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The Bend, Oregon, local daily newspaper "The Bulletin" contains, on the editorial page, the normal letters to the editor section. Since living in Bend, I have submitted some half dozen letters which have been published. Recently, I submitted another one and the paper has notified me it will be published. The text is given below. However, the editor sometimes disagrees with my grammar, and minor changes may be made.
When an opening occurs for state or federal Supreme Court judges, controversy starts whether the candidate for the opening should be liberal or conservative. Those of liberal beliefs, of course, want a liberal nominee, while conservative thinkers want a conservative candidate. Also, existing judges are frequently evaluated on their case decisions by the media and others based on liberal or conservative criteria. Thus, it would appear that judge's final decisions of cases under consideration are based on the judge's beliefs rather than objective evidence. This leads to the interesting conclusion that the highest level judiciary branches of our government are in reality super legislative branches. Be this the case, perhaps high court judges should be selected by popular vote rather than by the current divisive executive and legislative branch selection and approval process.
The above was written during one of my quiet moments as the result of the controversy surrounding President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the United States Supreme Court. It is good for one's self-esteem to have their thoughts worthy of appearing in a real newspaper.
While on the subject of newspapers, it amuses me that local liberals consider the Bulletin a conservative rag, while, in turn the conservatives are displeased with its liberal outlook. I assume this means the paper's outlook is reasonably balanced.
As a retired engineer, I have concluded that both sides consider the Laws of Thermodynamics to be a conspiracy to justify why their opinions are challenged. To summarize, the three Laws of Thermodynamics, reduced to a non-technical level, are:
1. You can't win. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed or you cannot get something for nothing.
2. You can't break even. You cannot return to the same energy state, because there is always an increase in disorder.
3. You can't get out of the game, because a finite number of steps cannot be used to reach absolute zero.
To summarize even further - there is no free lunch.
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