The cure for cancer and arrogance

Environmentalists make an interesting point when they plead for saving large tracts of wilderness to protect endangered plant life arguing that the plants might hold the keys to curing cancer or other illnesses. The same folks favor unfettered abortions ignoring the possibility that we might be killing the future researchers who will discover these cures.

I was just about to start this sentence by typing "radical environmentalists" but I paused for a moment and tried to delineate for myself the differences between an "environmentalist' and a "radical environmentalist" and frankly, I can't think of any. Do you know any issues on which a garden-variety environmentalist and a radical environmentalist will disagree? I don't.

When I lived in California's Mendocino County it was the center of gravity for Earth First!. I got to see a number of Earth First!ers stage various protests. They drove the oldest, most beat up, highest polluting cars to their protests where they screamed that everyone else was killing the planet. I suppose a few hitch hiked around the countryside depending on the kindness of productive individuals.

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Some social chasms that have been growing throughout the last couple of decades in America are beginning to be dramatically exposed with the Obama administration. Things that people would not say in public are now being spoken for all to hear.

Conservative pundits have long charged that liberals harbor some shame or even hatred of America. This bubbled to the surface when Michelle Obama made the comment about being proud of her country "for the first time" during last year's campaign. The president himself expressed a similar sentiment when told a French audience:

In America, there is a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

Where to start? First off, what does he mean by "America"? All Americans? Sounds like nationalistic profiling. Secondly, what does he mean by "Europe's leading role"? When the Balkans were coming apart at the seams, it took the courage of the United States to get the world to react. What has Europe done to curtail Iran's nuclear program? Why is Europe sending "police trainers" and not more soldiers to Afghanistan?

If by "leading" President Obama is referring to Europe's chronically high unemployment, or the Muslim riots in France, or the radical Islamic threat to tear apart the Netherlands, or the fact that French youth see no employment future for themselves, or budget busting healthcare rationing, I see what he means.

But if he is talking about making tough and sometimes unpopular decisions on the world stage and then backing up those decisions with blood and money, I don't see that from any European nation except Great Britain.

The United States, because of our power, will always be unpopular in many circles. We are not a perfect nation. But if you have to choose one country to be the "cop" of the world, who do you choose: the USA, China, or Russia? Those are the options. European leaders don't have the guts to step up to the plate. If we want someone to sit next to us at a United Nations meeting, we can always call the French. If we want someone to hunker down in a foxhole with us, we're usually our own.

Because our nation has had the courage to do what it thinks is right, until now at least, we are often preceived as being arrogant. That is a burden we have to bear. It is not something President Obama should be apologizing for abroad.

I pray that President Obama doesn't mistake his fleeting personal popularity throughout Europe for renewed respect for the United States.

Is it too soon to start the USA death watch? Or is it too late...

When the press musters the nerve to point out that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit $2.3 trillion larger than that projected by the administration over the next 10 years, President Obama responds, "Shucks, no one really knows what's going to happen in the future."

In other words, Obama is saying, "Data-shmata. That's our story and we're sticking by it."

In his second prime time, glacially-paced press conference, Obama made the argument that we need to spend our way back into prosperity. I'll be honest, I've tried to do that in my family with credit cards, and it just doesn't work.

But the press conference wasn't all bad. Obama managed to get rid of the teleprompter. Now he's reading off what looks like an 80's era big screen TV of some sort.

Have you noticed that Obama's presidential campaign seems to continue full bore? He's still conducting "town hall" meetings. He is still keeping his email marketers busy. It looks to me like his handlers are trying to establish a personality cult. I'm just waiting for the day his ardent supporters start calling him, "Dear Leader." The song and the artwork are already in place.

And just like totalitarian regimes around the world stage phony-baloney populist protests and demonstrations, ACORN, Service Employees International Union, and Move-On.org are doing the dirty work in this country (also check out this link). Corporate "news" reports conveniently forget to omit who is planning, funding, and busing folks out to protest in front of companies like AIG, trying to make the "demonstrations" look like spontaneous outbursts of worker rage.

And to add insult to injury, guess who's making money amid all our financial misery.

George Soros.

Where's the outrage over this greedy capitalist's success? Oh, by the way, do you know that the honorable Mr. Soros has a financial career noteworthy for the billions he has made betting against both the dollar and the British pound?

What a guy.

EXTRA! Clothing may protect you from the sun and bugs

L.L. Bean has made some major breakthroughs in the field of outdoor clothing. The company now has two special lines of apparel: SunSmart and Insect Shield Repellant. Apparently a crack team of L.L. Bean researchers discovered that their shirts have a tendency to shade the wearer's torso and prevent mosquitoes from landing directly on his or her skin.

I'm not a scientist, but I think what they are saying is that if you wear one of their shirts—say during a day spent at the beach—you can stay out in the sun for a much longer time without getting burned than if you went bare chested. Further, it seems that if a bug takes sight of you and tries to alight on your skin, the cloth of the shirt will act as some sort of barrier and prevent the insect from actually getting to your skin.

Astounding!

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but the more I think about this, I'm beginning to believe that a wide brimmed hat just might keep your face from getting sunburned.

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With the collapse of our lending system and the knowledge that some AIG traders are receiving million dollar bonuses for essentially engineering this catastrophe, we find our government trying to regulate and legislate against Wall Street greed. Obama and others are talking seriously about restricting pay for corporate executives.

Why is the government trying to reign in greed? Because the United States, as a whole, has turned its back on its commitment to Christian morality. The Bible speaks directly to this in Romans 13:1-3:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you.

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And finally, this is me.

Real March Madness

We get the government we deserve.

At the urging of the Obama administration, wording was put into last month's "stimulus" bill that protected executive bonuses agreed to before Feb. 11, ahem, like those at AIG, for instance. Almost all the Democrats voted for it along with a few Republicans.

Obama and the same Democrats who supported the bill last month are screaming bloody murder about the AIG bonuses this month. Please, can we have some Oscar nominations here?

With the exception of the soon-to-be-re-regulated conservative talk radio, I don't hear anyone going ballistic at this flip flop. Obama, with a straight face, decries the AIG bonuses as do our members of Congress. Cooler heads pleaded for Congress to take the time to read and have a robust debate on the bill. But sorry, we were told, this is such an emergency that we don't have even a couple of weeks to read and debate the bill.

So what does Obama do? The teleprompter-reading-$500,000-book-advance-taking-second-biggest-AIG-money-grabber president heads to the Tonight Show to hobnob with Jay Leno. On the way to the studio—by the way—he stops to fill out his March Madness brackets.

For real March Madness, forget the round ball games; follow what Obama and his Democrat buddies are trying to pull off in DC. I hope we can turn that madness into outrageous anger and direct it to our Democrat-controlled government.

On the bright side, it's taken Obama and the Democrat Congress just two months to do something George Bush was never able to accomplish: make George Bush look like a competent president.

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While this political circus has been going on, the Fed, with some fancy shuffling of IOUs and freshly-minted greenbacks, has pumped $1,000,000,000,000 into our money supply. Say "hello" to hyperinflation. If you got a kick out of worrying about the coming depression, the coming Third World hyperinflation should be pleasing indeed.

You see, the financial gurus that run this so-called system, are desperate to get American consumers spending again. This is what happens when our whole economy is based on us going into ever-increasing consumer debt so we can buy stuff from each other and not be bothered about having to produce anything anymore.

One of the good things about the current recession is that our rate of saving has actually increased. But nooooo, even after decades of deriding us for not saving, central bankers don’t want us to start saving now: we need to spend, spend, spend, borrow more, and spend, spend, spend again.

Does the American electorate care, or even notice? I don't think so.

We get the government we deserve.

Half the nation we used to be

This is so simple and as such it will be quite short.

Over the last couple of years Americans have seen the value of their major investment, their homes, plummet.

Now stocks have dropped in value by about one half.

Many years of wealth creation has been for naught. We have a president who thinks the way out of this predicament is to borrow money and use it to save or create government jobs.

The only way to recover from this historic evaporation of wealth is to get the wealth creating machine—capitalism—geared up and running smoothly again.

And the capitalists among us need to learn the lesson that wealth is created by hard work and innovation, not clever investment devices. The socialists among us need to realize that government spending doesn't create wealth, it just creates a dependent class.

It's going to be hard to bounce back from this one. If anyone has a contrary opinion, I'd like to hear it.

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Addendum: This article appeared on Bloomberg.com after I wrote this blog. It says the same thing but looking at the world situation. However, the Bloomberg article fails to take into consideration the collapse in real estate, so the situation is even worse than they posit.