What's "a lot?"

Ohio prostitute arrested for
soliciting sex from Chief of Police
sitting in unmarked car.

How does one determine what’s “a lot,” and does it matter (a lot) if something is a lot? I am thinking now of the Catholic Church and its problems with pedophilia and child abuse. There are said to be already 6,000 known complaints against the church. That seems to me to be a lot. But then I saw where it is estimated there will be 10,000 complaints just here in the U.S. That seems to me to be really a lot. Do we have to know how many Catholic Priests there are before we can decide if this is a lot? Do we have to know the actual percentage of Priests that are known abusers? Now that this scandal has been reported from virtually all over the world with more and more complaints coming in daily, can we conclude that there has truly been a lot of pedophilia and child abuse associated with the Catholic Church? It seems to me we can. Surely there are enough cases by now to make it clear that this is not just a few rogue Priests, nor can it be easily understood as lasting so long and being so widespread without concluding that there was/is something about the Church that either helped recruit such people or, at the least, encouraged the behavior. Perhaps after years of cover-ups it became known to pedophiles that the Church would defend them even if they were reported, and thus the practice spread over time, growing more common as there were more and more protections? Of course I don’t know this, but I cannot believe this was anything but somehow institutionalized within the Church. In other words, there were not just a few “bad apples,” the Church was itself the barrel that preserved and nourished bad apples. Sinead O’Connor, who was apparently abused as a child by the church, says the entire Catholic hierarchy that allowed this to happen for so long should be fired, jailed, or relieved of duties, including the Pope. I agree.

Does anyone know how many illegal aliens there are in the United States? I mean, really know? I doubt it, but it is safe to say there are a lot, even an awful lot. There are so many it would be completely unfeasible to send them all back where they came from. So what might be done with them? Ed Schultz on his Ed Show made a suggestion tonight that I think is utterly ridiculous. He thinks we should just give citizenship to every existing illegal alien in the U.S. at this time. He is a very opinionated man and I think he sometimes gets carried away and says things without sufficient thought. Among those illegals are some who are known criminals, there are some who have been here only a very short time, there are others who no doubt would prefer to remain citizens of whatever country they came from and would like to return there. And of course there are some who have been here for years, are gainfully employed, pay taxes, and have become pretty much incorporated. Obviously they cannot all be treated the same. Some should be given citizenship, many others should probably just be given valid work permits that would allow them to stay but not be actual citizens, and so on.

And think of all those plastic bottles that stretched end-to-end would encircle the earth many times. That is a lot. How many chickens would it take to pay for an appendectomy? A lot, I bet. Of course you can’t even begin to think of the national debt without the concept of a lot, a real lot, a super-duper lot. Think about the number of guns that exist in the U.S. There are really a lot, so many that attempting gun control would doubtless be futile and would create a new criminal class consisting of a lot of owners. There are so many things you can think of these days that can only be considered with a concept like a lot.

One further example might well be the problem of erectile dysfunction. I think I heard on a Viagra ad that some 20 million men have already discussed this problem with their doctors (maybe it was only 10 million). In any case, that is a lot, and if you consider that Cialis and other such “aids” must also include quite a few men it is truly a lot. Now in my humble opinion if there are that many American males that are failing to have erections “when the time comes,” there must be something terribly wrong with our culture. It just does not seem at all natural that so many males would suffer from such a problem. Perhaps it has to do with smog, or what we eat and drink, or the changing relationships between men and women, feminism, perhaps even unrealistic expectations, devil possessions, sorcery, or too much Budweiser beer. Perhaps Eva Morales has the right idea. He says our chickens are injected with hormones and stuff, so when we eat them it causes a "deviancy in our manhood." Everyone seems to assume he means they make men gay, but perhaps he was referring to the loss of other manly behaviors. He also pointed out something I had never thought about or been aware of; in Europe most men are bald, whereas in Latin America men do not become bald. I guess that is pretty much true, I wonder why.

Anyway, there are at least a couple of “primitive” languages reported in which there are only three numbers, one, two, and many (a lot). It seems to me we are doing much the same thing. We may count beyond two, but however far we go we eventually have to settle simply with “a lot.” Perhaps we should pay more attention to what we are doing.

LKBIQ:
We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well known liberal bias.
Stephen Colbert

TILT:
Genetically speaking, the aardvark is a living fossil.