Blatant inconsistency: Voter ID vs. gun background checks

The last three months have brought two major battles over forcing people to show identification.

The first came in the run-up to November's election. Some folks argued that voter-ID requirements were a relatively simple and painless way to prevent voter fraud. Others argued that such requirements posed an incredible burden on voting stations and on valid voters who, for entirely legitimate reasons, lacked any ID. Furthermore, voter-ID opponents argued that such laws would even scare off voters who ID but felt intimidated by the process.

This month, people are making almost exactly the same laws for and against regulations that would require background checks before gun purchases.

Oddly, however, the people who argued for voter ID measures tend to be the ones who argue against the background checks, and vice versa.

Perhaps there is a philosophically consistent way to come to a different moral stance on these two issues, but I cannot see it.

The right to vote and the right to bear arms are both fundamental guarantees, fully protected by the Constitution. Most people, intuitively, would likely say the right to vote is far more important to a functional society than the right to bear arms — indeed, many would argue that the right to bear arms works against a functional society — but the fact remains that they both get equal protection from the nation's most important legal document and, unless you think you have the votes to amend the Constitution on either point, you have to live with that.

Thus, at bottom, the moral issue is this: either you think that — in order to prevent people from undermining society by exercising rights they lack (or have lost) — it's acceptable to demand that citizens identify themselves in verifiable ways before they exercise their Constitutional rights.

Ah well. I suppose I should not be too surprised. This is, after all, a country where the people who fight hardest for smokers' rights are the ones who want to keep sending marijuana users to jail but where the people who want to legalize marijuana want to send cigarette smokers to jail.

This cliche must die: The huge man hiding in the back seat of a parked car

It cannot happen again. Not one more time.

The very first time it happened, probably sometime in the silent movie era, it was so stupid that the writer, director and anyone else who approved it should have been fired. The audience should have walked out the moment it happened and demanded a refund.

Seriously.

But no. It lives on. Endlessly.

How many times have we seen the person walk to the car, generally a person who knows he or, more often, she is in danger. A person whose eyes work. A person whose car has windows in it. Windows that would make it incredibly easy to see a massive intruder wedged into the tiny back seat of any vehicle that is on the road.

The entire "sneak up on someone" meme is stupid. It's really, really hard to sneak up on anyone who has any reason whatever to be on guard. If you doubt this, try it with someone in real life. You'll never get within 20 yards before you're spotted.

But the "huge guy hidden in the back seat of a tiny car" thing is just so bad that the next guy who puts it on a screen deserves to be horsewhipped.

How do smoking rates relate to food trends?

Every six months or so, after reading or watching a lot of Sherlock Holmes, I get the urge to smoke a pipe. I generally smoke a couple bowls, remember that I don't particularly enjoy it, and then store the pipe again.

During my most recent episode, I became particularly annoyed with the degree to which smoking utterly destroys the sense of taste. I could hardly discern even the strongest flavors for more than an hour after I'd put the pipe down.

This got me to thinking about the relationship between smoking and food:

1. Smokers famously weigh less than others, a fact that's generally credited to the effects of nicotine and other chemicals. I'd guess, however, that smokers also tend to eat less because they've destroyed their sense of taste and get less pleasure from food.

2. Restaurants have, in general, increased the intensity of the flavor in their dishes over the past few decades, a period that has seen smoking rates halve. At first this struck me as counterintuitive. Shouldn't flavors grow more subtle as a society's tastebuds become more sensitive? Then I decided that perhaps chefs didn't even bother back when fifty percent of men (who paid the bills) were smoking.

3. Perhaps the terrible reputation of mid-century cuisine stems from the fact that many chefs and many restaurant critics were themselves smokers. If so, how could smokers with dead tongues not get crowded out by non-smokers who could actually taste things? Yes, a lot of people smoked fifty years ago, but it was never even half the adult population.

Review: Breaking Bad, Season 5: Making a Monster?

Breaking Bad attempts to portray, step by step, a good family man's gradual descent into evil and his sleazy partner's gradual salvation. Nearly every review claims it succeeds brilliantly. Every viewer I know agrees.

They're all wrong.

Don't get me wrong. Breaking Bad rocks, but it still misses the mark it set for itself.

(If you haven't seen the first 4.5 seasons, stop reading and go watch the show. The rest of this piece abounds with spoilers.)

The best argument for Walter White's slow moral decline juxtaposes Season 1, when Walt refused to kill a man in self defense, with Season 4, when Walt happily endangered an innocent child to regain Jesse's allegiance. What a vivid change!

Except, of course, that the argument ignores Walt's trade.

Walt — even the "good Walt" of Season 1 — cooks meth. Meth kills people and ruins lives. Walt's super-pure meth doubtless kills even more people, including innocent children. And Walt is smart enough to realize this from day 1.

He is, in other words, a cheerful child murderer by the first episode.

If the show's creators had really wanted to illustrate a slow decline, they needed to choose a lesser criminal enterprise: marijuana, gambling, anything where Walt's day-to-day conduct, rather than his trade itself, would be the only thing that could make him truly evil.

As things stand, with Walt making meth, the only difference between early-Walt and late-Walt is that late-Walt is honest with himself and treats the people he knows with the same malice as the strangers he murders.

The same, of course, applies to Jesse in reverse. Jesse's bold stand for the kids that Gus exploited was just nonsense. How can you castigate Gus for using some kids as pushers when you kill far more kids with the meth you make?

I simply cannot understand how the show's creators think they are writing a show about moral transformation or how others believe they are watching one.

The only possible moral arc I see is in Walt's motivations. He began the series by murdering people to provide for her family. By Season 5, he murdered innocent people to aggrandize himself. I suppose that's somewhat worse, but, when you're murdering innocent people by the score, motives matter little.