Thursday, May 31, 2007

Breathtakingly Spectacular Bad Logic

The only presumption I consciously make about anything is that God gave humans brains in the hopes we'd put them to good use. I do not do so perfectly, but I try . . . and I find myself increasingly frustrated with the sheer quantity of poor thinking humans reveal every day. Consider several recent examples:

(1) Nebraska just failed (again) to pass a statewide smoking ban . . . and all the smokers are happy, because (a) their "rights" have been preserved; and (b) according to some of the state legislators, this is the sort of thing that each and every city and town should decide for itself. The first reason is wrong--no one has a right to smoke. Smoking is not an issue of "rights." It's a public health problem. There is more than enough credible evidence demonstrating the terrible effects smoking has on smokers and non-smokers alike. As I've said before, spittoons were ubiquitous until people figured out their connection to the spread of tuberculosis. Spittoons thereupon disappeared. The second reason is a cop-out pure and simple. Smoke doesn't obey political boundaries. But craven politicians who don't want to give up the money they get from cigarette companies would have you think so.

(2) If I heard the talking heads on MSNBC correctly, the latest lame attempt to prove Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing John F. Kennedy is this: Oswald got his job at the Texas School Book Depository about 6 weeks before the motorcade route was announced. Therefore, someone in the White House had to arrange for the motorcade to go past the Book Depository to let Oswald do his evil deed.

No one in the conspiracy theory crowd apparently has heard of Occam's Razor. It's really simple [that's the point!--Ed.]: if you have more than one possible explanation for something, the one that's most likely correct is the simplest, most straightforward one. In the JFK assassination case, the simplest explanation is that Oswald got the job, learned of the motorcade route when it was published, and decided, you will pardon the expression, to take his shot. We know he was already fixated on killing some important public figure (he tried to kill General Walker in April of 1963). He was just looking for his opportunity, which presented itself in November. The reason this explanation is preferable to the "high government insider" version is that it requires fewer people, it uses no uncorroborated allegations, it fits human behavior in general, and it matches what we know in particular about both Oswald's mind-set and the other physical evidence of the assassination.

(3) The Supremes are at it again. Now, by a 5-4 majority, the Court has ruled that no woman can claim sex discrimination in being paid a lesser wage than men doing the same job unless she brings the claim within 180 days of learning what her pay will be. Count me with Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the dissenters on this one. Most employers keep their employees from knowing what they pay. Besides, it is well-established at law that a person has time from the moment that person discovers the wrong done against him/herself to file a claim. If memory serves, the phraseology is a specific number of days/weeks/months/years from the time the person "knew or reasonably should have known" what was happening. It's not reasonable to say that the person should have known in the face of an employer's official policy to keep such information secret from its employees. This is even more true when an employee's knowing others' wages would likely be grounds for that employee's dismissal.

The Court majority admitted frankly that it held the interests of employers in highest regard, saying that no one intended employers to be socked economically for claims against behavior that happened so long ago as to be stale. Maybe so. Maybe not. The remedy in any event is simple. Congress needs to clarify the law, which is something Ginsberg exhorted Congress do, quickly. After all, Congress has done so in the past. Indeed, Congress years ago passed laws to overturn prior Supreme Court decisions that the Court in this case cited as precedent. Talk about slovenly research! Until Congress acts again, however, I see only another instance of "them what has, gets. The rest of us just gets screwed." [a/k/a "He who has the gold makes the rules."--Ed.]

(4) More silliness from the government: a NASA administrator on NPR this morning was trying to justify NASA's lack of interest in investigating global warming [more politically correctly now known as "climate change"--Ed.] on the grounds that it's not up to him or to NASA to determine that the climate we have now is the best climate there is for humans all over the globe. He also claimed his First Amendment free speech rights were not at all infringed by his position in the Bush administration. The myriad long pauses between words while he blatantly edited himself during each sentence were coincidences, I guess.

But the serious error is in what he said about this climate being "the best possible one." NO ONE is saying that, nor has anyone ever said that, nor will anyone with even half a brain ever say that about "climate change." That is NOT what global warming means. Indeed, the people encouraging more global warming research are saying quite the opposite, to wit: the climate already has worsened. Moreover, the warming is dangerously close to becoming irreversible and ultimately fatal to humanity. The NASA administrator's verbal tap dance was a shamefully apparent and sadly ineffective attempt to change the terms of the discussion so he'd not get into trouble with Dubya. And that's pathetic.

[(4a) I also just heard on the afternoon news that high US military officials in Iraq now say that September will be too soon to see whether the the troop surge is working. That isn't bad logic; it's simply duplicity. Dubya said when the troop "surge" was first announced that the Iraqi government would have to have its act together by September. But the new spin is also plenty disgusting. Russia may have been an enigma wrapped in a mystery, but Iraq is becoming a quagmire wrapped in quicksand. This news article is not unlike the ones that came out before Memorial Day about increasing gas prices. We the public are being softened up for results we don't want but cannot seem to convince our leaders to prevent.--Ed.]

(5) I've heard people carping about Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards's $400 haircut and the six-figure speaking fees he commands. They seem to think he is a hypocrite because fighting the insidious effects of poverty is one of the linchpins of his campaign. Well, I cannot quarrel with the complaints about the $400 haircut. That seems excessive, even allowing for the fact that the hairdresser had to come to him instead of him going to the hairdresser.

However, to complain about Edwards's speaking fees is pointless and mean. It's expensive to run for president. Everyone doing so is wealthy to start with--and with few exceptions, still needs to raise additional funds to mount an effective campaign. Edwards is sincere in his interest in ending poverty in the US. He understands better than a lot of people that the costs of poverty sap our economy and our society in countless ways that hurt all Americans. Better that Edwards's critics should examine how Edwards spends the money than at how he raises it.

(6) Have you ever noticed that pundits and the media collectively assume that the end of the Cold War was a good thing? That assumption is not correct. First, the way the Cold War ended wasn't such a good deal for us in economic terms. We didn't so much WIN the Cold War as we survived it. In the last few years before the USSR was dissolved, the USA and the USSR stumbled around like a couple of punch-drunk heavyweight boxers, mutually staggering under the size and weight of their military expenditures. We are still bearing that burden.

Second, "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know." Love the Soviet Union or hate the Soviet Union, we knew after the Cuban Missile Crisis that we could deal with the Soviet Union. Their leaders were no more eager than were ours to plunge the world into nuclear chaos and disaster. But nowadays, who can you trust? With the Soviet Union gone, dangerous people have come into power--dangerous people who no longer have the USSR's influence reining them in.

Third, the Soviets mostly kept the lid on the Arab terrorists in their allied states, all at the USSR's own expense in money, weapons, and manpower. With the Soviet Union's "Iron Hand" gone, however, terrorists now run amok all over the globe. So the USA now gets stuck footing the bill, in money, weapons, and most of all, in manpower. It would have been better for us to have kept the USSR around to contain that mess and buffer us than it is for the USSR to be gone and for us to sit directly in the terrorists' cross-hairs.

Fourth (as if all that weren't bad enough) substantial Soviet nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon components are missing. Who knows who has them? And when they'll be used? And how to stop them? We could keep an eye on the USSR and its military resources. But no matter how advanced our technologies, we can't keep track of hundreds and thousands of independent actors who now seek to destroy us.

In short, ending the Cold War let the genie out of the bottle. We didn't "win" the Cold War. We survived it. And now we are paying too high a price for having survived it.

(7) The History Channel's insistence on running programs--sloppy ones, to boot--about UFOs right after running really smart, up-to-date, well-researched and produced programs such as The Universe is also pathetic. The powers that be at that channel cannot decide whether they want the History Channel to be credible or popular. My disgust with the UFO programs boils down to those programs' most fundamental error of logic. They presume that because someone cannot identify what s/he saw, it means the thing comes from alien civilizations outside our solar system and even our galaxy.

WRONG. All it means is that the person seeing it has no idea what it is. Period. It says or even implies absolutely nothing about whence the unidentified thing came. [I won't believe in any UFO reports, Yeti sightings, or even Nessie sightings until I see long-lasting, sharp and in-focus film footage of same. I want a clear look. It's easy to fool people with the fuzzy and out-of-focus. It's harder to fool them once ambiguities are removed--Ed.]

(8) Speaking of the out of focus . . . did you hear the NPR interview with the Australian founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky? I think it aired Monday. One of the easiest ways to trash an opponent's point of view is to misstate that person's position. I'll give the Aussie this: he did it wonderfully well and with great subtlety. He claims that scientists who support evolution presuppose that everything they look at is millions of years old. He says that all he's doing is showing how a different supposition, namely that Genesis is literally correct, changes how one interprets what we find in the fossil record.

Two points: (1) even though his "museum" contains dioramas showing human children and T. Rexes together, I'll wager he's never found any fossil sites with human and T.Rex bones in the same stratum. And I'm no gambler. (2) Scientists do not presuppose ANYTHING. They are trained in the methods of logic and reason. They look at what they see and they let it tell its own story. When they find evidence that alters the story as they know it so far, they note the changes to the story and investigate further. They are not in the business of "truth." They are in the business of "fact." Their bailiwick is not "why." It is "how." [And that is why evolution is still called a "theory," even though nothing found so far in the fossil record has contradicted its basic premise.--Ed.]

I am sick practically to death of the people who try to squash scientific endeavor in the name of their faith. If they'd use their God-given brains, they'd see that there is no fundamental conflict between science and faith. I also wish they'd use those brains to realize that there is a very good reason for the First Amendment's prohibition on official government support of religion. Not everyone has the same religion. It is irrelevant that you know you are right and everyone else is wrong. From their point of view, they are right and you are wrong. If you are not in power and those in power do not share your faith, they cannot--because of the First Amendment--compel you to follow theirs. I, for one, do not want to live in an officially Islamic state. Nor, however, do I wish to live in an officially fundamentalist Christian state. God doesn't want us to push our particular beliefs down each other's throats. He wants us each to find Him and His love and redemption for ourselves.

I wonder how the fundamentalists would take it if they were shown that Jesus Himself believed in the separation of church and state. You know: "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's." (Matthew 22:21) Unfortunately, too many people like to cherry-pick from the Bible and cobble together a belief system that lets them keep behaving exactly the way they did before they "found religion" instead of meeting Christ's challenge to become new beings through faith.

[I find it truly astonishing that Tom Delay can say with a straight face that his adultery was not as bad/hypocritical as was Newt Gingrich's, since Delay was not committing adultery at the time he condemned President Clinton for doing so, while Gingrich was still committing adultery at the same time he condemned Clinton for his extramarital adventures. I say that adultery is wrong, period. But only those among us without sin should cast stones--or aspersions--on others.--Ed.]

My own take on how to use the Bible to guide one's life (if one claims to be a Christian) is to start with the words of Christ. While everything else in the Bible is important and useful to know, none of it has the same cachet as Christ's own words--otherwise, we are either raising lesser things to Christ's level or lowering Christ to the level of those lesser things. If we are to live according to the New Covenant that Jesus's death and Resurrection offers us, Christ's own words have to count more than anything else.

I could be wrong about that. I often am. And a huge thunderclap just struck, so maybe I ought to take the hint. In any event, I am signing off for now so that my computer doesn't get fried by lightning.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Rosenblatt and Guildenstern Are Dead

Have you been following the latest local political dust-up? Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey and several important businessmen want to build a new baseball stadium in North Downtown (a/k/a NoDo), near the Qwest Center and the new riverfront development. Rosenblatt Stadium, on South 13th Street, next door to the world-class Henry Doorly Zoo, is to be abandoned, apparently.

Pressure comes from several directions to support this. The new stadium would be smaller, which would improve the attendance figures (and hence revenues) of the Omaha Royals, Triple A farm team for the Kansas City Royals. The new stadium would have all the latest amenities, including luxury boxes, thus improving the city's revenues. Creighton University could play its home games there, making for an easier, shorter trip from campus to ball park than the student-athletes have to endure now. [And if you cannot feel the sarcasm dripping from that statement, either you have no clue about Omaha geography or I am losing my touch.--Ed.] The out-of-town guests who come to the College World Series every year would have a much more cohesive experience, as their commute from their hotels to the new stadium would be easier. Plus the locals would have to use the Qwest Center's parking lot . . . again adding to the city's coffers. Finally, the zoo would now have room to expand. In its present configuration, its expansion is apparently blocked by Rosenblatt's presence.

What no one connected with the proposal is saying, however, is how this would be a more efficient use of money than re-re-re-renovating Rosenblatt. Building a new stadium is estimated to cost $50 million dollars. Making Rosenblatt 100% state of the art would cost much less--plus the history of the place would be preserved. Besides, what do the powers that be at the NCAA and the College World Series have to say about this? They regularly sell out all the games at Rosenblatt. A new, albeit smaller, stadium, surely cannot please them, despite the suggestions that temporary bleachers can be helicoptered in for the CWS games and then removed again once the CWS is over. I know as a CWS fan, I'd not be happy paying more (as I am sure I would have to) to sit in temporary bleacher seats. That strikes me, as a fan, as being more than a bit of a rip-off.

What of the complaints of the Omaha Royals that Rosenblatt is just too big? They wouldn't have that problem if they'd field a better team. The Royals had no trouble at all regularly selling all the available seats in the mid-80s . . . which is the last time both the Omaha and Kansas City incarnations of the Royals were winning.

And what of all the renovations already made to Rosenblatt to keep the CWS here? That includes the destruction of several homes along the east side of 13th Street. These homes were razed to improve the landscaping around the side of the stadium that most people see first. The human cost of that was huge. At the time, most of us (including many of the homeowners whose homes were taken) thought it was a worthy and noble sacrifice for the sake of keeping the CWS in Omaha. But to abandon Rosenblatt just a few years later makes it a cruelty to the people whose homes were taken.

Further, Rosenblatt is up on a hill, and it's pleasant to attend games there even in the hottest of Omaha summer weather. A new stadium, farther north and down by the river, would be a sauna . . . except in the luxury boxes, I suppose. Nor would a new stadium be nearly as charming, even if the "Road to Omaha" sculpture is moved to the new stadium's entrance area.

Nonetheless, despite the large and vociferous outcry against it, I suspect that the building of the new stadium is a done deal. Fahey wants his legacy, the financiers want their vision of the riverfront, and the money is probably already in place. The SAC Museum (renamed the Strategic Air and Space Museum) got moved from its historic home in Bellevue because the powers that be [i.e., those with the money--Ed.] wanted it to be nearer Interstate 80 for easier tourist access, historical accuracy be damned. They got their way because they refused to finance enclosed display spaces for the historic planes unless the museum relocated. And they lost a tremendous amount of local support from the large US Air Force (active duty and retired) community in Bellevue . . . but they think their success in increasing tourist dollars has more than compensated for it. They're probably right, darn it.

I hate to see Rosenblatt go, though. No matter what amenities are built into a new stadium, there is no way it will be as charming a place to watch a ball game as is "the Blatt."

Mark Twain Advised Against This

Despite Mark Twain's excellent advice, a letter writer opened his mouth [so to speak-Ed.] and removed all doubt about his own ignorance in one of last week's Omaha World-Herald's Letters to the Editor. The man expressed astonishment that Warren Buffett is a (gasp) Democrat and that he supports (gasp) a Democratic candidate for President. He was bewildered that Buffett would be so stupid as to give money to people who want only to destroy the free market system that helped Buffett make his billions in the first place.

What's wrong with this picture? Where do I start? First, the man never seems to have entertained the thought for a nanosecond that Buffett knows more than he, the letter writer, does about markets and what makes their worlds go around . . . and that maybe, just maybe, the letter writer needs to adjust his own attitude instead of thinking Buffett is stupid.

Further, the letter writer never seems to have recognized (unlike Buffett) that there are more important things in life than money, and that the Spider-Man philosophy applies to more than just super powers. "Those who have been given great gifts have great responsibilities." Didn't we used to call that noblesse oblige in the old days?

If anyone out there is reading this, you've heard me say it before, but it bears repeating: humans are social beings. We live in societies. We have obligations to one another if we are to have successful societies. No society that has a cadre of super-duper rich at the top, a large population of very poor at the bottom, and a disappearing middle class which is mostly sinking into poverty and not rising to the level of the super-duper rich, can long endure. No society in all of history lacking a stable middle class ever has.

Not everyone wants to be super-duper rich, believe it or not. Not everyone wants to make a symbolic financial killing. Many of us are content to live a modest life, as long as we have enough to cover our basic needs for clothing, housing, food, utilities, transportation, medical necessitites, and a bit left over for fun or to save for the unexpected disasters (like flooded basements) that inevitably occur.

But this letter writer seems to have swallowed the current right-wing Republican party line . . . and hook . . . and sinker. He can't even see that his position hurts his own economic well-being. He just presumes that a very successful man is stupid because his political and social beliefs don't revolve around the grubbing of money (even though Buffett is very, very good at doing so). He senses there is something wrong with the situation as he sees it, but he draws the wrong conclusion. He exhibits all the classic symptoms of someone who has been brainwashed.

Not to make Buffett out to be a saint. Businesses under his control are frequently much more nasty in the ways they treat their employees than anyone listening to Buffett would expect. I have personal knowledge of the circumstances of several people who were laid off from a Berkshire-Hathaway-owned company with no notice, no warning, and no genuine concern for their well-being, financial and otherwise. This includes more than one person with a physical disability--all of whom had given loyal and dedicated service to said company for over 10 years each (and who'd never received a less-than-positive employee evaluation). I guess all that talk about the company being a family and its success revolving around teamwork was just so much hot air.

Not that I am surprised by this. It's no different in kind from the way the present Bush administration treats its soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Just look at the Walter Reed outpatient treatment scandal and also at how Dubya is arguing that a 3.5% pay raise for our troops is too high. He wants to limit it to 3%. That half-percent discrepancy makes a difference in pay averaging only $26 a month if the statistics reported on MSNBC are accurate. That's chump change to the super-duper rich like Dubya, but it's a lot of money to someone in the military who still has to use food stamps to feed his family.

This is one of the reasons Buffett supports the Democrats. Buffett does recognize, in general, that money equals power and power cannot be allowed to reign unchecked, lest it grind into the mud the people who form the basis of a truly stable, successful society. It's just too bad that Buffett's knowledge hasn't trickled down [ironic reference intended--Ed.] to the people he lets handle the day-to-day business of running the machines of his empire.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Tricks Of The Tirade

The single biggest trick of the tirade is the tirade itself. The second biggest trick is judicious use of irony. The third is rampant speculation. Fourth is the use of haughty contempt. I can illustrate all but the first with recent baseball events. The first, I can illustrate with a recent event, but it's in the current American pastime, political scandal.

First, regarding the DC Madame--how in the world can she say that she ran a "legal" sexual business but have no records of any customers' names? (All she has is telephone numbers. Hmmm . . .) As Graham Chapman would have said, "Stop that! That's silly!"

Second, regarding Alex Rodriguez's current wonderful stats at the same time the Yankees are playing crappy baseball--has anyone but me considered whether A-Rod has to play badly for the Yankees to do well? The moral of the story here is "Be careful what you ask for . . ." George Steinbrenner wanted the most expensive players to guarantee his Yankees even more World Series championships than they already have . . . but (1) just as there is no crying in baseball, there are no guarantees in baseball; (2) when A-Rod played (relatively) poorly, the Yankees won . . . it stands to reason that when A-Rod finally gets the hang of being a Yankee, the rest of the team goes south. Anybody out there remember Rowan and Martin's "Fickle Finger of Fate"?

Third, the reports are already coming out that St. Louis middle reliever Josh Hancock, who died in a one-car accident last Sunday, was seen drinking heavily late Saturday night . . . in the realm of rampant speculation, I suspect a lot more evidence is coming about his drinking habits, to the point of his being an all-too-young alcoholic. Frankly, I am surprised that the media have restrained themselves as much as they have regarding this possibility to date. That won't last much longer.

Fourth, in the realm of haughty contempt: how in the world could anyone for a moment take seriously (and report it as truth) the rumor (which turned out to be a joke) that Curt Shilling's infamous bloody sock from Boston's World Series winning season held just paint and not blood? I remember seeing the camera close-ups of the sock as the game progressed, and it was perfectly obvious that what was on that sock was blood. Geez, haven't any of these reporters ever looked at a Band-Aid of their own paper cuts? Journalistic standards have plummeted, judging from this debacle. Apparently the current standard is to be the first to report--and who cares if it's true, let alone take the time to verify? A pox on them all, I say!

Two other baseball notes for good measure: regarding the Cubs, who spent ridiculous amounts of money on the wrong players and the wrong new manager, and whose starting pitching staff is again on disability, plus ca change, plus le meme chose. They still stink. Why do I do this to myself every year?

On the other hand, it is nice to see Sammy Sosa back in the swing of things, literally, even if it is in a Texas Rangers uniform.