KellanStec

We should just run the Bill of Rights through a paper shredder. We won’t be needing it any more.

This article is a bit old, but I just saw it today (the article was published on February 23, 2007). It deals with the freedom of speech assured by the first amendment to students in public schools. Specifically, a girl wrote an opinion article–her first for the school newspaper–telling other students she thinks it is wrong to look down upon people who have a sexual preference unlike your own. The teacher in charge of the newspaper was suspended for two months for allowing the story to be published.

I remember throughout high school being puzzled after learning that the liberties illustrated in the Bill of Rights apparently did not apply in school. The court case Tinker v. Des Moines made it clear that students do not “shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse door.” For some reason, high school administrators have higher authority to limit students’ rights than the United States government does its citizens–despite the clear opinions of the high courts.

What exactly did she say? Here’s an excerpt from the entire editorial, which I have archived here:

I can only imagine how hard it would be to come out as homosexual in today’s society. I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you. There is nothing wrong with them or their brain; they’re just different than you. I’ve heard some people say that they think there is a cure to being homosexual. I can’t believe anyone would think that. It’s not a disease, or something that you catch from someone else; it’s something that they don’t have control over.

This is what the administration at Woodlan Junior-Senior High School would rather not be available to students. Assistant superintendent Andy Melin, who claimed that the opinion piece was biased and also stated that he hasn’t read the editorial, said school officials do not have an issue with the topic but with the lack of balance and thoroughness in the opinion piece. In one sentence, we can see just how twisted this guy is: he simultaneously has not read the article, knows it is an opinion piece, and claims that it is biased. If anyone knows how someone can possibly know that an article he hasn’t read is biased, please let me know. Also, does he know that it is an opinion article? It’s supposed to be biased. Hence, an opinion.

Presumably, the administration was angered because it only offered one viewpoint of the debate: pro-homosexual. But if you read the article, you will see that the student urges for compassion for everyone, because everyone is different. How is that a bad message to send to students?

Whatever the rationale is, it shouldn’t matter. Everyone is guaranteed a full right to free speech as outlined by the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

There are no obvious reasons why this should not apply in public schools–especially when the message in question is a message of peace and acceptance. One person’s private quarrel to some type of speech does not counteract the principles of the first amendment. It’s freedom of speech; not freedom from. This is exactly the type of thing that the first amendment was designed to protect, and here we have a case where it is being completely ignored. Students need to be taught how to think, not what to think.

If only we thought more like Voltaire:

I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

This is going to be a longer post than usual. This is the first presidential election that I have paid any mind to, and I think it is important after spending the past six years wondering when we were going to get rid of Bush. It is my firm belief that we need a strong leader to get us out of the Middle East, restore our civil liberties, and reform government spending. There are a number of candidates that I am interested in, and I am going to take the time to summarize their political views and why I do or do not like them. I am taking two democrats (Clinton and Obama), two republicans (Paul and Giuliani), and one libertarian (Kubby). I’d like to do the greens and independents, but I don’t particularly care for either party. Libertarian is my party of choice, so that’s the only reason I am including a third party at all.

Democratic candidates

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Hillary is a strong democrat, and currently the only woman who ever had a good shot at being president. I like her support for some personal liberties, such as same-sex marriage and abortion as well as her support of net neutrality. However, had it not been for the democrat’s continual insistence that personal safety be regulated whether or not it breaches personal liberties such as the right to bear arms, I would probably be liberal. I would probably never vote for Hillary. I really don’t have a problem with a woman president. The idea of a woman president scares me a little, but I think that’s just because I am afraid of change. I am sure there are plenty of competent women out there that could run this country better than our current and many past presidents. I just don’t think that she is the right person for the job. Overall, the most I can say for Hillary is that she is okay. It’s probably true that I don’t like her because she’s a woman, but I think some of my views are motivated by her potential or lack thereof as a president.

Barack Hussein Obama: Barack is a great guy, and probably someone I would want in the White House. His only problem is getting by Hillary in the primaries. Anyone who has read The Audacity of Hope knows how intelligent he is. The name might damage him a little–having the middle name Hussein and a last name that sounds like Osama might deter potential voters. Some people may look at his race as well. It’s a shame, but I think that if he can beat Hillary in the primaries, he could give any republican opponent a run for his money. He supports many of the same policies that Clinton does, and supports mild gun control. Obama’s gun control system makes more sense to me, and he didn’t vote against the 2006 Vitter Amendment, which prohibits the confiscation of lawfully-acquired firearms during a disaster. This is an obvious breech on the second amendment, and Hillary supported it. I support Obama over Hillary mostly because his book was brilliant, and he doesn’t smear the opponents in his own party like Hillary does. It seems like Obama “gets” that politics should not be a game or competition, especially when it comes to the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world. If you don’t currently support Obama, read his books and you will most likely be assuaged.

Republican candidates

Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani was the mayor of NYC during and following the September 11, 2001 attacks. His political views don’t make him a true republican–he is a moderate, if anything. I really like the way he feels about global warming (that the debate is irrelevant–we should be dealing with pollution anyway), but this isn’t exactly within the realm of presidential duties. On the topic of abortion, his views are pretty much in line with mine, “I hate [abortion]…However, I believe in a woman’s right to choose.” Hell, this guy is a quoting machine, “I’ve supported four or five hundred candidates in my time, but I’ve not yet found one with whom I can agree completely. In fact, I don’t even agree with myself on everything. There’s not a candidate with a clean skirt out there. Hell, I’ve been married myself three times.” I think I am starting to like this guy. My only problem with him is his failure to support same-sex marriages and his views on prayer in school. Other than that, he looks like a pretty solid candidate.

Ron Paul: Ron Paul is a libertarian disguised as a republican. Although many of his views aren’t in line with true libertarians, he could probably run as one without a hitch (and did–as a libertarian nominee in 1988). He supports the use of Marijuana for medical use and the abolition of the federal income tax. Ron Paul does have some admiral qualities, and I think this country could use a good libertarian president. I’m just not sure he could give either Hillary or Obama good opposition. Congressman Paul has been quoted on record in supporting the primary facets of libertarianism. He believes that the lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government’s. Government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth or to grant special privileges. However, there are many sections of the electorate that do wish to regulate private affairs, including religious groups and people with dollar signs in their eyes. These are the people who would probably not give their vote to Paul.

Libertarian Candidate

Steve Kubby: Steve Kubby is a true libertarian. He wants to enforce complete personal and economic liberty for all citizens. He is probably the most colorful potential presidential candidate. He has said that he has cheated death by using medical marijuana to treat a type of cancer. In 1968 he was given five years to live, but has lived 25 since. His past criminal record (relating to the marijuana he uses) will probably be a turn-off to voters. This is probably the man that I want in office, and there’s a strong chance that I would vote for him.

All in all, there are quite a few good candidates and it will be interesting to see who wins primaries. The way it looks to me, Obama will probably be my first choice, followed by Paul and Kubby. I would like to see Paul and Obama running against each other, mostly because I would like to see either of them in office. I would vote for Kubby in this case to give the Libertarians a boost in the popular vote. The way presidential elections are set up wouldn’t allow my vote to count for Kubby anyway except on popular vote.

Who would you like to see run for president, and who would you vote for?

You can take a very simple quiz to determine where your views fall on the two-dimensional political spectrum. I’m a solid libertarian.

Since when was it the government’s responsibility to legislate astronomy? Yesterday, Wired posted an article about a Republican representative form New Mexico named Joni Marie Gutierrez who proposed a bill to make Pluto a planet “as [it] passes overhead through New Mexico’s excellent night skies”. The absurd notion that New Mexico has its own sky through which an object 3.5 billion miles can pass coupled with the fact that it can’t be seen by 99% of the New Mexico population makes Gutierrez look all the more ridiculous until you consider that she is passing this bill through legislation. The bill also declares March 13 to be “Pluto Planet Day”.

She appeals to emotion, saying that “We always took a lot of pride in the fact that [Clyde Tombaugh, a New Mexico native] discovered Pluto…When they declared it a dwarf planet, we took it as a personal affront.” Well, aside from the fact that passing a bill solely to make people feel proud is never a good idea, it is not the government’s job to decide what a planet is and what is not. Leave astronomy to the astronomers. I didn’t really know how to respond to this, so I am going to give seven reasons why Pluto should not be considered a planet.

1. Pluto does not have a central nervous system. It is a ball of frozen water and methane billions of miles away. It cannot feel pain, love, or any emotion whatsoever. Its feelings will not be hurt if we make it a dwarf planet. This sounds silly, but it seems to me that all the groups created on Facebook somehow think that removing planetary status deals a devastating blow to Pluto’s self-esteem. Emotional appeal is never a good reason to make something a scientific truth.
2. Pluto does not orbit in the ecliptic plane. Every other planet orbits in this plane. Pluto is inclined by as much as 17°. This means at perihelion, Pluto is about 8 Astronomical Units above the plane. This is absurdly divergent from the other planets.
3. Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit. Well, all planets have an elliptical orbit, but Pluto’s is abnormally high. This puts Pluto closer to the sun than Neptune for part of its year. 8th or 9th planet? Make up your mind, Pluto!
4. Pluto is tiny. At 2/3 the size of the moon, why should we even consider this a planet? There are numerous other Jovian moons that are quite a bit larger than Pluto as well.
5. Incretio ad absurdum. This is a Latin derivation that I made up, which means increasing to absurdity. The definition of planet that allowed Pluto to become a planet in the first place could potentially be applied to dozens of bodies in the solar system not currently considered planets. In fact, we already have discovered a few, and one of them is larger than Pluto–Eris.
6. Why aren’t Ceres and Eris planets? I think if this question is asked in an astronomy class, there should be a better answer than “The public is afraid of change.”
7. It’s a ball of ice. Pluto would be the first planet to melt into liquid if it were brought closer to the sun. If it were orbiting closer to the sun, we would probably call it a comet. It would have a tail just like all other comets.

Pluto’s planetary status has been questioned by science for years, so this is nothing new. Finally, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to include the three following criteria in a formal definition of a planet:

• The body must orbit the sun and have a diameter of 2000 km.
• The body must keep its shape stable due to its own gravity.
• The body must be dominant in its immediate neighborhood.

These make sense to me. Of course, there were other things defined, such as what exactly constitutes “dominance”, but that’s not the point. These guidelines were designed to create more order in the naming of solar system objects. It’s great that the Pluto debate is sparking an interest in the public for science, but nostalgia does not make a science. If we start identifying remote snowballs smaller than our Moon with unconventional orbits as planets, then before you know it, lozenge-shaped lumps of iron will want to be planets, too. What’s next? A Voyager heat shield? Wow, that reductio ad absurdum is actually pretty funny.

If people want to form a close emotional relationship to a ball of ice billions of miles away, that’s fine with me. But some people expect the scientific community to gratify their fixation by distorting the definition of a planet into something that includes Pluto, purely for emotional and nostalgic reasons. Sorry, it does not work that way.

I typically don’t care about the Oscar awards until I found out that Al Gore won an Oscar for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Before I start, it should be revealed that I have not seen this film. Yet. I do plan on seeing it in the near future to see what the big deal is. I suppose I should have seen it before I go on criticizing it, but it’s not like I have a reputation on the line. For my purposes I think my opinion would be unaltered had I seen the film or not. Throughout this post, you will see me spouting satirical global warming hysteria jabs directed towards Al Gore. Although I praise him for inventing the Internet, I still believe he is a giant douche.

Don’t get me wrong, the Earth probably is warming. Something should probably be done to at least decelerate the effects of warming. It also cools a lot. Obviously it has warmed at least enough to bring us out of the ice age we were in about ten thousand years ago. It’s natural for a planet to go through periods of warming and cooling. What I am not convinced of, though, is that the planet’s warming is a direct result of human activity.

But how do we know that the Earth is even warming? The weathermen can barely predict the weather for the next week accurately. Sure, we can look at graphs and see a warming trend, but who’s to say where it ends? We don’t know how the Earth’s climate changes over long periods of time, because we have only been logging temperature data for a little over 150 years. Don’t forget that there was once a global cooling hysteria that looked equally convincing at the time.

Alright, so that was thirty years ago. Their science was inferior to our science, obviously. But could you not also say the same thing about their methods of obtaining temperature? Maybe they were off by a degree in the negative direction–especially in the 1800s. This illegitimizes the principle of global warming–that we’re seeing a warming trend since temperatures started to be logged.

It just bothers me when people like Al Gore make it seem like humans are intrinsically evil. Other factors of global warming, such as volcanic activity and solar warming are commonly ignored. Mars is warming up too, you know. So, those polar animals are going extinct? It happens. A conservative estimate of the percentage of all species that have gone extinct is 95%. Many animals went extinct both before and after the earth’s last ice age.

I also have yet to see any persuasive effects of global warming. If it’s so super duper serial, why aren’t I ablaze under the February sun? It just snowed six inches Saturday night. The ground has not been free of snow for well over a month. It’s cold. The more intelligent penguins would be well-advised to migrate to Nebraska. Take a look at the graph again. The record anomalies are about +.42° and -.53° C. The record anomaly is .95° lower than the record high. We are talking about temperature changes of less than a degree. Wow, it would sure suck if the early meteorologists were off by .2°.

Al Gore is here to tell you that manbearpig–I mean global warming–most certainly exists. And he’s serial. It doesn’t care who you are, or what you’ve done–global warming is out to get you. And someday, when the world is rid of global warming everyone will say, “Thank you Al Gore! You’re awesome!” Should we take him seriously? Who knows?

Excelsior!

I cannot believe that I am actually writing about this, but it has gotten to a point which I cannot bear. It seems that every week, there is at least one new story or article regarding the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It’s becoming a bit ridiculous. The inveterate theme is a continual re-hashing and re-interpretation–in effect, bending–of the “facts”. There are videos, documentaries, and websites created explicitly for this purpose. Today, I’m going to add one more opinionated story to this week’s tally. As if one story weren’t enough.

9/11 conspiracy theorists would have you believe that it was not terrorists who flew planes into three of our buildings, but our own government that initiated the event. Governmental involvement is, at the very least, a fundamental belief of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Some say that the United States government hired the Islamic terrorists to do the job, and still others say that the entire plot was executed by the government itself–both equally absurd. Taken directly from the mission statement on 911Truth.org:

TO EXPOSE the official lies and cover-up surrounding the events of September 11th, 2001 in a way that inspires the people to overcome denial and understand the truth; namely, that elements within the US government and covert policy apparatus must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened in the way that they did.

Let’s look more closely at what they are saying. Our government–the same government responsible for the failed policy in Iraq, lackluster homeland security plan, pathetic no child left behind bill, and cohorts of an inept president who can barely grasp the English language–committed one of the greatest war atrocities our country has ever seen on our own soil, while at the same time, covered it up. When reminded how little compelling evidence there is for what they’re saying, a typical response is something like, “And the reality that there is little compelling evidence for this makes it all the more plausible. Of course there is little evidence for it. That’s how profound the conspiracy really is!” Absolutely ludicrous.

If this administration was so good at covering things up, why didn’t it cover up that feral quail hunt incident? There were only a handful of people present, and it couldn’t have been to difficult to hush-up this public relations disaster. Maybe they saw the potential landmine of jokes associated with Cheney’s mishap. Jon Stewart and the like were pretty quick to jump on that one. My point is, it would have been wise to try to cover this up, although it is less serious than 9/11 by orders of magnitude. The truth is this: the implementation and number of people that would have to keep their mouths shut about this is unfathomable. Countless military officials, air line employees, and members of the administration. This could not have been executed successfully by a handful of people, this would have had to have required widespread cooperation of individuals all over the country.

I am going to propose something that has already been covered on an episode of South Park [video]. The 9/11 conspiracy is a government conspiracy. This should make the conspiracy theorists squirm in their chairs. This means that all those who believe there was a conspiracy are playing right into the government’s hands. How diabolical!

There are other things that immediately debunk the 9/11 conspiracy myth. As satirist Maddox pointed out, the fact that people like David Lynch, Dylan Avery, and the 911truth.org gang are alive is proof enough that the government didn’t have anything to do with this. Maddox writes, “…the government has no problem killing 3,000 innocent people, [and] this raises the question: if his documentary [Loose Change] is true, and we’ve established that the government has no ethical qualms about killing thousands of its own people, then why wouldn’t the government kill Avery and his friends as well? What’s a few more lives to them to ensure the success of this conspiracy?” Eloquent as always.

Seriously people, the truth is obvious. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were planned and orchestrated by nineteen Islamic terrorists following Allah’s law: killing infidels. They believed they would be going to paradise accompanied by “dark-eyed virgins” (Koran 37:40-48) upon death. Plus, we already know many Muslims hate us. Many believe 9/11 was justified.

By now it should be clear what my position is. Anyone who believes that the attacks on 9/11/01 were a government conspiracy is–I’m sorry–a delusional moron. There are probably many things that we do not know about that day more than five years ago, and probably never will. But, it doesn’t help when people just start making things up. I am going to leave you with a series of dialogue from a recent South Park episode: The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce.

Cartman: Kyle, why are you so afraid of the truth?
Kyle: Because everyone who thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy is a retard.
Cartman: Oh, really? Well, did you know that over ¼ of the people in America think that 9/11 was a conspiracy? Are you saying that ¼ of Americans are retards?
Kyle: Yes. I am saying ¼ of Americans are retards.
Stan: Yeah, at least ¼.
Kyle: Let’s take a test sample. There are four of us; you’re a retard, that’s ¼.

later….

Kyle: …well then who was responsible for 9/11?
Stan: What do you mean? a bunch of pissed off Muslims.
Hardly Boys: Yeah, what are you? Retarded?

Further reading:

Edit 02/26/07:
As I said above, there’s a new 9/11 conspiracy hysteria story every week. This time, four days later. Here‘s another one.