The Nature of Things

I confess I have not closely followed the Baylor sex crimes scandal and its aftermath which resulted in the demotion of Kenneth Starr and the firing of their football coach this week . Another instance of privileged college athletes being allowed to rape and assault women without suffering consequences, in fact being protected by the powers that be at their universities? Ho hum . Such things only happen on days ending in y. To afford each such felony the outrage which it deserves would mean that I am in a constant state of outrage. My sincere apologies to the innocent victims of these crimes but I simply can't live my life like that. Still, even though I've followed the story only tangentially, like many others in Texas - and, I suspect, elsewhere - I was surprised when Baylor fired its winning football coach this week, for, contrary to what you may have heard, evangelistic Christianity is not the number one religion in Texas; football is. To have one of that religion's suc...

Here are some things that are on my mind on this last Friday in April. 1.  Remember that old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times"? Well, we certainly do live in interesting times, but this week I'm particularly thinking about interesting weather.  We are no strangers to extreme weather here along the Gulf Coast and Mother Nature has delivered that in spades recently. Since April 17, we've had a total of 12.77 inches of rain and the forecasters tell us that more is on the way this weekend.  The last storm that came through, early Wednesday morning, was especially destructive in our community. One woman was killed when a tree fell on her house; others were injured and some areas were flooded again before they had even recovered from the floods of a week before.  The storm knocked us off the electricity grid from 4:30 in the morning until 9:30 that same morning. Even so, we were a lot luckier than many of our neighbors whose power was out all day. We heard...

My mind wanders over the Tuesday landscape and digs up these random thoughts. *~*~*~* Lincoln Chafee doesn't have a snowball's chance of succeeding in the Democratic race for President, but he does have at least one interesting idea. It's probably not going anywhere either, but maybe it should. Maybe it is time that we joined the rest of the world and adopted the metric system. At this point, only the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia cling to our old-fashioned non-metric system. Myanmar and Liberia will most likely accept metric long before we do. Our political system is too hidebound to unbend itself to accept something as sensible as the metric system. After all, feet and inches, pounds and miles are all part of "American exceptionalism," aren't they? And that's something we are so inordinately proud of, as we beat our chests and trumpet it to the rest of the world.  Moreover, there is a lot of fear of metric abroad in the land. Many will agree with m...

The appalling scandal at the Veterans Administration seems to be heating up as more hospitals are accused of having a "secret wait list" for services that resulted in unconscionably long waits for some veterans, some of whom died while waiting. There are calls from several quarters for the resignation of Gen. Eric Shinseki, the head of VA, and countervailing statements from many supporters who hold that he is doing his best to clean up the mess. On the other hand, we have several surveys over the years, including the most recent one from the American Customer Satisfaction Index , an independent customer service survey, that confirm a very high degree of satisfaction among veterans regarding the services that they receive from VA. No doubt, as in most cases, the objective truth lies somewhere in between, but there can be no argument that the backlog of claims which continues to dog the VA and the long wait for services at least in some areas is entirely unacceptable. It is al...

(1.)  I wonder if President Obama will have the intestinal fortitude to continue to press hard for the "Buffett tax" in the face of intransigent Republican opposition.  Every poll that I have seen shows that the public is strongly in favor of his plan to require the super-rich to pay their fair share of taxes.  Obama has a populist wave of support at his back if he has the will and skill to use it.  Meantime, the Republicans complain that there is a large percentage of Americans who pay no income tax.  I assume they are not referring to their friends the corporations and rich people who manage to leverage tax breaks into a zero tax bill.  No, they are talking about the poor who Michele Bachmann screeches must pay something "even if it is only a dollar."  What apparently has not occurred to these people is that the poor who pay no income tax do so BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE ENOUGH INCO M E TO REQUIRE A TAX!   On   the other hand, they pay a dis...