Pat Robertson Backs Legalizing Marijuana - NYTimes.com

It's a start... maybe. Could be Pat is beginning to come to his senses. But more importantly, his nodding followers will now fall in line and mimic his opinion.

It's a tenuous victory, though. If he changes his mind, they'll all go the other way or any way he points them. So I'm not going to jump up and down.  Just hope he maintains this healthy and intelligent position long enough to effect legislation and deny the criminal-processing industry of a large part of its current and incoming inventory.

Outa My Way!

Your attitude about driving down neighborhood streets, I’m beginning to think, says a lot about your character. It might even peg your political affiliation.

Streets go through residential and commercial areas. People live on both sides or shop on both sides. Cars on the streets, people on the sidewalks. Trouble is, people have to cross the streets.

It’s their neighborhood, they spend a lot of time there. Some of the cars on their streets carry them home and to work, but many are just passing through. Either way, how they drive tells a tale.

Do they drive slowly with an eye out for residents, young or old, walking or biking? Or do they plow through with a mind that says, "I’ve got the right of way. People need to watch out for me."

We’ve arm wrestled with this fundamental issue from the dawn of time and the birth of our nation. Should my individual rights yield or even tolerate moderation in the interest of the common good?

As I write, the House has dim-wittedly favored energy-wasting incandescent light bulbs over way-more-efficient fluorescents. In Dim and Dimmer, Robert B. Semple Jr. reports the national savings for flipping the switch the other way would be “equivalent to 30 large power plants; household savings of up to $200 a year; and 100 million fewer tons of carbon dioxide pollution yearly, roughly the amount from 17 million cars.”

So when I see a neatly dressed macho man plunging his two-ton SUV with a war-like model name down a residential street, I know his vote—dimmer.

Health Care: Will It Take a Catastrophe?

Recipe for Disaster: Start with an annual flu epidemic. Add a good portion of the workforce without paid sick days. Mix in about 47 million Americans without health care coverage.

The Result: Catastrophe!

First, workers who deal with the public—waiters, teachers, school bus drivers, child care givers, store cashiers—get the new flu bug. Then they come to work sick because they don’t get paid when they miss work. When their kids get sick, they have no option but to send them off to school or day care. You can’t afford to stay home, when working every day of the week brings in just enough to feed and shelter your family.

And since you can’t afford health care, you don’t see a doctor and don’t get the advice to stay home. Even if you hear the advice, how can you afford to follow it? Some companies not only dock pay for missed days, they let workers go if they miss a certain number of days. So some people have no choice but to work while contagious.

But wait, don’t forget the whack jobs on hate-radio and websites telling the least informed and least educated not to vaccinate: It’s a government plot!

Why all this talk about disaster? Because even though the companies we work for provide great pay, plenty of sick days, and Cadillac health care coverage, we don’t want ourselves or our children meeting the public workers who don’t get these kinds of perks.

Unfortunately it might take a catastrophe to remedy this situation.

It took 9/11 to put a lot of necessary security procedures in place. Who would have tolerated all the hoops we have to jump through at airports and public places, had they been imposed before the attack?

Some time ago on “60 Minutes,” Steve Croft presented “Sabotaging the System,” which warned that essential parts of America’s and the world’s infrastructure—our military arsenals, power grids, water works—have been attacked and are susceptible to more devastating attacks.

Toward the end of the report, Retired Admiral Mike McConnell, once the nation’s top spy, lamented that we probably won’t address this threat, “until we have some catastrophic event.”

In the blog attached to the “60 Minutes” report, one information technology professional warned that our current efforts may be “too little too late.” Another commented on the danger of outsourcing tech jobs.

I don’t want to walk through the sneeze cloud of an infected public worker. For me, it’s a no-brainer. What about you?

When will the rest of the country wise up enough to understand that the better we treat everybody, the better we treat ourselves? Let’s hope it’s not after a catastrophe.

Labels: 60 Minutes, Admiral Mike McConnell, catastrophe, disaster, flu, outsourcing, Steve Croft, waring

Peter Lloyd, Native American

Holding my annual X-ray in his hand, my dentist recently asked me, “Do you have any American Indian ancestors?”

I was born in the United States of America, sometimes presumptuously called America. Canadians, Mexicans, and other people in the Western Hemisphere rightly consider themselves born in America as well.

Since I was born in the USA, I can justify calling myself a Native American. So can just about anyone native to this hemisphere. Which makes the politically correct designation Native American rather innocuous for the descendants of the people who were here before various European tribes began their ethnic cleansing. The name distinguishes their descendants as nothing different from the rest of us.

Indigenous Americans might serve as a more descriptive collective name for the progeny of the Cherokee, Miami, Dakota, Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, Ojibwa, Winnebego, Shawnee, Montauk, Apache, Chippewa, Blackfoot.... But in some strict definitions or to an ET happening upon our hemisphere, all of us could be considered indigenous to the Americas.

“It’s funny you should ask,” I answered my dentist. “My mother used to joke about us being part Indian, because her people came through Quebec in the frontier days. And I’ve always thought that her mother and one of her sisters had American Indian facial features. Why do you ask?”

“Every time I see multiple canals in a lower bicuspid, the owner claims to have some sort of American Indian heritage.”

So, you see, I just may carry Native Indigenous American Indian blood. Or more precisely, DNA. I’ve scanned the literature on bicuspid canal morphology but found no conclusive evidence of multiple roots as a trait specific to American Indians. But if my French Canadian ancestors did mix chromosomes with the indigenous people they encountered, I want to be called American Indian, until I find out whether I’m Cree, Huron, Kahnawake, Odanak, Timiskaming, Weymontachie....

Labels: american indian, Cree, dentist, Huron, Kahnawake, native american, Odanak, quebec, Timiskaming, Weymontachie

Banned by Facebook

What an honor! Someone found my previous blog post, Conservative Thumbs, offensive enough to ask Facebook to shut off access to it. Maybe even more than one person. Maybe a whole stupid of Conservatives!
And they did. Just like that.


I suppose it's easy enough to be banned for linking to a porn site or some racist rant or a terrorist site. No brainer. But my mini-screed, meant to cause a chuckle by illustrating the slow-to-learn nature of Conservative knuckle-draggers and to tie that propensity to a recent science news story? Somebody or bodies just couldn't take it, I guess.

Of course, I quickly commented on my own Facebook post and provided a new link to the blog post. Let's see how long it takes for the company that gives you "What Decade Fits Your Personality Best?" to ban a comment on a ban of a political opinion.

Labels: conservatives, Facebook

Conservative Thumbs

News: Evidence that Neanderthals may have mated with humans at more than one point in evolutionary history. Of course! That explains the Conservative strain that runs through our otherwise noble race.

I know it's bad form and not conducive to dialog to call Conservatives names, but as far as I'm concerned the time for dialog is over. It ended somewhere between Reagan's shell game of trickle down, voodoo economics and Shrub's "Mission Accomplished" fiasco.

Argue with morons and you end up in the loony bin. I'm headed in the other direction.

The fact is that everything we cherish here in America comes from Liberal thinking and action. Starting with our Revolution, through Abolition, to Civil Rights. It's not my job to coax Teabaggers down from their trees and hate-radio demagogues off the air.

Patience: Neanderthal Conservatives eventually discard their caveman causes. Most no longer support slavery, Prohibition, segregation, separate but equal, the Dred Scott Decision, and the like. We had to drag them kicking and screaming, but they came around.

Eventually they'll drop their opposition to universal health care, stem cell research, gays in the military, and bans on gay marriage. Then when they get used to their political prehensile thumbs, they'll stop denying global warming, the Holocaust, Evolution—the kind of progressive stuff we Liberals have embraced since the Enlightenment.

But for now, I'm tuning them out!

Labels: conservatism, liberalism

Black and White

Nothing is black and white. Not even Manhattan, the 1979 Woody Allen film. Like its vintage, black-and-white predecessors, Manhattan resonates in shades of gray. Frank Rich called it "a prismatic portrait of a time and place."

Slower, lazier, meaner minds fail to appreciate the multifaceted complexity of art and life. Simpler people demand simpler explanations. Does this demand betray the weakness of their brains or the nastiness of their heats? Both traits are to be shunned, I think.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, a Sheridan Middle School seventh-grader was asked to take off or turn inside-out his T-shirt that read, "Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white." The boy refused, the school sent him home, a legal battle ensued, and a federal judge ruled that the boy could continue to display the hateful stupidity "as long as it does not disrupt classes."

All of this could have been avoided if somewhere along the line someone had taught the boy, whoever raised him, and the knuckleheaded judge that things are never black and white. Instead, all of them ended up with the numskull notions that sexual orientation is a choice, centuries of religious heritage can be summarized in a word, and that a legal medical procedure is a capital crime.

But the final, stupid simplification of the T-shirt diatribe goes to the root of the problem. Contrary to the typical, ill-informed Christian-conservative conclusion, all issues have more than two tentacles.

No act is always right or wrong. No idea is always good or bad. Not even the act of cutting someone with a knife. Consider the cutter being a surgeon with a scalpel performing a life-enhancing operation or a jealous husband springing from the bushes to decapitate his wife.

To think in black and white, dulls the mind and cheats the thinker of so much color. That's why a film like Casablanca still resonates with new generations and why Manhattan will do the same—without anyone telling them that the author or director is an infallible god or that not appreciating the film guarantees eternal damnation.