George Rebane

Happy Winter Solstice to everyone.  At 4:04 AM PST this morning the sun was exactly overhead somewhere at the Tropic of Capricorn latitude in the southern hemisphere.  For Jews everywhere Hanukkah, the festival of the lights, starts this evening at sunset.  Christians have today lit the fourth candle of Advent and await the annual celebration of the Incarnation.  I haven’t a clue what the secular humanists are doing this season besides monitoring that the odd crèche or menorah is not found anywhere on public property.  All in all, we should take maximum advantage of these holy days and stock up on all the goodness and mercy we can because 2009 is going to be a duuzy.

Saw on TV where some Indians are being insulted again.  It seems that a ski area has been making snow with recycled sewer water.  Now this water is clean enough to drink, but the Indians don’t want to have the stuff sprayed on yet another piece of recently discovered sacred ground.  For those of you of a scientific bent, consider that things disperse pretty thoroughly over time.  For instance, every breath you take today contains about 43 atoms of the last breath exhaled by Julius Caesar or Jesus Christ when they were executed two thousand years ago.  I also recall that the palefaces did beat the redskins, but then taught them how to dial up the local office of the ACLU.  Fortunately none of the Red Man’s Revenge casinos are located on holy ground – or, come to think of it, maybe they are. (Imagine how many H2O molecules formerly in the urine of infidels rains down on Muslim holy places annually.  Everyone can really get worked up about that.)

Thinking about the King’s English, it occurred to me that our language has recently lost some more words as dumbth and political correctness spread across the land.  For example, there is no longer a single word to describe the lifelong legal bond between a man and a woman – we used to call it marriage.  And, of course, for years we haven’t had a word that uniquely describes a person who has knowingly risked (or lost) his life, limb, or fortune, above and beyond the call, in the benevolent service of a fellow human – we used to call such a person a hero.  The word which formerly described a laudable character trait that allowed an individual to correctly assess the worth of something desirable versus something not so desirable is now a pejorative label – we used to call it discrimination.  There are many other words that no longer can be used without appending qualifiers or modifiers; and some words today are completely proscribed.  In days of yore the information carrying capacity of language grew by adding new words for new ideas.

The late Michael Crichton made a great speech at the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy in 2005 that throws some much needed light on how people should think about realworld processes like global warming.  A correspondent sent me the link (here) – it’s worth a read.