#42 Sunday Sundries

Worst of the Week

• Alas, another Obama shuffle. He said last week that he's willing to consider a compromise, which he said earlier he wouldn't consider, on the OFF-SHORE DRILLING issue. I have no special brief against it, nor I don't intend to get into any technicalities about it, but I do wish the young man would chill. He's got some great policy-positions to work with, if he would only stick to them a little better. It's beginning to look like a definite weakness of character.
• And speaking of which, McCAIN gets the vote this week for his under-handed and racially over-toned ad campaign vs. Obama. He says it's to call attention to Obama's lack of substance--all empty celebrity and fame a la Britney and Paris. Come on now, couldn't his henchmen have chosen more analogous, maybe even MALE tabloidniks (George Clooney?), instead of having Obama in photoshopped juxtaposition with pretty, just-past-jail-bait white girls? No...no salacious miscegenation fantasies intended, I'm sure. I wonder if Charlie Black, Jesse Helms old race-card dealer (see post 7/6), and now signed on to the McCain campaign, is somehow involved.
  
• Religious child abuse. Texas state supreme court says EXORCISM is all right, First Amendment-wise, even though 17-year-old Laura Parsons was "held captive and pinned to the ground and pummelled" because "fellow members of the church became convinced she was possessed." Medieval. The Constitutional guarantee of "free exercise" (maybe the idiot judges misread the word), doesn't cover CRIMINAL acts like kidnapping and battery. Nonetheless, the court dismissed the victim's civil suit against the church, "PLEASANT GLADE Assembly of God." (More on this one later.)
  

Best of the Week

• "Six Degrees of Separation" confirmed. Isn't it droll that I (drolly) alluded to the a.k.a. "small world theory" in Friday's post (the Kevin Bacon boink) just before the Saturday Washington Post reports on a study that seems to validate the old chestnut. (No extra charge for prescience.) The Microsoft researchers of course went to cyberspace for corroboration. They studied "30 billion (!) electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world" and concluded that "any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances." Why should this make us happy? Because it makes utopian Globalization (sorry) all the more inevitable. If inter-marriage won't do it, maybe the inter-net will.
  

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