Whose law?

This statue of Baphomet is looking for a home and
Arkansas is on the list.

Just slightly more than a week ago, Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert announced on his Facebook page that “After several months of waiting for the American History & Heritage Foundation attorneys to finish application paperwork for the Arkansas Secretary of State, I am advised they are now submitting the paperwork to begin the process of site selection approval for the Arkansas Ten Commandments Monument!”

Thus marking a milestone in a process that has caused a great deal of debate in Arkansas where the separation of church and state should be. Historically speaking, a Ten Commandments Monument would be a violation of it. 

Not that lawmakers don't try.

Oklahoma famously passed a law allowing for privately-funded religious monuments on the state capitol grounds. The kicker was, that it was open to all religions as long as they could afford to pay for their own monuments. 

This backfired on them when the Temple of Satan did just that. 

Of course, the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma came down pretty fast after lawmakers learned there was no way to stop the Temple of Satan to put up a monument of its own on state capitol grounds. After all, it was open to all relgions.

In Arkansas, state lawmakers are trying to avoid what happened in Oklahoma by proclaiming that the Ten Commandments monument is not a religious monument. The argument that is being used is “the Ten Commandments aren't a religious document, but the historical foundation of our laws.” 

The Arkansas Ten Commandment Display Act states:

“The Ten Commandments represent a philosophy of government held by many of the founders of this nation and by many Arkansans and other Americans today, that God has ordained civil government and has delegated limited authority to civil government, that God has limited the authority of civil government, and that God has endowed people with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

“In order that they may understand and appreciate the basic principles of the American system of government, the people of the United States of America and of the State of Arkansas need to identify the Ten Commandments, one of many sources, as influencing the development of what has 5 become modern law;

“The placing of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol would help the people of the United States and of the State of Arkansas to know the Ten Commandments as the moral foundation of the law.”

The problem is that the Ten Commandments are mostly religious and moral rules, not the foundation of Western law. Even the Act itself sounds religious in nature as it makes mention of God, divine endowments and morality — none of those things that most people believe that the state should be involved in. 

“What?” you might say. “But every elected official says they are historical!”

Well, that may be so but the thing about elected officials is that they often tell people what they want to hear, especially if it's their base. In Arkansas, as well as most of the South, religious voters are a very big base, if not the biggest. Their support is what keeps many lawmakers in office. Things like the Ten Commandments Monument makes the more fundamentalist-leaning voters happy.

The problem is, most of the things on there aren't crimes, nor were they crimes in the times of the Founding Fathers of the U.S.

Of the Ten Commandments, there are only three that are actually crimes: Thou shall not murder, steal or bear false witness. The rest are basically good advice (don't cheat on your spouse, don't be a jealous jerk) or rules pertaining to practicing the faith (no graven images, no taking God's name in vein) which almost all self-proclaimed religious folks break on a daily basis anyway.

On top of all that, of the things that are actually illegal in the Ten Commandments, all of them were illegal before Judaism and Christianity had their respective boom periods in the Mediterranean region, which is pretty much the cradle of Western civilization.

Chances are, those things were probably fit for some sort of punishment even before the time of writing. But it's one figure, Hammurabi, that made the law famous. 

Hammurabi, who lived from 1810 BC to 1750 BC. He was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigning from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. Written in stone, his famous code had 252 laws. Among them were rules against stealing, murder and bearing false witness. Also among them is the famous “eye for an eye” rule. 

The punishment called for by Hammurabi's Code was very uneven and depended on the perpetrator's social status. A poor perpetrator would always face harsher punishment, often death, while the rich criminal often paid only a fine. 

Fortunately, no such uneven dispensation of justice exists in our society today. (For those of you that are a little dense, that's supposed to be sarcasm.)

But, even Hammurabi can't be given credit for first transcribing those three laws. He was late by a couple of hundred years. The first person, as far as we know, to actually have laws against murder, stealing and false witness transcribed is another Mesopotamian — Ur-Nammu, founder of the third Sumerian Dynasty. Ur-Nammu was believed to have lived around 2030 BC. 

Moses' birthdate, on the other hand, is believed to have been around 1400 BC, hundreds of years after Hammurabi's and Ur-Nammu's deaths. By the time Moses came along, laws against murdering, lying and bearing false witness were not only standard across the region, but across the known world as well. 

Thus there's just not a valid case that the Ten Commandments are the basis of Western law. By the time that the Romans started converting to Christianity, such laws were already put in place centuries before by polytheists. 

Now one can try to make an argument that the Ten Commandments are the “moral” basis for Western law, but even after the the Christianization of the West, morality was a very flexible thing. After all, it's doubtful that Moses would approve of the Trinity, Saints, crosses or various iconography that we see in regards to Christianity today.

Other things, like coveting and honoring one's parents, have never really been addressed by Western law to any meaningful extent. Looking at the leaders of old, how many of them launched wars out of greed or dishonored their parents? A lot.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us a system based on man's law. Our secular law is not only supposed to protect Christians, but hold them at equal footing with the likes of Muslims, Atheists and modern Pagans. If we let one or the other take control of the law, there'd be nothing for anyone else.  

Sen. Rapert might want to take this into consideration. After all, he's one of the beneficiaries of secular law, which allowed for his ancestors to pass their faith onto him. If the U.S. was founded on religion, it's possible he wouldn't be following the “right” form of it. 

Like Joseph on Facebook or Twitter. 

Uncovered loads create dangers for Arkansas drivers

By Joseph Price • May 26, 2016

Originally printed in the Batesville Daily Guard

The nemesis of many a driver.

Over my 22 years of driving, there’s been one thing that consistently gets my blood boiling when I see it — dump trucks driving down the road with uncovered loads.

I relived that all-too-frequent sense of anger on Interstate 30 last weekend. My family and I were on the way to Arkadelphia, driving the speed limit, which is 70 miles per hour for cars and 65 mph for trucks. As we drove along, a dump truck with an uncovered load blasted past us, flinging gravel out of its top, a piece of which hit my car.

We were unable to get a tag, because there was none (

but there was a “Stay at least 200 feet back” sticker) and we couldn’t see if there were any identifying stencils on the side because he was traveling so fast — fast enough as it would be dangerous to try to catch up.

So, I could only watch as this madman weaved between vehicles and eventually disappeared, flinging gravel the entire way.

If the dump truck had caused actual damage with its flinging of gravel, I’d just be out of luck. I was not about to risk my own life or that of my family just to get the name of the company that owns the truck, if it’s even on there, nor was I going to try to keep up with a guy driving more than 80 miles an hour.

Now, I know I’m not the only driver in Arkansas who has had to dodge gravel or to have been hit by it flying out of the top of one of these metal beasts. It’s frustrating for other drivers as many dump truck drivers, not all of course, seem to think the rules don’t apply to them.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to all dump trucks. Over the years, I’ve seen many more securing their loads on Arkansas roads. But there are still a significant amount that don’t.

For me as a driver, it’s frustrating to see these trucks with no identifying markers on the rear. If one happens to get a windshield chipped, they often have to speed up to get beside the truck, or follow it to its destination, to get some sort of identifying marker.

Why many of them don’t cover their loads, I don’t know. It could be ignorance, laziness or indifference — possibly a little combination of all three.

But whatever the reason, covering loads in the law. I checked with the Arkansas Highway Police and according to state law:

No vehicle shall be driven or moved on any highway unless the vehicle is so constructed or loaded as to prevent any of its load from dropping, sifting, leaking, or otherwise escaping there from.

If that doesn’t sound like “cover your load” then I must need a brushing up on the English language. Sure, someone might say “well, I don’t need to cover my load because it’s loaded the right way” but that is pretty irrelevant when you have rocks, gravel and other things flying out of the back of your truck at the people you share the road with.

Now the law does allow for an open bed manufactured on or before Sept. 30, 2001, 6 inches of freeboard at the perimeter of the load within the open bed of the vehicle or trailer carrying the load. The measurements must be taken at the perimeter of the bed and measured from the top edge of the bed down to whatever is transported.

But, of course, that rule doesn’t seem to be followed very often either. I know I’m not the only one who has seen the top of a gravel pile peaking out of the middle of the truck, higher than the surrounding bed.

Over the last few months, I’ve also noticed trucks with stickers stating “stay at least 200’ away.” From what I gathered from others, some truck owners have claimed that the said stickers protect them from liability.

Of course, I checked into whether this was actually the case or not.

The “stay at least 200 feet away” stickers may be good advice, but they have no legal bearing, according to the Arkansas Highway Police.

Plus, it’s kind of hard to do when you’re going through areas with stoplights and congested traffic or the truck is passing you. You’d think the people who put on the stickers would consider that.

Now if it were a one-time occurrence, I probably wouldn’t feel so frustrated, but it seems to be something I run into all the time as a frequent driver. There’s frustration that the trucks keep breaking the rules and frustration with law enforcement because it seems that many of them don’t seem compelled to enforce it, even when these trucks are right in front of them.

I understand, there’s bigger fish to fry out there. But myself, and many other drivers I’ve spoken to, have been put into dangerous situations due to this. The dump truck drivers may not be driving drunk or even driving recklessly, but they are creating hazards out there by not securing their loads.

So I ask anybody driving a loaded dump truck, please cover your loads. You’re not the only ones who have to deal with your loads.

How about a side of clickbait?

By Joseph Price • May 19, 2016

Originally published in the Batesville Daily Guard

So would someone tell me when posts by a bunch of nobodies on the Twitter or Facebook accounts of well-known individuals became newsworthy?

I’m not talking about the posts by the actual public figure, but the posts made in response to them. Somehow, those posts are being passed off as “news.”

It’s a trend that I’ve noticed lately. It really jumped out last week when a former colleague of mine, who now works in Oregon, shared an article called “Bernie Sanders Fanatics At

tack Anne Rice and George Takei.”

Unable to resist something that would annoy me at that moment, I pressed my screen and was directed to an “article” on a site called Modern Liberal which basically said “people who like Bernie Sanders said mean things to the Vampire Lady and Sulu” and proceeded to have a long list of copy and paste Facebook posts and Tweets of people saying they were unhappy with those people’s support of Hillary. Aside from some inarticulate and self-righteous posting, none of it seemed too offensive.

Most recently, I saw another friend post something similar from the Huffington Post about how Old Navy smacked down racists on its Twitter feed. It’s great that Old Navy did that, but a bunch of racist nobodies posting on social media is nothing new. That sort of thing goes back to the beginnings of the Internet boom and it wasn’t news back then.

All that I got out of those two “stories” is that I was looking at really lazy journalism, if you could call it journalism at all.

I mean, seriously, I could go on any famous person’s or business’ Facebook or Twitter account and cherry pick comments and make a quick “story” out of it as well. Anyone could do it actually. It’s not even journalism, it’s just copy and pasting.

Now, I’m not the sort of person who longs for the good-old-days that never existed. If you look at them with a critical eye, the “good old days” weren’t really that good. But something like this that passes for journalism now makes me long for the days that news was informative and clickbait didn’t exist.

“What is clickbait?” those not in on the lingo of the Internet might ask.

Well, clickbait is content that’s main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular web page. It’s pretty much become the dominant form of “news” delievery on social media and is largely full of irrelevant topics that are usually recycled and lack any worthwhile substance.

I mean, why should I really care if John Smith left a mean Facebook post for Chuck Norris because he supported Mike Huckabee? Is Jane Smith telling Bernie Sanders that Hillary has better hair newsworthy? Will people even bother to remember those people after they closed the page? Are we particularly informed by any of this?

One particular Facebook post I remember that made national news, at least on the Internet, was a post that originated on the KARK page in 2015. It was right on the heels of the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S. A man was upset about the decision and accused the NBC affiliate of having rainbow colors on its peacock logo. It was pointed out to the man that the colors had always been that way. Funny, but not really earth-shaking. But within a couple of days, the man’s post was plastered across the Internet, with once-reputable sites like Raw Story and Buzzfeed taking not and doing stories of their own. It got a lot of clicks and Mr. Don Stair apparently got a lot of feedback for it, closing his account, according to Raw Story.

That’s just one example. Now it seems that anyone can get 0.15 seconds of fame if they respond angry or mean enough to someone or something on Facebook or Twitter.

To me, it’s like splashing “Red Butte High Student calls Kirk Douglas Old” across the front page. Sure, some may find it offensive, but who cares what some anonymous kid says? Is anyone going to care or even remember five minutes later?

But apparently they do, because when someone shares one of these “stories” online, they get responses on their own feed in return. It’s like a piranha finding a meal and then other piranhas show up to eat that piranha and even more piranhas show up to eat those piranhas and so on.

Am I supposed to change my mind about a particular politician because some of their supporters make inarticulate, stupid or outright crazy posts on Facebook? Is that really supposed to make me rethink the issues?

If the answer is supposed to be “yes” then I guess I’m missing something. But then, maybe it’s just the mess that’s the Internet where that sort of thing may be considered news. I just don’t see it.

Thus is the world of clickbait.

I don’t like it, but I guess I’m stuck with it. And sometimes, I’m going to bite.

America has always been a mixed bag

By Joseph Price

Some Americans didn't have the "good old days."

Who knew a hat could cause so much outrage?

A couple of weeks ago, a Home Depot employee in New York found out.

Krystal Lake of Staten Island, New York, decided to wear a personalized hat stating “America was never great” to her job.
As expected, this lead to someone taking a snapshot of her in said hat and sharing it on social media. 
This eventually led her employer to disavow the hat, as well as any other politically-themed clothing or accessories that employees might be wearing. According to Home Depot, some sort of action was taken and as of now, I'm not sure of her job status.

Now, the logical conclusion is that would be the end of it. But of course, it never is.

As soon as the photos went up, there was the typical knee-jerk reaction from outraged people on Facebook, Twitter and other social media ranging from demanding her firing to, according to Lake at least, death threats.

Lake told the Staten Island Advance that she had the hat made as a reaction to Donald Trump's slogan “Make America Great Again.”

"The point of the hat was to say America needs changing and improvement," Lake told the Advance. "I don't think it's a positive message to say, "'Let's look to the past.'"

Of course, this triggered the usual knee-jerk reaction of “if you don't like it, get out” and “do you want to live in Africa instead?”

But is that reaction really the right one?

Whether something is great or not is a pretty subjective thing. This is especially true of past events.

There's a lot of things people can point to in our collective past or present and say America is great. We've had times of great economic growth and have been the world's largest economy. We've had, and still have, one of the world's strongest military forces. Despite all the fear of government surveillance and confidentiality, our press is among the freest and our privacy is largely respected. Even as far as governments go, we've still got one of the least corrupt and most transparent. Those are all things people could call “great.”

On the other hand, we need to ask if things have been “great” for people who aren't white and male.

Disclaimer: I happen to be white and male.

Now this is where a lot of people begin to get pretty defensive. A lot of people react as if looking at America through the experiences of people who had hardships because of their race or gender is somehow going to invalidate everything about the country that they've held dear. Others view it as a personal insult to those that served in the military, past and present.

But seriously, how is saying “yeah, it's been rough for black people, American Indians and women” an insult to anyone?

I often hear the statement “American blacks should be glad they're not in Africa” as a response to pretty much anyone who brings up some of the country's sordid history in regards to black people. Honestly, I find that to be an irrelevant point because black people in America are not comparing their status to Africans, they're comparing it to other Americans. After all, their collective experience has been in America, not Africa. Are we supposed to dismiss the tricky past of chattel slavery, segregation and lynchings when it comes to looking back at America's past? Is it really that offensive to ask “has America been good to black people?”

It's a similar story for Native Americans who saw themselves evicted from their lands in the Eastern states during the first half of the 1800s, then confined to ever-shrinking reservations from that point on. Not only that, but they also faced forced assimilation, which saw many of their customs and languages die out. Again, is it really out of line to ask “has America been great for American Indians?”

And finally, there is the experience for American women, who were not allowed to vote until 1920. But even after that, the law was used to keep women in the home and out of the workplace. It also made it hard for women to escape abusive men, often leaving those who sought escape little legal recourse. Child support itself was, and still is, often treated as a joke.

Of course, there are other groups of Americans that could be mentioned. They all have different experiences and all vary in levels of “greatness.”

Now of course, this is not a defense of Lake wearing the hat. She claims that her co-workers were wearing pro-Trump accessories, but I've yet to see any evidence of that. As far as I'm concerned, I'm going to Home Depot to buy nuts and bolts, not get a history lesson or be bombarded by campaign slogans.

But, I don't think the hat should spark the amount of outrage it has. Honestly, if you believe that acknowledging that some groups of people have had historically negative experiences in America is either an insult or is somehow going to destroy America, then you probably need to take a moment and breathe. Getting outraged isn't going to make your case any stronger.

Instead of being outraged, it may be more conductive to ask “why do you think that?”

Chemtrails don’t make any sense

By Joseph Price • May 11, 2016

Originally published in the Batesville Daily Guard

It's just contrails, not chemtrails.

I really don’t get why the chemtrail theory persists. But I’m going to blame it on a mix of social media and celebrity endorsements. The latest of those endorsers is Walker, Texas Ranger himself, Chuck Norris. Norris joins other celebrities like Roseanne Barr, Billy Corgan, Kylie Jenner and the late Prince in looking up into the sky and trembling in fear of poison supposedly raining down upon them.

Now, I can’t speak as to why Norris believes this unsubstantiated and endlessly debunked conspiracy theory, but I’m guessing he may be guilty of what a lot of similar minded people are — finding sources that confirm his bias instead of looking at it with a critical eye. By critical, I mean willing to accept results that do not fit hit preconceptions after facts are presented.

“What the heck is a chemtrail?” you might ask.

Well, according to those who believe in such things, it’s usually a vapor trail left behind airplanes containing chemical agents which the government rains down upon the population for a variety of reasons. It’s almost always something nefarious like population control, weather control or even mind control.

There are many, many websites and Facebook groups that do nothing but propagate this conspiracy theory, often accusing those who speak up with a skeptical voice of being “COINTEL” or victims of MSM (mainstream media) brainwashing. All the sites keep coming up with ever-more elaborate explanations whenever holes are poked in this theory and all of them present misrepresentation and insinuation as fact.

Some scientifically-literate people have actually examined “chemtrails” and do you know what they found?

What people call a “chemtrail” is just a contrail or, in other words, water in the jet exhaust condensing to form a trail of clouds.

The chemtrail conspiracy theory started in the early 1990s when some people began believing that some contrails tend to linger and that they were in a grid pattern. With a little research, one finds that contrails do linger for varying lengths of times depending on the amount of moisture already in the air and that the “grid” pattern is due to the ever-increasing amount of flights criss-crossing in the sky since the 1980s. It’s a pretty simple answer.

Aside from the straightforward answers, one can also examine the two most cited reasons believers claim that the government is using chemtrails, controlling weather and population, and apply Occam’s Razor to them.

If the government were trying to control the weather, they’re doing a pretty bad job considering that we’ve had a secession of the warmest years on record in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Not to mention nature still hits us with things like blizzards, hurricanes and tornadoes.

If the intent was to cool it down, do you think that the government would waste billions over the last 2 1/2 decades on something that’s failed miserably? Same goes for trying to control the weather.

The population control theory is even weaker, considering that world population has grown by  more than 2 billion in the last 26 years. Despite a lower birthrate in developed countries, mostly owed to the accessibility of contraceptions since the 1960s, population in the U.S. and developed world have continued to grow, mostly thanks to people living longer lives and immigration. And, if the chemtrails are poison, then why are lifespans increasing every year?

As far as I’m concerned, there’s not much reason to go past logic into the scientific when it comes to the chemtrail theory. After all, if there were “secret elite globalists” behind the curtain, they’d be affected too, a situation akin to trying to stop a fire in your neighborhood by setting your house and then all your neighbors’ houses on fire.

Of course, for many who believe, neither this reasoning nor the contrail explanation is going to cut it. Instead of accepting a simple answers and facts, the believer rebuts with ever-growing complexity without considering that at some point, there would have to be hundreds of thousands of people, even millions, “in on it” and working against their own interests for their conspiracy theory to hold true.

The goal post is always moved further, so to speak.

So next time a friend shares a post about chemtrails, keep in mind that there’s no real evidence or reasoning to hold it up. You may even try to bring this up with your friend, but if they’re sharing it, you may want to consider arguing with a rock instead.

Yes, measles is a ‘big deal’

By Joseph Price • May 5, 2016

Originally published in the Batesville Daily Guard

The handful of measles cases reported in Memphis last week has re-ignited the never-ending online debate about whether to vaccinate or not. Pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine folks keep recycling the same arguments about whether vaccines cause autism or not, whether they’re to thank for the near-eradication of small pox and polio or not, and whether they’re safe or not. It all gets rather tedious to read.

A young boy suffering with measles.

But this column is not about that.

It’s about a trend I’ve noticed, largely on social media, by the anti-vaccination side which has started making another argument: they claim that measles “is no big deal.”

I beg to differ.

If they did a little research, they’d know that of every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It might not sound like that high of a chance, but for me, it’s too high when it comes to my child.

According to the World Health Organization, the first sign of measles is usually a high fever, which lasts four to seven days. A runny nose, a cough, red and watery eyes, and small white spots inside the cheeks can develop in the initial stage. Within seven to 18 days after exposure, a rash usually appears on the face and upper neck. Over approximately three days, the rash spreads, eventually reaching the hands and feet. The rash lasts for five to six days and then fades.

That may not sound any worse than the flu, which kills many more people in any given year, but if it stopped there, I wouldn’t be writing a column. Now we’re going to look at what makes measles a pretty serious disease.

The most common complications are ear infections and diarrhea. The ear infection is capable of causing permanent hearing damage in about one out of every 10 children.

But it can do more than damage hearing, it can destroy it. It can also do much more in the line of permanent damage.

One child out of every 1,000 who gets measles will develop swelling of the brain, or encephalitis, that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or intellectually disabled. Finally, it can also lead to pneumonia, which is the cause of the most deaths from measles in young children and affects one in 20 victims, according to the CDC. 

All a pretty “big deal” in my book.

So, how did measles get from being taken seriously in the U.S. to many people being so dismissive of it? Well, one very controversial word for some: vaccines.

In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year worldwide, according to WHO. In 2014 that number had dropped to 114,900 measles deaths globally, 4 percent of what it had been less than 35 years earlier. It’s still a lot of deaths, but it’s far less deaths than there used to be from the disease.

It may be difficult to believe now, due to the press coverage, but in 2000, measles was considered eliminated in the U.S. “Eliminated” means that measles was no longer endemic in the U.S. and had to be brought in from outside of the country and less than 40 people in the U.S. a year were infected on average. That was the case until 2014, when cases spiked to 288 in a single year.

With so few cases, it seems pretty easy for people to claim it’s “no big deal” because they’ve likely had no experience with it. This is particularly true of the generations born in the 1970s and onward, after vaccination became common place and measles became rare. From the time I started kindergarten in the early 1980s to my graduation in the mid-’90s, I can’t remember a single case of one of my classmates having it.

It may be this lack of direct experience with the disease that causes so many people to be dismissive of it, or worse yet, left with the belief that their children should catch it like the “good old days.”

One more thing to keep in mind. Even if measles will likely not be fatal or permanently damage your children, do you really want them to deal with its effects? Once they have measles, that means that they’ll be isolated and suffering for at least two weeks. That’s two weeks of round-the-clock care, two weeks of not going out, and two weeks of dealing with your child’s bodily fluids and possibly two weeks of missed work ... not to mention a medical bill. Is that really a side effect one can be so dismissive of?

So, to the anti-vaccination crowd, say what you want, but please don’t try to claim that measles “is no big deal.”