Current Affairs

It's beginning to look like the "we are just doing what's best for you" crowd won't give up until everybody lives to be 150 years old, during which lifespan they will be carefully monitored to make sure no one is having fun, which as we all know, leads to higher expectations, which can cause stress, which is even more harmul to health than trans fats:

I've dismissed claims from the left that the United States still has ambitions as a colonial power. But maybe I need to rethink that:

If the county's proposed smoking ban, much tougher than the city's, is passed, will we need to hire a few extra people for the sheriff's department to be the tobacco police?

An interesting take on the difference between the average American of 1967, when we hit the 200 million population mark, and the average American of today's 300-million landscape:

As the U.S. population crossed the 300 million mark sometime around 7:46 a.m. Tuesday (according to the U.S. Census Bureau), the typical family is doing a whole lot better than their grandparents were in 1967, the year the population first surpassed 200 million.

In 1930, 84 percent of U.S. households were married couples. By 1990, the percent had fallen to 56. And in the last five years, according to analysis of Census data by The New York Times, a milestone has been reached:

"Star Trek" just keeps coming true. Our cell phones are their communicators. The Internet, of course, is the real-life version of their computer that has all human knowledge. Now we're one step closer to the universal translator:

If you've ever heard Andy Rooney's commentaries, you know there are a lot of things he doesn't understand -- in fact, he's quite proud of that. But occasionally, the depth of his lack of understanding is astonishing:

Right now, I don't understand why we think it is OK for us to have nuclear weapons but it isn't all right for some other countries to have any.

[. . .]

With the U.S. population approaching 300 million and the world's having passed 6 billion, I started wondering how many people had ever lived on Earth. I started looking around on the Web and finally found someone who addressed the question. You have to go almost to the bottom, but the answer is 106.5 billion, which makes today's 6.2 billion about 5.8 percent of the total. There are lots of qualifiers for the estimate, as we might expect:

This is one of the most disturnbing photos I've seen in a while.

For those of you who vowed to just quit this country and move to France if Allen County even ever considered a smoking ban, too bad:

The prime minister announced Sunday that a ban on smoking in schools, offices and other public buildings will start in February, while restaurants, dance clubs and some bars have until 2008 to comply.