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.)

Intelligence

So why are people who are intelligent enough to "discover" there is no God so stupid as to jump in bed with an attractive coed that had the unfortunate experience of signing up for his or her class? Why are we so intelligent as to make the medical "discovery" that a human embryo is an unviable tissue mass until such time as its mother, (father?, what father?) decides she wants it, leaving us with the utterly comical discussion about when "life" actually begins. Wouldn't real intelligence take us to a very different place? A place where proven facts don't have to be treated like obstructions and philosophical dialogue can have at least a thread tying it to known fact. Why does not believing in God compel action against those who do? Does my not accepting Mormon doctrine compel me to attack every influence I can find that Mormonism has been part of? If I were to engage in such an attack I would be weakening the society I am part of while also wasting a lot of time. I think I've picked a bad example but to follow through with it, while I do not accept the teachings of Mormonism I also do not try to destroy everything that is traceable to that religion. Granted, if the Congress passed a law requiring adherence to Mormon doctrine I would object. But to live in a country where many Mormon teachings are graven into our laws, such as not murdering, not stealing etc. is an advantage to me regardless of their origin. (Which, while not uniquely Mormon, are certainly part of their doctrine). Atheists and Agnostics alike benefit from a system based on an understanding of a Creator, but rather than living peaceably with their neighbors and enjoying this great land some are driven to destroy those who follow Christ as God's son. A life, by the way, whose teachings are often in contrast to accepted social and cultural behavior.

Integrity

This whole idea of men governing themselves is a complex and unsettling study indeed. How do you set up a government that is effective at governing and also effective at offsetting man's inclination of being drawn to power? Not sure I would want to tackle that one on my own. Personally I think the Constitution of the United States of America is where I would start; ratified in 1787, it has guided a nation for 227 years and could easily move us, with our civil society intact, through the next 227 years if we could figure out a way to re-establish it as our guiding document.

    While my endeavors as an amateur singer-songwriter have not provided any significant monetary gains, they have provided a bit of education. While talking with a respected lawyer here in Wichita once about a contract that would define my position as related to any royalties that may be generated by a multi-artist project I was considering taking part in, I inquired as to what I should look for in the said contract's wording. After offering a few suggestions he basically said the whole thing hinged on the integrity of the one writing the contract. Paramount to any other consideration was whether this person is trustworthy because regardless of the care taken in the wording of the contract, an unscrupulous person could find a way around it. This lesson has stuck with me over the years and I have seen evidence of its presence in other places as well. For instance, our Constitution is said to be useless if used to govern an immoral people. I believe we are witnessing a government being facilitated by men and women who have demonstrated their lack of integrity by swearing to uphold the Constitution then circumventing it when it is the least bit inconvenient for them. My hope for this great country is that "we the people" will wake up and start electing men and women of integrity as our representatives and that it is not too late to find our way back to a government guided by the greatest Constitution ever conceived. Disciplining oneself when so much power is available to you by way of  language manipulation and the skewed presentation of facts by a largely willing media machine, is a difficult thing to reject. Much too difficult for most of those currently residing in Washington these days. While I believe John Adams when he said "Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." It would also seem it is  inadequate to reign in an immoral and irreligious Washington elite. What do you say we start to fix it this November.