Friday Follies

It Really _Is_ the Economy, Stupid!

I recently mentioned the economic pressures on Afghan farmers to raise food instead of opium. Now we see that the flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico has abated somewhat, due to – you'll never guess – economic considerations! Again, we violate the law of parsimony when we assume that people do things for abstract or obscure reasons when there are other far more obvious possibilities. The Mexicans come up here because they want to be “Americans”? Because they envy our “life style”? Hell no, they just want more money. And as if to prove this painfully obvious point, they aren't coming up here at quite the same rate since our economy ran aground – and yes, this also proves that they keep up on current events and aren't just a bunch of illiterate peons napping under a huge sombrero against an adobe wall. OK, so let's see... what lessons can we learn from this? To cut down on opium production, we have to subsidize corn for ethanol production and therefore threaten the Third World with starvation. To cut down on illegal immigration, we have to voluntarily trash our own economy. Hmmm... these aren't the solutions that would have immediately come to mind. But still, it's good that there's a silver lining to almost any catastrophe.

Wide Body Jets

Canada, in another spasm of terminal humanism, has decided that fat people get two for the price of one – airplane seats, that is. Now personally, I'm all in favor of that innovation since I've had to sit next to what I call an “occuphant” on many a plane ride. I'm not exactly svelte, but having half my body buried under a mound of someone else's flab is not my idea of a pleasure trip. And the funny thing is, fat people have long since lost any concept of “personal space” -- they're perfectly happy just plopping down and establishing a blanket-sized interface between their body and yours. It doesn't bother them a bit! I guess that's a form of adaptation in a way. But what the Canadian authorities obviously have not yet considered is this – who defines “fat”? I mean, who decides how fat someone has to be to get the free extra seat? Is it a simple matter of weight? Or how about the ratio of weight over height (AKA the Body Mass Index)? Or... will they actually get out a tape measure and see how wide someone is when the person buys a ticket? (Try doing this over the Internet.) Plus, we all know that people who are already wide get even wider when they sit down. Plus... who brought this suit in the first place? Probably a guy big enough to qualify as “class-action” all by himself.

Finns in Space

A Finnish woman had a baby on board an airplane as it was flying over Kazakhstan. So... does the kid wind up with dual citizenship, in which case they might be the first person in history to be a dual Finnish-Kazakh citizen. Wonder what “Borat” could do with this one...

Real Retirement

Every few weeks I read about another ancient mobster or white-collar criminal who is declared “too old to stand trial”, or, if convicted, “too old to go to jail”. Well, let's see... they weren't “too old” to commit the crime, were they? Or to order someone else to commit the crime. And why isn't that argument ever used for the guys still being rounded up by “Nazi hunters”? They're brought into courtrooms in wheel chairs or oxygen tents, and on life support. Where in the law does it provide an exemption for people who just happen to get old before they're caught? I'm not aware of a “get out of jail free” card for geezers. And yet it keeps coming up. And a similar mind set is shown when a middle-aged person receives a long sentence. The complaint is invariably, “That's the same as a life sentence.” I wish, just once, a judge would look down from the bench, smile, and say “Yep, that's the idea.”