BEWARE DRINKERS

 In case you missed the announcement, I'm patiently waiting for our country to take another shot at prohibition. See my earlier blog for details. But let me offer a friendly warning to my friends who choose to consume adult beverages. Beware of the socialists amongst us. There was a report on the news today about how many more health problems drinkers have and how, because of Obamacare, those costs burden us all. Socialised medicine, or single payer, or Obamacare, provides an end run to the sluggish and painfully slow process of passing legislation. With the government in control of health-care they will seize control of your behavior and force you into life-style choices you are opposed to. Instead of the predictable and non-discriminatory actuary table determining your premiums and thereby offering a type of incentive to alter your behavior, or not, depending on your personal choice. Your decisions will be dictated by the benevolent government who will be acting on behalf of the people who will be reacting to the latest pseudo-scientific study showing that YOU are costing us all lots of money so you will be required to change your behavior. After all, it isn't fair to the rest of us that men engage in sexual behavior with other men which increases their risk for contracting AIDS resulting in higher health-care costs for all of us. (Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen). Anyway, you get my point. The government already knows how much water you should need to flush your toilet and take a shower. They already figured out that you need smaller, lighter, more dangerous cars to drive so we don't kill the Earth. Additionally, they see the sacred wisdom in using everyone's money to finance the harvesting of body parts from unborn, and born, children for profit. By using everyone's money then we all have blood on our hands, not just the animals we are employing at these houses of worship. So, as you can see, there are none more qualified to tell you what to eat and drink, how much you can eat and drink, and when you can eat and drink those pre-determined amounts of food and liquid. After all, if the government didn't have your best interest at heart would they have offered you "free" healthcare?

THANKS BUT NO THANKS

    So then, if the three of you haven't figured it our yet, I'm a bit of an odd duck. For further proof please keep reading.
    I don't order items off the "Senior Menu" in restaurants, not because I'm pretending not to be old when I am, but because I don't want others subsidizing my purchases. If I get a break, someone else gets a "non-break" as it were. Maybe when I'm on a fixed income and things are truly tight financially, but not now while I'm gainfully employed and can afford to buy my own lunch. While trying to figure out a way to retire ASAP I noticed that, on a retirement income, my wife and I could get insurance for $33 a month. That's thirty three dollars. not $330.00. This would make retirement close to doable but it ain't gonna happen. There is a movement afoot to grab all the freebies you can and just play the system for all it's worth. Why keep fighting when giving up is so easy and so lucrative. Just relax and let the government take care of you like so many of our countrymen have done. The problem is I'm smart enough to see that letting the government take care of me means asking them to take money from others and give it to me. In the case of health care it's pretty much milking the young folks to subsidize the older. A tempting proposition if one isn't particularly concerned about the loss of individual freedoms and liberty in general. As it turns out, I am interested in these things and I refuse to hand the government more power than it already has by playing along with their power grabbing ways. Sure, I could let others pay for my insurance and use that "extra income" to buy nicer cars and bigger TV sets. A kind of personal bait and switch if you will. Get help with the insurance from other hard-working Americans, then shift the money that I would have had to spend on health care over to a miscellaneous fund to buy electronic gadgets and such. What a deal. Except for the ones paying for my insurance. But then they don't really have a choice since the Supreme Court decided the government can force you to play the game. This is a game I refuse to participate in. I can afford health insurance if I sacrifice certain other luxuries. And that will lighten the tax load on the younger generation which, it appears, will be drowning in their elders' debts as they try to build their futures. There are better ways to improve the health care situation than single payer socialized approaches. And for a moment let's pretend there aren't; still, our Constitution is too valuable to the survival of our free and prosperous nation to trample it underfoot for the sake of someone's idea of what's fair. If someone who is driving a beater and only has one 32" flat screen in their house, a house that is sufficient but not exorbitant, and who is not refusing to work when they are capable, needs some help with their insurance premiums then, by all means, society should have a mechanism to help them. But offering someone with sufficient means a subsidized plan for $33 dollars a month by way of taking money from other people is simply stupid and self-destructive. Self-destructive to a free nation, but empowering to the ruling class.

TAKE TWO

 
This is my second attempt at this idea and I'm guessing more will be needed. Paul's calling the Gospel a mystery didn't make it so. Paul was simply expressing a nugget of truth he had discovered. One that all who dare to follow Christ will encounter. While I am willing to argue that my faith is a reasonable one, not a foundation-less belief in some fairy tale or vague legend that has been verbally passed down for generations, it nevertheless, leaves me scratching my head a bit. When I apply faith to the compelling evidence of Jesus being who He says He is, I enter a new life. Not a life lived according to a different set of rules and regulations, but a life changed. Not perfect, but being moved to a more Christ-like place. Not through shock treatments and sleep deprived emotional encounters, but through my awareness of God's activity in my life. As I explore this intellectually, I am left with some illogical notions that seem to be, nevertheless, true. Isa. 1:18 says, "Come now, and let us reason together", says the Lord. (then Isaiah goes on to present an UNreasonable offer)
"Though your sins be as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; 
Though they be red, like crimson, They will be like wool ......."
 While God is unspeakably powerful and beyond our understanding and is Holy, (that is to say fully righteous or perfect, complete, if you will), according to Isaiah God isn't saying get your life in order and come back later to finish our little talk here. He doesn't turn His head away from our lives in disgust but presents us with an offer He calls reasonable. Then Isaiah beautifully exposes God's love and forgiveness with the "reasonable" offer that is presented. An offer that I suggest finds its most satisfying expression in Jesus. This is indeed the mystery. Our Perfect, Holy, God is orchestrating the most scandalous of propositions. The perfect man marrying a prostitute and unconditionally loving her. And just to add to the mysteriousness of it, on the wedding day, we get to wear white.
(If you're a music lover, like me, listen to the 2003 song titled "Wearing White" recorded by Martina McBride. It's a great companion to this idea.)
Thank you and have a nice day. 
 

SOMETHING IS AMISS`

Have you ever had that gut feeling that things were not as they seem? That the alleged facts of a situation didn't seem to jive with the attitudes being exhibited? Or there was a feeling that you were missing the punch line of a joke you didn't know was playing out? Can it be that so many very intelligent people are being sucked into the AGW idea. Do we actually have to believe that the best argument for gun control is the horrible, recorded murder of a TV news personality and her cameraman? Are there really a significant number of leaders in our country that believe the 14th amendment bestows citizenship on a baby born to alien parents who are here in defiance of our laws? Really? REALLY? I'm a proud C student of both high school and college and I'm looking around at ostensibly the best and the brightest to whom we have entrusted the leadership of our country and am increasingly struck with the idea that we are a great country in decline being led by a bunch of idiots. Or are they? Climate change. Gun control. Open borders. Arguing these positions if one is inclined to believe in them is fine, but do we have to enter the twilight zone of dialogue to approach them? If you want to argue gun control why pick and choose an event every several months and milk it for all the emotional energy you can while ignoring the fact that in Chicago alone we have already had over 200 murders this year? Most of which are carried out with guns. Isn't this worth mentioning in a discussion? I guess not. We have to wait for a nut to kill a bunch of people at a school or in a movie theater. What gives? And climate change. Wow, you mean to tell me the climate is changing. What genius figured that out? Not only are we prohibited from questioning the computer models and the incomplete and shaky data that the models are using but the only way to fix this earth-ending cycle is to end the world as we know it. Nothing less will do. News flash. The Civil War didn't end discrimination as if you'd flipped a switch. The South and North did not immediately shake hands and say, "good game" after the war. The union was spared, and I'm so glad it was, but several amendments were introduced to help lay the foundation for the freedmen. A legal tool to try and encourage the assimilation of the blacks into the fabric of society. This is the spirit and intention behind the 14th amendment. Trying to expressly declare citizenship on the freed slaves. 
    Back to my original contention that something is amiss. The only way really smart people might say the things they are saying and do the things they are doing. The only way the media would use the template they are using to decide what stories to cover and what not to cover, is this. There is a class of people, many of whom darken the halls of Congress, and many who reside at influential positions in media or on university campi, (thank you Rush), who feel like a Utopia is coming within their reach and they are trying to move us away from our Constitution and Democratic Republic form of government. They are already acting like a ruling class and are working together, Republican and Democrat alike, to continue seizing power so that they can implement what they know to be best for us. While you may find fault in my theory, you can not deny that smart people are acting like idiots. And I think the safest way to deal with them, regardless of their grand scheme, is to kick the bums out.
    If you've been waiting for a sign, here it is.
LET'S WAKE UP AND TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK! 

Saving the Earth is a Dangerous Proposition

Sort of odd times we live in, eh? We are so concerned about smokers that we all but ban them from society. Poor things are just too stupid to make good decisions so we have to step in with the force of law and save them from themselves. Yes, I know some people are "allergic" to cigarette smoke. Just like milk and peanut butter and gluten. But any substantial health issues are reserved for the person who has decided to smoke, not the general public. Please don't point to the many studies about second-hand smoke as proving otherwise because I will ask you to take a close look at those studies and see that they are far from convincing. Even if they had more damning data in them I could suggest looking at all the other "scares" the media, with their cherry-picking of studies, have foisted on us in the past. Even some of the more authentic concerns have been found to be less ominous than first thought; cholesterol being the most recent. Alar, silicone breast implants, DDT and others come to mind. The greatest health threat from smoking is to the one smoking, not the whole of society. So I say, let them have the freedom to choose to smoke. And when they come to your house I'm sure they will gladly go outside, and the free market will see to it that there are plenty of smoke-free restaurants available. On the other hand, the behavior that takes many more innocent lives from our society every year than smoking could ever hope to, is celebrated and so comfortably ingrained in our culture that it is absolutely immovable. Drinking is just one of those things that we do. You know, like kids having sex. There's just nothing you can do about it. Boys will be boys, girls will be girls, and innocent dead people will be, ah, I guess they will just be dead. Oh well. So now I'm headed to work every morning, passing bicycles on a narrow, busy, 2-lane road with no shoulder, contemplating the fact that the danger they are putting themselves and everyone who passes them in, is forgiven because they are trying to do the right thing. They are trying to save our poor, delicate planet we call earth, from those money-grubbing rich bastards who don't give a rip about it. So as the death toll rises from this behavior it will be quickly forgotten and forgiven. As the cyclists and the motorists fail at trying not to put themselves in situations that sometimes takes a life, it will simply be a necessary loss to aid in the salvation of Mother Earth. Meanwhile, we are ticketing people who choose not to wear a seat belt in order to save them from their idiocy. It seems to me there is certainly idiocy on display but that it resides right in front of our faces, and is the direct result of some nuanced action by our powerful, ostensibly benevolent government to further the "general welfare" of our country. I think our country would be "generally" better off if they took a more constitutional approach to our welfare.

A NOTE OF THANKS and FRUSTRATION

  
    It is not with pleasure that I enter this blog today. It is with frustration on the one hand and thanks on the other. My family and I have not lived with an excess of financial success. We have lived rather frugally by most standards but have managed to find money for the things we really wanted to do. One of the main things that has allowed us the freedom to do many of the things we wanted to is our ability to find contentment in places other than those advertised on TV. We have never owned a new car and likely never will. Thankfully, my wife and I both feel like a car is to be a servant to our family, not our master. When I buy a car now, I expect it to run well over the 300,000 mile mark. If it doesn't make it I feel like I have failed to choose wisely and am disappointed. Additionally, I do most of the maintenance myself which has saved us untold thousands over the years. Unfortunately, this approach to car buying leaves us looking at Japanese-made vehicles, not American-made. A few years ago I purchased a Camry with over 200,000 miles on it, for an even thousand dollars and when we gave it away, (still running), it had over 300,000 miles on it. America should be producing the best everything as far as I'm concerned, but we're not. While GM was becoming a manufacturing-based health care provider the Japanese were working hard at developing processes to produce high quality cars. While we were demanding more and more pay for producing lower quality cars, they were taking personal pride in their workmanship. While I don't have specifics in front of me I believe that, by and large, union workers at GM were making more money with better benefits than the vast majority of the people who were buying their cars. I understand the challenges of manufacturing here in the US; many of those challenges are unavoidable. But the big paychecks and huge pension promises made by our biggest companies will see that we are held at a disadvantage for decades.
    So this is my frustration. And here is my thanks. Thank you, Japan, for supplying my family and me with reliable and efficient transportation for the last 40 years.

SHREWDNESS EXAMINED

    It has been a mystery to me for some time how the word shrewdness has been used to disguise deceit and dishonesty; how a politician using misleading statements and mischaracterizations of his opponents positions can, in victory, be called a shrewd politician. This is a lying and intentionally misleading politician, not a shrewd one.
    We have a global political ideology at work which is quite comfortable in the Liberal wing of our two-party system. U.S. policy and global initiatives are both drawing on the myth of "global warming" or "global climate change" or whatever they decide to call it tomorrow. How very shrewd of them to take a fact of physics, (climate is always, has always, and will always be changing), and fuel a world-changing movement from it. Call it shrewd if you want, I call it utterly reprehensible. There are many factors contributing to the fall of this great nation but the incredible transfer of power from the people to the government is no more obviously represented than in the "environmental" movement. Animated by a religious fervor that rivals John Brown's they seek to influence the whole world under the banner of compassion while leaving whole countries in ruin in their wake. Their action will bring whole economies to a grinding halt while they are busy re-distributing the collected wealth of individuals to those they deem more worthy or more in need. So they will be undermining the very system of economics that could lift people out of their situations and distributing the diminishing wealth to places of their choosing. Problem is, the whole world will be worse off when the dust clears. But, they will be in charge, and that is, after all, what they really want. How very shrewd of them.

A NEW DREAM

    I feel like I woke up in a new country this morning. A third-world country where people either live with some level of despair about their limited options for a full and happy life or they dream of escaping to a place where hope resides. My despair is tempered by the dream that someday my grandchildren or their children might experience a place where the government, imperfect as it may be, holds in high regard the idea of an intrinsic right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
    This dream is measurably more difficult to deal with because it's one that my family and I have lived. A reality that is now relegated to the world of fantasy. A world where ideas live; ideas void of expression. As our president has promised, the hundred-year journey of fundamentally transforming our great nation is now complete; (at least one politician knows how to keep a promise). A nation once characterized by the rule of law and an adherence to a Constitution that represented man's best effort, in all of history, to provide an equitable and effective method of governance. Now, however, its highest court, its most powerful leaders, whose powers have long since been elevated far above the original intent of our founders, have shown utter contempt for the rule of law and the people it is there to protect.  Our supreme court looks like a bunch of Middle Schoolers role-playing in a civics  class. The majority opinion on the last several cases sound more like a child nonsensically defending their unruly behavior. What an embarrassment.
     So, I am left to dream of some future time when this country will be transformed back into a place  where all men are recognized as being equal and we are free to live, pursue happiness, (as defined by  the citizen, not the government), and to live free. At least that transformation won't require the destruction of our foundational principles.

American exceptionalism

Seems like this topic has been sliced and diced sufficiently that I should offer my 2 and 1/2 cents now. Lets start with what I call collaborative miracles. God created such an incredible world with so many intricate and amazing processes. Full of beauty and things that taste good. Oh ya, and things that dazzle the eye and the mind of man. An example of a collaborative miracle is a loaf of bread. God gave us wheat. Man has developed a way to grow, harvest and process wheat in such a way that, if corrupt governments would somehow evaporate overnight we could feed the whole world and end hunger. Man has developed systems of agriculture that allow this. Of course, "who has put wisdom in the innermost being or given understanding to the mind". In Job 38 we are reminded that God has given us this ability to imagine and engineer things, so even our part of the collaboration is dependent on Him.

Nonetheless, here we are. Collaborative miracles, while not residing entirely outside the natural world as we normally think when speaking of miracles, are still amazing things to behold. When I eat an egg mcmuffin with a hash-brown and a glass of orange juice, I am enjoying a product that has involved 100's of people, 1000's of inventions and an economic system which enables the actuation of the miracle. I am eating a miracle. Exceptionalism is found in all people but only takes flight when coupled with individual freedom and free markets. Indeed, our exceptionalism is not unique, it is simply given a vehicle for expression. We don't need to modernize our constitution, we need to convince our leaders to honor it and to promote it's principles around the world. Of course my prayers are still offered in hopes of God's Spirit leading us back to His side first and foremost. This is the logical starting place for the aforementioned release of exceptionalism to be reconvened.

CLIMATE CLIMATE

I was pondering the AGW conversation the other day and it hit me how odd it is that we are so worried about what is commonly referred to as climate change. It would seem to me that the real test of man's effect on the climate would be if he could keep it FROM changing. Now that would be truly incredible and much easier to prove man's involvement. We could argue that for many millennium our climate has been changing and now that man has arrived on the scene it is no longer changing. No more ice ages followed by periods of warming. Changes that the sun would have brought to our climate are being counter-acted by the by-products of man's existence. Cycles of warm and cold ocean currents are no longer measurable due to the many climatological changes we have brought to bear on this poor, impressionable, delicate cosmological flower we call Earth. Now that would be front page stuff. That should certainly be deemed "fit to print" by any self-respecting newspaper in the world. (if there are, indeed, some left). But no, we are treated on a daily basis with vague and ambiguous notions of how man has so negatively impacted his environment that we are doomed to destruction. If I may quote an old TV show here, "just the facts, ma'am." We cannot restrict our discussion to the facts because the facts do not decidedly point in the direction the ruling class would like to take us so we are left with seemingly intelligent people spewing what you could call propaganda except that the true propagandists would take exception to being lumped in with such a laughable community. It would seem their strongest argument is simple, "oh yea, well what if it's true?". That game becomes real interesting real fast and can quickly unravel even the strongest of societies. If we throw out 5 or 6 carefully chosen what-if's and then took particular action to counter- act those things which might occur we could quickly bring the world to an end even faster than if the what-if's turned out to be true. For today's research assignment please read the children's story of the Three Silly's. This will give you some insight as to the dangers of piecing together a string of what-if's.

As for climate change, the choice of words to frame this discussion should tell you something about the IQ's of those who are driving the fear-mongering. In case you didn't know, climate is change. The two words are all but interchangeable. It could just as accurately be called climate climate.

Full Disclosure

So then, inasmuch as a blog is sometimes superfluous I feel compelled on this day to entertain a subject that I usually avoid so as to keep as many friends as possible. So, while I have likely enjoyed having most of you as friends I will not hold you responsible if you feel led to terminate our relationship today. I just don't understand the amount of tolerance our society has for the consumption of alcoholic beverages. I understand that alcohol, like guns, does't kill people, people kill people. But if we treated alcohol like we do guns I would be happy. However, we don't. While it's been years since I made a study of the statistics surrounding our most beloved of killers, I think it's safe to say that alcohol is involved in, if not the primary cause of, the loss of far more innocent lives than guns and swimming pools combined. Smoking, on the other hand, endangers only the person sucking the smoke into their lungs. But really, do we want those nasty smells floating about our cities and homes. Heck, no. Let's ban them from society. Alcohol, on the other hand, gives us so many memorable events, from those lovely mass gatherings out by the river in high school to those foggy frat parties, and on to the ever popular vague impressions of striking those closest to us with the back of our hands, or worse. My mother was a heavy smoker but the cigarettes never influenced her to make rash decisions with tragic results. Those cigarettes never led to the break up of our home nor the financial ruin of spending all we had on her habit. I'm not aware of any car accidents resulting in the loss of life due to someone smoking while driving. Things like lake drownings, alcohol poisoning, sticking an arm in the fan blade of an engine while it's running, parking-lot fights, mattress fires from passing out with a lit cigarette in your hand, and untold public resources spent to offer assistance to those who were alcohol impaired come to mind. I know life offers lots of risks and accidents will happen for lots of reasons, but in my mind there is nothing we could do to more effectively improve our society than to try the whole prohibition thing again. The fact that we are so ready to legalize more drugs tells me what little understanding we have of the toll we are paying for the ones we already have.

Time to Reboot

I just had what I believe to be a decent, if not good, idea. Instead of propelling our country ever more briskly toward sameness, uniformity and an ever-more-powerful centralized government let's try an experiment where citizens have protected rights that are unassailable and inalienable. It seems there was such an experiment somewhere in history but the time has come to give it another shot. Our country has strayed many miles from its home and we are experiencing separation anxiety from our freedoms. Our pursuit of happiness has but a few, ever-decreasing options and within the next 30 years I would say that the path to "happiness" will be as narrowly defined as the term "happiness" itself. Fascism is the theme I see in our future and it causes me great distress. Additionally, it is being perpetrated by people who think they are measurably more compassionate than anyone else and by people who, if you ask them, believe that people are inherently good. If people are inherently good, why do they need so much intervention and oversight from a demonstrably evil, power-hungry government? If the love of money is the root of all evil then the government should be the most carefully watched suspect. Instead we hand over more and more power every day and it is used to co-opt more and more of our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. I leave you with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in the early to mid 1800's had identified a possible pothole in our form of government called a soft tyranny. He described it this way, "It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided. Men are seldom forced by it to act but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence, it does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until every nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd".

(and the people said, "Bah,bah, baaahhh.)