Saturday, December 29, 2007

Tiger wall was too low - Tiger kills teen

It is not the height of the wall that is the problem, it is the moat.

On Dec 25 2007, 1 teen was killed and 2 were injured at the San Francisco zoo when a Siberian Tiger scaled a 12 and half foot retaining wall and attacked the teens.

According to the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, the walls around a tiger exhibit should be at least 16.4 feet high. This is a recommendation, not a regulation. The zoo has been inspected several times and never was it recommended the wall be raised.

The following picture is from the San Francisco Zoo. A moat separates the tiger compound from the 12.6 foot wall and the visitor fence.


As you can see from the above image, a 30 foot wide moat would allow a running tiger to reach its top speed of about 30mph, and with that momentum it could easily scale a 12.5 foot wall.

Yes, the wall would be to low, but isn’t a moat designed to be filled with water. If the moat was filled with even a couple feet of water, there is probably no way a tiger could scale the short wall.

The design of the compound included a moat and the wall height was adequate based on design. The Zoo said the moat was never filled with water. Since the Zoo failed to utilize the compound as designed, they should have raised the wall height. Either way, the Zoo appears to be liable.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Will Smith - Hitler was a good person - Idiots

Will Smith said Hitler was a good person, or so some people want you to believe he said it. But again, their reporting is manipulative, misleading, and downright dishonest. Without doing any research, countless web sites and articles repeat the same misleading story over and over again. This is an injustice to you.

Smith was not saying Hitler was good.

The following story is from AOL and has the incomplete quote that everyone is repeating. I’ve added in red the part of the quote they have conveniently left out. It is the most important part, the part that puts it in context, the part that apparently the writer, Siobhan Synnot (Interviewer for the DailyRecord) couldn’t comprehend.

————–STORY—————————————————-

(Dec. 25) - Will Smith is angry over celebrity gossip Web site articles that he said misinterpreted a recent remark he made in a Scottish newspaper about Adolf Hitler.

In a story published Saturday in the Daily Record, Smith was quoted saying: “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.’” Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.












(Image: Scott Gries, Getty Images)

After Will Smith was quoted as saying that Adolf Hitler likely used twisted logic to justify his own actions as “good,” many media outlets reported or implied that Smith believes Hitler was good. “Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer,” Smith said Monday..

The quote was preceded by the writer’s observation: “Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.”

Over the weekend, dozens of celebrity gossip Web sites posted articles about the comment, many saying that Smith believed that Hitler was a “good” person. “It is an awful and disgusting lie,” Smith said in a statement Monday provided by his publicist. “It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation.” “Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet,” read the statement

————-END STORY —————

13am: Now that you have seen the correct quote, what exactly is Smith saying?

I believe he is saying that Hitler was twisted and his logic was backward and that Hitler (not Smith) believed he was good and that he was doing the right thing. Smith’s point was that Hitler didn’t wake up in the morning thinking what evil he could do that day. That is what makes a man like Hitler dangerous. Smith’s conclusion was that Hitler’s warped way of thinking could have been reprogrammed.

Smith was not saying Hitler was good.

LINKS:Original Daily Record Interview here:


http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity-interviews/2007/12/22/will-smith-my-work-ethic-will-make-me-a-legend-86908-20262460/