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.