Hail to the Chief, Baby

    Someone remarked to me the other day that I should run for the presidency.  While a flattering thought, I reluctantly replied with teh obvious truth that I am essentially unelectable.

    For one thing, I am not religious.  This in and of itself is enough of a disqualifying factor.  A black female will be elected to the president before a non-religious white guy.  People will not vote for someone who does not believe in god (specifically the Christian variety). 

    It is baffling to me, this whole religion thing.  I just don't get it at all.  There have been various points at my life where I have taken time to re-examine my life philosophies and consider religion, but in each of these instances I have not found any reason to begin to have even the slightest inkling of what one would call 'faith'.

    I was asked recently whether the fact that 70% of the populace was religious bothered me, to which I replied that it did.  Let me try and describe why this is the case.

Kind of like a giant bunny named Harvey

    Imagine, if you will, that you are lying on the surgery table about to be anesthesized before some major operation.  As you lay there mentally preparing, you notice the surgeon off to one side.  She is looking at an empty space beside him and saying "Well Bob, this is gonna be tricky.  I'm gonna need your help on this one, eh?  Make sure I don't fuck this up."

    You ask the nurse who the doctor is talking to and she replies "Oh, that's the doctor's imaginary friend Bob.  Bob helps guide her."  Would this bother you?

    One can also imagine similar scenarios with police men, fire fighters or public officials.  President Reagan used to rely on his astrologer to make presidential decisions.  Scary, huh?  Same thing with religion.

And we use the term "peers" loosely

    This is similar to the issues that I have with the jury system.  The jury system, as we all recall from public school, has its roots in the Magna Carta, which was written in 1215.  1215 was centuries before the birth of Galileo or DaVinci, at a time when people regularly believed in witchcraft and that the Earth was the center of the universe.

    Yes, a foul idea from nearly 800 years ago is still in use today.  The general thought is that the best way to determine whether or not someone is innocent is to find twelve random people, pay them $6 a day, and ask them to give a fuck about someone else's life.

    This is kind of like asking twelve random people to officiate a football game.  Hell, you can't get twelve people to agree on a pizze, let alone make life-altering decisions.  These people are not scholars of the law and they have no business playing at such.  We have judges for a reason, let's use them.

Sociology and group dynamics

    I think that I would have fun though, If I ever do make it through the screening process for a jury (and I doubt seriously that I would).  My current thinking is to use the time as a sandbox to practice persuasive argument.  Just find out which way everyone is currently leaning, and work to convince them of the opposite side, just to see if you can.

    Think about it, when are you going to have this kind of opportunity again?  This is the perfect place to grow your skills in swaying the thoughts and opinions of others.  You can try out all kinds of methods and see how the individuals respond.

    Then, when you are in a real situation like at work you can apply these techniques.  A clever person could probably find a way to deduct the time off their taxes as training... 

21 out of 50, good for baseball, bad for gunfire

    In other news, police in New York opened fire at a car outside a strip club.  I don't know the whole story (part of it is in this article), but apparently there was a groom and a car and some undercover cops.  Regardless, the interesting part is that the police fired 50 shots at the car and only managed to hit it 21 times.

    21 out of 50, that's a 42% hit rate.  These are trained professionals who must regularly re-qualified on their weapon and they are hitting a fairly large target (a car) considerably less than half of the time.

    That means that for every ten bullets fired, six of them are flying towards a random target on the street, and that's with a target as big as a car.  Imagine how often the police are missing when faced with a man-sized target. 

    Lesson to be learned here:  Stay the fuck away from the New York police when they are spraying lead.  The oods of them hitting an innocent bystander are greater than the odds of them hitting their target.