The ‘wait-until-next-year’ Aggie football team

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Editor’s note: I realize Michael is a little off-topic this week, but if you live in the Las Cruces area or are an Aggie, you will probably find this one interesting. © 2007 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “The perfect football record is seven wins and four losses. The fans are happy, the alumni are sullen but not mutinous and the NCAA does not feel a need to investigate.” – Former coach Warren Woodson I was thinking of that quote as another four-flush, steer-jobbed, never-have-a-great-season New Mexico State Aggie football year begins. In fact, this is my 40th Aggie football season. My first year featured Woodson, the last successful NMSU football coach in his last year at NMSU. Continue Reading

Time to deal with the killers

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© 2007 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. A friend taking her sister-in-law to El Paso saw the Rio Grande and said, “That’s the same river next to your house in Albuquerque.” The woman looked doubtfully and said, “Nope.” My friend was upset that her brother’s wife could not be convinced the same river flowed by Albuquerque and El Paso. I feel the same way when I talk about the need to kill all of the mosquitoes in our area, and perhaps use DDT among other things to do it. People just say, “Nope.” Killing all the mosquitoes may seem too drastic to some, but these potentially deadly creatures are lurking silently in our neighborhoods, waiting for an unguarded moment. I am not fear-mongering. Mosquitoes bring the epidemic of West Nile virus and other diseases. Continue Reading

No Child Left Behind: an overturned outhouse

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. Years ago nothing was more fun than outhouse tipping, unless you happened to be in the outhouse when it tipped over. Well, it didn’t tip over, adolescent boys pushed it over when the moon was right and they caught Uncle Fester sitting down. He exclaimed, “How’d this happen?” Some readers may not know about outhouses. Before indoor plumbing, the “bathroom” was downwind from the house in a small structure also called a privy. Using it tested the need to go versus smell aversion, with spider and snake phobias thrown in. Continue Reading

Use better carrots and sticks

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. It is odd that we Americans are so sensitive to battlefield deaths yet accept 40 times as many fatalities on our highways each year. Being killed suddenly and violently in combat is not much different than dying in a collision. I do not accept that it is inevitable that 40,000 people must die on our highways each year. They are killed and injured without much more than local notice. The carnage exists because we, as a society, are not providing the right carrots and sticks to control the behavior of drivers. Continue Reading

Wolves: good with teriyaki sauce

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. One day this tough hombre stepped up to my school picture camera. He was a fourth grader who glared at me and announced, “I’ve got a constitutional right not to smile.” I shrugged and said “OK.” He sat down, looked relieved and I took a pretty good school picture. Fourth grade must be when we learn our constitutional rights. A right compels or precludes an action. We hear of animal rights. Continue Reading

We can make our health care worse

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. I was talking with my dermatologist about all the new procedures and treatments that make our lives better. Many were not available even 10 years ago. Still, skin health always starts with wearing a hat. In the Southwest that advice is centuries old. The government may one day force us to wear hats. Continue Reading

Thank God for the atomic bomb

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “The Japanese government was by no means rational or ready to surrender… They were dictated to by Hirohito and the military, who believed they could inflict enough casualties to force the Americans to negotiate… As to the projected American casualties, they could have been higher than 800,000… Thank God for Harry Truman.” – Stephen E. Ambrose Nothing gets peaceniks like the United States dropping not one but two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. The 16th of July is the 62nd anniversary of the first test atomic explosion at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. This led to the bombing of two Japanese cities weeks later. In considering the decision to use the bomb, there are four core issues. Continue Reading

That Roswell Smirk

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. Should there be an office of historical correctness in New Mexico? Highly officious experts would drive government vehicles with bumper stickers proclaiming, “If it isn’t true, you’re through.” They would assure that what the festival organizers say about our history is true, functioning as our historical Myth Busters. This week there is the world famous amazing Roswell UFO Festival. OK, I know we are not supposed to mess with anything that brings cold, hard credit cards into New Mexico. Still, when I question Roswellians, they look embarrassed, duck their head like they passed gas in church and then exhibit that Roswell Smirk which tells me they know it is bunk. Continue Reading

This era’s field of glory will be tax reform

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. As a young man, Lincoln worried that the “field of glory” had been harvested by the founding fathers, that nothing had been left for his generation but modest ambitions. – Doris Kearns Goodwin Abraham Lincoln was wrong. Slavery and the resultant Civil War was his field of glory. In the years leading up to Lincoln’s time, no politician had been able to unite this county in the notion that slavery was fundamentally incompatible with the ideals of the United States of America. The slavery issue festered throughout most of our county’s first century. Continue Reading

Water must be treated as a commodity

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. Are we in New Mexico working toward a sustainable water supply? No. Rather, we are using political solutions for non-political water-supply problems. The Swickard Principle: Never use a political solution for anything other than a political problem. The problem with water supply is that we are not treating water as a commodity, where, when there is increased demand, there is a move to increase supply. The government’s solution, instead, is to urge conservation. Continue Reading

Understanding war veterans who became silent dads

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. This Sunday is both Father’s Day and my dad’s 86th birthday, though he died in 1993. He was one of those silent dads, not given to unnecessary conversation, similar to Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, who said, “I’m going to say as little as possible, if that.” Thankfully, my dad was a dignified, thoughtful man. Not the Hollywood fare like Chevy Chase portrays in the movie Vacation or the cartoonish joke of a man played by the character of Homer Simpson. I learned very little from his words and much from his deliberate actions. I am methodical and meticulous like him, though he never told me to be. Continue Reading

Developer deserves apology, clear annexation policy

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. The annexation controversy in our area has people writing letters to the editor and calling me on talk radio. Many of the comments make me think of Josh Billings, who said, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.” Many of the comments have been simply not true or not germane. For example, the fight over annexation is not about whether houses will be built; it is about which government entity will supervise the process. Regardless of whether the city annexes the land under consideration on the East Mesa, the houses will be constructed. Will it be the planners for the City of Las Cruces or those who work for Doña Ana County who oversee it? Continue Reading

Massacre reveals the need for guns in schools

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. A visitor to an Old West town thought it would be a great practical joke to whip out a pistol during a poker game and fire a couple of blanks at the ceiling. He died of multiple gunshot wounds from bullets fired by several players before anyone knew it was a joke. But that was a different time. The Virginia Tech massacre is the latest in a long litany of school shootings, but it was assuredly not the last. Initially, in school shootings, the only person armed is the perpetrator, while all the students and staff can do is run and hide. Continue Reading

I’ll show vision and vote to approve spaceport tax

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This is the fifth in a series of guest columns debating whether Doña Ana County voters should approve a 1/4 percent gross-receipts tax increase to help fund Spaceport America. Public officials and other readers are invited to participate in this debate. To submit a guest column for publication, e-mail me at heath@haussamen.com. Baseless personal attacks will not be published. © 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid The spaceport tax vote is more one of style than substance. Continue Reading

We must focus on collecting facts and developing better theories to combat impaired driving

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© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “… facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. … Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.” – Stephen Jay Gould, 1981.It is a fact people drive while impaired. Continue Reading