Random thoughts on the passing scene:

 Different people have different ideas about humility. One man said: "I don't think I'm half as good as I know I really am."

 What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been wrong innumerable times, by vast amounts, and with catastrophic results. Yet today there are still people who think that anyone who disagrees with them must be either bad or not know what he is talking about.

 Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive -- and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.

 Students can graduate from even the most prestigious colleges and universities wholly unaware that there are not simply different opinions about particular issues but a whole comprehensive framework of ideas and analysis through which those issues can be seen in a way that leads to very different conclusions from the ones their professors have taught or insinuated.

 Do the people who are making so much noise about the difficulties of creating a constitution in Iraq have any awareness that it was 13 years after the Declaration of Independence before the Constitution of the United States was created?

 When Ronald Reagan said that the government was spending money like a drunken sailor, he apologized to the sailors, who were after all spending their own money.

 Sometimes marriages break up, not because there are any big problems, but because every little problem becomes a confrontation and an impasse.

 Not only does the passage of time produce knowledge, it also produces ignorance. You would have to be about 50 years old to remember what the situation was like before Roe v. Wade. As the passage of time removes people with first-hand knowledge of an earlier era, they are replaced by people ignorant of those times and therefore easy targets for demagogues.

 In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.

 One of the consequences of such notions as "entitlements" is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence. Continued...