(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.
