Who killed Ronald Reagan?

On June 5, 2004, my wife and I attended a BBQ at a friend's home. Their son Jim was there along with his friend Pedro. They had been friends in college. As we sat on the patio dinking beer, the subject of daylight savings time came up.

Pedro said, "It was Ronald Reagan who forced daylight savings time on us."

"Well, this is what you get from a liberal arts education," I thought.

Discussing politics at a party is dicey.  I proceded gently to set the record straight with the truth as I knew it.

"When Benjamin Franklin was the American envoy to France, he send a letter to the editor of a Paris newspaper,  that if the city would set clocks back an hour in the summer that thousands of candel tallow would be saved."

[I checked Wikipedia and found that Franklin anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin observed that tallow could be saved but he did not propose DST.]

I continued,"During WWI and WWII the country went on daylight savings time. I was raised in Butte, Montana, which continued honoring daylight savings time after the WWII, even though it was an island of a different time in the state of Montana.

"When Reagan was in office, congress tried to standardize some of the problems with DST in the country. In Indiana, one could drive thirty-some miles and change timezones and in and out of DST five times. States could sign up for standardized rules for DST (or opt out of it--like Arizona)."

That was the end of my lecture. We talked about guy things, drank more beer and ate brauts.

When the party was over, and my wife and I were in the hallway ready to leave, Pedro entered my space and said out of the blue, "Reagan was evil!"

We talked about this weird happening as we drove home. Then we heard on the news that that Reagan had just died!

Wow, that was spooky. As I remember from Psychology 101, there are only  five possibilities for relating events A and B ("Reagan was evil'" and Reagan's death :

1) A causes B
2) B causes A
3) A causes X causes B
4) X causes both A and C (epiphenominalism)
5) A and B are not related.

It is obvious to me that possibility 5) needs to be eliminated. This is far more than just synchronicity. The two events were synchronous. The only possibility then is that Pedro killed Ronald Regan.
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[Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity]


[June 5, 2004 President Reagan died of pneumonia at his home at 2:09 MDT.]

Close Call

Two days ago, my wife Lois and I decided to drive down to Pueblo for lunch. It was going to be in the mid seventies--very warm for mid November.

After arriving in the historic part of Pueblo, we walked up and down Union Street, passing the Branch Inn twice. We then decided to eat at Magpie's Restaurant which was across the street from the Branch Inn.

After eating, we walked down to the river walk. We heard a large blast, followed by the sirens of many emergency vehicles. We went back to where we started and found that the Branch Inn had blown up; it was completely leveled. There was lots of smoke, dust and fire.

Eight people were injured. One of them, a 22 year old woman and nursing student, died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

So many good and bad happenings in life are being (or not being) there at the right moment.