Just Thinking

Ramblings:

So, if God is all powerful, how can He stand by and watch all of the horrors mankind is always, somewhere, actively perpetrating on itself? This is a question which has been asked for ever and ever and it is now my turn to take a stab at it.

    I believe the answer lies somewhere in the idea of "freewill". That is to say, He cannot effectively show His love for us, nor we for Him, by His turning us all into robots. While the evidence of our Creator is, in my experience, everywhere to be found, it is still a matter of an intentional act to "believe" in Him. That is to say, if God were to split the sky and make an announcement for all of humankind to see, hear and experience, then our natural tendency would be to believe, of course, and to stand fearful and cowering in His presence. Is this "love"? I would say no. And I believe a relationship of love with His creation is what God most wants. Our decision to follow Him, through His expression of love in the Christ, the messiah, is what He wants. There is sufficient evidence in the sciences to lay a foundation for a very plausible faith. Not a blind, radical, emotional response, but a thoughtful, reasoned response resulting in placing our faith in God's work on earth. While He is holy and just, attributes that we are to strive for but without the realistic expectation of achieving, He still loves us. As we express our love for Him we enter into an eternal relationship which will some day be made perfect through Christ.

    Getting a bit off track here. Let me offer an analogy if I may. Back to the question of how a loving God can "allow" so many evil things to occur. As I said, I tie it to "freewill". If you are in a courtroom where your brother has been found guilty of manslaughter because he ventured out on the road after having a few too many drinks and the family of the deceased comes up to you and says, "why did you let him continue drinking and driving after his first 2 DUI's?" What is your defense? After all, you could have handcuffed him and kept him in your basement. You could have had him forcibly taken to a State run facility to live out his days. You could have kept closer tabs on him and driven him home after he got himself drunk. So many things you could have done. But each of them would have violated his "freewill".  So you had to stand by and watch him destroy his own life and he has now  also taken someone else's life. Are you a murderer? Your efforts to talk some sense into your brother were unsuccessful but you could have taken a more direct, physical approach. But that approach, while potentially saving someone's life, would have infringed on your brothers basic rights as a person. God is constantly calling us to a point of redemption. He has made a way for humankind that would move us to a less violent existence. But He has not yet directly intervened on a worldwide scale, I believe, hoping more of His creation will choose to place their faith in Him void of the feelings of compulsion which would certainly accompany a decision after His second coming or some other worldwide supernatural event.
    So I believe we are left with a world inexerably tied to both tragedy and joy. A world capable of evil but a world that offers a loving creators invitation to grace and forgiveness and eternal life with Him. 

AS I WAS THINKING

    Well, there I was reading a few tweets when I stumbled on to another problem I have with government provided healthcare and viewing it as a right. If it is indeed a right then it opens up the idea of someone, needing medical attention, suing the government, or the doctor, for not providing them with their "right" to healthcare. Another way to look at it is that government has the power, under the auspices of protecting ones rights to force certain people to go into the medical profession against their will so that they would be able to provide the citizenry with their right to healthcare. Otherwise, if individuals were left to pursue their own ambitions, the rights of millions of people could be compromised. Additionally, those who did want to pursue a medical profession would be required to study which ever field of medicine the government felt would best provide for the meeting of the medical rights of the people.
    Again, I reiterate, a right is not a right if it infringes on others rights. On the other hand, if we, as a nation, undertake the task of seeing that all who want healthcare are given every opportunity to purchase it, with some assistance if needed, then things fall in place without the heavy hand of government removing even more of our freedoms. It's not hard for me to show where half of my income is going to taxes today. With federal and state income taxes being just the most obvious. We pay a ton of property taxes, registration fees, in addition to inflated prices for goods due to tariffs and subsidies to certain business interests. Also, over 40 cents of the price of every gallon of gas goes to taxes. We have already lost the idea of a man owning the fruits of the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands since over half of such fruit is forcefully picked by the government. With government run healthcare the government would take the final necessary step to accomplish it's socialistic goals. After that power play by the government it would only be a matter of time before we are a truly socialist country.
    I respect your desire to accomplish this if you wish but it would be best to start with a country that does not purport to protect our individual God given rights. In other words, please take your ideas somewhere else and let us rebuild a truly free society where free enterprise and free people can transform the whole world and make it a better place. You know, like happened before our governmental system was corrupted by men and women whose lust for power eroded the protections intended for the individuals.
    I'm not particularly fond of having Mr. Trump as president, but he may, in fact, be the kind of dramatic change that can start the pendulum swinging back in the direction of freedom. Just maybe.

IDEA ALERT (a solution to our healthcare debate)

    Finally, I think I have an answer to what's been ailing us. See what you think of this. People who want health insurance but who don't want to, ( or can't ), pay for it on their own and who are forced to take money from evil rich top one percenters, (which I presume presents a moral delemna for them), are about to be freed. Here's how it would work. Those who can buy actuary table based health insurance at face value will live with the restrictions of their plans. That is to say, they will buy insurance based on the risk factor associated with their lifestyle and dietary choices. On the other hand, those who's health insurance is being purchased or subsidized for them will be subject to lifestyle and dietary behavior guidelines which will reduce the risk to their health so as to limit the cost to those who are buying health insurance on their behalf.
    Those who are the recipients of free or reduced health insurance costs will be asked to reduce costs for those buying their healthcare. Seems like the fair thing to do. After a couple of generations the lower income segment of our society will emerge healthier and with higher life expectancies then the rich who are not conforming to such stringent health decisions. So eventually the rich will die off and we will be left with the poorer folks who by default are also more noble and trustworthy than the one percenters who are so very stingy with their wealth.
    Seems like this should be a win win to me. The poor can shoulder the sugar tax burden and will be directed to follow whatever "health" concerns are identified by the medical community, like cutting back on coffee for a while then resuming normal consumption and cutting cholesterol out of their diets for 20 or 30 years while we figure out it isn't really the consumption of it that raises our body's cholesterol, or significantly reducing salt intake for half a lifetime until we can confirm that it isn't as harmful as we once thought. The rich can be the "tasters" for the poor. I just don't see a down side. And we can hold on to a semblance of individual freedoms while doing this.
    Additionally, it's time to separate insurance from employment and introduce competition back into our insurance choices. HSA's would be a great start. Employers could contribute to the HSA as a benefit but the insurance part of it would be exclusive of the employment part. Then workers wouldn't feel so trapped,(something employers don't want),and could "shop" around for better pay without risking the loss of coverage.
    Just something to think about. By the way, check out the "Direct Care" and "Concierge" models that are beginning to spring up all across the country. I'm smelling a solution in the offing.

IS HEALTH INSURANCE A RIGHT (or a left)?

It seems dangerous to me to refer to the providing of heath insurance to every man, woman, and child, as a right. I understand that the word has a bit of latitude when it comes to it's definition but I would argue calling it a right establishes it as a basic human right in most peoples minds. And this is what I reject. The right to life, as represented in the Declaration of Independence, and protected in the Constitution, is the basic right of mankind, to live with the expectation that others will not take his life from him. This basic right results in laws against murder. Also, within the understanding of this right is the expectation that others will not impede his path toward his pursuits. Not that they will participate in his endeavors, (thought they may choose to do so), but that they will not intentionally block his activities to keep him from his pursuits. This right is contained within man's nature, placed there by his Creator. A man's rights are not dependent on others participation but rather on their refraining from behaviors which limit or remove this right.
If health insurance is a right then it is of a dissimilar nature than the right to life. In order to provide someone with insurance that has chosen not to purchase it (or is unable to purchase it) for themselves, it is imperative that others basic rights be subjegated to the ones for whom the right of insurance is being provided. This strikes me as an illogical and unethical position to take. Protecting my basic right to life is substantially different than a systematic infringement on others rights to provide me with something that has been deemed a right by public discourse. My right to life does not, and should not, imply a particular standard of living. A standard of living is the by-product of many things including my personal choices and should not default to a specific level.
Before you start in with the declaration of my being the personification of evil please understand that I am willing to have a discussion about wheather a country as wealthy as the free enterprise system has made us should provide some basic health insurance for our citizens. But I am not willing to mis-use the word "right" in the discussion. There are plenty of words in our language that have been absolutely obliterated by mainly politicians, we don't need to add more to the pile.

You WHAT now!

    I would like to take some time to review and comment on some remarks our ostensibly intelligent President has recently made. These comments were part of his weekly saturday address. There are, in fact, more than a few interesting statements to deal with but I will focus on but a couple.  Early in his comments he talks about the "investments" his administration has made in science and technology that has sparked innovation and lots of jobs. I'm guessing he's including the bankruptcy lawyers for Solyndra in the list of new jobs. And by the way, those investments were made with money from the citizens pockets at large. My only influence over these "investment" decisions comes in the form of my vote during elections which has proven to be rather frustrating of late. The half a billion tax dollars that were invested in Solyndra didn't exactly work out all that well. And if the government subsidies were removed from, lets say, the ethanol world there would likely be more bankruptcies. Just like social security, the money the government "invests" would be more effectively "invested" by those from whom the money was taken. Wind and solar are not an answer to our energy needs and could have found an appropriate and effective place in the big energy picture under the direction of private enterprise. But this would preclude the governments acquistion of power and therefore is not even considered.
    Later in the same address he equated the fact of the Russians sending Sputnik into space with the illusion of AGW. A physical, and rather large piece of metal, engineered for, and delivered to, space is the same as man-made global warming? Seems a bit of a stretch to me. Denying Sputnik is, in every way I can come up with, quite dissimilar from questioning the argument of man-made global warming. I believed from the beginning that Obama was indeed an empty suit waiting for others to fill. Apparently, those who added intelligence to the suit were dreaming, or hoping. Their hopes have been met with an unpleasant reality.

RUNNING SCARED

Well, now. I can't for the life of me remember what the subject of this blog was going to be. This is why you should always finish what you start. Being the creative sort I've decided to compose a likely unrelated blog of the same name. Again, being the optimistic type I will look into my rose colored crystal ball and offer some predictions about my AGW friends. What will become of them and their supporting industry as the global temperatures begin to cool or possibly rise at the very slow pace which they have been over the last century or so. I mean, talk about running scared. At some point even people who didn't take Earth Science class in High School are going to start putting together the obvious inconsistencies in the climate "models" compared to the reality of the situation. Sure the media can extend the game a bit longer with all the "first time" stories about weather events and such. But at some point someone is going to look back at all those interesting, "on this day in weather history" scenarios and see that they are only "firsts" for a particular location. Weather has been quite unruly for millennia and we are not experiencing an odd collection of phenomena but in fact are experiencing the intrinsic nature of weather. It's truly fascinating. Look up something called a "Heat Burst". Middle of the night, the high for the day was maybe, 95, and some location in Oklahoma has a hundred mph wind and temperatures of 102. Geepers Wally. And if you hadn't heard of them before the media could blame it on AGW and most would believe them. How about those Mesoscale Convective Complexes of thunderstorms. There's another cool weather phenomenon. In my life here in Wichita, Ks, (I'm 60), I remember Summer's with over 40 days above 100. I remember a winter where the temperature was below freezing for well over a month. Peoples water supplies were freezing up because the frost line went so deep. Anyway, it may take a while, but the Climate Change profiteers will begin changing their story and then will eventually disappear. I just hope there is a semblance of economic activity left when they finally come clean and tell the truth. And the truth, just so you'll recognize it when they finally tell it, is that man's effect on the climate is real, but minimal in scope compared to the effects of the sun and the oceans.
    So, to summarize, in the future, the Al Gore types will indeed be "running scared"
Thanks and have a great day.

A CALL TO EXCE0TIONALISM

    Odd, I suppose, to address whole nations with a seldom read article. Assuming the readership here, including myself, will still qualify as seldom.But this is my intent today, though if you don't qualify as a country I would still invite you to listen, with your eyes, to my points. Once again, while consuming a meal my mind was overwhelmed trying to understand all the steps, all the people, all the companies involved in bringing me the chance to enjoy my stack of pancakes with a sausage patty. For instance;

    THE WHEAT: the wheat is used in making the pancake batter. Some form of flour that is.

God created wheat:

Man learned how to grow it more and more efficiently so as to make it available to all.

    :irrigation

    :weed control

    :combines

    :tractors

    :genetics

Over time we developed ways of bring it to the masses.

    :trucks

    :trains

    :elevators w/dryers to help preserve it

    :mills and other processing facilities

    :stores (owners, stockers, checkers etc.)

Now, above is a partial treatment, due to time restraints, of just one aspect of my meal. But it you expand this partial list to include the designers, engineers, manufacturers, assemblers, truck drivers, store owners, stockers, checkers, quality control, fuel for harvesting and transporting, and a stove and pan to cook the pancakes in it's incredible. And if you expand this discussion to include the milk and butter, syrup, ketchup, (yes, ketchup), etc. it's absolutely mind boggling.

    These processes are part of what I call collaborative miracles. A partnership between God and man. I believe our country, because of it's Constitution protecting our individual freedoms, has become the most fertile ground for these collaborations to take place. I also believe we are moving away from a government which will allow for the continuation of these processes. These processes unfold over time as people engage in commerce with each other. As someone with a service or product contracts with someone needing that service or product to provide such for an agreed upon item of value. Money or an exchange of other services for instance. This is where the rubber meets the road in defining freedom. Freedom and free market capitalism go together. With a civil society intact, and yes we are loosing that by the day, these interactions result in great advantage for the country as a whole. If there is a catch it is this; we need to understand our createdness. We need to understand that we are all made in God's image and that we have intrinsic value. Without this understanding it all unravels.

    So, Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria, Russia, listen up. If you want to be exceptional you don't need to become American, you need to become a champion of individual rights and free markets and a respecter of all who live in your country's borders. In time your citizens will make your country truly exceptional. Who knows, maybe at some point you could show us the way back from our current path towards Oligarchy.

Thanks, and have a great day. (That is, if you want too)