Please note the qualifying adjectives in the title of this post. I’m not a radical liberal firebrand or bare-footed long-bearded anarchist (my beard’s usually nicely trimmed). I’m simply asking whether we want a democracy where everyone has an equal voice, like the old Greeks used to have (of course, their democracy excluded their slaves). My thesis is that WE DO NOT.
The “God particle” or Higgs boson should stir up excitement in every amateur scientist and sci-fi addict (I refuse to change to syfy just because a cable channel decided to do it). The concept has been around for a long time-thirty to forty years, depending on how you measure the genesis of an idea in theoretical high energy physics. Without going into details (which you can find in many places-try googling “Higgs boson”), let me just say that this particle up to now is only a neat mathematical trick in quantum field theory that is responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking which, in turn, after all the great witches’ recipes of renormalized infinities and special rules are applied, gives birth to the zoological garden of elementary particles (that’s quite a curriculum vitae, by the way!).
The People’s Republic of Cambridge made the national news last night as the media repeated cries of “racial profiling” in the case of Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. While last night’s post defended Mr. Obama for looking beyond a simple cost analysis in the health care issue, I now have to say that his comment, “Cambridge police acted stupidly,” shows not only where his loyalties lie but represents an error in judgement, perhaps to be expected from a rookie President.
Now, before anyone jumps to the conclusion that I’m just another angry white man ranting against his black brethren, let me state quickly what in my opinion is missing in this discussion: Both Mr. and Mrs. Obama went to Harvard. Mr. Gates, who is asking the Cambridge cop to “beg for his forgiveness,” is from Harvard. A lot of Obama’s White House is from Harvard. Do you see where I’m going with this yet?
It is interesting that in all this health care debate that no politician gets beyond a simple cost analysis, besides President Obama. While I was unable to see his speech tonight, I’m sure he did his best to go beyond the simple analysis to that not very happy place our nation will be in when the consequences of not fixing this very broken system hit, and hit hard.
The following short story features Sgt. Rolando Castilblanco of the NYPD. He is also a main character in my new novel The Midas Bomb, soon to be published. Enjoy.
The Best Route from Here to There
Steven M. Moore
Copyright 2008, Steven M. Moore
The follow-through was good, but Grace missed with the vase. It soared by Jack’s ear and crashed into the wall.
“I bought you that vase in Paris!”
“And I hated it even then!”
She grabbed her laptop and stormed out of the house.
She’ll be back, he thought.
It’s as good as time as any to talk about the right to die with dignity. At this moment our illustrious U.S. Senators are quizzing Judge Sotomayor about whether judges should be activist judges. I have already argued elsewhere in this blog that they must be in order to mitigate the tyranny of the majority, which includes insuring all our rights (otherwise one large group could become the majority and take away all the rights previously won).
At this moment we are also in a debate about health care. In this debate de jour and almost always the flip side of health insurance is avoided: Often it pays for a prolonged battle with the grim reaper either in a hospital or hospice and generally under doctors and nurses’ care.
The point of all this preamble is that one of those rights we should protect (please take note, Judge Sotomayor) is the right to choose to die with dignity. While most religions declare suicide to be wrong, I think that it’s the individual’s right to make that choice. Otherwise, you would have to argue that whatever God you believe in really is out to make you suffer, a far cry from the loving God of the New Testament.
Recently there have been quite a few incidents where politicians have been caught with their pants down (figuratively or literally, depending on how graphic your imagination is). None of the recent events is really comparable to those of the Prime Minister of Italy, but due to our Puritan heritage and the media’s infinite capacity to blow things out of proportion, the events drew a lot of attention in this country. While Europe scratches its head wondering what all the hoopla is about, I thought I’d analyze what makes a politician in general and what makes him enter into a sexual dalliance that can and often does destroy his career in this strange country of ours.
Government by the lobbyists, for the lobbyists! This second installment is due to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 13-11 vote for paying for seven more F-22′s in spite of a White House veto threat. This is just another piece of evidence that shows that another place where lobbyists rule the legislative roost is making sure your big defense contractors get their juicy contracts for making all kinds of whiz-bang stuff, some of which the Pentagon doesn’t even want. Eisenhower, a moderate Republican from the old school (a vanishing class, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian, being one of its last members), warned us about the military-industrial complex. Today the bloat, waste and inefficiencies in this system threaten the safety of this country.
Have you ever moved, called your land-line phone company, found yourself going down a long tree of computer options, and then be cut off by an uncaring computer? Or, did you take the option in the tree that is supposed to give you a real human being? If you were lucky, you actually got someone that spoke English or some patois resembling it and they set you up with an installation appointment: such and such a day, between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. You waited faithfully at home for the truck to show up during those twelve hours, but no one came. You call the next day and now the real human you come up with tells you that you were never on a list for that day because the computer automatically assigned you some other day.
I finally finished reading Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. Mr. Vinge published this 775 page paperback tome ten years ago and it won him another Hugo Award. (A Fire upon the Deep, which I have commented on in this blog, was the first.) I am trying to mind travel back those ten years and figure out my reluctance to start reading this novel as soon as I bought it. So, as a very strange and late review, let me let you in on some of that mind wandering.
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