In particular, getting rid of carseats to avoid the risk of a toddler left in the car dying from being overheated is like keeping boxes of matches in his reach all through the house to protect your toddler from freezing to death in case the power goes out in wintertime.

The technology is there, was developed fairly easily and is quite effective, but no one wants to mass produce it do to liability issues should it malfunction.

http://tinyurl.com/mkd9pc

One of the benefits of ignoring MSM, I guess.

[From what I have heard in the last 24 hours, I can truly say that ignorance appears to have been bliss.]

As for forgetting the kid in the car… I dunno. My daughter can completely exhaust me at times, but I just couldn’t imagine leaving her in the car seat. Not even when she was younger and the car seat was rear-facing.

If only there were a way to determine *why* the crowd grew unruly. Was there some sort of triggering event that caused this happy party to devolve into chaos and mayhem? The world may never know.

Keep up the good work, boys!

Really, I think the primary culprit is lack of attention, most likely due to lack of adequate rest. So many people are operating on a sleep deficit, especially parents, and unfortunately it’s usually due to their own choices. Certainly sometimes a kid will keep you up late being sick, or there’s something you must get done as a special project, but generally, the reason most people don’t get adequate sleep is television and other entertainment choices (computer, movie, etc). And when people are tired, they make mistakes, and the operate on ‘auto-pilot’.

Everyone’s done it. Get to work in the morning, and you can’t remember the drive there. Or finish work and get home, and you can’t remember the drive home. Oh, I forgot to stop at the store and pick up whatever. But you don’t remember you forgot something until another factor reminds you. If you’re able to keep going through your routine, it could be a long time before you notice what you forgot.

It’s possible there might be some remote sensing ability that gets deployed in the near future. Perhaps a weight and motion sensor combined with remote sending (emergency cellphone or SMS) built into a car seat that can notify parents if the seat detects weight + no movement of the vehicle + warm temperatures or something. But I wouldn’t support any sort of law mandating it, because it would just cost a lot of people who can’t really afford that sort of thing more money.

The problem with that is, I keep the back middle seatbelt buckled so that when there are enough people in the car to need it, it’s obvious which belt goes into which buckle.

Well said… This is why I’m wary of any encounter with a cop.

Too many people have bought into a good old days, Hollywood gilded mythology of the “cop as hero” and hold a mysterious belief is that these men (and women) deserve our obedience and respect simply for their chosen career path rather then their choices, actions, and contributions.

I suppose the gradual erosion of these beliefs will be met with further violence and intimidation from shit cops while leaving the cops that understand the concepts of community policing at an even greater disadvantage.

Another thing I’m sick of is local crimes getting whipped into huge national stories and then people I know who are otherwise perfectly reasonable people jump on the bandwagon. Sucks the Anthony kid is dead, but lots of people die. Quit acting like she was your favorite niece and flogging yourself all over the internet so you can impress us by how wonderful you are that you’re sad. Especially when 99.99999% of the crap you post you didn’t write but copied and pasted from someone that was evidently fired from Hallmark for being to sappy.

We actually did expel a whole bunch of foreign nationals (not just Saudis) after 9/11. IIRC, we rounded up about 1,000 foreigners who, for whatever reason, the feds were worried about and who had no legal right to stay here (that is, not legal residents or citizens), and shipped them back where they came from. I gather this was probably a pretty effective thing to do, though it’s very hard to prove.

But it’s important to recognize something here: Your view of WW2 is, I’m sorry to say, probably very heavily influenced by propaganda during and after the war, rather than reality. Among the unsavory stuff we did in that war:

(i) Rounded up a bunch of Japanese and stuck them in concentration camps, not for security reasons, but because it was politically popular. (We would have had to intern or deport Japanese nationals and suspected spies anyway, but that would have been a tiny fraction of the people we put in camps.)

(ii) Had a president who lied us into a war. (A war we probably needed to be in, true, but it’s unambiguous that FDR was working to get us into that war even while he was campaigning on the claim that he’d keep us out of war.)

(iii) Allied ourselves with Joe Stalin, one of humanity’s all-time champion mass-murderers, responsible for even more deaths than Adolf Hitler.

(iv) Firebombed and later nuked cities full of civilians in order to break the enemy’s morale and force them to surrender. (Firebombing didn’t work, but nuking Japan a couple times did.)

And so on.