Time to Replace Earth Day With Math Day

My good friend and former broadcast partner Paul Robins, now anchor of the morning newscast at Fox 40 in Sacramento, recently issued an e-mail pointing out what he believed to be a glaring error in some news copy he read on Earth Day.  In fairness to the producer responsible for that Earth Day segment, the error was not theirs, it’s a recycling factoid that has been repeated ad nauseum.  But it’s another glaring example of the degree to which the green movement is willing to misstate and exaggerate the facts in order to convince us that the planet is in imminent need of rescue.  Either that, or environmentalists are complete and utter dolts.  You decide.

The factoid goes as follows.  On any number of websites celebrating the wonder that is Earth Day, they encourage us to recycle by, among other things, pointing to this “fun fact”:  

More than 20,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil.  All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.

As noted, this “fact” turned up on literally hundreds of websites, using this identical verbiage, including (and this should be cause for real concern) Earth Day pages for U. of Michigan, Western Michigan U., U. of Maryland, U. of Iowa, Virginia Wesleyan College and Brandeis University.  Problem is, this assertion is patently false.  Let’s do some simple math, a process which apparently eluded the esteemed eggheads at Brandeis.

– A Hershey’s Kiss is wrapped in a piece of foil measuring 2.5 in. square, a generous measurement.  That comes to 6.25 sq. in. of foil (2.5 x 2.5)

– 20 million Kisses, at 6.25 sq. in. of foil each, require the use of 125 million sq. in. of foil (6.25 x 20,000,000) for wrapping

– A mile is 5,280 feet, or 63,360 inches.  Expressed in inches, one square mile (63,360 x 63,360) consists of 4,014,489,600 sq. in.  That’s right, one square mile is over four BILLION square inches

A square mile of aluminum foil– one!– would be enough to wrap 642,318,336 Hershey’s Kisses  (4,014,489,600 / 6.25).  133 sq. mi. of foil would wrap more than 85 billion Kisses!  Wrapping 20 million Hershey’s Kisses uses not 133 square miles of foil a day, but 1/32 of one square mile.  The “133 square miles of foil” claim exaggerates the figure by a factor of over 4,200! 

In reality, the Hershey’s website claims they produce 80 million Kisses each day, not 20 (the Earth Day devotees didn’t even get that right).  Even at the correct figure, Hershey’s Kiss-wrapping accounts for just over 45 sq. mi. of foil annually, so it would take nearly three years for them to use 133 sq. mi.

Who comes up with environmental “facts” like these?  Not mathematicians, that’s for sure.  Even more perplexing, and more disturbing, is how we have gotten to the place where seemingly intelligent people accept ridiculous claims like these as truth.  The Earth Day propagandists say it, and it gets repeated over and over, even at highly regarded American universities, and we end up with a generation of young people who believe it.  How else to explain a recent poll which found that one in three American children live in fear of the lurking environmental dangers that surely await them?

Encouraging responsible citizens to recycle is a fine and noble thing, but do we really need to lie about it?

Confused By Analogies, Mr. President? Let Me Help…

At last night’s nationally televised press conference (#83), President Obama, in response to a question about closing our border with Mexico as a means of slowing the spread of swine flu, said the following:

I’ve consulted with our public health officials extensively on a day-to-day basis, in some cases an hour-to-hour basis. At this point, they have not recommended a border closing. From their perspective, it would be akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out, because we already have cases here in the United States.

He was kidding, right?  Can our public health officials really be that stupid?  Can our President?  Just to get this straight, because we “already have cases here in the United States,” it won’t matter if we allow more infected people to cross the border?  Forgetting for a moment whether a border closing would even be viable (if that’s the issue, then say so), does this make sense to anyone? 

For the benefit of President Obama, who doesn’t appear to grasp the meaning of the “barn door” analogy, here’s a simple, helpful explanation.  The analogy doesn’t really apply in this case, because not all the horses have left the barn!  Otherwise, it would still make sense to close the door, wouldn’t it?  This timeworn analogy about reacting too late to solve a problem doesn’t refer to “closing the barn door after some of the horses have gotten out,” because that would be dumb.  In this case, what you seem to be saying is, “A few horses have already left the barn, so we might as well turn loose the whole damn herd.”  Again, pretty dumb. 

Just to make it crystal clear for our brilliant and inspirational leader, there are still plenty of “horses” (sick, infectious people) in that “barn” (Mexico) that warrant closing the “door” (U.S.-Mexico border), Mr. President.  I hope that helps.  Analogies can sometimes be subtle, and you have a lot on your plate… oh, wait a minute… was this on his teleprompter?  Maybe that explains it.  I knew he couldn’t be that big a dolt…

Obama’s Genius is Only Skin-Deep

With tonight’s nationally televised presidential address– this is the, what, 47th?  I lose track– many are wondering aloud when the Obama PR assault will slow down.  The sad truth is that it won’t.  Ever.  Because whatever else President Barack Obama is, savior, genius, history-maker, socialist reformer, you name it, the thing that most defines his presidency is his fame.  The guy is a rock star, the coolest, hippest president ever, even cooler than Bill Clinton, but without all the adolescent horniness. 

Obama will never go long without commandeering the networks for a reassuring chat with the peeps, not because we need reassuring, but because he does.  For one thing, I think he genuinely loves being the hottest celeb on the planet, and he wants to stay hot.  It completes him and satisfies his enormous ego.  But there’s also a strategic component at work.  If he allows his presidency to be judged strictly by his performance as a chief executive and administrator, people will sour on him as they surely sour on every president.  Contrary to what his devout followers believe, he’s no smarter than any of his predecessors, and most don’t realize just how little he has in common, politically speaking, with the average American.  To most who voted for him, the name Saul Alinsky means nothing.  If they knew what Alinsky stood for, and that Obama has stood for many of the same things, they’d be shocked.  Unfortunately, most never bothered to delve that deep into what Barack was really about.  What got him elected was his charisma, that Rat Pack-cool persona that sells so well in a celebrity-obsessed culture with a rapidly shrinking attention span.  If he allows his media star to dim for even a moment, people will begin to notice how average he really is, and how shockingly unqualified for the position he holds.

So the Obama publicity train will roll on, and we’ll be regularly reminded of how smart and assured he is, by virtue of how well he performs on camera when he’s reading from a teleprompter.  That we finally elected a black president is a good and just thing, but it’s a shame we couldn’t elect one of real substance.  Instead we voted for the rock star.  We might as well have elected Nipsy Russell.

California Exit Exam Hinders The Dense and Lazy

The California High School Exit Exam is an abject failure… or so its detractors would have us believe.  Today’s L.A. Times features an article about the exit exam, called CAHSEE in education circles, that focuses solely on its shortcomings.  Namely, the students who don’t receive a diploma because they can’t seem to pass it.  While there may be inherent problems with a standardized test that doesn’t– and really can’t– account or adjust for those H.S. seniors with disabilities, learning and otherwise, who will be denied diplomas under the current system if they can’t pass the test, there remains a legitimate need to ascertain whether or not a high school education has any real value in California, or if our schools are just an institutional holding pen where learning doesn’t matter that much.

The Times piece refers to a study that tries to make the case that the test is skewed in favor of white males.  Isn’t everything in this culture skewed in favor of white males?  Damn them and their achievements, anyway!  If it weren’t for all the skewing, they’d be as inept as everybody else!  The study, courtesy of researchers at Stanford and UC Davis (who probably all passed the CAHSEE without much trouble, especially if they were white males), points to something called “stereotype threat,” a psychological concept (so you know it’s based on hard science…) that “negative stereotypes become self-fulfilling.”  In essence, because females and students of color aren’t expected to perform as well as white males, they don’t.  As a result, an estimated 22,500 seniors may not receive their diplomas, despite fulfilling all other requirements. 

Some observations:

First, the egghead academician(s) who coined the phrase “stereotype threat,” and the other researchers and journalists who legitimize it by using it in print as if it had meaning should be set adrift on rough seas in a raft made of Kleenex.  Their work has no real value, and should be discontinued immediately.  I want to vomit when I think of the public monies we have invested in university research so someone could cook up a load of crap like “stereotype threat.”

Second, while 22,500 may sound like a lot of unhappy kids (threatened by stereotypes, damn it!), let’s at least keep it in perspective.  There are nearly 400,000 high school seniors enrolled in California this year.  So those 22,500 who will be denied their diplomas really only account for about 5.6% of the total.  From that perspective, the test doesn’t sound like such a monumental failure.  Even at a 10% failure rate, it doesn’t sound like a reason to panic.

Finally, something that goes unstated in any study or coverage about the CAHSEE, is that it really isn’t very hard.  Honest.  My kids have taken it, and while they’re pretty bright kids, it’s not like they’re uber-geniuses.  Each one who took it came home marvelling at how easy it was.  One of my daughters said that if you just paid a modicum of attention through the eighth grade, the test was passable.  They couldn’t believe it was a big deal.  Add to that the fact that kids have multiple opportunities to take and pass the test, and only need to retake the portion or portions they didn’t pass, it’s not like we’re demanding an Einsteinian effort of our graduating seniors.  Still, the test is apparently so hard that 5.6% can’t pass it, and that’s just unacceptable to a political and educational establishment that dreams of a society where nobody ever fails or feels bad because of it.  Everyone makes the team, and we never keep score…

And that’s really the endgame here.  When the CAHSEE critics talk about retooling the test because they think it may be, in the words of CA Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, “fatally flawed,” what they’re really shooting for is to make the test easier.  In fact, they’d like to make the test so easy that everyone would pass!  Which would leave us right back where we started, awarding high school diplomas to kids (at least 22,500 of them a year) who can’t really do high school level work.  But that’s okay, we’ll find places for them in California universities where we’ll offer them remedial classes in math and English!  And we wonder why American companies are looking abroad to find highly educated employees?

Come and Get Me, Napolitano!

After last week’s revelation that the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo to local law enforcement warning them of the threat of domestic terrorism by “right-wing extremists” (which I believe was made public on the eve of the “Tea Party” demonstrations for the express purpose of discouraging attendance), I’d like to go on record as saying that I am in profound opposition to the United States federal government, our president, our congress, and all the rest of these petty bastards who wish to solidify their power base by curtailing our freedoms.

I’m not a part of any extremist groups, right-wing or otherwise (I’ve never been much of a joiner… I only recently got a Facebook page).  I have no interest in armed insurrection or violent overthrow.  But I can tell you that I hate what this government has become, and will do all that I can within the law to change it for the better.  The very fact that they find it necessary to issue ominous and threatening memos directed at those who disagree with their policy objectives is not only offensive but a little bit frightening.  Big-government socialists are now in control of the country as never before, and remaining faithful to the socialist playbook, they’re trying to squash every dissenting voice they can find.

I happen to believe that the U.S. Constitution, interpreted as originally intended, still represents the apex of modern political thought, and Americans have the constitutionally guaranteed right to speak out against their government in any way they choose, short of encouraging violence against the state or violation of the law.  Janet Napolitano is nothing more than a stooge for the Democratic/Socialist Party.

So I’m speaking out, as is my right under the United States Constitution.  I hate and fear the federal government of the United States of America, because it’s being run by authoritarian thugs who have either forgotten what made America great– freedom– or simply prefer the shackles of communism and so plan to guide us in that direction.  I believe it’s the latter, and I encourage us all to head to the ballot box in 2010 and replace every damn one of them.

Free people.  Free markets.  Janet Napolitano and President Barack Obama can kiss my freedom-loving ass.

A Visit to The Georgia Guidestones

Anybody ever seen the Georgia Guidestones?  Ever even heard of the Georgia Guidestones?  I hadn’t either, until a couple of weeks ago, and now I’ve seen them!  My life will never be… wait a minute, my life is exactly the same…

While on vacation with my wife and two of our four kids (we’re not Mormons, just randy), we spent a few days in Atlanta.  The day my daughter, a high school junior, traipsed off with Mom to visit Clemson University (because she wants us to never retire), my son and I rented a car and drove out, at his request, to Elberton, GA to see the Georgia Guidestones, called by some the American Stonehenge.  Why they would call it that is not clear, other than the fact that it’s a monument consisting of several upright slabs of granite, but the similarities end there.

Unlike Stonehenge, the Guidestones are not ancient (erected in 1980), and only mildly mysterious.  In essence, it’s a monument to New Age bullshit.  My son’s interest in seeing them stems from his fascination with symbology, which I’ll get to a bit later (it pertains to the mild mystery).  Whatever the reason, I was happy to spend a day with my boy, touring the backroads of rural Georgia, dining with the locals, and enjoying one of the more bizarre roadside attractions the country has to offer.

Elberton, GA, is not a large community, something on the order of about 4,800 people, and its claim to fame is that it is the “Granite Capital of the World.”  More granite monuments are produced in Elberton than anywhere in the world, a fact that is proclaimed on nearly every flat (and some not so flat) surface in the city.  It’s home to the Elberton Granite Association.  There’s a granite museum.  The high school football stadium is called the Granite Bowl.  They have a Granite Fair, Granite Parade where they crown a Granite Queen (that’s gotta hurt), and a local diner offers deep-fried granite nuggets.  Okay, I made up all that stuff after the part about the Granite Bowl, but you get the idea.  Elberton is into granite.

Not knowing exactly where to find the Guidestones monument, Tom (my son) suggested we try the Granite Museum.  We found that without much trouble, but it was only open from 2-5 p.m., and at this point, it was just past noon, so we decided to kill time by having some lunch.  We could have played it safe (?) by going to the local Wendy’s (yes, even Georgia towns of 4,800 have fast food), but instead we decided to sample some local fare at the place right across the street from the museum, appropriately called the Granite City Restaurant.  GCR appeared to be an old drive-in, with service windows on the parking lot from which no patron was ordering or receiving food, so we headed inside.  It was indeed a former drive-in, as evidenced by the long service counter that separated the dining room from the kitchen, but no one appeared to be using that, either.  Nor did there appear to be any menus or table service, although there were maybe a dozen people in the place, and they were all eating lunch.  As we stood there scoping the place out, looking like the stupid out-of-towners that we were, an older woman, dining alone, said something to us around a mouthful of food that I couldn’t quite decipher.  So now we looked like stupid, hard-of-hearing outsiders.  “Pardon me?”  So she repeated herself.  What she had said was, “They’s a buffet in the back.”  Ah, a buffet.  So that’s where all the chow was coming from.  We graciously thanked her (Californians may be deaf and dumb, but never let it be said we’re impolite) and went into the back portion of the dining room to check out the buffet…

Vegas it was not.  The entire buffet was about six feet long, with a small, elderly woman at the end working the cash register. The limited offerings consisted of:  fried chicken; a glowingly pink meat which I took to be ham, but didn’t look like any ham I’d ever seen before; mac and cheese; fried okra; corn-on-the-cob; steak fries; your choice of biscuits or cornbread muffins; and three or four trays contaning dishes which were completely unknown to me.  Vegetables of some kind… I think.  I couldn’t help but imagine a large, Southern fry-cook laboring over these stainless steel serving trays, large droplets of sweat peppering each dish like a Georgia thunderstorm, making it all even soggier and steamier.  Before I could turn and run, a woman appeared from nowhere and asked, “What can can get you fellas to drink?”  “Uh… Coke, I guess.”  Our fate was sealed, so we grabbed plates and dug in.  Sticking to the foods I could identify (but not the ham– it was so pink), we filled our plates and sat down to lunch. 

It was really pretty good.  The fried chicken was about as tasty as fried chicken gets, moist and tender with a nice crispy coating, and the mac & cheese was passable, although I’ve been spoiled over the years by my wife’s version.  The biscuit?  I wish all biscuits were that good.  My son, a more courageous diner than I, also gave passing marks to the okra.  Still, I kept wondering if the salt in the food was of the iodized variety, or simple fry-cook perspiration…

The nice woman who served the beverages was even kind enough to give us directions to the Guidestones without vibing us as oddball Northerners.   When we left the Granite City Restaurant, we stopped to thank her for her help.  She was on a break, sitting out front on an upturned five-gallon bucket, elbows on her knees, smoking a cigarette.  For me, that image completed our Southern dining experience perfectly.  It was on to the Guidestones…

The Georgia Guidestones can be found atop a small knoll on the east side of GA Hwy 77, nine miles north of Elberton.  Why are they there?  Aside from the convenience factor– if you’re building a large granite monument, where better than the Granite Capital of the World, eh?– no one really seems to know.  Each side of the four large slabs is engraved with a message for mankind, each in a different language.  The message, in English, is as follows:

MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000

IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE

GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY —

IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY

UNITE HUMANITY WITH A LIVING

NEW LANGUAGE

RULE PASSION — FAITH — TRADITION

AND ALL THINGS

WITH TEMPERED REASON

PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS

WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS

LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY

RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES

IN A WORLD COURT

AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS

OFFICIALS

BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH

SOCIAL DUTIES.

PRIZE TRUTH — BEAUTY — LOVE —

SEEKING HARMONY WITH THE

INFINITE

BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH —

LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE —

LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE

 

See what I mean about it being a monument to New Age bullshit?  The sentiment is nice and all, but isn’t it about a thousand years too late?  “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000″?!  “Avoid petty laws and officials”?!  “Guide reproduction wisely”?!  Didn’t those horses leave the barn several centuries ago?  The whole thing sounds like a bad Joan Baez song (as if there were any other kind).

The message is reproduced on the remaining seven sides in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic and Swahili.  God help you if you’re Swedish or Vietnamese, you’re on your own.

No one seems to know exactly who is responsible for its erection, which is why it’s mildly mysterious.  My son, as I have noted, has an acute interest in symbology, and he possesses a breadth of knowledge that rivals Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s.  Want to know something about the Freemasons?  Rosicrucians?  Illuminati?  Opus Dei?  Ask my boy!  Ever wonder why the pyramid with the all-seeing eye is on the back of our dollar bill and what it means?  Tom knows.  He’ll also tell you the ancient origins of any number of iconic cultural symbols, and explain how most of them are really nothing more than likenesses of human reproductive organs.  Or something like that.  He knows this stuff in such excruciating detail that sometimes when he talks about it, my eyes sort of glaze over and I start thinking about this week’s upcoming Dodgers pitching rotation, or inventive ways to make my wife’s cat disappear without arousing her suspicion.  The young man knows his stuff.  The reason the Guidestones piqued his interest is because their origins are an enigma, and assumed by some to be the work of a secret society.  The author of the message is unknown, listed only as “R.C. Christian,” which, as explained on an informational slab set in the lawn nearby, is a pseudyonym…

…or “pseudonyn,” when you’re having your monuments engraved in Georgia…  Tom explained that there’s some speculation that the “R.C.” is a reference to the Rosicrucians, a secret order of mystics dating back to the early 1400′s that had a profound influence on the development of Freemasonry.  Whatever.  Given where they stuck their message to the world, they’re likely to remain a secret.

The infomational slab contains a lot of other fascinating factoids about the monument, like dimensions, total weight, total cubic feet of granite (951!) and other minutiae.  There’s also some explanation of how everything was situated in relation to the path of the sun and the stars and other celestial considerations or some such crap.  I was at least thankful that the word “Gaia” didn’t appear anywhere.

You might have noticed from my photos that the Georgia Guidestones have been pretty thoroughly vandalized by the locals.  While I might not think much of its New Age-ness (people start talking about living in harmony with nature, it makes me want to fire up a chainsaw…), my son and I were both disappointed to find that some disgusting liquid had been thrown on it in several places, and some kids (I hope they were just kids), saw fit to deface it with contrary graffiti.

That’s Tom pointing to a rudimentary sketch of, yes, the sandaled foot of Jesus crushing a pyramid.  My favorite (and it’s a little tough to read) was this literary gem:

That’s right, it reads, “OLIVIA WUZ HEAR”

Reprehensible to be sure, but what can one really expect?  A secret society building a New Age message to the world in the middle of rural Georgia?  Hard to imagine the locals are terribly receptive to the cause.  It might have played better in some place out west like Sedona or Santa Cruz.  Put it there, and you couldn’t have gotten near the thing without walking across a sea of yoga mats.

So it didn’t change our lives, or set us to pondering how efficiently we could wipe out about 6.25 billion people, but it was interesting nonetheless.  As I said, an opportunity to spend an afternoon alone with my only son was a rare and precious thing, and I’ll take that any time I can get it.  Next time maybe we’ll cruise down to Sedona and do a little yoga on the red rocks.  Eat some bulgar wheat.  Hell, they probably have it on the buffet!

The Tea Party (Sacramento version)

For a long time I’ve wondered if there was a political protest that could or would inspire the attendance of the people who matter most in this country, the responsible, productive members of middle-class America.  Protest has long been largely the domain of students, fringies and outright losers who had nowhere else to be, people for whom the mundane daily burdens of job and family were not a concern.  Wednesday’s outpouring of  frustration surprised me just a little bit.  Last minute, I made the decision to head down to the Capitol, just to see if there would be much of a turnout.  I’ve been saying for years that our government’s behavior is frequently so shameless and disgusting it’s a wonder we don’t surround them with torches and demand they do better.  There were no torches (or pitchforks for that matter, and I love a pitchfork) on display Wednesday, but there was a sizable and vocal crowd who let it be known they were deeply unhappy with the policies of their newly-minted Democratic rulers.

Local news accounts estimated the attendance at somewhere near 5,000 people, which seemed a fair guess.  It certainly would have made for robust attendance at any of this year’s dismal Sacramento Kings games.  Fox News was on hand (Neil Cavuto was doing his show live from the site), as well the folks from Pajamas Media.  It was not, as NY Times columnist and e-commie-nist Paul Krugman would have us believe, an “astroturf” event.  This was as grassroots as it gets.  These were not people who have an organization of activists to represent them, and none of them were influenced by some shadowy conservative think tank.  They were frustrated Americans, tired of having their concerns about the fate of the nation ignored by politicians and belittled by the press.  They were well-behaved, enthusiastic and loud.

As usual, the mainstream press got it all wrong in their largely dimissive coverage of the Tea Parties.  These protests weren’t all about taxes.  Look, it can’t be denied that our economy has steamed along quite nicely in years past with much higher tax rates than today’s, but that only accounts for the income tax.  As opposed to the Eisenhower, or even Reagan years, today we are taxed in so many ways, large and small, by so many government agencies, national and local, that The State consumes roughly half our GDP.  So yes, income tax rates are historically low, but the total tax bite hasn’t gone down correspondingly.  But taxes are only part of the Tea Party picture.  These protests were about a fervent, deep-seated unhappiness with a federal government that unabashedly seeks greater power and control over its citizens, an effort that has shifted into overdrive since the Democrats became dominant.  Republicans weren’t much better, they were just bigger liars about it.

The Dems have made it clear that they have little interest in making this economy healthy again.  Their goal is to control as much of the economy as possible.  They believe that investing public money in private companies gives them the moral authority to dictate those companies’ business practices, and in a sense, it does.  Collective ownership of a society’s economic resources, friends, is the very essence of socialism, and that is the path we’re on.  What the federal government is executing isn’t a bailout– it’s a semi-hostile takeover.

Most of us are so stupefied by mindless loyalty to our party we seem unable to even consider that there might be alternative choices.  Neither party stands for what it did fifty years ago.  Read some Hubert Humphrey quotes from the 60′s, and you’d swear he was a conservative, but the typical lifelong Democrat, now seventy-five or eighty years old, is blind to it.  It’s his party, his team, and his only interest is in seeing that his team emerge victorious, regardless of what it stands for.  Republicans aren’t different.  They listen to campaign rhetoric proclaiming devotion to libertarian principles like limited government, then witness six years of unprecedented federal expansion, but they keep voting Republican.  Go figure.  Our inexorable march toward Marxism continues…

Whether the Tea Party movement can maintain momentum or make a difference remains to be seen, but for one day, it was refreshing to see that not everyone has forgotten what made America great.  Free markets.  Free people.  That is the American Way.

Here are a few photos of the more interesting and entertaining signs that were on display:

 

 

And as a native and nearly lifelong Californian, my personal favorite:

Truer words were never spoken…

Now, for a few soundbites…

Listen to the conclusion of our National anthem, which, call me sappy, still never fails to inspire…

Listen to the opening-remarks by my pals, NorCal radio hosts Armstrong & Getty…

Armstrong & Getty, making the crowd a very common sense offer…

A crowd chant that broke out numerous times during the course of the event, vote-them-out…

And finally, the only detractor I saw on the Capitol grounds that day, a single guy on a bike, yelling at no one in particular… counter-protestor

Our Disappearing Freedom, And Why It Matters

For those who might think Libertarians are paranoid when it comes to the issue of government authoritarianism, consider these three recent news items:

1)  The State of California (my home, sweet home) is considering legislation that will prohibit residents from owning dark-colored cars;

2)  In England, local governement is hiring planes with thermal-imaging cameras to see which homes are wasting energy; and

3)  In a Rasmussen poll, 30% of the respondents said they think government should limit the annual pay of athletes and entertainers to a million dollars.

Each of these stories is disturbing on its own, but when you consider that all three occurred in the same week, it serves as a frightening reminder of just how far personal freedom has fallen on the list of things we value in western society.  Is there any aspect of our lives that The State doesn’t want to manage?  Worse yet, is there any level of government micro-management that we’re not willing to accept?

Outlawing dark-colored cars has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas ever cooked up by any legislature anywhere, but comes as no surprise when it’s the California legislature, the most inept and dyfunctional bunch of lawmakers ever gathered under one roof.  This is the same bunch that governs the most prosperous state in the union, yet year after year continues to have the largest deficits.  Concerned as they are about the imminent threat of carbon dioxide production and its propensity to heat up the globe, they’ve come to the conclusion that black and navy blue cars get too hot in the California summer sun, requiring AC units to work harder than those in white or silver cars, thus wasting energy that needn’t be wasted and producing greenhouse gases that needn’t be produced.  And now some Brits have taken that concern so far as to use planes to spy on common citizens!  Those homes and residents that use energy inefficiently have to be identified and made compliant.  Is it really paranoid to be worried about a government that would go that far to insure our compliance?  Where does it end?  If we grant them the authority to dictate what color cars we can own, then it stands to reason that they can tell us the size of our living quarters and how far from our workplaces they can be, or what we eat and how it gets produced.  This isn’t just a  a slippery slope, friends, it’s an Olympic downhill course leading straight to socialist hell.

The entire debate over anthropogenic climate change is hogwash.  Our common use of the phrase “greenhouse gases,” as though the “greenhouse effect” were a proven scientific fact, is foolish and misleading.  The “greenhouse effect” is still an unproven theory, nothing more.  The consensus among the scientific community (which is not nearly as broad as its proponents would have us believe) that excessive CO2 production is overheating the planet is based on politics, not science.  Those who seek to discredit western capitalism and individual liberty have spent the last forty years trying to frighten us into believing that free people and free markets are wasteful, and that their wasteful ways are literally destroying the planet.  From Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968 (hundreds of millions will die of famine!) to the global cooling scare of the ’70′s (we’re entering a new ice age!) to today’s equally silly hypothesis that our reckless consumption is about to render the planet too hot to inhabit (Manhattan and Shanghai will be under water!), the goal has always been the same: curtailing your freedom.  Taking away your choices and making you more compliant with their vision of how life should be lived.  And in every case, their vision is one of state-controlled utopia. 

The Rasmussen poll is a clear indication of just how willing we are to let The State influence our lives.  Does Alex Rodriguez or Lebron James deserve to make in excess of twenty million dollars a year?  Does Tom Cruise or Will Smith deserve twenty million dollars to star in a motion picture?  The answer is yes, if their performance generates the revenue results to justify it.  That’s the beauty of the market.  If you don’t believe entertainers should make that kind of money, don’t patronize them.  Stop going to games, stop watching them on TV, and stop buying $200 sneakers and $100 team jerseys.  Quit going to movie theaters and renting DVDs.  When the revenue stream dries up, prices and salaries will come down accordingly.  The scary thing about the 30% who favor government limitations on income is their monumental ignorance of the market and its relationship to human behavior.  They believe that if Jim Carrey were to make one million per movie instead of twenty, it would leave nineteen million for the rest of us to share in socialist bliss.  The idea that human productivity and achievement are fueled by the promise of personal profit is lost on them, because these are the people who have never produced or achieved.  It never occurs to them that if we take away the profit motive, all the goods, services and money that they feel entitled to would never be produced in the first place.  The free market, and the free people required to make it work have done more to elevate the condition of mankind than any other institution or idea in history.  Nothing else even comes close.  The more we lose sight of that, the closer we get to the old Soviet Russia, watching films approved and produced by The State, and waiting in lines for simple goods like toilet paper or a loaf of bread.

A friend recently sent me this salient quote by Abraham Lincoln, one we would all do well to read and remember. 

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

These are exactly the things today’s government thinks it can and should do.  Who knew Lincoln was such a Libertarian?

Bush’s Departure Leaves A Liberal Vacuum

Why is it that in any discussion of contemporary political issues, progressives (and I’m using that word in kindness) still seem stuck in the Bush Years?  Try to have a substantive debate about anything, and if their positions or candidates are challenged or criticized, the standard liberal fallback response is to hammer Bush.

Here is a fairly typical example.  On an amazon.com forum about Massachusetts’  failing effort at state-run healthcare, a fairly reasonable discussion of the issue was derailed by this posting (feel free to scroll to the end when you get bored– I only included the post in its entirety so you could see how loony some of these people are):

Bush’s Accomplishments As President

Attacked and took over two countries.
Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.
Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
First president in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.
First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in U.S. history.
After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.
Set the record for most campaign fund raising trips than any other president in U.S. history.
In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.
Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in U.S. history.
Set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.
Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in U.S. history.
Set the record for the least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.
Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in U.S. history.
Presided over the biggest energy crises in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
Presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have.
Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind.
Dissolved more international treaties than any president in U.S. history.
My presidency is the most secretive and unaccountable of any in U.S. history.
Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history (the ‘poorest’ multimillionaire, Condoleezza Rice, has an Exxon oil tanker named after her).
First president in U.S. history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt.
Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world.
First president in U.S. history to order a U.S. attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation.
Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in U.S. history.
First president in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the human rights commission.
First president in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the elections monitoring board.
Removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight than any presidential administration in U.S. history.
Rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
Withdrew from the World Court of Law.
Refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.
First president in U.S. history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. elections).
All-time U.S. (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations.
My biggest lifetime campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in U.S. history.
First president in U.S. history to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
First president to run and hide when the U.S. came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1)
First U.S. president to establish a secret shadow government.
Took the biggest world sympathy for the U.S. after 9/11, and in less than a year made the U.S. the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in U.S. and world history).
With a policy of ‘disengagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years.
Fist U.S. president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
First U.S. president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the U.S. than their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated U.S. law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
Failed to fulfill my pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive.’
Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capital building. After 18 months I have no leads and zero suspects.
In the 18 months following the 9/11 attacks I have successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in U.S. history.
In a little over two years created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the U.S. has ever been since the Civil War.
Entered office with the strongest economy in U.S. history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down.

Setting aside for the moment that about half of those proclamations are partially or completely wrong, what in the HELL does it have to do with state-run health care in Massachusetts?  Bush sucked, we all get that.  He likely wasn’t the Antichrist most libs believe, but his presidency was, in many respects, a disaster.  It’s over.  “Bush sucks!” won’t pass for informed debate (as if it ever did).  That government managed medical care always turns out to be more expensive, and more inefficient than the system that preceded it, has nothing to do with Bush or how much he sucked.

One would like to think this is rare, but it’s not.  Criticize anything Democratic or liberal and the response is “Well, Bush sucked.”  Criticize Obama’s  ”stimulus” effort, and they’ll tell you it was Bush’s fault.  He wrecked the economy.  Criticize Obama’s cabinet appointment miscues and they’ll tell you how corrupt Bush and Cheney are and that they belong in jail.  Criticize Obama’s thoughtless joke about the Special Olympics, and they’ll tell you that more developmentally disabled people were born under Bush than at any time in history, so it’s still his fault (okay, I’m probably reaching on that  one).

Libs, the Bush crutch has been kicked out from under you.  Bush’s competence, or lack thereof, is no longer relevant.  Not even a little bit.  Your candidates and your policies have to stand on their own now.  When they’re subjected to scrutiny, don’t get mad, and don’t respond like children.  Engage in a discussion about the issue.  If you can.  If you know anything about the issue.  Which, I think, is the root of their problem. A great many of them never did understand the issues.  All they knew was that they hated Bush, and while it may have gotten them this far, it won’t, and can’t, get them any farther.

Hot Music Tip: Hillbilly Boogie

Okay, enough about politics for the moment, here’s a great music tip, especially for those with a taste for American roots music.  Proper Records, a British label, offers a nice variety of box sets and compilations, sort of a British version of Rhino Records.  One of their compilations I’ve grown mighty fond of is a four-disc set called Hillbilly Boogie, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  I found it at Dimple Records here in Sacramento, but it’s also available on Amazon and elsewhere.

 

 

An outstanding collection of ’40′s & ’50′s boogie-woogie as played by the country artists of the day.  Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Hank Snow, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bill Haley (pre-Comets), The Delmore Bros., Zeb & Zeke Turner.  If you’re a fan of great guitar pickin’, this is a must-have.  Tommy Emmanuel fans will recognize the original Guitar Boogie by Arthur Smith & His Sensational Trio, which has become an Emmanuel standard.  My personal favorite:  Merle’s Boogie-Woogie by Merle Travis, the greatest guitar player who ever lived.

You might not be up for listening to a hundred country boogie songs in a row, but it’s great stuff.  Hillbilly Boogie.  Check it out.