa

From the heartland:

A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.

“We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood,” said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.

It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.

“Blood just all over my face, in my mouth, I could taste it. It was terrible. I had it in my mouth and I kept spitting and I couldn’t get rid of it,” said Huebner.

Gross. But what I want to know is, in the course of their daily work, do sewer workers normally have waste water spraying into to their faces/mouths/eyes? And in that respect, how is blood worse than, for example, feeces? Perhaps it’s the quasi-biblical nature of the event. After all, God never turned the Nile into a river of poop.

An interesting little comment thread has cropped up on my post about the sub-prime mortgage industry disaster. Pablo has cracked open his law books and brought us some intelligent analysis, while Steve has taken the opportunity to curse the forces of regulation.

According to how we (that is, Pablo) have sussed it out, sub-prime lenders make money by granting sneaky loans to people who can’t really afford them. Once the person defaults, the company takes possession of the house, flips it, makes a tidy profit, then moves on to its next victim.

This is a great business strategy - until housing prices drop. Alternatively, if the market slows down and it takes longer to sell the repossessed homes, sub-prime lenders can experience a cash-flow crunch and go tits up, which appears to be what’s going on.

Steve is worried that the regulation (and bailout) hawks are sharpening their claws. I, on the other hand, think this is a good example of why pure-bred libertarianism is a terrible idea. Libertarians base their economic philosophy on the idea that people do a detailed cost/benefit analysis before committing themselves to any transaction. But anyone who’s lived around human beings knows this is bunk, and the sub-prime mortgage crash is a perfect example.

Lack of 100 percent reasonability is still not a good enough reason in my book to start regulating the hell out of things. However, when it comes to big, big markets, where the crash of one big player who did something stupid/illegal can affect the overall value of other people’s property, the libertarian ethos (I can do what I want as long as my actions don’t hurt anyone else) has actually been trespassed.

Therefore! Considering the irrationality of people, combined with the effect their bad decisions in this case are having on those around them, I don’t think a little careful regulation as a response to this crisis would be such a bad idea. Although I’m open to suggestions. Which I’m sure you all will be giving.

- Movie studio promotional material disguised as news (drink)

- WWII/Nazis/the Holocaust/Fascism (drink)

- Lenny Bruce/Charlie Chaplin/Bob Dylan presented as hippie/red-diaper-baby magic talismans of Culture. (drink, drink, drink!)

- Trend stories (”more and more”/”increasingly”/”anecdotally speaking”) (drink once for every 1,000 words)

- Scientific studies presented to explain/justify why human beings do what they do… (drink)

- … especially in relation to some issue of culture wars, eg- homosexual sheep (chug)

- “How has (X) changed since 9/11?” (finish the fucking bottle)

Reading about this on-going sub-prime mortgage colapse thing, in which thousands of people are losing their homes because they signed up for shady mortgage deals, I’m left wondering: Isn’t it bad for business to screw so many people so badly? Surely some knuckle-heads who wanted to make a quick buck are regretting it. Or maybe not. Anyway, thank god I rent.

A German judge has cited the Koran in denying a speedy divorce to a woman of Moroccan descent whose husband was beating her and threatening to kill her:

In January, the judge turned down the wife’s request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband’s behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. “In this cultural background,” she wrote, “it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife.”

Ms. Becker-Rojczyk filed a request to remove the judge from the case, contending that she had not been neutral.

In a statement defending her ruling, Judge Datz-Winter noted that she had ordered the man to move out and put a restraining order on him. But she also cited the verse in the Koran that speaks of a husband’s prerogatives in disciplining his wife. And she suggested that the wife’s Western lifestyle would give her husband grounds to claim his honor had been compromised.

The woman, her lawyer said, does not wear a headscarf. She has been a German citizen for eight years.

Sometimes these things are so ridiculous I suspect leg-pulling. From the craigslist.org writing gigs message board:

WRITER NEEDED
Ok so. I have a couple of story ideas if there are any writers interested.

-PETEY 

It turns out there was more to that Bronx fire situation I posted about awhile back. I made an off-hand comment about male-dominated Muslim culture being kind of a problem, but I was a little more right than I realized. Turns out the husband taxi driver was actually a husband twice. He had two wives living in that building.

And today, the New York Times gets a gold star for covering polygamy in the New York African immigrant community. This is the part of the show where cultural relativism starts to look a little bit sick:

Don’t-ask-don’t-know policies prevail in many agencies that deal with immigrant families in New York, perhaps because there is no framework for addressing polygamy in a city that prides itself on tolerance of religious, cultural and sexual differences — and on support for human rights and equality.

Tolerance. Which is all well and good until someone gets her genitals mutilated and is forced at the age of 15 to marry an abusive stranger. If that’s their culture, that’s fine with me.

As long as they keep it in their own shitty country.

It was 60 degrees in the city today, damp and humid and thawing, and so all the creepy things crawled out of the alleys and window wells and subway tunnels to leer and stagger in a state of public intoxication. Young men stood in groups on street corners and puffed out their chests in the sunlight, posturing loudly, legs akimbo, while the dirty slush melted and dripped into the gutters. Everything had come alive in an edgy, shifty-eyed, spring-fever kind of way, like something was about to happen, but it wouldn’t until after the sun had set.

It’s a pretty well established fact that journalists put quotes into their articles as a matter of form, not substance. It’s also a matter of gerrymandering to get at the truth. The reporter wants to say something obvious, but he can’t say it because, hm, that would mean he is biased, or whatever. So we get quotes like this one in a story on a $12,000 theft from a Victoria’s Secret store:

“That stuff is pretty expensive,” said Nancy Bochenek, 29, who works nearby at ISO, a risk-analysis company. She said she buys pajamas and panties there. “So a few bras?” Ms. Bochenek said. “That adds up. The newer bras are, like, $50 a bra.” 

Why? Why is this quote in the article? To add color? Column inches? What? See, this is why I never want to work for a general interest newspaper ever again, because the editors want you to get these stupid man-on-the-street quotes that add nothing to the news.

Except The Economist. The Economist doesn’t quote shit. They’re kind of bad-ass that way.

I’m usually not one to dump on Europeans for kowtowing to extremism, etcetera, but this latest move by the Italians seems like a particularly bad one: They’ve swapped five Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan for a journalist hostage.

“We think that the life of a person is very precious,” said Mr. Prodi’s spokesman, Silvio Sircana, who is also a friend of Mr. Mastrogiacomo’s. “So if there is a chance to save a life, we must do all we can do. And this was our very simple line, and not anything more.”

Meanwhile, Ustad Yasir, one of the Taliban prisoners released, has stated that “he would return immediately to war, and was ‘grabbing two rifles to begin jihad again to hunt down invaders and fight nonbelievers.’”

Morally, this feels like some sort of a puzzle from a freshman-level ethics seminar: Is it worth it to save one life now if by doing so you endanger a dozen more later? It’s a fascinating question. For an ethics seminar.

Meanwhile, I certainly wouldn’t want to be an Italian civilian working in Afghanistan right now.