This Week in the News

The news this week has been interesting, mainly for some of the smaller stories that might escape your notice. Seeing as how readership of this site once reached 123 unique visitors in a single day, your humble blogger realizes what a powerful influence on this world he is. He realizes, moreover, that, armed with a degree in Spanish, it is his duty to bring his university skills to bear on world events so that the twenty four people who read the blog today may reach a greater clarity of understanding, the which they may pass on to others in a continuing chain of geometrical growth which will eventually encompass the world and get Ron Paul into the White House, famously named after the race of its first 43 occupants. Before your humble blogger spouts any more 81 word sentences, let us proceed...

Our first item comes to us from Kansas. Apparently, at a recent game involving a Catholic school, a woman was not allowed to ref the boys' basketball game because this would be putting a woman in a position of authority over men. It is not hard to understand the Kansanian resistance to the Theory of Evolution since they evince such a loathing to engage in it themselves. One day, so the thinking goes, you accede to all the changes that have occurred in society since 1885 by allowing a woman to ref a boys' game, and the next day chimps will start turning into humans. It's best to nip this sort of thing in the bud, even if the millions of buds in other states are already blooming and healthy.

Long time readers of the blog will recall the ocassional dig that your humble blogger has aimed at the feebleminded denizens of that shoebox-shaped province; let them now cease to wonder why. We do not claim that every Kansanian fell off the Evolution Train at about the time Homo Erectus was standing up straight, but we can hardly pretend that we haven't noticed the collection of superstitious dupes and mouth-breathing bounders who have congregated there. An occurrence of such perfect troglodytic boorishness is not simply a reflection on the actors involved, but also on the environment in which they feel safe enough to pollute.

It is high time that we studied the phenomenon of Kansas. Is it a land where the very poisoned soil perverts good thinking, or does it work more like a magnet for those who will never think well? This is important to know, because the policy prescriptions suggested by each are diametrical opposites.

Item number two comes to us from the Carolinas. Apparently, poverty is not entirely due to a divine thrusting-on but may have something to do with the choices made by the people who languish in it. A recent college grad undertook a personal experiment wherein, with only $25 dollars in his pocket, he checked into a homeless shelter and started life over. Without mentioning his education and working only those jobs available to anyone with a pulse, he moved into the middle class in a very short period of time. Only ten months after sleeping in a homeless shelter, he had an apartment, a vehicle and $5,000 saved in the bank. He did go on food stamps for a time, but other than that the story is perfect.

We must be careful here, because conservatives sometimes use these kind of arguments to stop all complaints, even the legitimate ones, but it is important to recognize that the downtrodden sometimes choose to lay down in pedestrian walkways. Or, as P.J. O'Rourke once wrote, no one is too poor to clean their own home.

The next bit of news comes to us from Saturn. Apparently, Titan, its largest moon, is awash in liquid hydrocarbons. Oil, in other words. Before the good reader rushes to Google to inquire about dinosaurs on this frigid moon, allow me to introduce him to a new idea. Oil is an abiotically produced substance.

It may buck conventional wisdom, but one must remember that in this case conventional wisdom is no more than an untested 18th century relic. In the 19th century, the great Russian chemist Mendeleev noted that there was nothing about oil to lead one to suppose that it has biotic origins (indeed, no one has yet figured out how oil could form under the conditions in the earth's crust). He proposed that it formed deep in the earth, and when asked how it got to the surface, he said that there must be fissures through which it leaked, that the crust was not one solid sheet of rock. He was laughed at then.

There are many aspects of oil and natural gas which remain mysteries from a biotic perspective. These include deep oil reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas and oil (thanks to Dave McGowan for this). This debate need have no political implications. We do not claim to know at what rate the earth is producing oil, so modern alarmists can still have their Peak Oil Crisis, but this we do know: the only broad scientific debate on the subject, which took place over a period of several decades, occurred in the Soviet Union and the consensus was that oil is abiotic in origin.

Finally, we come to New York, scene of more election shenanigans, this time at the expense of Barack Obama. We do not mention this to resurrect our reputation as a political prognosticator, for we labor no longer under any delusions that we have a very keen eye for the process. Our prediction for Ron Paul was about as errant as it could be, but we cannot help wondering what results would have been given an accurate and honets vote count.