Stupid Statements (part III)

Truly some of the stupidest statements are made by criminals and their friends.

Russia's "chessboard killer" has appealed his life sentence, saying to his lawyer, “I think spending the rest of my life in jail is too strong a punishment for murdering 48 people.” Actually they have found four more bodies in which his victim’s deaths have been attributed to him. In my opinion, life in prison is not enough punishment for this man. My idea of a suitable punishment for this serial killer would be; natural life in solitary confinement in which he would have no access to other inmates, no bed, pillow or blankets, nor have access to TV, radio, newspapers, magazines or books, and only eat cold baked beans once every day and only water to drink and make sure that he is healthy so that he can have a long boring life. Life in prison under that form of punishment would really be a strong punishment.

In 2002, a company called Sunrise Petroleum was successfully sued by First Choice Petroleum Inc., an oil and lubricants supplier that claimed the company owed them for $54,063.73 worth of products and forged a document to get out of settling their account. In the lawsuit, the principals of Sunrise Petroleum are listed as Sean Ben-Moshe, also known as "Shay Ben-Moshe," and Leon Belahov. Justice Bruce Glass found that the company had forged the signature of a First Choice employee named Thomas Tims in a 1999 document, which stated Sunrise Petroleum would be taken over by a new company called Sunrise Petroleum Lubricants, and that Sunrise Petroleum would thereby not be responsible for any outstanding, unpaid or unsettled accounts. Glass also noted that "In my opinion, many documents were included in the exhibits that referred to a variety of names for Sunrise." Glass cited, along with Sunrise Petroleum and Sunrise Petroleum Lubricants, a third name found on a 1999 company order – Sunrise Propane & Petroleum. In his judgment, Glass wrote that even Ben-Moshe "could not keep the names straight." A close family friend of Ben-Moshe later said to the news media; “He's (Ben-Moshe) a good-hearted man.” I have to tell you that good-hearted men don’t screw around with their creditors like this man did. Now you knew that all along, didn’t you?

"That's not the kind of person I am." That’s the statement made by Priscilla Wiebe, 33 at her trial held in Winnipeg, Manitoba on September 3, 2008 after being convicted of assault causing bodily harm. In June, 2005, she punched a 40-year-old woman in the face and banged her head into a concrete sidewalk. The police wiretapped Weib’s phone and she was overheard to say to a friend on the other end of the line, "I fucking smoked her fucking fat ass," she said in one exchange. "I kicked the fuck out of that chick. You know why? Because I can. I fucked her up real bad. I don't take shit from nobody." A psychiatrist who examined Wiebe described her as "remorseful" and called her a "kind and loving person." That’s the other stupid statement made at the woman’s trial. She got 90 days house arrest.

In February 2002, 29-year-old John Menga of Toronto, Ontario was driving a stolen vehicle towards two police officers who tried to stop him. His vehicle struck one of them so they pulled out their guns and fired at him and killed him. His friends and family said that he was a good man, despite the fact that he also had a criminal record. A good man doesn’t steal other peoples’ property and attempt to run over two police officers who are trying to stop him. However, it was his brother who made the real stupid statement when he was complaining about how John was shot. He was shot twice in the cheek and once in his left thigh. His brother said, “My brother shouldn’t have been shot like that.” How is he to be shot when the police are shooting at a fleeing criminal who is attempting to run over them?

During the eight-week trial of Juan Manuel Alvarez, prosecutors had argued that Alvarez had intended to kill commuters as part of a sick attempt to gain attention from his estranged wife when he parked his sport-utility vehicle on the train tracks. A passenger train plowed into the vehicle, struck a parked freight train and slammed into an oncoming commuter train in January 2005. His defense attorney said, “Alvarez never meant to harm anyone. His actions were part of an aborted suicide attempt.” The Los Angeles judge says he is not convinced that Juan Manuel Alvarez was trying to harm himself on 2005 when he triggered a train crash and killed 11 people. If in fact he really intended to commit suicide, he could have simply laid down on the tracks.

Stupid statements by people who should know better are made all the time.

When trains were first developed, the King of Prussia confidently predicted: "No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free." In 2006, my wife and I rode a train from Cologne to Berlin. In one hour, we had gone 178 kilometres. The distance between Berlin and Potsdam is only 28 kilometres. At 178 kilometres an hour, it would have taken five minutes to go from Berlin to Potsdam

In 1903, the president of Michigan Savings Bank gave this market advice to Horace Rackham, Henry Ford's lawyer: "The horse is here to stay. The automobile is only a fad, a novelty." I remember seeing horses in city streets in the early forties but they were gone soon after that.

A British parliamentary committee assessed whether Edison's light bulb would ever be useful. They concluded it was “unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men."

Edison himself made these market assessments: "The phonograph is not of any commercial value" and "the radio craze will die out in time." Phonographs finally died out in the latter part of the last century but billions of them were made before that happened. The radio craze is still with us, perhaps not as much as the television craze but we still listen to the radio, especially when we are driving our cars.

In 1946, Darryl Zanuck, then head of 20th Century Fox, predicted: "Video (television) won't hold any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

From a news item in an 1868 New York paper: "A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires." It didn’t say much for well-informed people, did it?

In 1980, a Wall Street auto analyst told a Senate committee: "General Motors, already the automotive king of the road, will become even more dominant by the mid-1980s and will be the only auto company capable of building a full range of cars and trucks." Executives at Toyota’s Hino Motors truck unit doubled the company’s U.S. market share. As part of the expansion plans, Hino assembled medium-duty trucks in the U.S. for the first time at a facility in Long Beach. Toyota’s Hino Motors Manufacturing USA unit also opened a $30-million parts, logistics and corporate headquarters center in Ontario. And the company built a parts distribution center in Arkansas. That was just one of many truck building firms around the world building trucks. More Japanese cars are sold in North America than General Motors ever dreamed of manufacturing.

The Greyhound bus company has scrapped an ad campaign that extolled the peaceful, worry-free upside of bus travel following the beheading of a passenger near Winnipeg in August 2008. The punch line of the ad was “There's a reason you've never heard of 'bus rage.” In some of the buses, the ad was still not taken out.

Sarah Palen, a former mayor of a small town in Alaska and the governor of Alaska and vice president presumptive of the United States said at the Republican convention; “I guess the mayor of a small town is a community organizer.” Oh my. That is so profound. We have learned so much from her after having given us that statement.

Unfortunately, many stupid statements have been made by religious authorities, writers and others about women.

Read this asinine statement published in the ‘The Catholic Encyclopedia’ in 1940. “The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards to body and soul.”

In 1946, James Agate (a diarist) in his book, Ego 6 wrote, “The woman barrister (lawyer) looks and is ridiculous and has been since Portia. (a character in the play by William Shakespeare) Neither should that sex sit on juries; no woman will believe that a witness wearing the wrong hat can be giving the right evidence.” The chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is a woman. I don’t think the testimony of a woman wearing a hat she doesn’t like will have any bearing on her view of a woman’s testimony.

Denis Diderot (1713 –1784) was a French philosopher and writer who said about the manner in which women dress; “The only thing that has been taught successfully to women, is to wear becomingly the fig leaf from their first mother.”

Chris Pelekondas, a former baseball umpire, on the question of women umpires said in 1976, “A woman’s mind is not trained like ours. She couldn’t make those decisions. The female mind will not work that fast. The female mind will not have the intestinal fortitude (guts) to stand up to the guff the players would give them.” When I was a baseball umpire in the 1970s, the women umpires in our league not only stood up to the guff by the players, they gave it back in spades.

Here is the epitome of stupidity and made by no less than a judge who should have known better. The judge who was giving his ruling against a girl athlete whom he was excluding from a school team in 1976, said; (Brace yourselves. Here it comes) “Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls.” I have said it many times in the past and I will say it again. “Many members of the judiciary are some of the stupidest people on earth.”

I will give you more stupid statements in later blogs.