• Home
• About
• Articles
• tag

The important difference between Christmas in Japan and Christmas here in the United States is that in Japan they are allowed to call Christmas trees Christmas trees whereas here we have to call them holiday trees, or some such nonsense. Christmas is both a religious holiday and a secular holiday. That shouldn’t be a problem, but due to odd concepts of political correctness currently in vogue it has become one.

What I want from news commentary are ideas, either new facts or new ways of looking at facts that explain why events unfolded as they did. Hannity and Colmes succeeds at doing that through the guests they have on the show. Neither host contributes as much as they could to the process. Hannity is too often a preacher delivering a limited number of canned sermons. Colmes listens to what guests have to say and responds to it, but often fails to advance the subject by analyzing what was said.

By torturing coach class passengers, airlines are able to sell wildly overpriced first class seats to people who have the money to afford escape. This is not a good situation. One possibility is for government to require minimum levels of service, for which airlines may compete with their pricing of fares. However, before leaping to regulation of that sort, let’s try just requiring disclosure of the level of service. Customers will know what they are buying at what price. Seat space is the most important thing being sold, so that ought to be the first thing disclosed.

Voting is a right, but not an unconstrained one. The right to vote is not granted to those under the age of eighteen. That age limitation shows that voting rights may be restricted when there is reason to doubt the potential voter’s good judgment. Resident aliens are excluded from voting on the grounds that their interests are not necessarily coincident with the interests of ordinary citizens. Convicted felons are another class of citizens whose judgment is reasonably called into question. The interests of convicted felons are likely to be contrary to the interests of citizens as a whole, who want to be protected from criminals.

Some proponents say that gay marriage is a right, and therefore should not be a debatable issue. It should, they say, be guaranteed as equal protection under the law, and enforced by the Supreme Court as such. Is it possible that use of a word in a new way is a fundamental right? How do we know what is a right and what isn’t a right?

Older