Re: [Paddlewise] Who's to Blame?

>  "Shawn Baker" <shawnkayak_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

> ...It is sad that Americans as a whole do not accept personal
responsibility
> as a lifestyle.  "It's someone else's fault"....and it's a sad plague
> spreading to other countries...

Shawn your'e right. Right there is the crux of the issue.

It all started not to long ago. If you remember back in the 60s there was a
man who was later to be known as the "father" of tort law. A fellow by the
name of Ralph, "unsafe at any speed" Nader. He set the example to be
followed by so many. He figured out that he could exploit that feature of
the American psyche to his financial and political advantage. He went after
GM on account they had the biggest pockets around at the time. Tried to
extort GM claiming the Corvair flipped over unusually easily. In the end it
was bogus and his own studies revealed it was no les safe than any other car
on the road, in fact in comparison to any other vehicle on the road at the
time a smaller number of them ever flipped over. Ol Ralph dismissed the
report he commissioned himself as bogus and kept at it and lined his pockets
in the process. And it has been down hill ever since.

John Kirk Anderson wrote:

> Rather than worry too much about litigation-avoidance (or responsibility
> avoidance), we should instead use this energy to ensure we practise, not
> just preach, best practice.

yes but you see my friend there is this little thing called greed. now you
cant let little issues like moraliy and responsability get in the way of
making some easy money, why well you see I was iiiiiinnnjured, but nooo it
wasn't my own dumb fault, I can turn this picture to my advantage and do
what al Ralph showed us how to do.

Like a few years back in the early 80s when a fellow took an old Piper J3
cub airplane built in 1932 and installed a tripod w/ a video camera in the
front seat and went to tow a glider up, only he did not see the van that the
owner of the land had parked on the runway cause the airport management had
not paid up their rent for a while. Well you can guess what happened. The
now dead oh so creative pilots wife successfully sewed and won the largest
single award against any corporation to date because Piper aircraft did not
think back in 1932 to install a full 4 point seat harness to keep ol Rube
Goldberg from mortally impaling himself on the very camera tripod he himself
had staled in the front seat. And Piper aircraft went bankrupt.

time to go paddling.

Michael
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