Editorials

I believed that vaccines could prevent diseases and save lives. So in March-April, 2021, I had taken the two prescribed doses of the vaccine for COVID-19. I had no trouble with them. In December, 2021, providers were offering another shot—a booster. I took it. For four or five hours, I had no problem. But then my bowels poured out their contents, and about every half hour for about three hours this happened again. Each time I was amazed at how much fluid I was losing. After the last trip to the toilet, I wondered whether I’d have enough strength to stand up and walk back to the bed.

Hype likely leads to the formation of crowds. In any case, reporting on the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 focused much more on the social phenomenon than on the astronomical event. A lot of people gathered for and many cheered and applauded the show in the sky; quite a few people interviewed provided accounts of their awesome experiences.

So, what is your name?
........So, my name is So.
So, I'm not So--you're So.
........So, yeah, that's right, you got it.
So, you don't understand: I'm not So.
........So, you're not So, I know.
So, why do you keep calling me So?
........So, why are we going around and around?
Well, I just wanted to know your name.
........Well, my name is not Well.
Well, my name is not Well.
........Well, I'm not feeling well right now.
Well, you're getting on my nerves.

While an acorn can develop into an oak tree, an acorn is not an oak tree. While all citizens of the United States (natural born citizens at least 35 years old who have resided in the United States for at least 14 years) have the potential to become the president, a potential president is not a president. While an embryo can develop into a human being, a potential human is not a human: an embryo is not a human being.

There are many critics of the billionaires who will be taking quick trips into space, riding on rockets built and operated by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. Senator Bernie Sanders weighed in on the matter recently.

Information technology is complicated. And so, for those who do not understand how it works, it may be dangerous. The same is true for cars and rotary saws. Risk management is not just for certified professionals to practice; we all manage risk. The little sister who guides her younger brother across a busy street, the advisor to a president regarding a matter of national security—these people manage risk. They—we all—have to consider probabilities for success and failure, for living and dying.

The consequences of the lockdown of businesses and the curtailment of travel by State governors in response to the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 are many. The main purpose of the regulation is limiting the pandemic. The regulation has helped to achieve that goal. Many of the economic and social consequences, while unintentional, are nevertheless undesired and harmful.

At least 15 States have passed resolutions declaring pornography a public health crisis. Others are moving in that direction. Ohio now has H. R. No. 180—a resolution “to declare that pornography is a public health hazard with statewide and national public health impacts leading to a broad spectrum of individual and societal harms.”

Let us hope that all the revelations about sexual crimes and indiscretions that occurred in decades past will embolden those who have been violated to report attacks quickly. There are several reasons why victims of crimes of all sorts do not press charges against the perpetrators or ever acknowledge that crimes have been committed: fear of reprisal or embarrassment, a sense that no one will believe the stories told, hopelessness where disparity in wealth or status between victim and violator is stark.

Every now and then the most profound questions arise. Just a look at the clear night sky splattered with stars reveals a scale—immensity—against which the measures of our little lives wither. The view can prompt the biggest questions—questions about how it all began and where it all is going, questions about our importance or insignificance in the universe—and are we alone?—even the ultimate question 'why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?' We are on a dangerous path. It can be uncomfortable. Most of us do not pursue very far the answers; we can recoil at the consequences.

[Published in the Congressional Record—Appendix, May 6, 1965, pp. 2235-2236.]

Putting a hand deep into the punch at a party is a deviation from polite behavior that typically does not signify much else except, perhaps, retrieving a ring, grabbing a piece of fruit, trying to shock, offend or amuse people. Such an act is generally considered uncouth but apolitical: it does not express an idea or opinion, but only reveals at most an urgency to snag something, or convey an attitude or emotion.

The attack by American forces on the Shayrat airbase in Syria on April 7, 2017 was enough to show that our president and our country are aware that a chemical agent was used to kill civilians in Syria. The cruise missiles that targeted some of Assad’s military assets should clearly have demonstrated our disapproval of the use of any chemical or biological means for harming humans. Unfortunately, as a number of analysts have pointed out, the toughest problem is what America should do next.

At and around the founding of the American republic, a well-armed militia or a combination of a few could have overthrown the government. If necessary, citizen soldiers could have prevailed in a fight to protect the country from tyranny, preserve the rights of the people, abolish a regime that had lost its legitimacy.

We make rules and look to rulebooks to help us manage our interactions in games and in life. There are even rules for war. Of course, getting everyone to comply with all the rules all the time can be challenging and in many cases impossible. Yet we try. Order in society entails our support for institutions, laws, the rules of a game. Our lives in society are structured to such an extent that we follow different scripts in a variety of circumstances; those scripts guide our actions and communications in restaurants, stadiums, casinos, churches, hospitals, banks, battle-zones.

In the latest encyclical, "Laudato Si'" [1], Pope Francis delivers theology with consequences, though apparently not the theology many of his critics espouse, and not the consequences those critics want to see derived under any circumstances from any source—earthly or supernatural.

Now that the Boy Scouts have accepted the policy of admitting openly gay members, the organization should just focus on all the other aspects of its mission and move on. Forget the debate. The arguments in favor of discrimination against gays are weak and will, we hope, begin to fade away.

There have been many mass shootings and several bombings that have received considerable attention from the media. A few are mentioned here.

In a Century 16 theater in the Town Center at Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, a shooter killed ten people and wounded many others, including two who died later in hospital. James Eagan Holmes, the man charged with this crime, had acquired hundreds of 12-gauge shotgun shells and thousands of rounds of ammunition for handguns and semiautomatic rifles in a few months before the massacre.

Robots are playing more and greater roles in industry, entertainment and everyday life.

They are already performing some menial tasks, retrieving items from a stockroom, for example, and supporting sophisticated manufacturing for the automotive, aviation and electronics industries. They are assisting surgeons performing delicate operations, and they are helping police and military forces, where they keep humans at a distance from dangerous environments. Some robots are exploring other worlds.

Confession
"I believe that at my age, I am well past the time for facing a certain fact. And the world might as well know about it. I don't want to avoid the truth; I don't want to live a lie. I am now willing to tell everyone about a preference that springs from the very core of my being, without embarrassment or apology: I don't like Wonder Bread." -- William Rossiter, 2012

Some countries allow the parents of an unwanted child to deposit it in a box or hatch at a building where attendants care for it and arrange for its eventual adoption.

The motivation for instituting baby boxes ('Babyklappe') is humane: the arrangement protects an abandoned child from many of the adverse effects of living with people who have no love and little regard for its life and health.

Baby boxes beat murder. And yet this way out of responsibility for rearing a child has some very undesirable consequences:

Congratulations to SpaceX for completing its first mission to the International Space Station. The company ought to expand its capabilities and realize the vision of Elon Musk, its co-founder, to take human explorers to the moon and eventually to Mars.

But although the privatization of transportation to outer space is a welcome development, it should not herald the end of the leading role for American government in setting an agenda for our nation and financing the most advanced research.

Anyone who expects to lead a diverse group of people, be it a little club or a great nation, must avoid revealing too much about personal beliefs. People hold a great variety of opinions, and giving the slightest suggestion that we hold a different view can stop a conversation, fuel a heated argument, start a nasty shouting match, or begin a war.

Certain words like 'abortion', 'evolution', 'socialism', and these days even 'science' or 'reason', 'Mormon' or 'Muslim', 'fundamentalist' or 'liberal' can be incendiary in debates.

The riots that began on August 6 and lasted at least four days damaged or destroyed much property in scattered areas in England including Birmingham, Bristol, Camden, Clapham Junction, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Hackney, Lewisham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Peckham, Salford, Tottenham, Wolverhampton and Woolwich.

Did Casey murder Caylee? No one has the right to say, and no one even has the right to an opinion on the matter except the person with certain knowledge or the jury in the case of the State of Florida v. Casey Marie Anthony.

Some TV personalities have asked viewers whether they think Casey is guilty or not--as if the vote, as if what respondents thought about the matter, makes a difference. (It probably does: getting responses may bind viewers, at least for a time, to a given channel or keep them, at least for a while, tuned in. It whips up a little frenzy.)

In 1969, around his birthday on July 20, the author had a conversation with his grandmother about the landing of two men on the moon. She doubted that it happened--and that it ever could happen. And she had good reasons. First, when we see it, the moon is always above the Earth. Anyone getting up to it could hardly stay on it for long: a person would fall off. Second, in any case, the moon was too small to hold one man, let alone two men and a vehicle. Furthermore, the moon changes shape. At one time, it is a full disk and, at another, a mere sliver. For a time, it disappears altogether.

Unfortunately, many schools fail to accomplish their primary goal: the education of their students. The immediate causes of this failure are the boredom and chaos that students experience in their classrooms.

Little projects and great public works alike depend on the physical and psychological resources of individual human beings. And the achievement of any goal--major or minor--depends on how well the people in pursuit of that goal are motivated. Motivation, then, is crucial to the progress of a whole society as well as to the progress in an individual's life. Activism, in particular, depends on extraordinary motivation.

We might explode if we stopped, listened, looked at the world as if for the first time--heard the sounds, saw the sights, and began to question what these things we see and hear are all about.

Honesty is the revelation of hearts and minds: it is the expression of thoughts and feelings without reservation or distortion. In honest communication, the life within is made public, put on view for others to see. The honest person is 'transparent': the outer aspect of the person is congruent with--a true representation of--the person's mental and emotional state.

Some people have said, and have meant it, "I wish I had never been born." Aside from how this sentiment could, in the extreme, prompt a further downward slide toward depression and even suicide, the chief problem with admitting this is the hurt it could cause the people who hear it.

BlackBerry offers a couple of services that trouble officials in India: the BlackBerry Messenger Service (BMS) and the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES). The government of India wants access, by the end of this month, to the information transmitted through these services. The reason for concern is that the encryption used in BMS and BES is so strong that authorities cannot readily crack it.

As we mature, we gain in our awareness of, and to some extent our ability to manage, two features of human life: complexity and uncertainty. But we can never avoid them entirely, nor can we ever control them completely.

Legislators are mostly about telling people what to do. And in our republic we call on legislators to influence--often to control--the actions of fellow citizens. But we also live by principles, so that the considerable demands we make on others are not expressions of prejudice, mere whim, or the worst of our impulses.

There are several arguments against same-sex marriage, but for the most part, the counter-arguments are better.

All American politicians will say that the American worker can compete with any worker in the world. They can make a good case with regard to the skill, motivation and endurance of our labor force. But we must admit that in many cases American workers cannot compete with foreign laborers with regard to pay. American workers cannot maintain the American minimum standard of living while earning $2, $3 or $4 an hour. The difference in the cost of labor is a major reason why many jobs have gone overseas.

In ancient times beginning around the 1950s, the dominant paradigm for computer systems involved a mainframe that users accessed through one or several dumb terminals. Personal computers did not exist; the massive size and great cost of the central processing units typically required very substantial investments by large companies or departments of government.

Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Michael Enzi (R-WY), Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) advocate the removal of restrictions on travel by Americans to Cuba. (See the 'Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act', S. 428.) Now is a good time for ending not only the ban on travel but also the remaining embargo against Cuba.

Renewing the freedoms of travel and trade would benefit both Cuba and the United States.

Copyright laws aim to protect authors of original material, so that they can earn income for their work. Unless the activities generate revenue, many kinds of research and writing are not sustainable. So copyrights foster the collection and dissemination of facts, theories and commentaries. And copyright laws, to a degree, may protect the very existence of a commercial literary enterprise.

There are small issues regarding public safety: the concern for the safe use of firecrackers is one of them. And there are some big issues, for example, those that involve threats to the very existence of humanity. One such threat is astronomical: one comet or asteroid could destroy all human life. It just has to have sufficient mass and hit Earth almost anywhere.

Ghoulardi's admonition is a good one for the national holidays--especially the Fourth of July. To the delight of many viewers of WJW in Cleveland in the early sixties, the host of Shock Theater often lit firecrackers on the set to blow up model cars, effigies of local personalities he lampooned, and even the letter he received from the fire marshal telling him to stop lighting explosives in the building. Ghoulardi did end the practice after he dispatched a big one that deafened some of the crew and started fires that took a couple dozen extinguishers to subdue.