-Caveat Lector-
November 22, 2000
Ockham's Razor and the election
By Bill Starr
Washington Times
Discussions of the 2000 presidential election may never
satisfactorily agree on how the major broadcast news networks
made chaos of America's once-esteemed political process.
Suspicion will linger that liberal bias prompted the premature
announcement of Democratic victory in Florida, discouraging many
Republican voters from going to the polls.
Pondering the mess, I turned to English philosopher William of
Occam (1280-1349). His revered "Ockham's Razor," is a guide to
clear thinking that states rather unclearly: "Multiplicity ought
not to be posited without necessity." In science, that is
expressed: "When more than one explanation of a phenomenon is
offered, the simplest explanation is probably the most accurate
one."
Galileo took that course when he argued that the Copernican
earth-goes-around-sun theory provided a better astrophysical
account of the orbits of the moon, planets and stars than
Ptolemy's sun-goes-around-earth theory.
To aid William's shaving away of superfluities to slice down to
the nitty-gritty, I offer Starr's Scalpel: "Excessive
improbabilities excise probable possibility."
In uncertain life, it isn't sufficient to judge events with such
broad and meaningless generalizations as "anything is possible."
We must rely on probability theory, which works pretty well when
figuring with figures, as in calculating your odds of winning a
lottery. When the human element is added, the mixture becomes
complex and too many improbable occurrences challenge
credibility.
For example, police officers are automatically skeptical of
multiple coincidences. They take a dim view of a suspect's story
that he just happened to have a long criminal record when he just
happened to be walking in a neighborhood he had never visited
before and just happened to see an unlocked door, so he just
happened to enter the house and just happened to find a dead
person who had been shot with a gun that just happened to have
his fingerprints on it and he just happened to possess some of
the victim's property when he was arrested.
So let us follow my scalpel's cutting edge along this
far-from-complete train of improbable events as it speeds to the
disastrous election-media wreck.
(But please don't think I'm hinting at conspiracy. We all know
that there have never been any conspiracies on the left,
especially the mythical International Communist Conspiracy
Involving American diplomats. It just happened that Marxist
dictators conquered much of the world and Alger Hiss turned out
to be the Stalinist spy that Whittaker Chambers said he was.)
Going back only to 1992, the liberal media instantly approved of
a major political party's selection of a draft-dodger with murky
state government credentials as its presidential candidate.
Media enthusiasm extended to the candidate's running-mate � a
tobacco-fueled robot who had inherited his father's name and
Senate seat but not his ability to think for himself.
The Fourth Estate's loyalty remained unshaken through exposure of
the candidate/electee's long-running adultery with Gennifer
Flowers and other sex scandals under his wife's nose � and the
wife's involvement with real estate fraud and exceptional luck in
commodities futures. The mysterious appearance of the real
estate fraud's records and a "snafu" of several thousand
confidential FBI records in the White House were shrugged off by
the boys and girls with press passes.
Then came impeachment for presidential perjury about his romp
with a flirty intern, as his media defense team's most respected
member, pornographer Larry Flynt, blackmailed the Senate jurors
into acquittal by threatening to print real or imagined smut
about their sex lives.
In the meantime, news hounds covering the vice president and Heir
to the Throne looked away when he accepted illegal campaign
contributions in Buddhist temples. They continued doing that as
he told whopping lies that would have raised doubts of another
man's grip on reality.
And so it went; improbabilities piled improbabilities, climaxing
with a journalistic abortion that dumped the world's greatest
superpower into a mud-wrestling match for a few ballots that
could be easily tampered with by Democratic election workers.
It's hard to imagine a better plan to prolong the Clinton reign
indefinitely, with Bubba Bill controlling his robot from behind
the throne. But don't you dare think of conspiracy.
All of this could have happened entirely by accident, just as you
could win a lottery.
Some things just happen � yeah, right.
Bill Starr is a retired author living in Burbank and was a marine
rifleman in the Korean War.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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