In this episode, I rant about how we think we know everything and then scientists go ahead and discover wild new species.

Overreaction of the week: Huge fines for neatly stacked palates at a store.

Grumpy neighbor award: People complaining about seeing deer carcasses during deer season.

Safety: We now need permits to be homeless. Who knew?

Referenced articles:

10 Astonishing New Species Discovered in 2012

More than $20G in Fines for This…

Of Course They Did…Neighbors Complained About Deer Carcasses

You Need a Permit to Be Homeless

The Government Drove This Guy Out of Business

My New Desktop Wallpaper

So, let’s say you violate your city’s municipal code. Most of us do. Usually, it’s things like taking the trash cans out too early or forgetting to register our pets on an annual basis. But, what if we have a junk car on our property? Of course, that is out of the question, especially if vegetables on the property are out of the question.

Now, cities are mulling the idea of whether they can have your goods removed from your own property if they deem the goods to be in violation of city code — this includes cars.

The proposed amendments, which sparked public outcry last October, give the county’s planning and zoning director authority to have derelict vehicles and buildings deemed a public nuisance removed from private property if the property owner does not comply with a notice of ordinance violation within 30 days. The cost of removal, holding of the vehicle, and disposal would be billed to the property owner and collected as county taxes are collected.

Ok, so perfect! Not only do they want to take your belongings from your property, they want to bill you for it! Even junk cars have value. If they didn’t have value or purpose, nobody would keep them. They might not be your idea of a nice thing to view, but that doesn’t mean we need to remove them just to make things look tidy.

Stealing is wrong. Stealing to improve the subjective aesthetic value of a community is still wrong.

No. I am not regurgitating a story from a few  years ago. This is a new one…in a new town. Another person has been forbidden from growing vegetables. (The first story was from Oak Park, Michigan). The vegetables are against city code because they happen to be situated on the front lawn, rather than the back. Evidently, it is too unsightly to grow food. How barbaric! Doesn’t that poor homeowner know that civilized people don’t grow food? They buy it!

One of the best decisions you can make for the earth is to buy local, sustainable produce and meat. But, not in Oak Park or Orlando. In those towns, it is more important to keep up appearances and property values. Everyone knows that nearby vegetables always plummet the value of surrounding homes.

One very troubling aspect of today’s police-heavy, legislation-ridden society is the requirement that we act as informants for the police. These days, in many situations, it is no longer optional to get the authorities involved.

As a counselor, I was a mandated reporter for any suspicion of child abuse. That’s something I’m not planning address in detail today. However, I will say that it lays the ground work for many similar laws around the country. There are too many examples to list right now, but if you pay attention, you’ll see what I mean. People are being punished for not reporting crimes. This relates mostly to felonies, but you’d actually be surprised how many things are considered felonies these days. Just read the newspaper with your eyes and ears open and you will find stories like this one.

The story is about a man who was using illegal (unapproved) containers for gasoline. He was using five gallon buckets with lids. Of course, this is not smart. I’m not defending him. However, if you read closely in the story, you will find out that he received a misdemeanor ticket…but so did the gas station owner!

The gas station owner, Muniruzzaman Gomosta, 41, of West Haven, said he was busy and didn’t realize what the man was doing. He told police that Latif had come inside the store several times to pay for gas, but didn’t realize what he was doing.

Gomosta and Latif both were issued a misdemeanor summons for violation of regulation concerning flammable or combustible liquids.

“Officers felt Gomosta should have realized what Latif was doing as he entered the store several times to pay for buckets of gasoline,” Cuozzo said.

Orange Fire Marshal Timothy Smith and state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection officials responded to the scene and decided to return the gasoline to the station’s underground storage tanks.

Gomosta and Latif are due in Derby Superior Court on Nov. 19.

So, somehow, the gas station owner is responsible for the irresponsible behavior of his customers. Sometimes our society makes no sense.

A woman in Riverside, California was recently arrested for exceeding her speaking time at the local city council meeting. She went over her three minute limit, and was led away in handcuffs.

The really horrible thing here is how she was treated. She’s 60 years old. She cannot get up without putting her hands down on the ground. So, when she had her hands behind her back on her knees (not sure how she got to her knees), the officers were pulling on her wrists and hands to get her up, which was causing her pain. To some young people without physical ailments  this may seem trivial, but I am one of those people who can’t get up from the ground without turning face-down and pushing off.

There is no mention in any article I’ve read of her causing a disturbance. Of course, there will always be people who assume that every arrest was justified. But, until I find out otherwise, I will assume the opposite — that authority figures overreact these days and criminalize everything.

Back in March, I told you about a new city ordinance in Philadelphia that made it illegal for people to feed the homeless in public (for most locations). At that time, I said that it would hurt those in need. Of course, anyone with half of a brain could realize that.

Today, I found out that a Philadelphia woman is currently facing fines of $600 per day for feeding children in her neighborhood. She is doing this in her own yard. She refuses to get the required variance (at a cost of around $1,000) and plans to continue to feed the children.

Note: It is unclear whether this is supposedly a violation of the original ordinance I wrote about or a different issue. It seems like it is a different issue since the original post was in relation to public lands like parks. However, the city of Philadelphia must have a real problem with benevolence for this issue to have made the news again with a different twist.

Also, shame on the neighbor that called this in. What have we come to? We’re more concerned about our neighborhoods being quiet than making sure people have enough food?

In most towns, you cannot discharge a firearm. You can’t just do some target practice, hunt, or shoot an animal. The reason for this is obvious — there are other people living in close proximity who either may be disturbed by the noise or even hit by stray projectiles. So, to prevent this type of behavior, most municipalities have instituted a code which states that you cannot discharge a firearm within the city limits.

In my town it reads:

No person shall discharge any firearm in the city unless that person is a police officer or citizen acting under necessity.

Of course, the police officers should also only be acting under necessity, so that exception to the rule does not need to be there.

A woman in Kansas City, Kansas has found out that the exceptions to the rule don’t apply to her. Of course, I assume the Kansas City police don’t get tickets for firing their guns in town and that there is some provision to allow for personal protection.

It was early Saturday when Beck says she saw a stranger climbing over her backyard fence. Beck says when he lunged at her, she shot at him with the .22 pistol she happened to be carrying.

Of course, this is just her testimony, but I would think that a stranger climbing your fence and lunging at you would be a good enough reason to think that your safety may be in jeopardy.

The article goes on:

“I’m relieved I had my gun, because if not I don’t know what would’ve happened to me,” said Beck.

So Beck wasn’t at all happy when FOX 4 told her police records indicate she’d been given a summons for criminal use of a weapon.  A KCK Police Department public information officer told FOX 4 that according to their report, Beck told police she fired the weapon into the ground after the man turned to run away – something Beck denies saying.

“If I shot it in the ground, they would’ve found the casing,” said Beck.

Of course, they probably would not bother to look for the casing to prove her story one way or the other. It turns out that the police had been to her house the night before during an attempted break in. At that time, they did not give the impression that they were taking the case seriously. They didn’t even dust for fingerprints. Then, when someone is climbing her fence the next day, it’s no wonder she felt like she had to take matters into her own hands.

While zero tolerance regulations in school and workplaces aren’t necessarily illegal, they are symptomatic of a bigger problem (and one that I document here quite frequently), which is the lack of common sense while enforcing laws and regulations across the board. There are times when rules and regulations get put in place for the best reasons. We don’t want any child to get hurt at school, so we have zero tolerance policy on weapons. Well, then, when it is taken to the extreme, you have kids getting suspended for bringing Nerf guns to show-n-tell. We don’t want people to operate dangerous and expensive machinery while intoxicated, so we heartily approve of a zero alcohol policy at the workplace. Well, then, you have people getting fired who happened to have alcohol before bed the previous night and would have been within the legal limits to drive. It’s just my opinion that a workplace policy is a little overboard if the same amount of alcohol would make a cop turn the other direction and let you keep operating a motor vehicle.

Here’s another example of zero tolerance in the workplace — and an example of why it doesn’t pay to do the right thing. A Michigan public works employee was fired after turning a gun into police.  He found the gun while working. The police said he did the right thing by turning it in, but his employer disagreed.

 A check revealed that it had been stolen from a nearby suburb in 2005.

Where he ran into trouble is with his superiors, who saw things rather differently.

A Wayne County spokeswoman told WJBK that according to department rules employees aren’t allowed to possess a weapon on work property.

So after 23 years — just two shy of retirement — Chevilott was fired for violation of department policies, even though he found the gun while on the job and didn’t bring it to work. His foreman, who knew about the incident, was suspended for 30 days.

So, there you have it. Evidently, that’s all you need to know. He wasn’t allowed to possess a weapon on work property, and even though he found it there, he’s in violation of the rule and terminated. Rules are rules.

When will we wake up and realize that regulations have gone too far? On one hand, we’re told to trust the police and turn stuff like this in. But, on the other hand, we are punished for it. Nice. What would the punishment have been if the gun went off and injured or killed someone and he did nothing to prevent it?

What do you think of when I use the term sex offender? I would guess that most people think of a child molester. We don’t think of there being any gray area in the world of sex crimes, and we nearly always associate it with abuse of a child. One of the more controversial things that I’ve discussed on this blog is the fact that I disagree with sex offender registries. They just serve to add paranoia to our lives by convincing us that our neighborhoods are unsafe. Plus, there are a bunch of people on it who pose no danger to society at all. For more detailed reasoning about why you should burn your sex offender map, click here.

Today, I will share with you a little interesting tidbit. Did you know that there are some people on sex offender registries because they committed adultery? That is, they cheated on their spouse in a consensual relationship with another adult. While I think that behavior is highly immoral, it certainly doesn’t post a threat to me or my young children.  The rulings on this are different in every state, but a man in West Virginia was finally removed from the sex offender registry after a judge agreed with him that it was not warranted. His crime of misdemeanor sexual misconduct (adultery) occurred in the late 1970s. The “crime” was de-criminalized in the 1980s. Yet, when West Virginia started tracking sex offenders (more than 20 years later), he was required to register or face imprisonment. While his removal from the registry is a small victory, there are still a lot of people on the registry that don’t belong there.

The fact is that the regular citizen doesn’t know what misdemeanor sexual misconduct is. We don’t read that term on our sex offender map and make a mental note that the labeled person is not a threat. We no longer let our kids walk to school past that house. We tell others to avoid it and watch out. We spoil our neighborhoods.

I’ve known marriages that have survived adultery. For all we know, this guy could still be married to his wife. They could be a happy little family. Anyway, it is not our place to judge him. Neither is it our place to tell me he can’t live next to a school or a childcare facility (as if that has anything to do with his crime). When there are restrictions like this on the sex offenders, no wonder we associate it with child abuse.

A man in Lockport, New York has been sentenced by a judge to serve 15 days in jail for violating the city’s sign ordinance.  In my opinion, this victimless crime (as well as any victimless crime) should not result in begin confined to a cage forany amount of time.

In Lockport, the law dictates electronic signs can’t change more than once every ten minutes.

The man, David Mongielo, objects.  He says that a video-formatted sign is different because the message of the sign wasn’t changing, it’s just hat it had moving pictures, basically.  He also argues that it violates his constitutional rights to free speech for the city to regulate the messages that he can put on signs that he pays for, anyway.  He and his attorney say they plan to appeal.

If he does not win this appeal, I will be even more disgusted with the level of “freedoms” that we have today in the USA.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t come up with any good reason to have this time stipulation as part of the law, anyway.  The article does not offer the prosecutor’s side of the story, as he/she did not want to comment.