Logical Conclusions: Essays on America: 1998-2013: Volume II

By James E. Dustin

Chapters include the following:

Lawsuits: These are actual lawsuits allowed into our nation's courts. The only way this chapter would be stranger is if it listed lawsuits so absurd they were not allowed into the courts.

Hunting and Fishing: I live in a small drinking town with a hunting and fishing problem.

Weather: This includes a column on the benefits of climate change, a subject that most news reports ignore, and why we in Walden, Colorado, are in favor of global warming.

Politics: The first column is my abortive attempt to run for president of the United States. Another is on what we should learn from the Greeks, and another on state stereotyping. Yes, that happened.

Internet English: This is the Age of the Text. So why do so many of these texters not know basic English? Sadly, examples abound.

Technology: I've suggested a number of new inventions. You'll like the Fleshomatic.

EEKs: Hope you're not one.

Health: You don't realize the value of an eye until you've lost one.

Advertising: Dilbert once observed that if marketing worked, it would be illegal. But it must work on some of us.

Bureaucracies: If learning about what our government workers are actually doing doesn't drop you into a state of depression, you might be heavily medicated.

Human Behavior: None of these columns seemed to fit anywhere else, like what if the passage of an asteroid made us all smarter?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781639037803

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Logical Conclusions

Essays on America: 1998-2013: Volume II

James E. Dustin

ISBN 978-1-63903-779-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63903-781-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-63903-780-3 (digital)

Copyright © 2021 by James E. Dustin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

This volume

is dedicated to

Michael Dyer Gill

who—through his intelligence, knowledge,

and experiences on this Earth—contributed greatly to

the ideas and thoughts expressed herein.

Prologue

If you are wondering why this edition of Logical Conclusions starts with chapter 12, it’s because this is volume 2. The first volume included these chapters:

"American Government 101." Schools are supposed to teach this subject, but schools never teach what actually goes on at the local, state, and national levels. This will help.

"Our Weird, Weird World." You would not believe how the behavior police want you to act while backpacking in the wilderness, and other weirdness.

"WeMuse On The News." These people are so serious when they read the news. They don’t realize how funny the news is!

"Sports." There are only two sports that remain where one can imbibe while one is playing the sport, and other observations.

"Dog Tales." I usually have a dog around, and I live in a town where I think dogs are allowed to vote.

"Space And Science." You don’t hear much about this nowadays, but there are some unbelievable things going on out there on the Final Frontier.

"Gopher Relays." I can’t help it. This happens every spring. You almost have to witness this phenomenon to appreciate it.

"Useful History." From all the anger expressed by Muslim extremists when the subject of the Crusades comes up, you’d think they’d lost those wars.

"Government Finances." If this chapter doesn’t frost your eyebrows, you probably don’t pay taxes.

"We Get Mail." A big part of the fun of owning a newspaper is opening the mail. I mean, really.

"Driving Us Crazy." The days of Route 66 may be ending, and why I don’t go abroad. Ever.

Chapter 12

Lawsuits

I haven’t quite reached the point where William Shakespeare wrote, Kill all the lawyers, kill ’em tonight! My cousin is a lawyer; I have friends who are lawyers. However, the legal profession could stand some solid reforms, starting with the contingency fee system.

That enables the lawyer to collect 25 percent to 35 percent or even more of the final award in a lawsuit. The plaintiff needs to put up nothing and therefore might as well roll the dice no matter how absurd the case is.

Another possible reform would be a qualification test for jurors. If that can’t happen, maybe we could educate our youth better so they wouldn’t think a $4.9 billion damage award is reasonable.

Judge, Isn’t $4.9 Billion Excessive?

July 22, 1999

I probably won’t be around fifty years from now. I was wondering if any of the big American corporations will be around fifty years from now either.

I was wondering that because General Motors just got ordered by a jury in California to pay $4.9 billion (yes, billion, with a B) to six people who were burned when their car exploded after being struck from behind by a drunk driver.

I sympathize with those people; I really do. I’ve been burned badly twice in my life, and it was the worst pain I have ever experienced. One of the victims in the car, an eleven-year-old, has had to go through sixty surgeries.

American corporations have a long history of being indifferent to the value of human life. One has only to look at the chronicles of coal mining in the US or Bhopal, India, where one American company killed three thousand people in one day, to understand that a corporation is not a human being even if the law treats it as one.

That stipulated, let’s look at this case.

According to news reports, the jury was highly influenced by some internal memos out of General Motors. In one of them, an engineer recommended putting the gas tank fifteen inches from the rear bumper rather than eleven inches. The recommendation was rejected because of cost reasons.

The car in which the people were hurt was stopped at a traffic signal. The car driven by the drunk driver was going seventy mph when it hit the stopped car. Do you think it would have made any difference if that gas tank were positioned four inches further forward?

But you know what? The jury never got to hear that information. The jury did not know that a motionless car was hit by another car going seventy mph. The judge ruled that information was irrelevant and might confuse the jurors.

As you may have guessed, this case was tried in California. I had a friend at my previous place of employment who, after watching several weeks of the O. J. Simpson trial, commented, If I’m ever accused of a crime, I want to be tried in the United States, not California.

I have a whole lot of problems with this case. One is why the drunken driver and his insurance company weren’t the ones being sued.

Second, how did the jury arrive at $4.9 billion? Usually, plaintiffs want a certain amount for actual damages, and a certain amount—called punitive damages—to send a message to the company and other companies that this is the price of choosing profits over making a safe product.

A couple more judgments like that, and GM won’t be making any products at all. The award in this case is about 12 percent of GM’s total market capitalization. It’s twice what the company earned last year.

And finally, don’t you think it’s dangerous basing judgments on internal memos? All kinds of memos fly around big companies. A guy presents an idea to his boss, it gets rejected, and then the guy tries something else. Maybe they make the gas tank out of a different material instead of moving it forward.

Or maybe the memo is bogus. I used to send around bogus memos fairly regularly just as revenge for someone wasting my time with regular, albeit inane, memos.

Big corporations in America like to incorporate themselves in Delaware regardless of where they are actually located. Delaware has a set of state laws that are favorable to corporations.

Similarly, shipping companies like to sail under the flags of Liberia and Panama because those nations are not, shall we say, all that concerned whether or not ships sailing under their flags are seaworthy enough to even clear the harbor.

I wonder how long it will be before the big companies decide the US is not such a great place to do business and start moving to Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas, and East Timor to be beyond the reach of such lawsuits as the one just tried in California.

Eye-Popping Underwear

September 15, 2011

It’s time again to embarrass the legal community (and really, when isn’t it time for that?) and examine some of the more ludicrous examples of jurisimprudence in our court systems by referring these cases to the Court of Jim. And as always, we will start off with one of our favorite lawyer jokes:

The US Postal Service had to recall their latest series of stamps because the stamps had a picture of a lawyer on them. People couldn’t figure out which side of the stamp to spit on.

Okay, these are all actual cases allowed into actual courts.

Case No. 1: A woman from Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against Victoria’s Secret over an injury she received while putting on a thong. The fifty-two-year-old woman (and the Court of Jim wonders aloud, isn’t fifty-two years old a little beyond thong-donning age?) claims the thong snapped while she was changing out of her uniform at work, sending a little ornamental piece flying into her eye.

She then drove home. Her lawyer said the flying shrapnel from the thong scratched her cornea. It does seem a little unbelievable at first, the lawyer said, but added the injury will affect her for the rest of her life. One is sorely tempted to observe that the thong is over, but the malady lingers on.

Well, the court, having suffered a serious eye injury in its life, believes that when your cornea is lacerated at work, you don’t drive home. Normal procedure is to scream, drawing the attention of your fellow employees who will call for help.

The court is also trying to picture at what point during the attire process a thong would snap at such an angle that it would launch a projectile toward the eye, but perhaps the court, being male, is just daydreaming about Sexy Little Thing® low-rise V-strings.

The Court of Jim finds in favor of the defendant in order to help ensure such products never go out of production.

Case No. 2: A federal judge in Hawaii has allowed a lawsuit to proceed against the South Korean developer of the video game Lineage II. The fifty-one-year-old man (and the court wonders aloud that isn’t fifty-one years old a little beyond the video game age?) claims in the suit that he has become addicted to the game, having played it for more than twenty thousand hours since 2004.

The plaintiff said that his addiction has left him unable to perform daily functions such as getting dressed or bathing or communicating with friends and family. The Court of Jim’s initial thought is that maybe dressing and bathing might improve the ability of the plaintiff to communicate with family and friends.

On a more serious note, who supports this guy? The Court of Jim is not familiar with online video games because the Court of Jim has to work for a living and doesn’t have twenty thousand spare hours to devote to such things.

The court finds in favor of the defendant because it believes some company in South Korea is hardly responsible for a grown man’s inability to control his own life. And as an aside, when will we see the first addiction lawsuit filed against an illegal drug manufacturer? Why file suits against these wimpy South Korean companies when you can take on a drug cartel?

Case No. 3: Many men did not want to play tennis with this Raleigh, NC, woman because she was too good. So the obvious solution to situations like this is to file a lawsuit. And what social dilemmas are not better solved by a court than by rational adults sitting down and discussing them?

This lady played in a league that used to allow the woman to play in the men’s competitive ladder. The city of Raleigh later created a co-ed ladder and would not allow the lady to join the men’s ladder, but later relented after she presented a petition in support of her position.

Men started avoiding her challenges. That should have triggered the avoidance rule, but the town threw out the avoidance rule. So the lady sued to reinstate the avoidance rule, which awards extra league points to the avoidee, and also gives her $10,000.

The Court of Jim sympathizes with the lady. Raleigh might want to consider putting up a sign at the town limits saying, Wimps Welcome. However, there are problems suitable for actual courts, and some problems more suitable for the tennis courts. This is one of the ladder, um, latter.

And thus ends this session of the Court of Jim.

A Strange Type of Case

March 15, 2007

The Court of Jim, due to the number of stupid lawsuits filed recently, is now convened for the purpose of examining the state of jurisimpudence in America as measured by the number of frivolous lawsuits judges have allowed into the courts.

As always, we start with our latest, favoritest lawyer joke:

What do you call twenty-five lawyers buried up to their necks in concrete? An indicator of a national cement shortage.

But enough frivolity. Call the first actual case.

Case No. 1: A man from Pennsylvania is suing the University of Michigan law school because the man has poor typing skills and therefore didn’t get higher grades.

The man’s name is A. Zachariasewycz. Really. He graduated from law school with a 2.996 grade-point average and claims he hasn’t been able to find a job because employers aren’t interested in prospects who have a grade-point average below B. He blames his lower scores on his inability to type as well as other students. Without this typing deficit on certain exams, he said his grade-point average would have been 3.4.

The Court of Jim wonders aloud how he could possibly know that. In any case, the Court, which graduated with a 2.16 grade-point average and still managed to find a job, is unsympathetic.

First of all, if you can’t type, and it’s that important, learn to type. The plaintiff in this case already has nearly half the number of letters in the alphabet in his own name. Just putting his name on term papers would be a good typing exercise.

Also, maybe the man can’t find a job because he still has poor typing skills. It’s a little difficult to negotiate the cyberspace world of today if you don’t know how to type. The Court finds in favor of the University of Michigan and orders Zachariasewycz to go to summer school to learn how to type as the Court’s mother made him do in 1963.

Case No. 2: According to the Associated Press, a man fired by IBM for visiting adult chat rooms while at work is suing IBM for $5 million. And why not? Why should a company expect an employee to do the work he or she is paid to do? Shouldn’t we all be a little more tolerant and allow staff to while away the day visiting adult websites rather than helping our companies sell products to earn enough revenue to pay people?

The plaintiff here argues that he suffers from stress resulting from his service in Vietnam that has resulted in him becoming a sex addict, and with the evolution of the internet, an internet addict. This ranks right up there with the woman in Chicago who avoided jail time for embezzlement by arguing that she was a shopping addict.

IBM, for its part, said the company has plain language prohibiting such behavior and had warned the man before. The Court feels such language is hardly necessary. How is this different from an employee drinking all day rather than working, or just not showing up?

Besides $5 million, the man wants treatment and sympathy. The Court awards him sympathy.

Case No. 3: A lawyer (big surprise here) sued a California restaurant chain for passing off prawns as lobsters in their $6 lobster burrito. According to Restaurant Business News, the defendant is Rubio’s Restaurants.

Citing a claws in state law, the lawyer filed the lawsuit as a class action, making it a whale of a case. Abalone, said Rubio’s. There’s nothing fishy going on. The Food and Drug Administration says it’s okay to use the term langostino lobster, even if the langostino is a large shrimp (the word langostino is Spanish for prawn, but biologists know that a langostino is neither lobster nor shrimp, but one of two species of crab).

The California judge on his perch up on the bench made no decision; he clammed up. The Court of Jim itself is floundering. It only has the one news item from a trade journal, and no further information on the porpoise of the case. Is the lawyer just on a fishing expedition? How should the scales of justice tip? Is the lawyer’s name Gil?

The Court decides it should consider the squid pro quo. The tentacles of justice reach far. This could be a sucker bet. We can’t put the seal of approval on this without someone buttering us up. Cod, this is difficult. It’s giving me a haddock.

Well, this is the way the Court seas it. Nobody should put lobster meat in a burrito, so langostino is just ducky. The Court finds in favor of the restaurant and orders the lawyer to stop being so shellfish.

A Case Laced with Irony

May 4, 2000

The Court of Jim is again convened to see what kind of business is clogging up the court system. As usual, we will start out with our latest favoritest lawyer joke.

Hey, did you hear about the judge in the lawsuit between the two big underwear companies? Seems he told the attorneys involved to turn in their briefs.

Moving right along, let’s look at some reasons why it takes two years for a court to handle a contested divorce.

Case No. 1: This involves a lady who was jogging in New York when she tripped over her own shoelaces. This, of course, was not the fault of the runner, according to the lawsuit. This was the fault of the shoes.

The woman said in the suit that when she was running, the lace of the right shoe caught on the tab of the rear of the left shoe, causing her to fall. Therefore, the design of the shoe is at fault, and she wants $10 million.

The court finds that the woman was exercising bad judgment right off the bat by jogging in New York City. The court feels if you’re willing to risk that, a wayward shoelace should be of no consequence.

Second, the court fell off a ladder last Sunday while working on its own house and determined that the chief culprit in the court bruising its honorable butt was gravity, not the manufacturer of the ladder.

The court finds for the defense and orders the woman to surrender her shoes before she hurts someone else while jogging.

Case No. 2: A Canadian skydiver who was knocked out in the midst of a dive by his skydiving teammate is suing the teammate for injuries sustained in the jump.

According to Reuters, the plaintiff had made about eighteen hundred jumps before the accident. He is seeking $1.1 million in Canadian dollars, which is worth about $4.57 US (at current exchange rates).

The court refers to previous case heard today and decides that if there is an activity more dangerous than jogging in New York City, it might well be jumping out of a perfectly good airplane and depending on a contraption made of strings and fabric to get you safely to the ground.

The court also feels that skydiving seems to be a dangerous hobby even if you’re jumping alone and becomes more dangerous if you’re jumping with a whole bunch of other people and making one of those diagrams in the sky.

And the court feels that anyone who has jumped eighteen hundred times ought to know that. The court finds for the defense and wishes the plaintiff better luck in the future because when you’re doing something like skydiving, luck plays a role. Until we can sue Lady Luck, that’s the way it goes.

Iced Coffee Might Be an Option

September 14, 2000

Well, here we are again at the Court of Jim where we examine the state of jurisimprudence in America (and the world) and why a speedy trial is defined as sometime next year.

As always, we begin with our favorite lawyer joke:

There are three guys on a disabled boat a hundred yards from shore in shark-infested waters: a preacher, a teacher, and a lawyer. The preacher says, I’ll swim to shore and get help. He dives into the water and is eaten.

The teacher says the same thing, dives into the water, and is eaten. The lawyer then swims to shore. Incredulous onlookers asked him why the sharks left him alone. Professional courtesy, he replied.

Case No. 1: McDonald’s, famous for its tepid coffee after a woman sued the restaurant chain for making their coffee too hot, is being sued again for, apparently, making its coffee on the too hot side of room temperature.

To review precedent, the woman voluntarily bought the coffee, went to her car, spilled the coffee all by herself in her lap. Somehow, she believed McDonald’s was responsible, sued, and incredibly, won. The Court of Jim won’t say how much she won because the court doesn’t want to encourage this kind of behavior.

Anyway, a jury of her peers (idiots) found in favor of the woman, so McDonald’s lowered the temperature of its coffee to lukewarm. Nevertheless, a group of Brits plans to sue the fast-food chain again. Hot coffee, hot tea, and hot water are at the center of this case. We are alleging they are too hot, the plaintiff’s lawyer said. McDonald’s had a typical corporate response: McDonald’s first concern is for the safety of our customers. The court believes that McDonald’s first concern probably is for the safety of its profits, but that’s what they said.

So the court will speak for McDonald’s. If you actually like McDonald’s coffee, and you buy a cup, drink it. Don’t pour it in your lap. And the court feels that it could personally immerse its honorable thumb in a pot of McDonald’s coffee and withdraw it unscathed.

The court finds that these particular Brits have a drinking problem, and that problem is unrelated to the temperature of the beverage.

Case No. 2: A man who won $65.4 million in a lottery has sued to recover $500,000 he gave to a woman while in an intoxicated state.

The state, by the way, is Kentucky. The court started out in sympathy with the winner. He had, after all, won $65.4 million. The honorable court itself might be tempted to go out and quaff a few after such an event, although $500,000 seems like rather a large tip.

However, the court refers to its judicial calculator and finds that the man, after taxes, will have about $43 million. After paying the woman $500,000, and $31,000 in past due child support he was found to owe, and court costs, and his lawyer, he will still have about $40 million. That’s enough, the court feels, to live on.

Life teaches us lessons. Some lessons are cheap, some are expensive. A $500,000 lesson when you’ve got $40 million in the bank is a pretty cheap course.

Case No. 3: This isn’t actually a lawsuit, but for sheer hutzpah, has been assigned to the Court of Jim. Madonna—the entertainer, not the saint—has petitioned the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization to order the release of a website called Madonna.com now owned by an enterprising fellow in New Jersey.

(Off the record: You people probably think I make this stuff up. I don’t. These are real cases.)

I used to think it took a lot of hutzpah on the part of Elvis Presley’s estate to claim that the name Elvis is protected by copyright. The court has always felt that Presley’s parents probably didn’t name him by throwing a bunch of Scrabble letters up in the air and picking the first five that hit the ground. Other people have been named Elvis.

There has been one other person of note called the Madonna. That name first came up about two thousand years ago, and the court feels that any copyright on the name might well have expired.

The court also is curious about Madonna’s choice of venue. The United Nations? New Jersey might have seemed more appropriate, or maybe the Vatican. The court orders Madonna to take her case there and see what the pope has to say.

That clears the docket. The Court of Jim will be in session again when enough strange people come forward to clog the nation’s, and the world’s, courts with cases judges can’t seem to turn away.

The Problem Here Is Apparent

July 1, 2010

The Court of Jim, wherein we examine the state of jurisimpudence in the United States, is now in session. And as is our custom, we start out with our favorite lawyer joke:

Question: Why is it that people from all other professions are buried six feet deep when they die, but lawyers are buried to a depth of thirty feet?

Answer: Because deep down, lawyers are good people.

All right, enough of the levity. Legal affairs are serious business.

Case 1: According to the Associated Press, a group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest plans to sue the McDonald’s restaurant chain for selling—wait for it—toys.

(Don’t you love these names—The Center for Science in the Public Interest? Who could argue with a group with such a lofty purpose? But I digress.)

The logic, if you can call it logic, is that McDonald’s uses the toys to entice