Taliban Says Malala ‘Has Done Nothing To Earn Prize’
Mr. Taliban, did you see Jon Stewarts interview with Malala? (See below) All she wants is an education. She wants an education for herself, but also for all children in Pakistan. Your children, too! She wants them to have that opportunity, that’s all. And she has paid the price for her courage speaking out, and she bravely continues to state the obvious – there is nothing in Islam against educating women.
MIRANSHAH, Pakistan: The Pakistani Taliban Thursday said teenage activist Malala Yousafzai had done “nothing” to deserve a prestigious EU rights award and vowed to try again to kill her.
The European Parliament awarded the Sakharov human rights prize to the 16-year-old, who has become a global ambassador for the right of all children to go to school since surviving a Taliban murder attempt.
Malala survived being shot in the head by a TTP gumnan on October 9 last year and is seen as a leading contender for the Nobel Peace prize, to be announced on Friday.
“She has done nothing. The enemies of Islam are awarding her because she has left Islam and has became secular,” Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Shahidullah Shahid told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.
“She is getting awards because she is working against Islam. Her struggle against Islam is the main reason of getting these awards.”
He repeated the TTP’s threat – made numerous times in recent months -try again to kill Malala, “even in America or the UK”.
Malala and moved to Britain in the wake of the shooting for treatment and to continue her education in safety.
Feted by world leaders and celebrities for her courage, Malala has addressed the UN, this week published an autobiography, and could become the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate on Friday.
Her autobiography “I am Malala”, written with journalist Christina Lamb, has gone on sale in Pakistan and Shahid warned the Taliban would target bookshops stocking it.
“Malala is the enemy of Islam and Taliban and she wrote this book against Islam and Taliban,” he said. (AFP)
Palafox One of ‘Ten Best Streets in America’
From today’s Pensacola News Journal, the best parade street I have ever seen is recognized nationally for parades, restaurants and community spirit.
Palafox named one of Ten Best Streets in America
Written by
Julio Diaz
and Kevin Robinson
Need more proof that Palafox Place has become a thriving thoroughfare? Here it is: Palafox Place is one of 10 “Great Streets in America for 2013,” according to the American Planning Association.
The independent, not-for-profit educational organization — affiliated with the American Institute of Certified Planners — named Palafox Place alongside streets in Philadelphia; Galveston, Texas; Honolulu; and Corning, N.Y., on its 2013 list.
“For hundreds of years, Palafox Street has been at the center of life in our city,” Mayor Ashton Hayward said in a news release. “Over the past three decades, our community has reinvested in Palafox Street and, as a result, Palafox has once again become the anchor to a thriving, vibrant downtown and a city in renaissance.”
The organization recognized the eight-block stretch from Wright Street to Main Street. Locals will note that Palafox Place addresses run from 1 to 400 south of Garden Street, so this honor additionally includes parts of North and South Palafox Street (from Wright Street to Garden Street and from Government Street to Main Street).
The selection cites the historic architecture and character of the street, as well as popular events such as Mardi Gras parades and the annual Pelican Drop on New Year’s Eve; management of public events and street closures by the Downtown Improvement Board; private investment, including the Al Fresco food trailer court; and a variety of planning and preservation achievements.
You can read the entire article by clicking here.
Or better yet – come for Mardi Gras! See for yourself 🙂
“Is Your Cat Always Fractious?”
“Fractious” isn’t a word you often hear. Clearly the veterinary tech had just read the word off the record, perhaps there is some warning in there about the Qatari Cat.
The Qatari Cat was born on the streets of Qatar, and had a bumpy start with another owner. While the man and his daughter liked him just fine, the wife and her mother did not. When the Qatari cat came to live with us, he was very wary of me. It took a couple years for him to fully trust me. He watched my feet all the time. He quailed in fear, ears back, if I used a loud voice. He was terrified of the sound of plastic bags.
Slowly, slowly, we built a relationship. Today, ten years later, he is a sweet cat.
He is a sweet cat every single day of the year, but he still has his street instincts. AdventureMan has learned that you can’t play rough with the Qatari Cat; you play rough, you lose. I never speak loudly to him; it just won’t work, it just gets his back up. Because he knows I am the boss, I speak sternly, but softly to him and he will do just what I ask him to do.
Our first visit to the vet went badly. You can read about it here. He was fine until the buzzing razor hit his bottom and then all his survival instincts kicked in. He’s been back twice, and he has been as good as gold, but somehow . . . that notation has stuck.
“No!” I replied, maybe a little bit too loudly.”No! He is a sweet kitty! He is snuggly and loving and quiet and good! But if he is scared, he wants to defend himself.” I told the tech about the Italian vet the Qatari Cat fell in love with in Kuwait, she snuggled him and told him how beautiful he was and how much she loved him and he was putty in her hands. I was almost jealous. I thought maybe she distilled some catnip and mixed it with her perfume or something, Qatari Cat’s eyes glazed a little in sheer adoration when he was around her, and he even drooled a little. She could take his temperature, give him a shot and check his innards and he never complained, just looked at her adoringly.
The tech shot a skeptical look at me and exited the room. I could hear her repeat this to the vet, and muffled laughter before she entered the room again.
So the vet came in and snuggled Qatari Cat, and told him he was pretty, and while she did not say it with an Italian accent, Qatari Cat was clearly intrigued – and on his best behavior. It doesn’t take much . . . he’s a male. Snuggle him a little, rub his fur the right way, chat him up . . . it doesn’t have to be rational, it’s all in the tone of voice and the flirtation. He totally digs it, he eats it up. A little grope here, a quick look at the teeth, a quick injection and he’s finished, not a fractious moment in the entire visit.
On the way home, we laughed thinking of our sensitivity at having our cat called “fractious.” We remember the indignant response of friends whose cat was annotated as “vicious” by a German vet. The cat was diabetic and objected to the roughness with which the vet wanted to take his blood. I think if you are a veterinarian, you might have an understanding that a sick animal, or a scared animal, might act unpredictably or defensively, there are big thick gloves you can wear if an animal seems wired up.
Does this look like a fractious cat to you?
Every Day Sadists Walk Among Us
“Trust your feelings,” my friend told me when I was telling her about a person who seemed so nice, but made me uncomfortable. This article says the same thing; if you feel like a person takes pleasure from humiliating or hurting others, stay far far away. It’s only a matter of time before they turn on you.
Everyday Sadists Walk Among Us, Study Says
(From AOL News/Every Day Health)
Although we may think of sadism in a sexual or criminal context, sadistic tendencies are common in everyday life.
By Laurie Sue Brockway, Everyday Health Staff Writer
Whether it’s the Marquis de Sade, the evil stepmother from Snow White, or Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, all sadists take great pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Fortunately, you are unlikely to meet those particular three anytime soon, but according to an unusual duo of studies conducted in Vancouver, British Columbia, and published in Psychological Science this week, it is very possible you will bump into a boss, a colleague, or even a family member who may be considered an “everyday sadist.”
While most people try to avoid hurting others — and will feel guilty, remorseful, and distressed if they do hurt someone intentionally or unintentionally — an everyday sadist enjoys being cruel and may find it exciting.
“We have probably all encountered people in our daily lives who — at least seem to — enjoy hurting others,” said lead researcher Erin Buckels, MA, who conducted this work as part of her master’s thesis in Social-Personality Psychology at the University of British Columbia. She is now a doctoral student at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
“Everyday sadists lack empathy, and they possess an internal motivation to hurt others. However, they are unlikely to act in a way that would be criminal or dangerous — at least in most contexts, where such behavior is met with social disapproval or punishment,” Buckels said.
Everyday sadists may be cousins to classic sociopaths in their lack of empathy, but they are not considered a danger to society in the same way. “It is only in situations where cruelty is encouraged or socially acceptable that dangerous behavior might enter the equation,” said Buckels. “Both sadistic personality and situational pressures are necessary for sadism to manifest with everyday people. War is one example of this confluence — we have all seen the images of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. All forms of cruel behavior have the potential to be motivated by sadistic pleasure, including bullying and abuse by others. If it were done purely for pleasure, then it would be sadism.”
If You Like to Hurt Bugs, You May Be a Sadist
It’s one thing to take an empty mayonnaise jar to catch fireflies when you are a kid and accidentally forget to poke holes in it, causing the fireflies to die. It’s another thing to enjoy harming bugs (or animals). Buckels used a bug-crushing exercise to draw the everyday sadists out in a controlled laboratory environment. For the experiment, she defined sadists in two ways: Their cruel behavior and felt pleasure in the lab, and personality characteristics consistent with sadism. A group of 71 participants were asked to fill out a sadism personality questionnaire and also given a list of four tasks they could choose from:
Killing bugs
Helping the experimenter kill bugs
Cleaning dirty toilets
Enduring pain from ice water
A bug-crunching machine fashioned out of a coffee grinder made distinct crunching sounds. Placed close to this machine were cups containing live pill bugs that were labeled with names like Muffin, Ike, and Tootsie. Those who selected bug-crushing were told to put the bugs into the machine and grind them up. Unbeknownst to them, there was a barrier that prevented the bugs from being dropped into the grinder. No bugs were killed for this experiment, but it brought the sadists out of the closet. Of 71 participants, nearly 28 percent chose to kill bugs.
What Exactly Is a Sadist?
Sadistic personality disorder was once defined as a mental illness, but over time sadism has been considered more of a lifestyle choice or a personality quirk or trait. The new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), does include sexual sadism disorder. “This is marked by recurrent and intense sexual arousal from the suffering of others as manifested by fantasies, urges, and behaviors,” said Wilfried Busse, PhD, a psychotherapist based in Bethesda, Md. “To meet full criteria for the disorder, an individual also has to act on such urges by inflicting harm on a non-consenting individual, or must experience such uncontrollable urges to cause significant social and occupational impairment.”
“The central feature of sadism is deriving pleasure from watching or inflicting physical or psychological harm on others,” added Dr. Busse. “In the extreme form a sadist will seek to inflict suffering on another for the psychological gratification derived from such an action.”
Buckel’s study did not use classic criteria to define sadism – most widely known as sexual or criminal behavior – and instead explored sadism as it exists in the “subclinical” range of personality, an aspect of sadism not considered a mental illness.
“There is clearly a difference between a person who gets pleasure from killing bugs and a person who kills other humans for pleasure,” said Buckels. “That being said, the core experience of sadism is probably pretty similar for both of them. Our research has also revealed both similarities and differences between people who enjoy acting cruelly, or direct sadists, and those who simply enjoy watching cruelty, or vicarious sadists.Regardless of whom the victim is, direct aggression requires a certain amount of callousness and a lack of distress towards the suffering of another living creature.”
How to Spot a Sadist
There is a big difference between the kind of evil sadists we know from history and movies and people with sadistic impulses, who fall into a category of sadism that is considered a personality trait rather than a personality disorder.
“It is very important to differentiate between an antisocial, or sadistic, personality disorder and sadistic impulses,” said psychologist Fran Walfish, Psy.D., a family therapist and author in Beverly Hills, Calif.
“Antisocial personality disorder is very rare,” Walfish said, offering examples such as Hitler, murderers who enjoy torturing their victims and watching them suffer, and, possibly, Syrian President Bashar Assad. “But the rest of us have unconscious sadistic impulses. Even the kindest, most loving person, when terribly mistreated, can feel an impulse of hate very strong,” she added.
Walfish explained that there are several sub-types of sadists:
Explosive sadist. When disappointed and/or frustrated with their lives, humiliated or hopeless, they lose control and seek revenge for the mistreatment to which they feel subjected. They are known for being unpredictably violent. This manifests through tantrums, fearsome attacks on others, especially family members, and uncontrollable rage.
Tyrannical sadist. They are frightening and cruel because they appear to relish the act of menacing and brutalizing others; forcing their victims to cower and submit gives them satisfaction.
Enforcing sadist. They tend to be military sergeants, deans of universities, prison overseers, police officers or people with other authoritative functions who feel they should be the ones controlling and punishing people who have broken rules, regulations or laws.
Spineless sadist. They are typically deeply insecure and act like cowards. In anticipation of real danger, they project their hostile fantasies and strike first, hoping thereby to forestall their antagonist and ask questions later. They use aggressive hostility to send the message to others that they aren’t intimidated or fearful, so that they can control their inner feelings and display the exact opposite of how they actually feel. They seek out scapegoats to gang up on, which allows them to assault the exact things that exist within themselves that they want to deny.
Everyday sadist. There is a renewed interest in studying subclinical sadism as a personality trait, said Walfish. Subclinical psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and everyday sadism form the so-called “Dark Tetrad” of personality.
“These people aren’t necessarily serial killers or sexual deviants but they gain some emotional benefit in causing or simply observing others’ suffering,” said Walfish. “The type of person the study is referring to are, for instance, the co-worker who repeatedly humiliates you and smiles or appears to reap pleasure from hurting you. If you self-advocate and say something that inflames your co-worker, she retaliates with evil revenge, further humiliating you.”
Exercise Caution Around Everyday Sadists
The British Columbia researchers surmised that everyday sadists are not the most popular people.“A person who has a high score on a sadism personality questionnaire is unlikely to be regarded as a nice and loving person,” said Buckels. “That is not to say that they are always nasty or that they can’t love others; but in general, high scorers tend to be less nice than average.”
How does someone become an everyday sadist? “In general, the cause or reason someone wants to go the extra effort to hurt another is because someone terribly mistreated them,” said Walfish. “That someone is usually their mother, father, or an older sibling. The sadist was a receptacle, or container, for hostility and evil meanness. These toxic feelings become too much for one to bear. They have no choice but to find a weaker victim and spew their venom onto the other.”
“Within their own families and in the workplace these people cannot be trusted,” Walfish observed. “No one can ever feel safe with them. Therefore, they do not have real relationships. They engage by exploiting, manipulating, and using other people as a means to their own end. The best thing to do is keep reasonable distance from these people. Always be pleasant so you don’t become their target. This does not mean to kiss up. It just means you present yourself as a benign nice guy. Never do business or get close to one of these people. They will always take you down.”
Buckels said she was surprised to find such a low baseline of positive emotions reported by sadists. “They are not just acting out to compensate for deep-rooted insecurity or low self-esteem,” she said. “Interestingly, after an act of cruelty, their moods seemed to lighten, suggesting instead that the sadist’s appetite for cruelty derives from some diabolical need. Although speculative, our hypothesis is that sadists have an underlying deficit that is sated through cruelty’s rewards.”
Gospel for 9/11
Are we who we say we are?
Do we follow the spirit of The Word? Do we as believers pick and choose from our holy book(s) or do we humble ourselves, as Christ did, and do as he commands?
The Lord Jesus Christ commanded a very difficult life style. I have met holy people among all religions; I am forced to believe that “the way and the truth and the light” are behavioral, and that there will be many surprises when we get to the last days.
September 11th is a difficult day. This is a difficult Gospel reading for a difficult day:
Matthew 5: 38 – 47
Eye for Eye
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’h 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Love for Enemies
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbori and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Presenter Ses Condoléances
Some things you do. Some things are hard, and you do them anyway. I always think of them in the formal – pour prendre conge’, respondez, pour rendre petite assistance . . . must do’s, societal niceties, the grease that keeps civilization running, never mind smoothly.
I had to call a friend this morning to tell her how sorry I am that her husband had died. When she came to the phone, I was initially shocked. For months, since her husband’s stroke, she has been subdued and tired, but this morning she sounded happy and energetic.
“He’s free!” she said to me. “”As it says in the Bible, his passing was a breath; if I hadn’t been holding his hand and paying attention, I wouldn’t have known he was gone. It was so easy.” She was joyful. We wept together, for joy. He was free of the burden his life had become.
What I thought was going to be a sad call turned out to be a joyful call. She loves her husband still. They had years and years and children and grandchildren together, and she let him go with joy because he was ready.
Thanks be to God.
The M/V Kennicott and the Birders
I hesitate to even write this post, but it was a significant part of our first day on board. AdventureMan and I headed for the forward deck just after we had eaten lunch, and found a nice place to watch departure and the whales and the passing scenery. As we stood there, a crowd began to gather, and they were all chirping and grabbleing, and the group got larger and larger and we kind of got shoved aside. It wasn’t intentional, it’s just as the group grew in size, like minded birders, they just backed out, and pushed into us.
Birders. There was a group of birders on board. We like birders. We belong to a bird group! But these birders are seriously focused people. Have you seen the movie The Big Year? These birders were loaded for bear, all decked out in foul weather gear, real rubber overalls and headgear, and had serious huge single-focus lensed cameras and equally formidable bird spotters.
They took over the forward deck.
Like I say, my emotions are mixed on this, because we like birds, too. We like people who like birds. We don’t much like being pushed aside, and having to climb over equipment set up where people usually walk. For those inside, the best viewing is from the forward lounge, and there were so many of the birders, busy spotting, that you really couldn’t see from the inside, nor could you get one of these prime positions on the forward deck because they would be first up in the morning to get the spot, and they would hang out there dawn to dusk.
One of the birders turned out to be a person who knows a very good old friend of mine – life is funny that way, and you can meet some great people on the Alaskan Ferries.
We had to admire their focus, and their persistence, and their seriousness with which they pursued their passion.
When we hit Yakutat, they were first off the boat, early, 5 in the morning kind of early, the whole flock of ’em, beady little eagle eyes sharply seeking unusual birds for their check lists. You could hear them making bird noises. Back on the ship, someone would say something and all eyes, all binoculars, all cameras would turn in one direction, and people would take their best shots. They manned their prime observation post with military dedication.
They left the boat at Whittier, on the second day. We wished the all success, and we were glad to have access to the front viewing deck once again.
The SeaTac Food Court
“Terminal T? Is that new? I don’t remember arriving at Terminal T before!”
Not even two weeks have passed, and we are going through SeaTac again, this time en route to Alaska. As we enter “Terminal T” we discover terminal T is like saying “Shrimp scampi” you are saying the same thing. T is the Terminal, it used to be the only terminal. It’s what used to be the original airport before all the South Terminals and North Terminals and others I don’t even know. Oh yeh, A, B, and C.
But the Main Terminal is a delight. Seattle loves public art, as do I, and arriving in Seattle at the main terminal, you find schools of little brass fish swirling under your footsteps, if you think to look. These little touches delight me.
We are flying out of Seattle to Alaska, and Alaska Airlines flies out of terminals C or N, and as it turns out, our flight flies out of N, or the North Concourse. On our way there, we are wondering if we will find something healthy to pick up for our dinner, when we come to the Food Court.
We’ve eaten here before, breakfast. They have an Anthony’s-in-the-Airport, and my best friend recommended their breakfast egg dishes. I hate oatmeal, but discovered that the oatmeal at Anthony’s is delicious! It must not be good for me; how can oatmeal that is good for me taste so good?
And, as it turns out, Anthony’s has a take-out section! Woo Hooo!
Well, hmmmm, not quite. They don’t have the Ceasar Salad with a piece of grilled salmon or halibut on the top, but isn’t salmon and chips almost as healthy? Although in intend to wait to eat on the plane, the odor of delicious deep fried salmon calls to me, along with a cup of freshly brewed mocha, and I go ahead and eat my dinner in the Seattle airport.
I love it that there are so many options. Anthony’s has a great restaurant, right in the old main terminal, with floor to ceiling glass, it is a glorious situation. There are other eating establishments where you can order and then sit in the same area at tables and chairs – Ivars, some Mexican, some others which are good, it’s just I love the take out from Anthony’s. Normally airport food can be a total drag, unless you go through Memphis and have some BBQ – or Seattle. Seattle does airport food right.
Worse Than Crack Cocaine? Growing up Poor
From AOL Daily Finance Poverty damages children more than being born to a crack addicted mother. Poverty keeps children from attaining their full potention, and hurts us all as a society as a huge waste of potential resource:
In the 1980s, the crack baby epidemic was hard to ignore. Television show after television show, article after article proclaimed that children born to addicts of the increasingly prevalent “crack” cocaine were all-but-guaranteed to have birth defects, including extremely low IQs and severe emotional problems. This “lost generation,” commentators emphasized, would be incapable of forming relationships or reaching full emotional maturity. They would be, in the words of Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, condemned to “a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.”
A little over 20 years later, Krauthammer’s predictions have proven almost embarrassingly inaccurate. Last week, the findings of a 24-year-long study of crack babies revealed that parental use of the drug had little or no direct effect on the children. In the process of investigating the babies, however, researchers discovered another environmental problem that did, in fact, lead to problems with depression, anxiety, cognitive functioning, and a host of other issues: poverty.
In 1989, Dr. Hallam Hurt, chair of the neonatology department at Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center, began tracking 224 near-term or full-term children who were born to crack addicts. In the ensuing years, her longitudinal study followed the children, finding that, overall, their IQs were about the same as a control group of children of non-addicted mothers. Further, the children in Hurt’s study had comparable outcomes when it came to educational and emotional development.
That having been said, Hurt’s study found that children raised in poverty — regardless of whether or not their mothers were addicted to crack — tended to have lower IQs and lower school readiness than those who weren’t raised in poverty. A big part of the problem, she argues, is environmental: Of the children in her study, “81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside.” The children themselves acknowledged the effect of these events: “Those children who reported a high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.”
In other words, while prenatal crack abuse may not have a major effect on children, the societal conditions in crack-ravaged communities most certainly do. As Hurt emphasized, “Given what we learned, we are invested in better understanding the effects of poverty. How can early effects be detected? Which developing systems are affected? And most important, how can findings inform interventions for our children?” Or, to put it another way, now that we understand that poverty is more dangerous for children than crack, what can we do to protect our children from its effects?
In Florida, the worst schools are those serving the poor. Many fell a full grade point in the Florida evaluations and would have fallen further if there were not a law – I am not kidding – that says they can only fall one grade point in a year. We are failing in the two most important areas that can help children pull themselves out of poverty – good health care, and good education.
The Official Worst Drivers in America: Miami
Slate.com has figured out which city has the worst drivers in America: Miami, Fla.
Slate looked at years of data about traffic accidents, automotive fatalities, alcohol-related driving deaths and pedestrian strike rates as indicators of bad driving.
Three out of the five cities with the worst drivers are found in the Sunshine State, with Miami topping the list as the absolute worst. Miami is first in auto fatalities and pedestrian strikes and, according to Slate, first in “obscenity-lace tirades of their fellow driver”. Fellow Floridian cities Hialeah, which comes in at number three, and Tampa at number four also seem to host a populace with a passion for running down pedestrians and fatal car accidents.
Miami shows up on more than just Slate.com’s worst list. The Huffington Post reported that Miami also had the most hit-and-runs in Florida last year, an incredible 35 a day. Transportation for America also ranked the most dangerous cities in America to drive in, with the top four all in Florida. Maybe Floridians should look into buying heavy-duty trucks and steering clear of sidewalks.
From the original report at Slate.com where you can read the entire article:
Adjusting the Allstate rankings for mileage this way has significant effects. Washington, D.C. remains the worst driving city using the insurance claims data, but Philadelphia surges to second worst. Hialeah drops seven places, from fourth to 11th.
Next we consider additional indicators. Car crashes are bad, but some accidents are worse than others. In July 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published automobile fatality data for major cities and metropolitan statistical areas from the year 2009. It’s useful for our purposes, but it comes with a couple of caveats. The researchers didn’t publish data for some of the smaller cities on our list. In those cases, we’ll use data from the larger metropolitan area. In addition, three cities (Boston, Newark, N.J., and Providence) had fewer than 20 fatalities, but the precise number is unpublished. We’ll assume that each of these cities had 10 fatalities, so we have a number to enter into the calculations.
Drunk drivers are bad drivers, and some cities have far more of them than others. Not all locales publish reliable data on drunk driving fatalities, so we’ll turn to the Century Council, an association of distillers organized to combat drunk driving. The group published the number of fatalities from alcohol-related car accidents in 2011. The data are, unfortunately, broken down by state rather than city. So, for our purposes, the sins of the state will be visited upon the cities. (New York City has reliable data, so we can use city-specific data in that instance.) We can’t adjust the statewide data for mileage, because our mileage numbers relate only to cities themselves. So DWI fatalities will have to be computed per capita, unadjusted for how many miles residents of a city drive.
Pedestrian strikes are another key metric. For this indicator we turn to the CDC’s WONDER, a searchable database of morbidity and mortality statistics. It’s a priceless epidemiological tool as well as a bottomless source of trivia. The most granular data on pedestrian injuries and deaths is by county.
You might object to the use of pedestrian injuries as a metric of driver incompetence, because some cities have far more pedestrians than others. That’s a fair point, but consider New York City. It is, by far, the most walked city in the United States. Two-thirds of New Yorkers either walk or use public transit to get to work. According to the website WalkScore.com, only 2 percent of New Yorkers live in neighborhoods where cars are necessary. While every pedestrian strike is a tragedy, there are fewer in New York than you might expect. Miami-Dade County, a significantly less walked city, had 20 percent more pedestrian strikes per mile driven between 2006 and 2010 than New York.
. . . . .
And now, America, on to the cities with your worst drivers.
No. 5: Baltimore. Baltimoreans just can’t keep from running into each other. They were outside the top 10 in fatalities, DWI deaths, and pedestrian strikes, but their rate of collision couldn’t keep them out of the top five overall.
No. 4: Tampa, Fla. Tampa doesn’t do any single thing terribly, but it is consistently poor: 18th worst in years between accidents, fifth in traffic fatalities, tied for 11th in DWI fatalities, and 10th in pedestrian strikes. If the city had managed to get outside the bottom half in any individual category, Tampa residents might have avoided this distinction.
No. 3: Hialeah. The drivers of Hialeah get into a middling number of accidents, ranking 11th among the 39 candidates. But when they hit someone, they really mean it. The city finished third for fatalities. They also have a terrifying tendency to hit pedestrians.
No. 2: Philadelphia. Drivers in the city of brotherly love enjoy a good love tap behind the wheel. Second-places finishes in collisions and pedestrian strikes overwhelm their semi-respectable 16th-place ranking in DWI deaths.
No. 1: Miami. And it’s not even close. First in automotive fatalities, first in pedestrian strikes, first in the obscenity-laced tirades of their fellow drivers.
A couple of other noteworthy findings: Californians did reasonably well. Although the Golden State had seven cities among our 39 candidates, only Glendale finished in the top half of the table. Louisiana’s two entries, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, finished 6th and 15th, owing to the state’s terrible record of drunk driving fatalities.
Washington, D.C., the whipping boy of the Allstate rankings, dropped to 16th, owing to low numbers of DWI fatalities. Boston drivers don’t deserve the torment they receive. They have few automotive fatalities and rarely kill people in alcohol-related accidents. It goes to show how flawed opinion polls can be.
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