death penalty

     When a trial is being arranged for a capital crime ( one that may result in a death sentence ), potential jurors are asked if they believe in the death penalty as a "qualifying" question. If the potential juror states that he or she does not believe in the death penalty, the potential juror is "disqualified". The jury will be made up only of  people who have agreed in advance that the death penalty is an acceptable criminal sentence. This not only undermines our entire jury system--wherein twelve citizens decide the facts of each case, and the guilt or innocence of the defendant--it also undermines the base of democratic government itself. We supposedly have representatives to pass laws to which the majority of the citizens have agreed, since it took a majority to elect each representative. But when selecting jurors for capital cases, more people may be turned away than accepted. In other words, more people disapprove of the death penalty than approve of it. I would like to know what the exact numbers are--that is, how many potential jurors are considered unfit, according to this test of belief, compared to the number who qualify. Two for every one?  A lawyer once guessed it at ten people turned down for each one accepted--hardly evidence that a majority wanted this law enacted.

health benefits and insurance

     People who work, but who do not have any insurance benefits from their employers, are paying taxes to provide insurance benefits to others. They are paying for insurance benefits for every state, local, and government employee. They are paying, one way and another, when they pay for the services, or buy the products, of any business concern that does provide health insurance benefits--it's part of the cost of goods or services. They are even paying, through taxes--federal, state, and local--for health insurance benefits and health care for all of the people in prison, on probation, and on welfare. When they need to go to a doctor themselves, they may not be able to afford it.
     Health benefits should be universal. They could be provided by every employer, and the cost of some goods and services would go up--reflecting more realistically the actual cost of those goods and services. Or, health benefits could be provided by the government, as in some other countries--a national health program that would probably put private health insurance out of business.

the UN and the USA

     Someone wrote in a letter/comment that the United States should get out of the United Nations because we shouldn't have to be the world's policeman. The writer completely missed the point--of the United Nations and why the United States should remain a member. The United Nations was founded to represent all of the countries (nations) in the world, and to help countries settle disputes with one another. When the United Nations decides on armed intervention in a conflict, member states are asked to contribute troops. The troops will be under the command of United Nations officers. The United States has refused this more than once--our country would not put American troops under UN command.  The United States has instead fought foreign wars on its own, without the help and direction of the UN. When the United States decides to let the UN make the decisions, and to send troops only as part of a UN mission, we will have stopped trying to be the "world's policeman"--or the world's superhero--and become a part of more mature group decision making.

home schooling and vaccinations

     One of the things that the public school system accomplished was making sure that all children had their vaccinations. When every child was assumed to be enrolled in school, we could assume that each school was checking on the vaccination status of every child. Most school districts required that a student be vaccinated before attending. Now that so many people are home-schooling, many children will never be vaccinated for diseases that may still become a threat to public health.  When enough people lack vaccinations, we could see epidemics of diseases we thought were "under control"--because the diseases were "under control" only with the widespread use of vaccines. We need a public health system that actually has the clout to insist on vaccinations for everyone. There are enough diseases to fight for which no vaccine exists.  Resources that might be used to find a cure for cancer, for instance, may be used to fight diseases for which we already have a vaccine. A waste.

where are your papers?

     We have all seen this in old movies--particularly World War II movies--a soldier or guard stops everyone and demands that they identify themselves. Many Americans think this is terrible, but in most other countries the citizens are more used to the idea. They all have to carry identity cards of some kind, and may be asked to show them to a police officer or some other government official. When people in other countries move to a new town, they may present themselves at the mayor's office or town hall, where they will introduce themselves and offer letters of recommendation ( from their former employer, or from business or personal connections).  This is strictly a voluntary custom--it's the way the people who introduce themselves at the town hall think life should be. They are not used to the idea of anonymity, and would be uncomfortable with the idea of moving from place to place as a complete unknown.
     The debate over proposed laws requiring voters to identify themselves (which they already have to do when asked)  should lead to a broader discussion of identity cards--what kind of identity cards people should have, and under what circumstances they should have to produce them.
    

how to be right or wrong

There is more than one way to be right, and more than one way to be wrong.
You can be right by believing what is true.
You can be right by refusing to believe what is false.
You can be wrong by believing what is false.
You can be wrong by disbelieving what is true.

The disbelieving what is true category causes more problems than common sense night lead you to believe. There is still a flat Earth society (it has a web site) .

name corrector?

     Twice in the past few weeks I have had my name "corrected" by some sort of a program. I was styled "dear oilmen" by one e-mailer, and the other actually changed my name to a more common, but similar, name. These were people who were using my name as I had written it to them on a contact form--not people who heard it over the phone.  To make it more plain, my name is Eileen, and the email called me Elaine. Oilmen may have been a similar attempt to correct what a program--I tend to refer to this as a machine--decided was my own misspelling of my name. I now have to wonder if people who "got" my name wrong in person were also attempting to correct me--as in perhaps I didn't have my own name right. This hasn't happened in some years, but it used to be difficult to conceal how annoyed I was when anyone made an error like this. Spelling my name wrong didn't bother me--but calling a roll and "changing" my name did.
    If this is a program, it is not a useful one. I cancelled "Elaine's" subscription, and "oilmen's", too.

the proverbial reasonable and prudent man

     A concept used in lawsuits involving negligence is a "reasonable and prudent man".  The idea is that if someone gets hurt doing something that a reasonable and prudent man would not have done, he is at least partly to blame for his own injuries, and the lawsuit is settled accordingly. No one has ever produced this reasonable and prudent man. Maybe he was taken up in a spacecraft.

more free advice

Never trust anyone who never says "I don't know."

illiteracy, yet again--a challenge

     A well-known piece of scientific research purports to prove that alcoholism is hereditary in males. The proof consists of brain scans of acknowledged alcoholics and their eleven-year-old sons. The scans differed from normal brain scans in the same way. The conclusion of the researchers was that alcoholism is hereditary--and that nothing can be done about it. I believe the experiment was very sloppily done, perhaps intentionally, to prove a hypothesis that won't stand up to real scientific scrutiny. I believe the researchers should have tested both fathers and sons for the actual physical presence of alcohol in their systems. I do not think that thy did this, but I'm not sure. Even if they did, they might have been merely looking at how alcohol consumption alters brain chemistry--as we know that many drugs do--and nothing more. The supposition that there was no alcohol in the children was both naive and unscientific.
      Researchers have used similar evidence to conclude that the brains of the illiterate are genetically different from the brains of those who can read. It's nonsense, and worse than nonsense. I have a suggestion--let's get some volunteers who are completely illiterate. We scan their brains. Then I teach them to read. Then we scan their brains again.  My prediction is that the brain scans will alter radically.  Learning matters.

recaptcha

     I don't know if this is the best forum for this, but it seems to be the only one. Yesterday I was offered a recaptcha with Hebrew characters in it. I have been offered a recaptcha with Greek characters in the past. I reloaded the page with the Hebrew character recaptcha, and that solved the problem, although it might have meant that any data I had entered would need to be resubmitted. A waste of my time, in other words. When I was offered the recaptcha in Greek characters, since I couldn't type in the Greek characters, I simply typed what seemed the most similar--and my submission was accepted--a possible security flaw in the recaptcha process, as well as a nuisance.
     The recaptcha website explains that recaptcha is mining old books for words.  Many older English works will have quotations in Greek, which was once commonly taught to anyone with academic credentials. Quotations from the Hebrew, or at least citations containing the originals of  translations from the Hebrew, are fairly common in religious works.
     If you are not familiar with characters from other alphabets, see the dictionary end pages, or the entry for "alphabet"--or search "alphabets". There are several of them in use around the globe.
     I don't know how the makers of recaptcha will learn to filter out the characters from different alphabets. Using pictures of words that cannot be read by a machine is the whole point. But someone certainly needs to work on it.

the "qwerty" keyboard

     The "qwerty" keyboard is the keyboard you see before you on typewriters, word processors, and computers. The arrangement of the letters, I once read, long ago, was meant to slow typists down. That's right, to slow them down. A really fast typist, in days of yore when typewriters were mechanical, could cause the keys to jam. The typist would need to stop typing to unstick the keys, and might have typed an error directly onto the paper. For a serious letter this meant starting over from the beginning with a fresh sheet of paper--time-consuming , expensive, and wasteful. So a new keyboard was designed that would make it more difficult to type rapidly enough to jam the keys. I didn't pull this story out of thin air--I read it in a newspaper years ago. I suggest that it's worth the time a technical person might want to spend on it. Experimenting with new keyboard configurations would be easier now than it has ever been, and there are no mechanical limits to how fast anyone should type.

cain and abel

     The scriptures shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews have a story of the first murder ever committed in human history. According to the story, Cain, a farmer, slew his brother Abel, a herdsman. The argument began when Abel's cattle trampled and ate Cain's crops. This argument still goes on today. The farmers fence off land that cattle herders want to pass through to get to a river or other source of water. Or a river or stream is diverted to irrigate farmland. In the American West, small local wars were fought over water rights, and they are disputed in courts today. 
     How little things change.

thirteen

     Did you know that there is no thirteenth floor in most buildings in America? Buildings that have thirteen stories or more, that is.They go from the 12th floor to the 14th floor--take a look next time you're in the elevator of a tall building.  It's not really the fault of the builders--people don't want to rent rooms or offices on the thirteenth floor. And even if they did, they might lose a lot of contacts or clients--who might not want to do business with a firm on the thirteenth floor, or associate with someone who lives on the thirteenth floor. A little superstition goes a long way.

it's all a plot

     Crime, war, disaster, romance, intrigue--these all do well at the box office. Making them seem boring in a history book is a crime--or a diabolical plot of some kind. Hollywood does a better job making history interesting than many authors of textbooks. Unfortunately, many people believe that if Hollywood puts it on the screen, it must be pretend. That's right, they believe that Hollywood invented Henry VIII as a screen character. So the movies can't teach them history, since they believe it to be a fantasy.  How to teach them that history was real is the problem.

why we have animals spayed or neutered

     Someone suggested recently that people have animals spayed or neutered simply to be mean. Not so. We have animals (dogs and cats) spayed or neutered so that they won't have any kittens or puppies. Isn't that mean? No. Kittens and puppies are very cute, The problem is that no one wants all of the kittens and puppies we have now. Animal shelters across the United States kill them by the millions every year--because nobody wants them, and they can't be left roaming the streets--they would quickly become a health and safety hazard to people. So if you really like kittens and puppies, have your dog or cat spayed or neutered. Then some of the kittens and puppies in animal shelters will get a home the next time someone wants a kitten or puppy. If you really just have to have a houseful of kittens or puppies, ask your local animal shelter if they need anyone to foster a pregnant animal. Fostering means keeping the animal until it finds a permanent home. You can enjoy a houseful of kittens or puppies, and help shelter animals at the same time.

the internet--part 1--satellite maps

     The internet is a wonder. It may someday do what some people thought television would do--teach everyone.While we're working our way up to that, there seems to be a large set of people who believe the world was created the day the internet was first switched on.  Many of them don't seem to understand that the real world, and the print world, are merely accessible through the medium of the internet. I watched a video on maps the other day. A person starting out with the idea that maps were created when satellites sent the first images back from space would have been left at the end of the video with the same impression. So I had to wonder--have the satellite images done much "correcting" of the maps made the old-fashioned way?

health food

Health food-- I eat it every day. There's coffee--a legume, I think. The sugar in my doughnuts is made from beets, a vegetable--and good for you. And the doughnuts are fried in vegetable oil. Tobacco is my favorite leafy green. When I do drink whiskey, I make sure it's whole grain.

are "manners" hypocritical?

     Someone suggested to me recently that manners are hypocritical.  That it is emotionally "wrong" in some way to be polite to people one does not "like", or to offer what was once called common courtesy. This person so completely missed the point that I was somewhat befuddled as to how to answer. Manners aren't about your emotions, or about what you think about other people. Manners are a code of behavior people have worked out over time. The code of manners is  meant to avoid conflict with strangers, particularly, and to facilitate movement in public places. When people abide by this code, they have little or no conflict.
     Anyone insisting that they have some sort of emotions connected to perfect strangers is on very shaky ground, anyway. They may not need mental health counseling ( which is probably where they are sent after displaying "emotions" to strangers in public places ), but they need some serious re-education.

yet more probation

     You can move into an apartment in our fair city, and your neighbors may be serving a prison sentence under a form of house arrest. You may be watched and monitored by the people whose job it is to watch and monitor your neighbors. Your neighbors may be serving  a term of probation, after having been convicted of a crime. They may actually be serving a kind of prison sentence. Your address can become the address of a jail, in effect. No one seems to have any responsibility for informing tenants or householders that their neighbors may be on probation or serving sentences. A speedy and a public trial ought to mean just that. We don't owe anyone convicted of a crime a rehabilitated reputation. No one can legally be tried in secret in the United States, so how is this happening?  We would need to change the US Constitution to make it legal to try people in private.I suggest that you take an interest. It might be your neighbors, too.

probation, again

     We have a probation system that pays people, basically, for being on probation. They may get a weekly check, medical and dental care, their rent and utilities paid, and an allowance for transportation and job related-expenses. This stops when their term of probation has ended. For some, the way to continue to get along is to commit another crime that will probably get them another term of probation as a sentence. Many of these people do find jobs--but the probation office is paying their wages. Some employers are getting free employees--and don't want them anymore when they are not on probation. If they want their jobs back, they have to commit a new crime, and get sentenced to probation again.

Suggestion--look here for the source of a lot of crime

illiteracy, again

     People spend years in jail, and when they get out, they are illiterate. This is outrageous. There isn't anyone who couldn't learn basic literacy skills in six months or less. What are they doing in there?