One last post for the night

This was a good opinion piece from Kelly Gunning, the director of advocacy and public policy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in Lexington.

Banishment of mentally ill all too common: Son also given trips; Horine case violated court order

It should come as no surprise that severely mentally-ill citizens of this country have long been targeted for relocation by some dubious law-enforcement agencies. In the case of Adam Horine, a compassionate judge, Carroll District Judge Elizabeth Chandler, could sense immediately upon interacting with him that he was not a dangerous criminal but a very ill individual pleading to go to the hospital. According to the news report, Chandler ordered an immediate mental-health examination of Horine and his transport to Eastern State Hospital. It is also noted that a social worker’s preliminary evaluation confirmed the judge’s initial read. Yet these prudent and justified acts of advocacy, according to the report and accompanying video, were soon overridden by Carrollton Police Chief Michael Willhoite and Officer Ron Dickow, who put him on a bus to Florida.

Also in The Lexington Herald-Leader today of note:

A picture of the Central Library check-out desk, 1982.

And a followup on the story of the bicyclist who was killed by an allegedly drunk driver recently:

Justice system failed family of Lexington bicyclist allegedly killed by drunk driver, widow says

Just a week before his death, Mark Hinkel said if anything ever happened to him while biking, he'd be OK with it because he'd be doing what he loved.

"I don't think he dreamed anything would happen" when he said that, his widow, Mary-Lynn Hinkel, said in a recent interview.

Mark Hinkel, 57, was at mile 99 of the Horsey Hundred 102-mile Century ride on May 23 in Scott County when he was hit by an oncoming truck whose driver allegedly was drunk. Hinkel landed on the truck bed cover, and the driver went about 3 miles with Hinkel on the cover before the truck was stopped by police. Odilon Paz-Salvador, 29, has been charged with murder.

Okay, let's put aside for a moment that this driver had no driver licence and is an illegal alien who should have been deported years ago back to his homeland. Let's look at this:

Paz-Salvador told officers after his arrest that he had nine previous DUIs, most older than five years.

The fourth DUI during a five-year period is a felony in Kentucky, but after five years, a person's DUI count resets. As a result, a driver could be charged every five years, and each time it would be the driver's first offense.

Without the five-year reset, Paz-Salvador would have been in prison, and Mark Hinkel would be alive today, Bayer said.

"The laws were not in place to protect our father, or anyone's father," Lauren Lewis said. "We cannot let another family go through what we're going through right now, because it's just unimaginable."

I hope the laws regarding driving under the influence and the 5-year reset will be changed as a result of this case. My heart goes out to the family of Mark Hinkel.

And lastly, there was a horrific accident on I-75 Southbound at the Clay's Ferry bridge. A tractor trailer caught on fire and the driver, no doubt fearing for his life, jumped from the cab, taking him off of the bridge and down below, where his body was found after the semi-truck crashed into a barrier, with flames spreading behind it for several trailer lengths. Someone shot a very chilling video of the fire. No one else was apparently hurt, which is a miracle, although the interstate was shut down for some time, there was a fire where the fuel came down off the bridge, and some of the fuel may have made it into the river, according to the Herald-Leader. The driver was from Florida. I am so sorry for his family. It was a horrible choice he had to make, and there was little chance short of a miracle that he would emerge unscathed, judging by the reports.

Interesting opinion piece on the value of natural history collections

Libraries of Life

Hidden behind the popular displays at many of your favorite natural history museums — in their basements, back rooms and, increasingly, off-site facilities — sit humanity’s most important libraries of life, holding not books but preserved animal and plant specimens, carefully collected over centuries by thousands of scientist explorers.

These specimen collections serve as the bedrock of our system of taxonomy — the rules by which we classify life — and are integral to our understanding of the threats, origins and interrelationships of biodiversity. And yet, thanks to budget cutbacks, misplaced ethical critiques, public misconceptions and government regulations that restrict scientists while failing to restrict environmental exploitation, the continued maintenance and growth of these libraries is in danger.

Though most visitors never know they are there, natural history collections are as critical to modern biologists as libraries are to journalists and historians. Indeed, like good literature, each museum specimen allows reinterpretation by every person who examines it.

But I should probably be careful about expressing opinions about anyone

(even though that is protected by US law). I give you:

Librarians Rally Behind Blogger Sued by Publisher Over Critical Comments

In 2010, Dale Askey, now a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, wrote a blog post about Edwin Mellen Press on his personal Web site, Bibliobrary, referring to the publisher as "dubious" and saying its books were often works of "second-class scholarship." For a few months afterward, several people chimed in in the blog's comments section, some agreeing with Mr. Askey, others arguing in support of the publisher.

In June 2012, Edwin Mellen Press's founder, Herbert Richardson, issued a notice of action to Mr. Askey, suing him for more than $1-million. That same day, the press issued a similar notice of action to Mr. Askey and McMaster University, telling them that they were being sued for $3-million. In the lawsuits, filed in a Canadian court, Mr. Richardson and the press are seeking damages for both the blog post and the comments left by the blog's readers.

So he's being sued personally by the press founder, plus being sued by the press, for comments on a PERSONAL blog. His CURRENT employer is also being sued, even though he was employed at another university, not named in the suit, at the time of publication. Additionally, some comments listed in teh suit are actually not Mr Askey's, but rather ones that were posted by readers.

In the United States, I think this would be considered spurious and thrown out. I don't know enough about Canadian law to know how they would respond. But it has some scary implications for bloggers, and also for librarians and academics who express opinions in their writings. Meanwhile, from the same article:

The Canadian Center of Science and Education is threatening to sue Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, after he included the center and three of its related companies on his blog's list of journals he considers to be "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers," which take advantage of academics desperate to get their work published. In separate blog posts, Mr. Beall details why he believes the companies are misleading.

I've had a takedown notice sent to me regarding this blog, from someone from my past who didn't like the comments (which were true) and opinions (which were my own) on the blog. They're a little scary, but sometimes it's just a lot of smoke and no fire. I went through and reviewed what I had written, kept almost all of it here, and tweaked a few so it was clear that they were my opinions. I also do not blog at work because someone (I'm not sure who) once complained about something I wrote (unspecified) while I was on our system. This was several years ago. I never learned what it was, but I suspect it was a comment I related that a friend had said, and one in fact that I disagreed with in the blog entry. So if you ever see a blog entry during the weekday inside normal business hours, I'm apparently off from work. Then again, I only agreed not to blog on their equipment. I can technically do so on my phone and tablet, and see no reason I couldn't when on break, but I haven't anyway. I've been blogging for almost 12 years, and those are really the only two problems I've had. Have you ever encountered people who tried to bully you into silence?

Then there was this

Terry Deary's attack on libraries branded 'ignorant twaddle': Authors, including artistic director of Bath Children's Literature Festival David Almond have criticised Terry Deary's comments that libraries are damaging the book industry

Deary furthered the debate yesterday by telling The Guardian that libraries were 'damaging'.

"Because it's been 150 years [since the Public Libraries Act], we've got this idea that we've got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers," he said.

The writer was the seventh most borrowed children's author from UK libraries last year. His books were borrowed more than 500,000 times during 2011/2012.

Under the Public Lending Right scheme, Deary would have received £6,600 – 6.2p per book – through people borrowing his books from a library. The amount he would get if he sold that number of books is £180,000.

But other library supporters have pointed out that families who use libraries are often those who can't afford to buy the books.

Here's a thought: without libraries, many of those 500,000 wouldn't have read his books at all, or told their friends what they thought about them, etc. I haven't read his illustrated series, Horrible Histories, which present unusual and sometimes downright gory scenes from history in a tongue-in-cheek manner, or any of his other books. I believe I shan't (and certainly won't buy them), especially given this, from his Wikipedia article:

Controversy

Deary is an outspoken critic of schools, which he believes serve no function above keeping children off the street. Deary has commented: "I've no interest in schools. They have no relevance in the 21st century. They were a Victorian idea to get kids off the street. Who decided that putting 30 kids with only their age in common in a classroom with one teacher was the best way of educating? At my school there were 52 kids in the class and all I learned was how to pass the 11-plus. Testing is the death of education. Kids should leave school at 11 and go to work. Not down the mines or up chimneys, mind, but working with computers or something relevant. Everything I learned after 11 was a waste of time. Trigonometry, Boyle's law: it's never been of any use to me. They should have been teaching me the life skills I was going to need, such as building relationships, parenting and managing money. I didn't have a clue about any of these things at 18. Schools need to change."

Terry Deary has said of historians: "They are nearly as seedy and devious as politicians..They pick on a particular angle and select the facts to prove their case and make a name for themselves... They don’t write objective history... Eventually you can see through them all. They all come with a twist."

In 2013 Deary spoke out against public libaries as they are unfair to authors and people should not expect things for free. He claims, in contrast to his earlier beliefs on the lack of value in schools, that schooling provides the poor and underpriviledged with sufficent literacy and that he, as a tax-payer, should not subsidise more.

. Wow. No, I see no reason to give him money. In my opinion, he sounds like a complete jerk.