Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Stella.

I work in an office that deals with among other things other people’s litigation, so this has been making the email rounds:

It’s time once again to consider the candidates for the annual Stella Awards. The Stellas are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonalds. That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States.

This year’s candidates:

1. Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson’s son.
2. A 19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr.Truman apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor’s hub caps.
3. Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn’t re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner’s insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.
4. Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor’s beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner’s fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams who was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.
5. A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.
6. Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms.Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.
7. This year’s favorite could easily be Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner’s manual that he couldn’t actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

There’s only one problem—or rather, seven: they’re all utter fabrications.

Beyond, of course, the fact that Stella Liebeck’s being maligned yet again.

If you’ve hung out on any internet forum anywhere, you know how firmly “that lady who spilled the coffee and sued McDonald’s” is entrenched in the popular imagination. A lie, after all, can get halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on, so let’s give that laggard truth a push.

Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in the passenger seat of her grandson’s car when she was severely burned by McDonalds’ coffee in February 1992. Liebeck, 79 at the time, ordered coffee that was served in a styrofoam cup at the drivethrough window of a local McDonalds.

After receiving the order, the grandson pulled his car forward and stopped momentarily so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. (Critics of civil justice, who have pounced on this case, often charge that Liebeck was driving the car or that the vehicle was in motion when she spilled the coffee; neither is true.) Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap.

The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.

During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds’ knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.

McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultant’s advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste. He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.

Further, McDonalds’ quality assurance manager testified that the company actively enforces a requirement that coffee be held in the pot at 185 degrees, plus or minus five degrees. He also testified that a burn hazard exists with any food substance served at 140 degrees or above, and that McDonalds coffee, at the temperature at which it was poured into styrofoam cups, was not fit for consumption because it would burn the mouth and throat. The quality assurance manager admitted that burns would occur, but testified that McDonalds had no intention of reducing the “holding temperature” of its coffee.

Sorry to dump the whole mess in your laps like that, but it’s necessary to go through this in some detail so it all sinks in. This was 40 to 50 degrees hotter than what you normally think of as “hot” coffee; just 20 degrees shy of boiling. McDonald’s knew that this practice caused hundreds of injuries. They had no intention of stopping. They offered to pay off Stella Liebeck much as they’d paid off earlier injuries; she said no. A jury awarded her $200,000, reduced to $160,000 because they judged her to be 20% at fault for the accident—and then they added on $2.7 million in punitive damages, a monetary hit designed to convince McDonald’s to stop burning hundreds of people with dangerously, illogically hot coffee. (And guess what? After the verdict, the temperature of coffee served in Albuquerque McDonald’s was around a much more sane 150 degrees.) And even though the punitive damages were reduced to $480,000, less than a fifth the original amount, McDonald’s—rather than accept a judgment which found their conduct reckless, callous, and willful—negotiated a secret settlement with Liebeck.

And yet she’s still the stupid dumbass crazy lady who got millions from McDonald’s for spilling some coffee. —Hell, even the real Stella Awards (an entertaining enough read, which focusses out of necessity on suits filed rather than insane amounts rewarded—you go where the material is, after all) admits her treatment has been grossly unfair. (But: the name doesn’t appear likely to change any time soon.)

This, then, is the atmosphere in which the debate over tort reform swirls. Quite literally: if you go back to the Snopes takedown, you’ll see that the New York Daily News printed a copy of that original, utterly fabricated email back in June of 2002. —Which, I suppose, is funnier to read over coffee than the Center for Economic Justice’s breakdown of exactly how much insurance companies made right after Texas instituted tort reform.

No one likes the idea of (someone else) getting something for nothing. Nor am I trying to deny that there aren’t excesses, fuck-ups, and egregious mistakes. (Though one should always keep Meredith’s Question in mind.) But to impose from the top down a one-size-fits-all solution like this is—leaving aside for the moment the fact that it’s a crooked solution rigged in favor of those with more money and more power—foolish and short-sighted (at best): sending an engineer to fix a problem of bricolage. I’m reminded of another attempt to impose via legislative fiat pre-ordained, one-size-fits-all solutions to complex judicial problems.

I mean—we all know what a great success mandatory minimum sentences have been.

—Filed 8376 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [7].

David Chess gave me a word.

Actually, he gave me a bit more than that.

Two and one quarter years ago or so (roughly), something I’d put up whose traffic I was checking desultorily logged a couple of hits from davidchess.com. As you do when you’re checking traffic, I followed the link back and found this engagingly eccentric dailyish journal thing sprinkled with links to whatever had happened to strike his quotidian fancy.

I’d met my first blog-thing.

So I started checking in from time to time and through him met others (Medley, say, or the divine Textism) and through having become familiar with the general concept went on to find yet more without his direct help. And then back on 17 January 2002, I went ahead and started posting hereabouts. (Actually, it was over here, and I really need to clean that up, don’t I?) It’s been a year, I guess, though maybe what with the hiatus from August through November last year and the irregular posting before that, we don’t want to get too rambunctious with the anniversary talk. —Also, considering that I didn’t get around to writing this until the 20th.

I was suitably impressed, then, when he referred to linking to the Kip/Barry/Jenn ontogroup. —An ontogroup being a group or community that agrees on a similar ontology, or so it’s defined by Alamut, a member of Chess’s ontogroup. It’s a neat word, and I like it a lot, and I’m glad it’s in my vocabulary; it’s an interesting way of thinking about how you track thinking about the various groups you run into online and the ways they hang out and interact with each other. Barry and Jenn and I are linked, for instance, because we keep writing about how we’ve known each other for (yikes) a decade and a half, but that isn’t enough, I don’t think, for ontogroup status; that alone isn’t a shared ontology. It’s more the fact that we each take comics seriously (them as practitioners, me as a critic—and I hope by now you’re well enough acquainted with me to realize that’s as questionable as any other genre distinction), and even moreso that we were each molded to one degree or another by Scott McCloud at impressionable stages in our respective developments (for all that we’ve each reacted in different ways and done different things with that molding); that’s the ontology we hold in common—lightly, but. (On the obverse: I would not, say, lump Bruce and John and Ginger and Vince in the same ontogroup, for all that each can wax eloquent on the four stances.)

But ontogroups aside, for the moment: do me a favor and raise your glasses in the general direction of David Chess. To the extent that it’s anybody’s fault, he bears his share of the blame. —Also, be sure to read his post today: it’s an excellent example of his ability to take seriously something that seems whimsical and harmless enough—a sort of cultural reverse engineering that’s at once funny and thought-provoking.

So: thanks. —Onward and upward!

—Filed 8377 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [1].

There they go again.

The long memory is the most radical idea in the country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going but where we want to go.

—Utah Phillips

Atrios proves once again that he doesn’t just shoot from the hip—he’s got a mean long memory, too. (What? Ten years is an eternity in politics.)

—Filed 8381 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

This; that; a little of the other.

Ignatz on the administration’s MLK Jr. amicus. —Also, Atrios.

Messr. Capozzolla touchingly wakes the hairdresser.

This one, for no particular reason the rest of you should be hip to, is for Skook. (But y’all did know about National Geographic’s wallpaper-​o’-​the-​day. Right?)

I really liked Chad Orzel’s point about rec.arts.nielsenhayden.com, so I thought I’d drop it casually in conversation over here, like I’d come up with it or something.

Via the ever-eloquent (by which, of course, I mean right-thinking) Dan Gillmor’s pithy, punches-unpulled take on the 7-2 Eldred decision: a new blog to follow, Copyfight.

In vaguely tangential if more important (although rather thumpingly obvious) news: television network executives are still every last one of them evil, ignorant scum who haven’t the sense God gave a flea and are all on a Machiavellian kick to suck everything good and pure and true and fun from our lives.

If you were wondering: yes. I am indeed Griffen’s hand model.

Oh, and Barry’s back. (Ask him about his electricity issues. It’s funny. In a glad-I-wasn’t-there sort of way.)

—Filed 8382 days ago to Poprocks; .

Bold.

I’ve figured out where all this bold rhetoric is coming from. Everything this administration is doing, from boldly negotiating with North Korea just like Clinton did, to boldly addressing our tax code’s horribly progressive nature (whereby people who don’t make enough money to live actually get money from people who have enough to worry about stock dividends), is bold. Bold bold bold.

You ever look at the etymology of bold? It comes from the Indo-European root bhel:

bhel-²: To blow, swell; with derivatives referring to various round objects and to the notion of tumescent masculinity.

Keep blowing, Bush; keep swelling, pundits. Just beware: there’s only one place to go when bold’s used up.

—Filed 8383 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Billions of dollars in Big Content profits saved by courageous Supreme Court; Sonny Bono’s legacy is secure.

Well, shit.

Barry pretty much nailed it, last year.

Okay; so SCOTUS called it on the constitutional merits of which branch of government gets to decide what. Fine. Time for us to start lobbying our representatives to change the law to favor all of us, and not just corporate citizens with huge lobbying budgets—what? What’s so funny?

Of course, I should have included a link to the blog of Lawrence Lessig, who argued Eldred v. Ashcroft on behalf of the plaintiff. Also, his comments section, which is busy rallying the troops for round 2. And, the Creative Commons. Yay, team!

—Filed 8383 days ago to Squawkbox; .

The terrorists have already—oh, never mind.

The next time you’re in the neighborhood with someone who proclaims themselves an anti-idiotarian or some such similar designation and they mouth off about Marxist traitorous ivory-towered Stalinist elitist class-war-fightin’ Maoist revolutionary workers’-paradisical anarchist idiotarian liberal Berkeley, try to temper your disgust with a healthy dollop of rue when you point out that Berkeley is censoring Emma Goldman, dead for 62 years now:

In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people “not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.” In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates “shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open.”

Berkeley officials said the quotations could be construed as a political statement by the university in opposition to United States policy toward Iraq.

—the New York Times

If that be treason, count me a traitor. You don’t fuck with Emma Goldman.

—Filed 8383 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

How many times do we have to say no?

The RAVE act is back. TalkLeft has the skinny:

The RAVE Act unfairly punishes businessmen and women for the crimes of their customers. The federal government can’t even keep drugs out of its own schools and prisons, yet it seeks to punish business owners for failing to keep people from carrying drugs onto their property. It is a danger to innocent businessmen and women, especially restaurant and nightclub owners, concert promoters, landlords, and real estate managers. Section 4 of the bill goes so far as to allow the federal government to charge property owners civilly, thus allowing prosecutors to fine property owners $250,000 (and put them out of business) without having to meet the higher standard of proof in criminal cases that is needed to protect innocent people.

It was shut down once before. It’s being snuck through as provisions to Senator Daschle’s omnibus security bill, S.22. Fax him right now and tell him hell no. Again.

—Filed 8383 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Now lemme hear an amen from the choir!

I open with the words of Paul, from his letter to the Romans, chapter 16, verses 18 and 19: “For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.” And I turn to his first letter to the people of Corinth, chapter 2, verses 4 and 5: “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

And what I would have you do, friends and neighbors, brothers and sisters, is go out into the world of blogs and the mediamilieu and see for yourselves what enticing words, good and fair, have been deceiving the hearts of the simple these past few days; I would have you seek out this wisdom of men and women and judge it for yourselves. —Go, read the words of Jeanne D’Arc, as she muses on the differences between a politician with a spine, and a politician without. (A spine is a spine, friends and neighbors, for all that it’s not found till the last minute of a long, dark midnight.)

Read for yourselves what Dwight Meredith says, when he tells us that getting things done is the only reward we need to do more things, and read for yourselves the signs he’s selected to prove to himself (and you, brothers and sisters) that things are, indeed, getting done.

Read the words of those who ought to be simple concerning evil, and who yet have the temerity to ask troubling, complex questions, about the actions we take against those we have named our enemies, and the actions taken against those who exhort us to stop. Read the words of those few who even have the temerity to ask troubling, complex questions of those who speak and preach in demonstration of power.

Come, read the burden that Sisyphus has shrugged off before you, and ponder the meaning of these two little words, so simple when it comes to doing good: Never again.—And if I might be permitted a moment to shrug off my own conceit, Prof. Reynolds: perhaps the Canadians and Europeans are so “sanctimonious” because they aren’t haphazardly proposing the unthinkable crime of locking up people whose only crimes are the colors of their skin, the countries of their origin, the names of their religions. If the Europeans and the Canadians are feckless in this regard, sir, then feck is something I never want; it is something utterly antithetical to the ideals of the country I thought I was in. Never again means never again. Not nohow, noway, nobody.

Ahem.

Then, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, I would ask you to hearken to the words of William Rivers Pitt, when he says to us, “In my faith, I stand on the precepts of the religion, and not upon any innate worthiness within the hierarchy. I do not do so because I am some sort of rebel. I do so because the truth that first breathed life into the Church is still worthy, even as the mortals who pretended to carry its banner are not. I did not leave the Church. It left me.”

How breathtaking in its arrogance, this wisdom of women and men! Exhorting us to show mercy and compassion, even to the least among us, even to those the law has condemned to die; affirming that the struggle is its own reward; demanding that our other cheek always be ready, no matter how foolish or dangerous it might seem to turn it. Urging us to set aside the words of those who serve only their own bellies. (Concerning those who ask complex and troubling questions of evil, evil in the face of which we are told to be simple, I can only offer up a question of my own: how can we be wise unto that which is good if we are not also wise in what we name to be evil?)

We fight, or so we are told by some, to preserve our way of life, the fine Judeo-Christian values which built this nation and made it strong. Let’s for the moment allow it; let’s set aside the many (and valid) arguments against this simple assertion. But set aside with it those notions of Judeo-Christianity drawn from the strictures of Deuteronomy or the comforting fevre dreams of Revelations. (I do not trust Biblical exegesis from those who can’t even read Tolkien properly.) Instead, let’s turn to Paul—crabby, vicious, mean-spirited, priggish Paul, nèe Saul the Pharisee, the tax collector; let’s take up what are perhaps the finest words he ever wrote, in that first letter to those immoral, deplorable Corinthians:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

“Charity.” Some translate it as “love,” but I find this a pale echo of what he meant: agape, Paul wrote; an open love, a social love, a love for your fellow humans. A charitable love. The greatest of that which abides.

If this is the Judeo-Christian value that we’re fighting for: charity; if we keep that always in mind, if we understand that when we speak we speak only our parts and that when we see the world around us we see it imperfectly, unclearly, through a dark glass; that none of us can ever know the whole of any of it, and so we must all in all our dealings act with charity, with the benefit of our doubts (though they may be legion)—if charity is what we’re fighting for—

Well, hell. Sign me up.

(Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose—)

—Filed 8384 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [4].

Better than bombs, yes, but—

We’re spamming key Iraqi leaders. Apparently, the subject lines read “Important Information”:

If you took part in the use of these ugly weapons you’ll be regarded as war criminals. If you can make these weapons ineffective then do it. If you can identify the position of weapons of mass destruction by light signals, then do it. If all this is not possible, then at least refuse to take part in any activity or follow orders to use weapons of mass destruction.

While the sentiment is laudable, you’ve got to admit—it lacks a certain credibility.

—Filed 8385 days ago to Poprocks; .

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