Blog Indiana — a site of which I had been unaware. It has a decent list of Indiana blogs along with maps of where the bloggers are located. A nice resource for the Hoosier-centric.

So, it’s been four years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Inevitably, this year 9/11 will draw comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. With respect to the property damage, 9/11 doesn’t hold a candle to Katrina. I suspect the death toll will end up being similar, though Katrina may end up with a higher body count. 9/11 carried a much greater sense of violation since it was perpetrated by malicious humans rather than by indifferent nature.

I recall the day of the attacks, getting started on work when one of the people who works in my office said what she’d seen on television before heading out. Immediately I was on the Internet, details were sketchy. As the day progressed, rumors were rampant — I recall stories about a car bomb outside the Supreme Court, for example. The local gas station jacked up prices. I remember crying just a little bit on the way home that night. Americans were united. In fact, most of the world was united in condemning the acts. The most touching example, for me, was some African tribe sending us a herd of cattle or somesuch. Clearly, they needed the herd more than we ever could. But, it was a very gracious gesture from those who have very little to America, which has so very much.

Since then, my feelings about 9/11 have changed. Some of it is just the passage of time. But, now I can’t think about 9/11 without associating it with the Bush administration who has rammed it down our throats at every chance and used it as an excuse for any policy it cared to pursue. My deliberate recollection of how I felt during and soon after the attacks is very different from my casual response when the term is brought up. Now, my knee-jerk reaction is an eye roll, because I have just come to expect that the person invoking 9/11 is doing so to forward their own agenda.

Being a history guy, and having heard 9/11 compared repeatedly to Pearl Harbor, it’s interesting to think about what we had accomplished between 12/7/41 and 12/7/45 versus what we’ve accomplished between 9/11/01 and 9/11/05. We’ve invaded Afghanistan, displaced the Taliban, and had some success in making Afghanistan a better place. Though that success seems to have stalled and I’m not sure how well we’re doing there in recent years. We have also, improbably, invaded Iraq, displaced it’s weak, secular dictator with essentially a state of chaos where radical Islamists seem to be gaining the upper hand. Certainly they are stronger in Iraq now than they were before we invaded. We don’t appear to have taken any action at all against Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the institutions in both countries that contributed to almost all of the 9/11 suiciders being from those countries. And, of course, Osama bin Laden is still at large.

During the World War II period, we had defeated two major powers (three if you include Italy — but Italy always seems like the red-headed Axis step child); Hitler was dead; we had demanded and received sacrifice from Americans but we had accomplished our mission and were headed to much better times than even those that had preceded the war.

Before Hurricane Katrina, it was pretty easy for administration apologists to just shrug that Terrorism is a more elusive and intractable enemy than the Japanese Empire or the German Reich. After the incompetence displayed in the wake of Katrina, particularly with respect to the personnel put in charge of major government agencies (“Brownie’s doing a great job”), it’s much easier to suspect that our problems in the War on Terror(ism/ists) have as much to do with incompetence as with the difficulty of the problem.

Maybe I’m to blame for my skepticism, cynicism, and politics, but my memory of 9/11 has been tainted. And it’s a shame.

An article in the Indianapolis Star on a dispute between residents of the West 86th Street area and Indianapolis Power and Light over IPL’s tree cutting policies.

The specifics of this case aren’t really that important to me. But, I have a personal interest in the law of utility tree cutting. A while back, I wrote this in response to a Muncie article about overzealous utility tree trimming approach:

The article discusses Indiana-Michigan Power’s new policy of clearing trees within 15 feet on either side of a three-phase power line and within 10 feet on either side of a single-phase line. Previously, the company would trim trees every 3 to 5 years.

The article doesn’t get into this, but my thought is that IMP and any other electric utility that behaves in this matter is asking for a fairly expensive class action suit — or at least a wave of individual suits. I guess it depends on how the utility’s easement is worded for a particular piece of property; but my understanding is that, by-and-large, the utility is only allowed to take action as is reasonably necessary to keep the line in good repair. Where trimming is an option, and the utility cuts a tree entirely without the consent of the property owner, it would seem to me that the utility is liable for the difference between the value of the trimmed tree and the value of the cut tree. Heck, maybe you could throw a claim at them for triple damages and attorney’s fees under IC 34-24-3.

I know that utilities get special treatment under the law a lot of times, but I went through the statutes awhile back when my electric utility was making noises about cutting down a bunch of my trees. I couldn’t find anything that let them simply clear cut through the easement with impunity. I pointed out the “reasonableness” provision of the easement, pointed out that the tips of my trees were at least 20 to 30 feet below the power lines, and indicated that they’d need a court order to cut my trees and they seem to have backed off. Maybe they’ll be back. So, if anyone knows how the law plays out in these situations, I’d love to hear about it.

I just tend to think that electric utilities are overstepping their easement rights. I know it’s easier for them if the world is paved, but I don’t think they have unfettered discretion even if the tree is below their power line.

I just wanted to post a thank you to my sister-in-law for designing my swanky new banner and to my wife for installing it. If it were up to me, this place would be margin to margin black text on white background. (Or, if I was feeling retro – green text on black background.) Fortunately, I’m surrounded by folks with better design sense than that.

The Muncie Star Press offers up Editorial: Sex scenes in games should worry parents.

Clamping an adults-only rating on a sexually explicit video game is like eating half a chocolate cake but putting it aside in favor of a lettuce salad: clearly, the damage has been done. Hundreds of calories have been consumed from the cake and, in the case of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, millions of copies have been sold and are already available to kids.

Cake and lettuce salad? O.k., if you say so. But, inane analogies aside, I’m just a little floored by the priorities here. Worrying about sex in a Grand Theft Auto game is a little like worrying about worrying about foul language in a snuff film. (So much for leaving inane analogies aside.)

What’s the message here? It’s o.k. for little Jimmy to carjack ice cream trucks, beat cops, and gun down whores, but you just have to draw the line at cartoon sex? Our relative comfort with violence compared to our national hysteria over sex never ceases to amaze me.

So, let’s say you have a newborn. Let’s say you give the newborn a zerbert. (Funny little farty noise when you blow on their belly.) Let’s say you take a picture of said zerbert. Super, now everyone has a nice little memory, right? In a sane world, maybe. In Raleigh North Carolina, apparently you get 6 months in jail and have your kids taken away from you:

Parents who were charged with child abuse last August have been exonerated and reunited with their children.

Charbel Hamaty was charged with sexually assaulting his newborn son, and Teresa Hamaty was arrested for taking sexually explicit pictures.

The couple describe the ordeal as a “nightmare” that started over a roll of film that Charbel Hamaty dropped off at a north Raleigh Eckerd.

The photo that raised alarms shows a naked Kristoff, now 16-months-old, getting a kiss from his father on the belly button, Teresa Hamaty said.

When the photos were shown to the police, the couple was arrested, and Kristoff was put in protective custody, while his half-sister, Victoria, was handed over to her birth father.

Teresa Hamaty was released on bond, but wasn’t allowed contact with her children for months.

Charbel Hamaty spent six months in prison before the charges were dropped because of a report submitted by an expert saying there was no criminal intent in the photos.

Maybe there is something else going on that makes this something other than jaw-droppingly insane. But, if not, this would seem to be the flip-side of the Aiyana Gauvin tragedy. On the one hand, you have the sadistic torture and death of a 4 year old girl that possibly could have been prevented. On the other hand you have a hypervigilance that encourages parents not to have any physical contact with their children at all.

It looks like the The Indiana Law Blog is back up and running since the end of July. Welcome back to the land of the blogging Marcia. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Marcia Oddi tends to cover Indiana judicial opinions, environmental developments, and state government.

While Governor Daniels is headed to Japan and Taiwan in an effort to attract jobs, this story discussing Toyota’s decision to build a new plant in Woodstock, Ontario instead of in the U.S. has disturbing implications if Toyota’s views of the American workforce are accurate and/or widespread. Basically, Toyota’s spokesman said that Canadians were easier to train than Americans and the presence of Canada’s national healthcare system added additional savings not to be found in the U.S.:

Industry experts say Ontarians are easier and cheaper to train – helping make it more cost-efficient to train workers when the new Woodstock plant opens in 2008, 40 kilometres away from its skilled workforce in Cambridge.

“The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States,” said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant.

. . .

The factory will cost $800 million to build, with the federal and provincial governments kicking in $125 million of that to help cover research, training and infrastructure costs.

Several U.S. states were reportedly prepared to offer more than double that amount of subsidy. But Fedchun said much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project.

He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained – and often illiterate – workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use “pictorials” to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.

“The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario,” Fedchun said.

In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson.

“Most people don’t think of our health-care system as being a competitive advantage,” he said.

Wow, this from a Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette editorial:

JEERS to lazy Hoosier workers. The results of a survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com show that Hoosiers waste an average of 2.8 hours a day at work. According to the survey, only Missouri workers wasted more time at work. The top time-wasters at work: Internet surfing and socializing with co-workers. Hoosiers have already suffered accusations that we are fat and dumb. It would be a shame to add lazy to Indiana’s reputation.

Sounds to me like a recommendation for a shorter work day. If the amount of work that Employee X is getting done in a day is worth, say, $80 to you, and if the employee can get a work day’s amount of work done in 5 hours, seems like there ought to be a way to pay folks $80 to get the work done in 5 hours and then let them go, then you’ve effectively raised their wage from $10/hour to $16/hour, gotten the same amount of work accomplished, and given the worker 3 hours of their life back.

(Incidentally, I see a lot of holes in that theory, but it’s something to think about, I suppose.)