09:19 – Things are slow at work, so Barbara decided to take today off. Her parents are starting their move this weekend from their house to the retirement facility. For now, they’ll be moving into a guest apartment temporarily while the one they’ll ultimately be in is cleaned and painted. We’ve been accumulating boxes for the move, which is no problem at all here, with science kit component shipments arriving frequently. Barbara just hauled a load over to her parents’ house, where she’ll spend the day helping them get some of their stuff packed up and ready to move tomorrow.
Science kit sales have been erratic. Some days, we sell only one or two science kits, or even none. Other days, we sell five or eight kits. As of now, we’re still in relatively good shape on biology and forensic science kits, but we’re down to half a dozen finished chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, we have a dozen more that just need to be boxed up and 30 more after that in progress. The biology kits worry me a bit. We have about 20 of those in stock, but once we run dry we have to start from scratch to build a new batch. That means making up and bottling a bunch of chemicals and so on. So I guess we’d better get started on a new batch of at least 30. I’ll probably make up and bottle sufficient chemicals for 60 kits and leave the extra 30 sets of chemicals in stock when we build a batch of 30 kits. That makes it a lot quicker to build another batch of 30.
I remember the first time we had an order from the same person for both a chemistry kit and a biology kit. That happens relatively frequently, but I thought it might be a while before one person ordered all three of the kits in one order. That happened this morning for the first time. I just thought how I’d have reacted as a teenager or even an adult to have all three of these kits show up at the door. It’d be like Christmas in September.
10:39 – Wow. Drew Peterson convicted of murder on literally zero evidence. I haven’t really followed the case, but my sense of it from what I’ve read is that he probably is guilty. But this prosecution violates what had until now been a sacrosanct principle of criminal law: hearsay evidence is not evidence at all. The state had to pass a special law to allow hearsay to be admitted in Peterson’s trial. Otherwise, the prosecution had no case. Since the beginnings of our legal system, it’s been a fundamental precept that “better 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted”. It is up to the state to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. There is nothing about this case but reasonable doubt, but in its determination to convict this guy no matter what, the prosecution (i.e., the government) managed to get the rules changed. This fundamental violation of legal principles may come back to haunt us. It’s a small step from this to the Star Chamber.
This must be a great relief on Barbara and yourself to have a closer watch on her parents. I hope things turn out well for them.
Thank you. Yes, Barbara and her sister have been near the breaking point. It will be great relief to them to have their parents living somewhere they’ll be safer if/when a medical emergency occurs.
Also no small matter, the facility eliminates the routine day-to-day burdens like taking their mom to have her hair done or taking one of their parents to a doctor or the supermarket. That sounds trivial, but when you consider that Barbara or her sister was having to take off work nearly every day to run these types of errands, the stress adds up fast.
Barbara and Frances will still be dreading those middle-of-the-night calls, but just eliminating the day-to-day stuff will help a lot.
Drew Peterson: Yes, and it is like saying that the ex post facto provision has been abandoned.
Regarding Drew Peterson:
What we have here is a new standard of American jurisprudence, Dr. Baden.
If the Dr. is paid by the state, Savio’s injuries are the result of a struggle and Drew Peterson is guilty.
If the Dr. is paid by the defense, the DNA evidence has been corrupted and OJ Simpson is not guilty.
Oh, and one more thing that they yappers always misconstrue: “Assumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Actually: “Assumed innocent until either proven guilty or judged not guilty.”
Innocent as a final declaration only occurs once in a generation with the most recent being the Duke University La Crosse 5.
I always liked the Scots “Not Proven” verdict, which from what little I know would probably have been the correct verdict in the Peterson case.
I’m surprised that the judge didn’t direct the jurors to return a Not Guilty verdict. Failing that, I can’t imagine that Peterson won’t be freed by an appeals court.
If I lived there, I’d be seriously considering moving out of state. Well, obviously, there were lots of good reasons to do that before this verdict, but when the state intentionally corrupts its own justice system that’s a very bad sign of things to come.
I did, 50 years ago and have no regrets whatsoever. Sheesh, now its major city as the murder capital of the nation by overwhelming margin and no possibility of cure.
Illinois—what a state! Always has been the corruption capital of America.
But this change in the justice system is what one gets when lawyers make the laws. Just what we don’t need!
I thought Louisiana was the corrupt state, and Chicago was just the corrupt town in Illinois?
Oh wait, there’s an Ottawa in Illinois, too. Never mind! Illinois is most corrupt!
Two quick points: Illinois is in a group with American Samoa and the Marianas Islands in terms of its handgun carry laws. That must be so special for them.
And the Peterson case was largely tried outside the court, in the media and on the internet. I also think the guy is probably guilty but they damn sure didn’t prove it and they rigged their own system to get that result, which should be a major warning shot across all our bows. Again.
In other nooz, this Windows 7 Ultimate box just crashed twice tonight with blue screens, first time in the eighteen months I’ve had it. And this since an Update on 9/4 and an install of Tversity Basic. Not sure what is going on; booted to Safe Mode With Network and ran some stuff and it promised me some kind of error report but none was forthcoming in the end. I am somewhat tempted to blow away Windows for good now and install Linux here on this machine but on the other hand if the problem is with the drive or the monitor or other hw, that would be kinda pointless. I would also have to then do over our home theater/media setup from scratch, with Linux.
Terrific lightning/thunderstorm rolling through for the last half-hour. You know its close when you hear that loud click of lightning through the uninsulated outside wall and the thunder is instant. Amazingly, no power or Internet failures. We are supposed to get 25mph winds through tomorrow (Sat) afternoon. Just what the farmers did not want, as it will lay the corn crop down.
I do not understand farming. These guys around here are always waiting too long for everything—spring planting and fall harvesting. The ones who put corn out early, got the most rain when it counted; the others have weak yields due to the drought that ensued. I was just driving south today on county roads, and all the corn is completely brown. Should have been harvested weeks ago, IMO. Now, heavy rains are rolling through, completely nullifying those who tried to dry the crop in the fields, and the winds are now going to lay it down, making harvesting expensive and time-consuming. These guys are the biggest procrastinators on the planet, it seems to me. And the biggest complainers after their procrastination.
After over a week of some of the most miserably humid weather of the summer, the temps will drop dramatically overnight with tomorrow’s high only 70° F. Tornado warnings west of Indy, but nothing untoward around here—just high winds. For some reason, the second story (west attic) of Tiny House gets hit repeatedly by flying debris during these high winds, right above my office/bedroom. Once, by complete coincidence, I even saw a squirrel slam into the side of the house while I was outside trying to identify all the stuff hitting the house. Nearly ran over a couple squirrels on the rural roads this morning. They are not used to any traffic at all, and literally go berserk when a car comes along.
All that stuff out by Tiny Town and the Tiny House sounds kinda weird. Are you seeing a middle-aged lady riding a bicycle around the ‘hood with a picnic basket on the back?
And was that a squirrel hitting the side of the house or a little dog?
Dorothy is still in Kansas, as far as I know. Although I think I have seen Toto wandering around the neighborhood. We have many little yappy dogs in this ‘hood. If I could get away with it, I would take the .38 police special—the only firearm left from my dad and brother’s collection—and do the little yappers in. Occasionally, something sets them all off at once, and every dog in the neighborhood for 3 blocks on all sides, starts in together. Sheesh!
Mosquitoes and dogs like the taste of me. Three times in my life, I have been bit by loose dogs severely enough to have to have the dogs put on rabies watch. Thank goodness there are no loose dogs around here anymore. Heavy penalties these days, and everyone obeys. But the yapper across the street is the worst. He was tied up to the iron railing of their porch, and he pulled that section of the railing clean out. Now they have him tied at the top of one of 3 iron support columns. I’m hoping that any day now, he will pull the overhanging roof down on himself and that will send him on to oblivion. He really is an unmitigated pest.
On Windows 7 Ult crashing, what does the event logs viewer say ? That event viewer actually worked for me for the first time on my Windows 7 pro x64 server.
You probably already know this, but Go to Control Panel, click on System, and the “View Event Logs” is under the Administrative tools header.
Might be a couple of things going on here; the blue screen blathered something about memory but disappeared immediately. The logs through the evening last night showed these two errors repeatedly:
“The DNS proxy agent was unable to allocate 0 bytes of memory. This may indicate that the system is low on virtual memory, or that the memory manager has encountered an internal error.”
“The ICS_IPV6 failed to configure IPv6 stack.”
I’ll mess around some more but so far today everything seems fine.
Useful to distinguish guilty which is a legal conclusion with respect to a particular criminal charge and did the deed which is an observation about facts on the ground.
Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded as a matter of law; the conviction would be reversed on appeal if that were possible. The trial procedure was literally a textbook example of railroading in books published as early as 1935. That fact tells us nothing about whether Sacco and/or Vanzetti did any deeds.
Notice too that there have been particular circumstances such as dying declaration which change the application of any hearsay rule.
If it is a IPv6 problem then sounds like a hardware error on a ethernet device driver. Or the ethernet driver has a IPv6 software error. In any case, not good.
Without pulling up all my research notes and books on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, I remember, off the top of my head, that the end result of wading through it all gave me the impression that Sacco was in fact guilty, and Vanzetti was at worst, an accessory after the fact and was dragooned into being part of the Cause. It was a while ago, but I had been accumulating material for a possible writing project. I’d also gone to look at the site of the actual robbery/murder in Braintree and the old courthouse in Dedham. Mrs. Sacco (Rosa) was alive well into the 90s if memory serves.
Ran Windows Recovery and update, and may have narrowed the issue down to a printer driver (to which this machine connects both wired and wirelessly). So far so good today.
On the Peterson case:
http://www.crimefilenews.com/2012/09/the-drew-peterson-prosecution-and.html
I’ve just come back from Melbourne, and I think the drivers there are trying to overtake Chicago as the horn honking capital of the world. Drove me nuts trying to get to sleep on Saturday night.
Wot a coincidence, mate! I just watched an Eagles concert staged in Melbourne. Them boyz is tight! And Joe Walsh did a song and mentioned his twenty years of booze abuse; I got him beat by twenty.
We don’t get much horn honking here in Vermont; it is considered bloody rude. Even if we sit behind someone at a green light and they’re taking longer than a nanosecond to get moving, like down in Megalopolis, where they will immediately get a blast from behind.