Raining Life

Tonight we have a meteor shower, the debris from a comet falling to Earth.

There may be profound significance to this sort of event.

First of all, it's highly probable. For gravitational reasons, all of the Sun's orbiters, over time, have come to lie essentially in a single plane. Given the long orbit of the comet, and the nearly circular one of Earth, it's inevitable that our paths will cross. And the radiant heat of the Sun guarantees that the ice ball leaves its outer skin behind each pass through. What's more intriguing is what it has been doing while on the far reach of its orbit.

It's been a cold object sweeping through a hot gas cloud, with such basic components of life as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. This cloud is not very thick, which is why the comet doesn't melt and meet obliteration there. But it does sweep through,
quenching the variety of chemical reactions that transiently occur in very hot environs.

Life didn't necessarily start here. The basic blocks, the amino acids, may first have
rained down in just such comet debris, distant ancient cousins to the light show tonight.

beer at the white house

OK, this one is out of the news now, but some things still need saying.

The uproar has subsided, with a talking head consensus that "this isn't about cops
trampling on the rights of black citizens, it's just about cops trampling on the rights of all citizens", as if that makes the problem go away.

Black people certainly do experience more than their share of such incidents, which may lead them to conclude, falsely, that only members of minorities are so imposed on.

A couple of stories you haven't heard on the national news:

In Easton, PA, a man heard about an altercation between his son and a classmate at school. He responded to this by getting his gun, taking his son to meet the classmate,
and then threatening the boy to prevent him from leaving or defending himself while his son beat the kid up. The prosecutor investigated the case, and could find nothing to prosecute! Irrelevant detail: the man was a cop. Irrelevant detail: everybody involved was white.

In the jurisdiction of this same prosecutor, Bethlehem, there was another notable case of unwarranted police violence. The details are sketchy, but if you've got nexus access, you can find a column that Paul Carpenter of the Morning Call wrote
about it.

Here's the sordid fact that the press hasn't told you - prosecutors do not rein in
cops. Why? because they are elected officials. They get elected by winning cases.
They have to have police cooperation to do that. They don't last if they piss off the
police. Which means that cops are free to also be crooks. For the benefit of idiots,
I hasten to say that I am not suggesting that all cops are crooks. What I am saying
is that their system does not meaningfully encourage them not to be. And that's a
problem. If people always did "the right thing" without consequences for doing "the
wrong thing", there would be no point in having cops in the first place. To suggest
that it's a tolerable thing to have a system where cops are not meaningfully
accountable is to argue for the abolition of their jobs.

So it is that we have a cop who falsely arrested a citizen for the non-crime of
speaking his mind, on his own property, even. Rather than serving hard time for his
crime against the First Amendment, not to mention assault with a deadly weapon, he's
drinking beer on the White House lawn.

In a free country, we would have a system where those who break the highest law, the
constitution, would be called to account for those crimes as surely as those who
break the more mundane laws. Don't hold your breath.

The wise Latina woman

Tomorrow this story will be put to bed, perhaps, though not likely, forever.

Curiously, nobody has really parsed the words of the now-famous phrase: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

If we change two words in that statement, it reads "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would as often as not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

That statement could not be construed as racist, and in fact objection to it would, on
its face, be racist.

So really, the furor revolves around the distinction between "more often than not" as
opposed to "as often as not". But "as often as not" is, mathematically, highly unlikely. If you toss a coin two million times, it is not going to come up heads exactly one million times. So the "as often as not" phrase would be unobjectionable,
but also false on its face, while the actual statement, which may or may not be true,
but at least could conceivably be true, raises holy hell.

Here's why it probably is true, at least in Sotomayor's case: the typical white male that goes to Princeton and Yale has only lived life in one station. The same cannot be said for Sotomayor. And that's the real reason for the furor. Rich, powerful people only want the outlook of rich, powerful people represented in government, for obvious reasons. They don't need to worry. You can't get justice if you can't pay through the nose for elite lawyers, no matter who is on the bench.