When they put me in charge of everything...

Goodbye Betty, Goodbye Phoebe, Goodbye Amy

2011-12-31T10:31:00.001-06:00

As is the custom for the cold last week of December, television and radio news programs pulled out the list of famous men and women who died throughout the year.

I was almost ready to hop out of bed the other day when NPR did an audio montage featuring musicians and songwriters we lost in 2011. Listening to it cast me into one of those bittersweet moments when the corner of my lips turn up into a small smile while my heart aches just a bit.

This may sound terrible, but my favorite part of the yearly Oscar show is when the glitterati take time out from honoring one another to remember the movie stars and filmmakers who died throughout the year. Watching the clips from old movies is like thumbing through a family scrapbook and being reminded of long forgotten friends.

I don't know exactly when it started to happen, but gradually the faces of those who passed away during the year have moved from being almost exclusively from my mom and dad's generation, to include many from my generation.

Of course, my generation has long been represented. We've lost many to tragic overindulgences and the inability to cope, like Mama Cass, John Belushi and Richard Brautigan. Others, like John Lennon, were taken from us far too soon.

However, for the longest time these were the exceptions. For every one from my generation who left us early like the shooting star you catch out of the corner of your eye, there were ten from my parents' generation.

I knew them too. I've always loved old movies and music. I'll still watch just about any Cary Grant movie they queue up on AMC and I've been downloading a lot of Louie Armstrong music to my iPhone lately.

When noted artists from my parents' generation died, I could look back and appreciate their entire body of work and see how much they contributed to entertaining us through the years. But, when someone like Jimi Hendrix was included in the montage, it was different. The influence was huge, but somehow incomplete.

Today notable men and women from my generation are beginning to pass on who have had enough time to let us know what they were capable of doing. Steve Jobs gave us an entire digital lifestyle starting with the humble Apple II computer and moving on to the iEverything. Gil Scott-Heron and Phoebe Snow created truly singular music and sounds that both inspired and entertained. (And, for those of us who appreciated Phoebe Snow, there are many things unsettling about losing Amy Winehouse in the same year.)

There are still many from my parents' generation making the year end roster; James Arness, Jackie Cooper and Betty Ford, are a few names included in most of the 2011 lists.

But my generation is catching up fast and very soon we'll be dominating.

Ad sales steer you along the 'Information Superhighway'

2011-12-14T08:28:00.000-06:00

There's an excellent TED talk you should see. Eli Pariser speaks to how the Internet is funneling information to us in a way that's putting us into comfortable little personalized worlds where we're fed only the information that the algorithms presuppose we want to know.

It's the "Information Superhighway" version of marrying your first cousins.

One thing the talk doesn't say is that virtually every editorial or informational decision on the Internet is being made by an adman, or adwoman—although technically it's a digital or software version of an advertising salesman.

My background is in print journalism and I've worked in the newspaper industry. There is a fence between the editorial side and advertising side of a newspaper...or at least there used to be. Ad salespeople are not allowed to meddle in the work being done on the editorial side of the newspaper.

On the Internet, just about every page you see is in someway connected to putting an ad in front of your face with the hopes that you'll click on a link or a banner and ultimately buy something. Editorial content is being digitally micro-managed to ultimately collect advertising revenue.

What makes this scary is that the news and information you are being fed on Google searches and even in your Facebook news feed is being edited and tailored in a way that attempts—very successfully I might add—to predict the kinds of things you want to see.

If you love cute cat pictures or news about professional sports, you are going to be presented with web pages and search results tailored to those interests. You'll never be treated to the absolutely hilarious dog pictures or the important ballet news.

In his TED talk, Pariser discusses how he noticed that Facebook had stopped sending him updates about his politically conservative friends. Admittedly, Pariser engaged his conservative friends less on Facebook than his liberal friends. Because the software running the news feed at Facebook is only concerned about commanding as much of your eyeball time as possible, it edits out information from the people you engage less often—without regard to the importance of what those individuals might be saying.

Ultimately, the decision is made solely to maximize profit from advertising sales.

Here's the paradox: The "Information Superhighway" is pushing us onto off ramps that lead to little side streets where we're surrounded only by the friends, family and information that make us feel comfortable.

When I was growing up we received both a morning and evening newspaper. The morning paper was the San Francisco Chronicle which covered larger regional, national and world news. The evening paper, The Redwood City Tribune, covered our hometown news.

Each day editors at these papers—men and women whose lives were devoted to gathering and reporting the news—made decisions about what they regarded as the most important stories. As space allowed, these stories were organized into newspapers that ended up on my front step. I made the final editorial decision on which stories I read and which stories I ignored. You can't get any more "personalized" than that, can you?

And, I was able to make those decisions absent of any advertising influence, except for the fact that had there been no ads, there wouldn't have been any newspaper to begin with.

It's starting to look to me like the old system was far superior for me and for society.

We are seeing dangerous political polarization all around the world. I can't help but think that as Internet news and information has become increasingly "personalized" it has made this problem worse, and all in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

With Free Trade You Get Egg Roll

2011-11-17T09:55:00.001-06:00

In the movie "You've Got Mail" small book shop owner Kathleen Kelly is talking to Joe Fox, whose large corporate bookstore is causing Kelly's store to go out of business. They have a conversation about Fox's decision to locate a store close to Kelly's.

Joe Fox: It wasn't... personal.

Kathleen Kelly: What is that supposed to mean? I am so sick of that. All that means is that it wasn't personal to you. But it was personal to me. It's personal to a lot of people. And what's so wrong with being personal, anyway?

We're seeing this dynamic all across our nation. International corporations shutter their factories in the United States so they can move somewhere in the world where they can make their products at a lower cost and compete more effectively in the global marketplace.

It isn't personal to the heads of the corporations. If they fail to respond to the demands of the global economy, the futures of their companies are doomed. But to the people who have lost their jobs it is very personal.

I see a problem with the globalization of commerce. To put it simply, factories are allowed to move, but factory workers are not.

Recently a GM plant stopped assembling cars at a plant in Tennessee. Many workers were given the option to relocate to a different state and work at another GM plant. This option isn't available when a plant moves to another country.

A friend of mine is planning to move to Thailand. He has married a woman there, likes the culture and the low cost of living. Since he is moving from the United States, with its much higher cost of living, he has an advantage when he relocates to Thailand.

Throughout history workers have moved to where the jobs are. Agricultural workers follow the crops. Farmers relocate to cities when factories open. But, aside from illegal immigration, this isn't permitted on an international level.

If we're going to have global free trade, shouldn't we also allow for global free movement of workers? When signing a "free trade agreement" with nations perhaps part of the agreement should be to allow for free immigration between each participating nation.

That would address Kathleen Kelly's complaint. If individuals were allowed to immigrate as freely as corporations are allowed to relocate, then globalization would become "personal."

If this idea sounds crazy, think of it this way. There are huge global pressures to keep wages low. Workers in the United States feel these pressures. Their wages do not increase. In fact, in many cases they go down. New workers in automobile plants in the United States are often forced to accept a lower pay scale than workers who are already working at the plants.

Essentially what this is saying to the new workers is, "If you want to work for us, we're going to have to treat you, at least in part, like we would treat workers at an assembly plant in China."

However, the workers don't have the option to live in a lower cost Chinese neighborhood. That's what makes this system "out of whack."

Why not give workers the option to relocate to a foreign country when their factories relocate? You might say, and rightly, that American workers wouldn't do that. But some would. And over the years the number of workers who would be willing to relocate would grow.

But, even more important than this is that it would make world leaders a lot more careful about negotiating "free trade" agreements if they knew free immigration was part of the deal.

As I see it, there is no way around the fact that ultimately free global trade will equalize incomes and standards of living throughout all participating countries. That's probably good for some people, bad for others.

Allowing for free immigration will speed this up and, if nothing else, make the painful process of accepting a lower standard of living within the developed world go by more quickly, like pulling a bandaid off with one quick yank.

By the way, if you remember "You've Got Mail" at least one worker from Kelly's bookstore follows the work and "immigrates" to the corporate bookseller.

Attention Environmentalists: It's the Economy, Stupid

2011-10-14T10:38:00.000-05:00

The problem with liberals is that they mistake the end result for the cause or for the process that leads to the end result.

Simply stated, liberals generally get things backwards.

Recently I wrote, "Our diversity is not our strength. Our strength is our shared values, if any remain. Our diversity is the spice that makes living in the United States a rich experience."

Liberals see the rich diversity in our nation and mistakenly believe diversity itself is the good thing that makes us strong. Here's the truth: Because we have been a nation united in the belief that God has given individuals the right to personal liberty, we are strong enough to allow a diverse group of people to express themselves and coexist peacefully (more often than not) among one another.

Liberals often point to the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…" as a "proof verse" that our strength is our diversity, or our willingness to allow anyone to immigrate to the United States. However, it is the next words that are the most important, "...yearning to breathe free." The diverse group of immigrants this nation opened its doors for was made up of individuals who valued personal liberty.

It is the shared quality of recognizing individual liberty that allows for diversity. Further, the concept of "God-given" individual liberty is a biblical Christian notion. You see, the idea of people being able to freely choose their own destiny is central to the Christian faith. Simply put, a person becomes a Christian by "believing" in Christ.

"Believing" in Christ is not possible unless a person can also choose not to believe in Christ. Without the personal freedom to reject Christ, Christianity cannot exist.

I am not saying that those who have professed to be Christians over the millennia have practiced their faith perfectly. But, if you look at the history of Christianity I believe you will see that Christians have recognized the times when they have erred and the foundational truth that Christianity is a free and unfettered faith in Christ has been true since the days of the apostles.

Without going into great detail, I want to explain why it is important that the founders of our nation recognized that our right to personal liberty comes from God:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The men who signed our Declaration of Independence recognized the ultimate authority of God and since God gave men the right to liberty, men could not take that right away. It is a universal and eternal fact. Even if there is a referendum tomorrow in the United States and a majority votes that man does not have personal liberty, the vote is null and void. Certainly we can be cruel and abrogate one another's liberties but that doesn't mean we don't have the God-given right to liberty, just as when a murderer takes someone's life it doesn't mean that the victim didn't have the right to live.

Humanists—virtually all liberals are humanists as well as many conservatives and libertarians—believe man is the ultimate authority. And, as we have seen many times, what man giveth he can also taketh away. Therefore, recognizing the fact that our right to liberty comes from God is vitally important if we want to maintain our liberty.

Before I move on to what I really want to discuss—which, believe it or not is the economy and the environment—let me capsulize the points I've made so far. First, liberals get things backwards. They think diversity itself is strength while the strength is actually the shared value of recognizing the right of personal liberty, among other shared values. And, personal liberty is a Judeo-Christian God-given right. The Islamic view of Allah does not share this attribute.

But, as I said above the real subject of this is the balance the interaction between our concern for the economy and our concern for the environment. This relationship illustrates another example of liberals getting things backwards.

During my entire adult life, and I'm almost 60 years old, liberals and the mainstream media have been pushing the message that our economic well being is dependent on environmental protection. (We have an Environmental Protection Agency that works like crazy to protect the environment and a Commerce Department that generally makes commerce difficult.)

In fact, the truth is the opposite: Environmental protection is dependent on a strong economy. Simply stated, when people are impoverished, they don't give a damn about the environment. That's why poor people who live on islands will chop down and burn every tree. It is human nature. When we are poor we will destroy our environment in the short term without any regards to the long term implications of our actions. Again, it's human nature. It cannot be changed.

This issue is more important today than it has ever been because our economic well being is more threatened than it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet, we still see liberals investing in "green technologies" that are contrary to the best interests of our economic development.

For example, the federal government has invested billions of dollars in electric cars and has pushed private corporations, like General Motors, to do the same thing. However, it takes a big population of wealthy people willing to spend the money on this technology for electric cars to be viable and given our economic crisis this is a virtual impossibility. The billions of dollars invested, is wasted. Money is also a resource that we must wisely steward.

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." As much as we might want to do everything within our power to make the environment pure, it cannot happen if we are not sufficiently wealthy as a nation.

If I there are any liberal environmentalists still reading this, here's my message: If you really care about the environment, you'll do everything you can to restore material prosperity in our nation, even if on the short term it seems contradictory to your environmental concerns.

On the verge of a UN sanctioned second Holocaust?

2011-09-24T18:59:00.001-05:00

Can we take Palestinian leadership at their word? If so, this effort for statehood is another step toward a second Holocaust. Here's what they've recently said:

"They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state." Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 9/23/2011.

“The future independent Palestinian state will not include a Jewish minority," a top Palestinian official told USA Today on 9/21/2011.

By contrast, here's what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN:

"...the Jewish state of Israel will always protect the rights of all its minorities, including more than 1 million Arab citizens of Israel."

Israel's Knesset currently has 14 Arab members. The list of Arabs who have been elected to the Knesset is long. In fact, Arabs have served on the Knesset since its first session.

It's ironic that while many hope the so-called "Arab Spring" will bring democracy to the Arab Middle East, Arab citizens of Israel have enjoyed democracy since the founding of the Jewish nation.

For there to be legitimate negotiations between two parties, both must have something to give, as well as benefits to receive.

The only things the Palestinians have to offer Israel are

to recognize the Jewish state and
to commit to being peaceful neighbors with Israel.

It is clear that the political leaders of the Palestinian people are committed to the destruction of Israel and driving Jews out of the Middle East. Why are we pushing Israel to negotiate with the current Palestinian leadership? And even worse, why is the United States attempting to force Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians even before the Palestinians are willing to sit down and negotiate in good faith?

Further, Abbas' use of the phrase "final answer" should send chills up the spine of every civilized person.

As much sympathy as many of us have for average Palestinians who are living in the most difficult conditions, we must not let that sympathy allow us to overlook the murderous, anti-semitism of the Palestinian leadership.

Nor should we ever forget that Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East and the only true friend the United States has in that region.

http://weaselzippers.us/2011/09/23/abbas-we-will-never-recognize-a-jewish-state/

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/what-plo-ambassador-said-about-removing-jews-palestinian-state_594117.html

Trading with the Enemy

2011-07-06T11:32:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal headline reads, "Cisco Poised to Help China Keep an Eye on Its Citizens."

Tech giant Cisco is providing much of the hardware that the Chinese city of Chongqing (oh, if that were only an allowable Scrabble word) needs to rig up a network of 500,000 cameras officials say they need to fight crime.

The name the Chinese have given the project pretty much guarantees that the Chinese are really up to no good. They're calling the installation of 500,000 spy cameras, "Peaceful Chongqing." As an armchair China watcher over the years, I've learned that whatever name the Communist Chinese give a project, it's a safe bet that the truth is exactly the opposite.

For example, the purpose of the "Cultural Revolution" was to destroy Chinese culture. The "Great Leap Forward" was a huge step backwards. You get the point. The "Peaceful Chongqing" project would probably be better served by a moniker like "The Project to Terrorize, Intimidate and Eliminate Dissidents."

The fascinating aspect of Cisco's participation is that the U.S. company has made its gazillions on the Internet, which Chinese officials—if they had their deepest and darkest wishes—would like to see just wither away.

Of course, Cisco isn't alone in its pursuit of Chinese cash. Legions of American and European companies are bidding against one another for "lucrative" Chinese contracts. However, it has to be obvious to any intellectually honest observer by now that China doesn't want to participate in world commerce and political discourse, the country wants to dominate world commerce and political discourse. And, western companies are low balling each other to win the contracts that will eventually provide China with the infrastructure it needs to get the job done. Google, to its credit, at one point turned its back on China over the issue of search results censorship.

The situation demonstrates a weakness of capitalism. Anyone who reads more than a sentence or two that I write knows that I think that capitalism is by far the best economic system. However, I believe that capitalism originally developed in a culture firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics. Over the last several decades that foundation, although never perfect, has eroded to a point where it is all but gone.

I don't believe there are very many powerful contemporary capitalists who realize what will happen if, to put it bluntly, China wins. All the personal and commercial liberties that are the basis of modern capitalism will eventually go away. China will contract with Western companies only as long as it needs to. We already know that one of the big requirements China often places on contracts with Western firms includes the transfer of vital technologies.

Again, as an armchair China watcher, I haven't yet heard the Communist Party leadership disavow adherence to Communist principles. The country's opening up to Western commerce will last only as long as it serves the Communists' interests.

Vladimir Lenin said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Cisco and many other Western firms are today's rope salesmen.

Fat folks need something as cool as that striped flag the gay guys have

2011-05-20T13:00:00.000-05:00

Let's consider the government response to two epidemics: Aids and obesity.

In the 1980s newspapers and television news programs were full of stories about the AIDS epidemic. Similarly today, the media are rife with articles about the mushrooming obesity epidemic.

The two health problems are similar in the fact that they both, to a very large degree, are caused by behaviors. Overeating in the case of obesity and male homosexual practices in the case of AIDS. Of course, intravenous drug with shared needles is also a common source of spreading the virus that leads to AIDS.

Not for a moment do I want to deny the seriousness of AIDS and all the heartbreak and tragic loss of life it has caused. I just want to look at the dissimilar ways the government has reacted to the AIDS epidemic and the obesity epidemic.

Today, at virtually every level of government—local, state and federal—there are massive campaigns to change the food people eat. To put it frankly, government agencies don't want people to eat the foods they enjoy: fast food, sweets, etc. They want Americans to change their behavior with regards to food. Essentially advocates like Michelle Obama and others are saying, "Hey, why don't you guys just start eating salads? They're a lot less fattening."

I don't think I would be stretching my point to say that some local governments are actively taking measures they hope will ultimately put fast food restaurants out of business. And, I suspect that the diet police at all levels would be overjoyed it this were to ever happen.

In contrast, government agencies have never proposed that male homosexuals change their behavior with regards to the type of sexual relations they enjoy. I don't think I've ever heard one federal official say, "Hey, why don't you guys just start having heterosexual sex instead? It's a lot safer."

The government response to AIDS was to encourage "safe homosexual sex" and invest billions in research to find a cure. Again, don't misinterpret what I'm saying. I'm glad that effective treatments have been developed over the years.

But, there is no denying the fact that both of these public health problems stem from human behaviors that when changed, would dramatically decrease the incidence of disease.

If the government were to take the same approach to obesity that it has to AIDS, it would be investing billions to find a medical cure that would allow people to consume fatty foods and sweets and not gain weight.

It's interesting that both of these "epidemics" are directly related to what must be the two biggest human urges: having sex and eating. I think one of the main reasons the government's response has been different is because fat people are not at all politically organized, while homosexuals have a lot of political power.

If America's fat folks could just get an emblem as eye catching as that multicolored flag the gays have adopted, then maybe we could get a low fat bacon cheeseburger that tastes good.

I'm not a "Birther" I'm a "Birth Certificater"

2011-04-23T10:07:00.004-05:00

All in all, I believe Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Planting newspaper accounts to make it seem he was born in the United States when he was, in fact, born elsewhere is highly improbable.

However, I want to see his birth certificate. Why? Simple. He doesn’t want me to see it.

When someone is keeping something secret, it’s only human nature to want to find out what it’s all about. There are legions of pundits and political operatives who want to convince the American public that the people who are fighting to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate are either idiots or racists.

I might be an idiot, but I’m not a racist. Further, even if I am an idiot, wanting to know as much as possible about the man who is president of our nation is not idiocy.

Until President Obama proves otherwise by releasing the actual birth certificate that was issued at the time of his birth, I have to assume that he’s hiding something. If I had to guess I suppose it would either say that his race was white or his religion was Muslim.

Also, the president who campaigned on “transparency” seems shrouded in mystery. As the copywriters like to say he “exploded” onto the national scene virtually overnight. He was an unknown Illinois state senator with a penchant for voting “present” who served part of a single term as a member of the United States Senate and the next thing you know he’s in the White House.

He supposedly sat in Reverend Wright’s church for 20 years but never heard any of the preacher’s anti-American rants. If he was the sort of churchgoer who only attends on Easter and Christmas, I could believe that. But Barack Obama said Reverend Wright was like family to him. Something doesn’t jibe.

President Obama refuses to release his college transcripts. Again, for a president who says he values transparency, why? There must be things noted within those records that he doesn’t want the American public to know.

It seems to me that Barack Obama and his political handlers have worked very hard to obscure his origins. Although Obama lived in the same neighborhood as unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, served on a prominent board with him and had his political career kicked off in Ayers’ living room, Obama has always denied any real knowledge of, or friendship with the man.

American voters gave Obama a pass on all these issues the first time around. We are a people who like to take others at their word, so when candidate Obama and his handlers said he was just a regular guy with an odd name who held traditional Christian values, voters believed it. Further, to question the (Democratic) party line was tantamount to racism, and no one wants to be considered a racist.

As the American political machine revs up for the 2012 presidential election, let’s hope that the public and the press vet President Obama and his Republican opponent fully and fairly. We have a right to know the background, temperament, tendencies, religion and philosophy of the man or woman who sends our youth into war and determines our economic future.

Regarding these Arab uprisings: Don't get your hopes up

2011-03-25T23:32:00.003-05:00

The unrest in the Arab Middle East underscores the superiority of Israel and why that small nation deserves the full support of the United States.

While angry citizens in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Jordan and Morocco rise up against a panoply or dictators and “kings,” Israel has been peacefully changing governments through the democratic process for some six decades.

Israel is an island of civilized modernity surrounded by a sea of stone age tribal territories.

Certainly there are a lot of hard working Arabs who live in these unstable countries who want better lives for themselves and greater freedoms. Many have immigrated to the United States and have become valued and productive members of our society. However, as we saw in Iran, hardline Islamists rush in to fill the power vacuum when the local Arab strongman gets pushed aside, and they play the game for keeps.

Through many Democratic and Republican administrations the United States has pledged to stand on the side of democracy. Our loyalty to Israel will test this commitment.

Today there is no reason to suspect that a so-called Palestinian state will be anything other than a repressive regime controlled by Islamists. When the United States pushes Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians we weaken the only true democracy in the area and pave the way for the establishment of another Iran or Syria. Such a state will do everything it can to destroy Israel and repress its own people if they dare to question the ruling class.

By fomenting hatred toward Jews and Israel, these repressive regimes remove the focus from themselves. Blaming all the ills of the world on the “Jews” takes the pressure off their backward and corrupt political and economic systems. It’s an ancient tactic.

Further, I believe any hope we might allow ourselves that today’s “revolutions” in these countries will result in less repressive and more democratic counties is just a pipe dream. As Westerners we have an almost built in notion that a popular uprising will lead to progressive changes. We need to set that aside when we look at what is happening in the Arab Middle East.

In many ways Arabic nations were more progressive and ready to engage the world in a positive way a thousand years ago than they are today. Earlier this year Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock” quipped that since the invention of democracy, Greece has been “coasting.”

Since they exported Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe in the 10th century, you could say the same thing for the Arab world.

Huge corporations: My best friends

2011-03-14T13:47:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that people who are critical of our economic system believe to a large extent that producers have an unfair advantage over consumers. They think that corporations—a word that critics of free enterprise do everything they can to sully—essentially hold all the cards.

Sometimes it might appear that way, but when you start to assemble a list of large companies that have gone out of business you realize that consumers do, ultimately, wield sufficient power to balance the equation.

Consider Blockbuster. Okay, technically it’s not out of business yet, but when you roam the corridors of corporate America shouting, “Bring out your dead,” Blockbuster is definitely going to get tossed into your cart.

At one time Blockbuster seemed to dictate what we would pay for video rentals. Remember all the late fees? Eventually consumers moved on to more appealing video delivery companies.

There is a natural ebb and flow in the economic contracts between consumers and suppliers. There are times when producers seem to have the upper hand. Corporations can charge a hefty price for their products when they make an innovation that gives them clear superiority over their competitors. We see this especially in technology and pharmaceuticals.

However, the competition soon catches up and then more power goes to consumers who can be picky about price points and various competitive features between products.

My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. This little machine was the world’s first computer to sell over one million units. Despite this, the company is defunct today. Consumers walked away from it.

That little computer by the way, cost $300 when it was introduced in 1980. That would be about $850 today. This was a computer that had less than 20 kilobytes of memory. Yes, 20K. Consider the computer that $850 would buy today.

A critic might say that computers are more powerful and relatively less expensive today because of technological innovations. This is, of course, true. But, run the entire scenario through your mind. How long could producers get away with making and selling a computer with 20K memory for $300. Not very long. (The Soviets tried producing consumer goods using that tactic and you can see where it got them.)

In other words, consumer demand for those low power computers dried up. Consumers wanted more for their money. This is what drives innovation.

I’m old enough to remember when Pan Am was “the” international airline to fly. I suppose that most people today only know the corporation for the small appearance it makes in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, “Catch Me If You Can.” It seemingly controlled international air travel.

Today, it’s a very interesting chapter in commercial airline history.

Maybe the best example of consumer power involves the Coca-Cola company. Can you imagine a more powerful global corporation than Coca-Cola? I don’t think so, yet all its corporate muscle couldn’t sell consumers on “New Coke.” The company took a major bath on that product.

If you still think that corporations are all powerful, I suggest you go start your own corporation and see how far you get trying to manipulate consumers. Oh, but you say that you’re talking about big corporations, not little startups.

Okay fine, but try to get big by ignoring consumer demand. Then, once you are big, try to stay that way by ignoring consumer demand.

So far that strategy hasn’t worked so well for AOL, Newsweek, Hummer or Woolworth’s.

'Anchor baby' problem solved

2011-02-26T11:16:00.000-06:00

The immigration problem caused by “anchor babies” has created a great deal of controversy lately. I believe I have a solution to this thorny issue that should please both sides of the debate and help alleviate other social problems as well.

When an illegal immigrant, or “undocumented” immigrant if you prefer, comes to this country and gives birth to an “anchor baby”—a term, by the way which has nothing to do with the baby’s physical appearance, but is used to communicate the fact that the family’s residence becomes more “anchored” in the United States by virtue of the child—we should allow that child, when he or she becomes a teenager, to decide whether or not to deport his or her parents.

In my experience, the vast major of teenagers would kick their parents out of the country if given the chance. With my approach to this problem, federal immigration authorities are no longer the “bad guy” so I don’t think there’s much room for anyone to complain.

Yes, you say, but what about those families where the relations between their teenage sons and daughters are sufficiently amicable that the teenagers would not deport their parents? In those cases, and I anticipate this to occur only very infrequently, the parents must have some secret piece of child rearing knowledge that could benefit us all.

These people should be given jobs where they more or less raise our children for us. They can work as nannies and maids, for example. And fortunately, we already have this part of my system largely in place.

Problem solved.

Why not make OJ and Lindsay Lohan cellmates?

2011-02-24T07:12:00.000-06:00

~~Lindsay Lohan is just crying out for help.~~
Lindsay Lohan is just crying out for jail time.

Wherein I turn a 53-word Facebook status update into a fully realized 524-word essay full of important insights.

2011-02-23T09:39:00.000-06:00

As I searched for good and important subjects for this blog, I discovered a fertile source of material that has, to date, been mostly unexplored by serious writers: my recent Facebook status updates.

For example, yesterday I posted the following:

I got really upset today when I heard that Americans drink so many bottled waters every year that the bottles, when laid end to end, would stretch around the world 100 times. It mostly bothered me that we don’t live on a bigger planet so people couldn’t make this kind of stupid comparison.

After I deftly crafted those two sentences, I copied and pasted them into that long and thin “What’s on your mind” rectangle and pressed “share.” I then sat back and waited for the “LOLs” and smiley face icons to appear.

I was quite disappointed.

Only one person responded, my BcFF (best childhood friend forever) and she said this:

Check out the artist Chris Jordan...similar topics and some really interesting work.

I did check out the artist Chris Jordan. His work is critical of American consumerism. I now think that my BcFF didn’t read the second sentence of my post. That suspicion and the fact that—aside from the aforementioned single ill-conceived response—my post so far remains bereft of responses, I feel I need to develop this theme somewhat further and, as I sit here thinking about it, this will naturally lead to a whole series of blogs based on my misunderstood, or overlooked, cleverly worded Facebook status updates.

However, let me set my introductory comments aside for a moment and explain this specific, hilarious status update.

You see, the circumference of the earth is almost 24,902 miles. The water bottle statement implies that a train made from our plastic bottles would stretch for 2,490,200 miles. As a side note, I might mention that I think the original statement would have been even better had they used the other old standby impressive distance comparison: “to the moon and back.”

The one-way distance to the moon is 238,857 miles, so they could have said that if laid end-to-end, we use enough plastic water bottles in a year to stretch from the moon and back more than five times. Personally I prefer the “moon and back” comparison because it always reminds me of Tom Hanks’ heroics in, “Apollo 13.”

Even more than that however, I am generally tired of these types of comparisons and truly wished we lived on a planet such as Jupiter. The circumference of Jupiter at 279,118 miles is, interestingly enough, even further than the distance between the earth and the moon. So, if we lived on Jupiter I could actually turn this statement against the environmentalists and say something like, “You know, if stretched end to end, all the plastic water bottles we use in a year wouldn’t even stretch around Jupiter 10 times!”

That would be telling them!

However, if you paid any attention at all in your high school science classes, you’ve probably already picked up on an even more salient fact: there is virtually no water on Jupiter, therefore no water bottles.

I rest my case.

Damn You Ken Jennings

2011-02-21T08:35:00.000-06:00

Only humans use tools.

Only humans mourn their dead.

Only humans can play Jeopardy.

Only humans bother listing things they mistakenly believe only they can do.

Need a (cheap) life coach? Try Pythagoras

2011-02-17T08:33:00.000-06:00

The self-help shelves at the book store are overflowing. Demand for "life coaches" is at record levels.

Save your money. Take some free advice from a guy who was in his prime about 2500 years ago, Pythagoras.

We all know the name. And depending on your attitude toward math you probably either love him or hate him. No one can avoid A² + B² = C² . That fact alone should tell us that Pythagoras was a man we should listen to. The Greek philosopher and mathematician came up with this truth almost three millennia ago and we're still teaching it in school.

I don't think that will be true for any of the self-help authors who are pumping out today's bestsellers.

Last night I was reading a general interest book on math and the author spent a few pages outlining some biographical information on Pythagoras. Pythagoras took on students. He impressed upon them a few simple disciplines. You can fire your life coach if you adopt these for yourself.

First he made them establish a strict routine for going to bed at night and getting up in the morning. That's simple enough, although it's often hard to do.

But, when you combine this with two little rhymes Pythagoras had his students memorize and obey, it can be life changing.

Commit this to memory:

As soon as you awake, in order lay

the actions to be done in the coming day.

Don't hit the snooze button. Don't lie in bed day dreaming. Lay out what you need to accomplish. If you're an iPhone person, get yourself an app and enter all "the actions to be done in the coming day."

Pythagoras then had his students "close the loop"—if I can borrow a phrase from the days when I worked as a quality control engineer in the electronics industry—with another short rhyme they were required to memorize and recite at the end of the day:

Allow not sleep to close your eyes

Before three times reflecting on

Your actions of the day. What deeds

Done well, what not, what left undone?

Before you nod off at night, make an honest evaluation of what you were able to accomplish from the list of actions you laid out for yourself in the morning. Note the qualitative aspect of this evaluation. What did you do well? What did you do, but perhaps poorly? Then, of course, what did you fail to do?

For many of us, our days look more like this flow chart than the disciplined approach to life that Pythagoras instilled in his students.

I don't expect my legacy to last nearly as long, or have any impact like A² + B² = C² , but maybe if I start my days with a clear understanding of the actions I need to take, and spend a few moments at night to honestly reflect on my day, I will be a better person and have more to offer my family and friends.

I don't suppose they had business cards back in the days of Pythagoras. But if they did, he could have listed "life coach" along with mathematician and philosopher. And, I think his rules to guide our relationship to the tasks of our daily life are just as enduring as his formula that defines the relationship of the sides of a right triangle.

Shameless attempt to gain page views

2011-01-20T08:03:00.000-06:00

Anne Hathaway's catwoman repeals health care law as Michelle Obama's new designer gown clings to Hilary Duff who claims she's not pregnant.

Facts, Fiction and Tuscon

2011-01-13T18:19:00.000-06:00

Facts are neither Republican nor Democrat, conservative nor liberal. Here are some facts regarding the tragic killing and injuring that occurred in Tucson, Arizona.

The killer, Jared Loughner, is a mentally ill homicidal maniac. He’s not a Republican or a Democrat and according to a person who knew him well, he didn’t watch television news or listen to talk radio.

Immediately after the incident, many liberals and Democrats linked the tragedy to intense and combative political discussion. There is no factual basis from which this connection can be made, yet this line of “reasoning” continues to be forwarded and legislation is being discussed that would in some case temper our freedom of speech.

Various law enforcement agencies were called to deal with Loughner’s erratic and threatening behavior over the last few years. He was expelled from the local junior college. He was denied entry into the military because of his mental instability.

Even though one of Loughner’s classmates clearly identified him as a mass murderer in the making, not enough flags were raised to get his name on the list that would have prevented Loughner from legally purchasing a gun. Why have a list like this if a character who has repeated run-ins with the law doesn’t get his name added?

Over the last few decades liberals, including the ACLU, have made it far more difficult to take a mentally ill person off the street. At the same time budget pressures have prompted local governments to make cuts or stem the growth of public mental health agencies.

Reforming our mental health system, improving communication between law enforcement agencies regarding people with potentially dangerous mental health issues and upgrading our “no-sell” firearms list seem like the issues that our lawmakers should begin to discuss. Trying to figure out a way to decrease the vitriol inherent in our political debate is a waste of time. Politicians can do that, in large measure, on their own without any legislation.

As voters we should insist that our elected officials deal with the facts and not pander to our emotions. That simple change would move our nation forward.

When there's no value, there's no value

2010-05-12T16:47:00.014-05:00

Here's a recent Facebook status of mine:

For people to prosper, they need to create real value. Ultimately neither redistribution nor speculation creates real value. Real value only comes through economic enterprise and hard work. Those are the lessons these last couple of years of economic turmoil should teach us.

Several friends commented on it. After I originally had the thought, it seemed painfully obvious to me. The following is a note I sent to a friend that adds a few details:

Do you remember when Nixon took the nation off the gold standard in 1971? At the time economists all said that the real value underlying the currency was the nation's ability to produce.

In those days we we still had a fairly strong manufacturing sector. Today, as we all know, manufacturing has eroded away to a tragic degree, and at best we are a service based economy.

I don't think we can base the value of the dollar on services.

The only bright light in this scenario is that—for now—the dollar might be seen as a safer currency than most of the others. However, when the world realizes that the real value of any currency is the ability of the nation to produce, we might see a huge worldwide collapse of the dollar and other currencies and rampant inflation.

We have drifted so far away from governance, commerce and banking based on the notion of value that it may take a huge worldwide financial shakeup to put the system back on track.

Adam Smith talked about the economy being guided by "an unseen hand." That hand may soon slap us silly.

Sorry I had to be the one to tell you, but now you can't say you weren't warned.

Old World Plagues with New World Incompetence and Immorality

2009-12-12T11:41:00.000-06:00

Without anyone taking notice, we’ve become a nation with a privileged and corrupt ruling class and a permanently entrenched bureaucracy. It’s like we’ve adopted the worst elements of the British class system and the French civil service system.

I could enumerate political scandals all day long, but let’s just take the most recent one as an example. Senator Max Baucus hooked up with a staff member. He then went on to nominate her for federal prosecutor in Montana. In the meantime the woman, Melodee Hanes, was meeting with Baucus’s divorce attorney as the attorney was plotting the senator’s strategy to dump his wife.

When things started to look even too ugly for Baucus, Hanes withdrew her name for the position in Montana and slid into a job at the Justice Department. Does anyone think that her, ahem, connection with Baucus has nothing to do with her ability to get a high-paying government job?

The nation has been gleefully following the details of Tiger Woods’s infidelity. At least Woods had enough character to step away from his profession to try to put his family life back together. How often does this happen in politics? Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned, but I suspect that was more because he was involved with illegal prostitution. Had he been a garden variety adulterer, he would have probably dug in his heels like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

There are dozens of pundits today saying that Baucus’s cheating doesn’t matter. This is the same reaction many, if not most, had when Bill Clinton was found to be an adulterer for the umpteenth time. I ask one simple question: Why do we think that politicians who have broken their vows to their wives and husbands won’t also turn their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution?

We keep returning these people to office. We have developed a class of career politicians who expect to hold office until they retire. And, on the slim chance they lose their office, they slide easily into lobbying jobs and onto boards of directors. It’s just a House of Lords by another name.

When I was younger and thinking about career paths, the predominant attitude toward government jobs was that they paid less than the private sector, but they were more secure. In other words, government workers accepted somewhat lower wages in exchange for greater job security.

In the last couple of years the number of government jobs has exploded and the average government worker now makes $70,000 per year. The average private sector worker makes $40,000 per year. With this pay differential and the security of a government job, where do you think most people are going to want to work?

How did this situation get turned upside down? Blame the new ruling class. As we become more dependent as a nation on the federal government, we are far more likely to return the same people back to Washington: congressmen and senators who won’t rock the boat and derail the gravy train, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphorical cliches. People are adverse to change, especially if their jobs depend on things remaining the same. Allow those public employees to unionize and you have a recipe for disaster.

And that’s what we have. A disaster.

Wherein I offer the shortest and most insightful blog ever on our current president, Barack Hussein Obama

2009-10-29T16:49:00.001-05:00

What a moron.

Obamacare for Everything

2009-09-19T08:48:00.009-05:00

It looks like the feds want to bring Obamacare to ISPs by controlling what they allow on their networks. I was reading some comments and I want to share one in particular because I have heard this sentiment several times in the last few days. The person commenting was saying that increased regulation is good and difficult to argue with because, "we are living through the bleak aftermath of an economic collapse created by too little regulation."

First let's quickly examine the main presupposition underlying this statement, that the current recession was caused by "too little regulation." That's like saying automobile accidents are caused by too few cops on the road. No, highway accidents are caused by drivers screwing up. Behind so much of the current push for bigger government is the idea that with just the right committees, advisers, and regulations we can fix all of our problems, or in other words, create a utopia. You see, we have really smart people in government right now, and we can trust them to come up with the correct "plans" for our economy.

If you want to see the ultimate outcome of a planned economy, look no further than Cuba. They have committees, advisers, and regulations to cover everything. I will trade the cyclical recessions of the free market system for the chronically under productive misery of a government regulated and planned economy any day.

I don't think this comparison is unfair because most reporters and commentators have missed a major theme of Obamacare for the economy. President Obama has a vision of what he believes the US economy should look like and he is implementing "plans" to realize his vision. The big issue at the moment is healthcare, 1/6 of our GDP. He thinks it's all wrong the way it is now. Whatever you believe about the "government option," no one can argue that Obama wants to establish a myriad of government panels to guide doctors and hospitals how to best do their jobs.

The assumption here is that the people who are actually doing the work are completely ignorant about how to best do their jobs. Doctors are always ordering the wrong tests. Hospitals have no idea how to run their business. Private insurers are bloated by inefficiency and greed. But committees in Washington will (the heavens open bathing us all in pure white light) be able to guide these poor fools to the truth.

This is just a continuation of what we have already seen. Obamacare applied to the auto industry resulted in the sacking of the GM's CEO and is pushing automakers (heavens open again) into business models centered around environmentally sensitive cars. This will be the ultimate demise of the US auto industry. Rather than let the marketplace guide auto production, Obama insists that his vision of the green future must guide production.

Four legs good, two legs bad. Planned economy good, market economy bad.

Look, I don't know how much clearer President Obama could make this. He repeatedly lectures the American people telling us that our future lies in "green" industry. If we get to this so-called "green" economy via market forces, fine. But if anyone, Obama or any future president, tries to regulate and muscle the American economy into this utopian green vision, it will be a disaster.

Pay attention the next time President Obama speaks on these issues. I want to give you a simple listening guide. First President Obama will declare how he is a firm supporter of the "free market system" and believes it's the "best system to guide our economy." Most people stop listening at this point, relieved that President Obama is a free market guy.

But next he'll start outlining all the ways he thinks government should curb, regulate, and direct the "free market." Forget about the pro-free market rhetoric, this gives us a much better clue as to what Obama really believes.

Fixing the British Healthcare System in My Sleep

2009-08-19T16:30:00.003-05:00

It turns out one of the ways the bureaucrats in England think they can improve their National Healthcare System is by somehow getting NHS workers to stop calling in sick so often.

Here's the way it breaks down:

NHS employees on average call in sick 10.7 days each year. This is one full day above the 9.7 day average for all public sector employees. (Gee, why do I suspect that government employees in England get 10 paid sick days per year?)

In case you're wondering, private sector employees in England take 6.4 sick days each year.

Officials are looking at all sorts of health and wellness issues and scheming expensive ways to bring down the NHS employee sick days.

I can save them the trouble. Here's the answer: privatize the healthcare system. The statistics indicate that this move alone should bring healthcare workers sick days down to about 6.4 per year.

You don't have to thank me.

More Moveon.org Disinformation

2009-08-14T09:19:00.003-05:00

In response to Moveon.org's TOP FIVE HEALTH CARE LIES—AND HOW TO FIGHT BACK:

1. Of course President Obama doesn’t want to euthanize your grandma. (Although by his own words, he might prefer she take pain pills rather than get an operation.) However, do you want government-backed end-of-life counseling when there will certainly be overwhelming pressures to keep healthcare costs down? The pressure on the poor and handicapped to make themselves less of a burden on society will be powerful.

2. Just because the bill has “words” that say it will not outlaw private insurers doesn’t guarantee there will continue to be private insurers. If one of the options is a public “health insurance” that has the full faith and credit of the US government behind it, not to mention Congress and the President, it will eventually put private insurers out of business. In candid moments lawmakers say this very thing.

3. Of course President Obama doesn’t want Soviet-style rationing. Actually, the Soviets didn’t want it either. There is rationing with any system. The question is: would you rather have the free market allocate the resources, or federal bureaucrats? I agree our healthcare system must be improved. I don’t believe it needs a total redesign.

4. True, Obama is not secretly plotting to cut Medicare. He is very open about it. Anyone who believes the government can cut $200 billion out of Medicare without reducing the care it provides is dreaming. And if you do believe this, by the way, you are signing on to the proposition that the government that allowed this “fraud and abuse” in the first place is now suddenly capable of running a lean-mean healthcare machine. Right.

5. When the government passed the income tax, lawmakers guaranteed no one would ever pay more than six percent. When they passed social security they guaranteed no one would ever pay more than two percent. Medicare is not funded. Bush’s Medicare drug reform is already under-funded. Whenever a politician from either party says something will pay for itself, grab your wallet. Can we please learn something from history?

And finally, puleeeeze, Moveon.org? Gimme a break.

Obama's Fight for, er I mean against, Civil Liberties

2009-08-07T10:14:00.003-05:00

Bush waged his war on terrorists. Obama wages his war on dissidents.

If the truth may be told, both “wars” threaten civil liberties. Bush’s war threatened the civil liberties of terrorists and a small group of ACLU-type terrorist sympathizers. Obama’s war threatens anyone who opposes his policies and has the courage to say so publicly.

We live in an imperfect world. Which civil-liberty-threatening war do you prefer?

My wife said this morning that for the first time she was “scared” by what Obama and the Democrat operatives were doing to silence the political opposition. As I read through various news stories and political commentaries, the word “terrified” started popping up. Something unprecedented is happening in this nation.

Our president started his career as a community organizer. But when communities of Americans who hold moderate and conservative political views “organize” it is suddenly a bad thing. If a community of doctors, or (shudder) insurers, organize it is evil.

Get ready for a mega-dose of the truth: whether we leave our health care system primarily in the hands of private insurance companies, or we go entirely to a government-run single-payer system, costs are going to increase.

Here’s the difference:
The government-run system will cover increased costs by raising your taxes and rationing care, although it will never be called “rationing.” The insurance-based system will cover increased costs by raising premiums and rationing care, although it will never be called “rationing.”

These facts are undeniable. The advantage of the system based on private insurance is that it can have the element of competition injected into it, which will tend to decrease the rate of premium hikes. There is nothing to check increased costs in the government system. In fact, citizens will perceive health care to be “free” and we know what happens when people think things are free.

Let’s put all our cards on the table: Has any federal program ever been known for saving us money?

Believe it or not, sometimes in private industry middle managers lose their jobs to streamline corporate operations. How often do mid-level civil service system bureaucrats get laid off? Does anyone locked into the civil service system ever lose his job except for extreme malfeasance?

What should we do? Level the playing field. Give employees the money that went to their insurance and let them spend it as they see fit. Give the self-employed the same tax advantages businesses receive when they purchase health insurance.

Build more medical schools and nursing schools. Encourage more use of nurse practitioners.

If the uninsured are clogging up our emergency rooms for minor medical problems, establish an adjunct to the emergency room that is staffed by nurse practitioners who can handle minor problems.

Limit malpractice settlements to actual damages. Eliminate punitive damages. When doctors screw up badly, take away their licenses. That should be punitive enough and send a message to the medical profession.

Give patients access to some quality of care rating system for physicians and hospitals. The fast food place where I grab a burger has a health department rating posted for everyone to see. Are doctors and hospitals any less critical to my well being?

Adios American Pie

2009-06-13T12:52:00.003-05:00

In Detroit, a rustbelt city busy waving bye-bye to the auto industry, there are plans to split the burg into a collection of small urban centers separated from each other by countryside. This reverse-supersizing is already well on the way to implementation in Flint, Michigan.

I remember touring some Mayan ruins several years ago. A pyramid and a few other impressive stone structures stood restored surrounded by neatly trimmed lawn. I climbed to the top of the pyramid and peered out over the jungle. The guidebook described how the city originally spread for miles in every direction. But for reasons unknown to us, the Mayans abandoned it, giving the entwining vines the only opening they needed to take back what had been theirs.

I imagine some day archeologists will explore the area we now call “Detroit” and conclude that at one time a large, vibrant people group—future anthropologists will call them something like Factory Workers Americanus—had inhabited a vast area but apparently abandoned the land for some reason which, by then, will be lost to history.

The day after I started working on this blog, I came across another item that does not portend well for this nation. WWMT in Kalamazoo, Michigan reports, “More than 20 of the state's 83 counties have reverted deteriorating paved roads to gravel in the last few years, according to the County Road Association of Michigan.” It only costs about $10,000 per mile to grind up old pavement and replace the road surface with gravel. To repave costs $100,000 per mile. This phenomena isn’t isolated in Michigan. According to WWMT, although the trend is biggest in Michigan, it is happening in other states as well.

When Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was on his way to being President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, he told the Senate, “…for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." Certainly Michigan’s troubles can be directly traced to the failing auto industry. Was Wilson speaking a truth perhaps bigger than even he thought at the time?

The American automobile has been the icon of the good life in the United States for the last 60+ years. It enabled the invention of something called “suburbia” which set the stage for modern America, the America that became the leader of the free world.

But now the automotive heartland is plowing itself under and letting its roads revert to ruts. Can the rest of the nation be far behind?

More truth than you can take

2009-06-07T16:22:00.000-05:00

Want to raise money without raising taxes? How about this: US out of Germany. Better yet: US out of everywhere. Then let's allow countries to bid on our presence. Our troops provide protection and pump billions of dollars into the economies of the countries where we have bases. That should be worth something to the "host" countries.

• • •

If Presidents Bush and Obama have accomplished nothing else, they have certainly brought into focus the social divide between conservatives and liberals in our nation:

Conservatives believe in freedom which is tempered by responsibility and the belief in eternal, transcendent truths.

Liberals believe in freedom as unfettered permissiveness with no absolute truth. Pornography on public school and library computers. In-your-face expression of homosexual (and heterosexual) behavior. Violent pornographic lyrics blaring in public. Video games that portray the most gruesome killings imaginable.

On security issues, conservatives want to maintain a safe society in which responsible citizens of all stripes can exercise their rights and freedoms while liberals believe the highest good is to protect the rights and freedoms of those who most directly threaten the rights and freedoms of responsible citizens. For example, liberals object to snooping on people talking to known terrorists, yet advise police to start snooping on people sporting Palin bumper stickers.

Conservatives desire to protect the innocent while liberals desire to protect the guilty. We see this most starkly in that conservatives oppose abortion while liberals oppose capital punishment.

Tell me where I’m wrong.

• • •

MISCELLANEA: Iran Clones Goat. I'll let you, valued reader, build a joke around this news item. And not to be outdone, scientists at Dubai's Camel Reproduction Center (this place actually exists) have cloned a camel, of course…Want to cut oil imports? Make all the roads toll roads tomorrow…Newspaper closings. As we depend on electronic media we open ourselves to info disruption by enemy hackers or EMI…The day I read about thousands of government workers being laid off the same way I've been reading about factory workers, I'll know someone in Washington is serious about saving money… Are you as tired of President Obama's "nose in the air" national lectures as I am? His arrogance is overwhelming.

• • •

"The impact of climate change is a tremendous risk to the security and well-being of our countries," Nancy Pelosi announced to a group in China. Exactly what is the risk to our security if the world warms up or cools down a few degrees? Or to our "well-being"? Explain please. It's just hyperbole, nothing more. Isn't it ironic, by the way, that perhaps the biggest socialist in our government, Nancy Pelosi, went to the world's biggest socialist/communist nation, and found that they are more committed to growing their private sector than we are?

• • •

During the campaign no one dared whisper Hussein when referring to the candidate's name, but now President Obama virtually insists on using this Muslim moniker. As part of his rapprochement to the Islamic world, our president asserted that the US is one of the world's largest Muslim nations if you count the number of Muslims in the population. As soon as people started to crunch the numbers it turns out that even with the most generous estimate of the number of Muslims living in the USA, the country would be no more than the world's 34th largest Muslim nation, behind world powers such as Burkina Faso and Tajikistan. Another lie from BHO. (Isn't that an airport abbreviation?)

• • •

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's pick for the Supremes, said repeatedly.

Of course I disagree with her, but if what she said is true, I know one thing: a wise Latina woman who happened to be a judge aspiring to higher office would have had the sense not to say as much publicly.

The cure for cancer and arrogance

2009-03-28T10:13:00.000-05:00

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.

• • •

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...

2009-03-25T08:39:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-23T09:43:00.000-05:00

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.

• • •

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.

• • •

And finally, this is me.

Real March Madness

2009-03-19T13:03:00.000-05:00

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.

• • •

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

2009-03-07T14:15:00.000-06:00

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.

• • •

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.

Obama's Plastic Surgery

2009-01-18T17:43:00.000-06:00

Even prior to his inauguration, Obama has managed to implement a successful economic stimulus program for our nation's plastic surgeons. The botox biz is up between 200 and 300 percent driven by folks getting ready for the festivities in DC. All the frozen smiles you see at the swearing in ceremony won't be from the cold weather. Don't believe me? Read it yourself.

• • •

My wife and I moved last summer and when we arrived at our new place, we had to get busy finding new jobs. I registered with a bunch of the online job banks and placement websites. One of these was Beyond.com which makes the following claims:

The right people. The right skills.
The right location. Right now.

My background is in teaching, writing, editing and quality assurance. I was thrilled last week when I got an email "instant job alert" from Beyond.com:

Dear Raymond,
We wanted to notify you immediately about a new job posting that may fit your interest and skill set. Please review the information below. You can easily access the job description by clicking on the link provided.

The job they so breathlessly needed to call my attention to? Pool boy. Well, actually pool manager. It seems Beyond.com hasn't seen me in a bathing suit, nor read my resume.

• • •

Tell a lie enough times and people will believe it. It worked for the Nazis. It's working for the global warming doomsayers. A NASA scientist is warning that we have less than four years to reverse this so-called man made climate change.

NASA scientist Jim Hansen is warning about rising oceans etc. I'm not even going to call him on the facts that ice packs are growing and the earth is cooling. Let's assume, for a moment that the oceans do rise. They won't rise overnight, it will take considerable time. People will move out of the low lying areas. Maybe people will get out of Bangladesh where about every other year thousands die due to flooding. There have been plenty of human migrations in this history of mankind. There will be more.

• • •

When high schoolers read Orwell's 1984, is it seen as tragic irony? Is it possible to write books like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 anymore? With security cameras on nearly every corner of our major cities and politicians employing armies of spin doctors. It doesn't seem like disturbing fiction about our future is disturbing anymore.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Apologies to Herb Caen

2009-01-09T21:45:00.000-06:00

ROUX CONFESSIONS: I'll admit reading the comments made on Internet news stories. So witty and enlightening. Regular Oscar Wildes most of them. Found one guy making comments whose screen name was "your an idiot." Ah, public schools... Completely hooked on honkey-jocks Rick and Bubba in the morning and, truth be told, I only understand about every third word.

MICHELIN (MAN) GUIDE: How's this for culture: Tuesday, Ben Stein's "Expelled"; Wednesday, the Met's HD broadcast of Massenet's "Thais"; and Friday the high school's staging of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" in the gym/multi-use room. Mix up the lead characters from these three productions and you've got the makings of a memorable nightmare... Of course, prior to the Twain, I had to take my lovely wife out to a little Italian place I know, The Olive Garden.

PHIL HER UP: Bought gas at Kroeger's. Twenty-five cents a gallon higher than a week ago. A bit later I saw a picture of the Saudis parachuting $3 million dollars onto a hijacked oil freighter to pay off Solmali pirates. I'd like to see a pie chart showing where our gas dollar goes. I'm thinking a pretty good slice is going to feed swashbuckling Somalis at this point. Another question: who polls better, the Somali pirates of the Saudi sheiks? To me it's a toss up.

NAME PHREAK: The New York Times ran an op-ed essay making the point that cocaine use among white teenagers is some four times higher than among black teens. The author? Charles M. Blow.

I SAID I'M SORRY: OK, I took a swipe at The Olive Garden a couple of paragraphs ago. (Or was I taking a swipe at myself? Not important.) But today I had the leftover lasagna for lunch and it was tops. So, Olive Garden, if you're reading this, please accept my apologies.

Google from "a" to "z"

2009-01-05T07:35:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure exactly what I was doing, but the other day I did a Google search for the letter "D." What came up as the first hit? The wikipedia entry for the Democratic Party.

Hmmmm.

I decided to do a Google search for the letter "R." No Republican Party. I scrolled through the first few pages of "R" results. No entry for the Republican Party. Don't believe me? Here are the results:

...and we've always been lead to believe that there's a huge right wing conspiracy. Hah!

This little exercise piqued my curiosity just a smidgen so I did Google searches for every lower case letter of the English alphabet. The results were at times quirky, unexpected, totally expected, and just so-so. Here they are:

A HTML links. Obama speech. Don't have much use for either.
B Wikipedia, second letter in the Latin alphabet.
C Speed of light and lots of Citigroup stuff. Interesting fact: Citigroup is burning through taxpayer money at the speed of light.
D Democratic party.
E Natural log and E! Online.
F Ford Motor Company. The only automaker not on the dole. I will remember this next time I go new car shopping. (Cue laugh track)
G Surprise! Gmail scores the coveted first spot. Second goes to Wikipedia on the Latin letter G. Seems like they missed the spot on this one.
H Planck's constant and Wikipedia Hydrogen. I'm thinking Planck's constant doesn't get a lot of hits.
I Apple's iPod and iTunes at the top then Wikipedia Latin...
J Wikipedia Latin J
K Boltzmann constant and Wikipedia K. BTW the unknown (to me) label of K Records ranked above K Mart by one spot on the list.
L LaTeX project. Where's Wikipedia's Latin L for crying out loud?!
M The movie "M" (1931) which starred Peter Lorre. I have no gripe here. Also, Wikipedia is back with the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet.
N Nitrogen, the Wikipedia entry. OK that makes sense. We also learn from Wikipedia that, "N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet." Don't know how I've made it this far in life without that pearl of wisdom.
O O, The Oprah Magazine. Anyone surprised? Beats out number two—and one of my favorite gasses—oxygen, and another name from the theatrical world, who I hope and pray outlasts Oprah: Othello.
P Wikipedia Latin alphabet.
Q Wikipedia, Semitic sound value.
R R-project website. Something to do with statistical programming. Wikipedia runs a distant third here.
S Craigslist. Yeah, that's right, Craigslist. You explain it to me. Also on the first page of search results: Victoria's Secret. I guess it just takes two S's to rank highly here...or maybe not. With that logic Guess Jeans should have beat them both.
T The website for public transit in Boston. Wha?
U After a long hiatus, Wikipedia is back with an alphabet listing.
V Is for Visa. No Mastercard. No American Express. No Discover. Are people really sitting down at the computers and saying themselves, "Gee, I wonder how I can get a Visa card?" Hello, go look in your mailbox, moron.
W Interesting. Our second movie. Oliver Stone's "W" (2008). Do you think it will still be listed first in another 78 years like the Peter Lorre movie "M"? And let's face it, shouldn't President Bush get the number one spot here?
X Hmmm. What would you expect to find here? You'd be wrong. "X The Band" scored the top spot. The kind of scoring that gets XXX ratings didn't show on the first page at all. You know Google is messing with this search big time.
Y Huge surprise here: Yahoo! And Yahoo! mail took the number two spot. If Yahoo! and Microsoft ever pull off the merger, it'll be, "Hello page 47 of search results!"
Z And to end this pointless list, Wikipedia's back on top, beating out the much faster and sexier 2008 Nissan Z.

Manufacturing Down, Blogging Up

2008-12-29T17:38:00.000-06:00

Here are a couple of "leading economic indicators" for you: US car manufacturing is down 457 percent (caution: I invented this number to illustrate my point) while US blog creation is up 1532 percent (again, an invented number).

These trends came to me this morning as I was making my coffee and mulling over the insightful— yet humorous—comment I wanted to make on Joe Mazzanti's blog. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but you get the idea, and the idea is dead on.

After a few seconds of considering how and why these two "industries" are heading in opposite directions, a question occurred to me: What ever happened to the service industry sector of our economy?

We know that the traditional hard manufacturing industries have in large part left the United States for places like China, where cheap labor is found in abundance and pesky things like health and safety codes are found not at all. Okay, we get it.

But those manufacturing jobs were supposed to be replaced by the service industry sector. You know, those bastions of economic strength like the insurance industry (think AIG), investment banking (think Lehman Brothers), and transportation (think your favorite bankrupt airline here).

So we no longer make stuff and sell it to each other. Fine. It looks like we're about done "servicing" each other as well (excuse the word choice please). Now all we do is blog and blather back and forth to one another.

Is this our destiny?

• • •

Contrary to Kristen's observation on her blog, The List, my blog entry about Miley Cyrus generated like zero page views. Is the pop world over Miley already, or is it just me? Rhetorical question. Don't answer.

• • •

Some things are just words. There are people in the world who think it's wrong for Israel to try to defeat the people who keep lobbing rockets and mortars at them. These critics complain that Israel's response is disproportionate. In other words, Israel shouldn't try to win. "Disproportionate response" is just words. They sound good together. Nothing more, nothing less.

By the way, among those complaining that Israel's response to Hamas is "disproportionate" is France.

Enough said.

All the places I haven't seen Miley Cyrus

2008-12-26T18:21:00.000-06:00

I live in Nashville right off Franklin Pike. Miley Cyrus lives right down the road in Franklin. It has recently come to my attention that blogs about Miley Cyrus get way more hits than mildly humorous blogs about global warming, so I want to tell you about all the times I haven't seen Miley Cyrus around town. (I haven't seen global warming yet either, but noooo, you don't care about that, even if my writing is on occasion mildly humorous.)

Christmas night we got home from visiting our youngest son in the LA area. When we got off the plane we didn't see Miley Cyrus in the airport. And ironically enough, we didn't see Miley Cyrus in Hollywood either when we took aforementioned youngest son to the Pantages theater (home of the Oscars from 1949 to 1959—that should be good for a few hits, don't you think?) to see Wicked featuring Erin Mackey, Teal Wicks, Derrick Williams, and Carol Kane, but not Miley Cyrus.

You might remember Carol Kane from her role as Simka in Taxi. It is interesting to note that Taxi was a hit sitcom on both ABC and NBC, garnering 18 Emmy awards during its run between 1978-1983, many years before Miley Cyrus was born in 1992. You do the math.

On our way back from the airport we almost stopped at an AM/PM mini mart to pick up milk. But when I saw that Miley Cyrus wasn't there, I just drove by. We had to skip our morning cereal the next day. Thank you Miley Cyrus.

Probably about once a week for the last month or so, my wife and I have been hitting Monell's Express for dinner on the way home and despite the fact that it is one of the most highly rated meat-and-threes in the area, so far no Miley Cyrus. This one is a little hard for me to comprehend.

Miley Cyrus held a free concert outside the Sommet Center a couple of months ago and my route to work took me right past the stage. But I was way too early and didn't see Miley Cyrus again.

I don't want to waste much more of your time describing all the places and times I haven't seen Miley Cyrus, so I'll finish this up with a quick list (apparently lists pull in the blog hits too):

1. Lovelace Cafe

2. Dollar General

3. Outside Ryman Auditorium

4. Lower Broadway

5. Upper Broadway

6. Frist Center for the Visual Arts

7. Kroegers

8. Green Hills Mall

9. Lake Radnor

10. All the places between above nine

So, Miley Cyrus, if you are reading this, how about hanging out in the Waverly-Belmont area one of these days? But call first and make sure I'm home.

Obama Policies Expose Rifts in Liberal Cabal

2008-12-18T18:56:00.000-06:00

Here's an interesting question: Will Barack Obama align himself more with white liberal democrats or working class blacks? There are some profound differences between these groups which, because of the monolithic nature of liberal politics, has never really surfaced before. But now we are seeing some cracks in the liberal cabal, especially with the environmental and homosexual elements.

Black voters in California overwhelming voted for Prop 8, the constitutional ammendment banning gay marriage. Obama himself has walked a tightrope saying he was against homosexual marriage, but didn't think measures like Prop 8 were the correct way to handle the issue. (I don't understand this either, but there you go.)

Now that Obama has asked evangelical pastor Rick Warren to say a prayer at his inauguration, homosexual activists are screaming. You'd think Obama had appointed Pat Robertson to a cabinet post! I doubt, however, that the average black voter has any problem with Warren praying at the event.

An even more important rift is beginning to be exposed between Obama and the environmental activist arm of the Democratic party. The incoming president is concerned about jobs, and very rightly so. His idea is to build or repair highways and bridges, which are bad because they enable evil automobiles. He certainly doesn't want to see the auto industry go under either.

The black community understands the importance of job creation and retention better than most groups in this country. When it comes to balancing trees and jobs, black Americans are going to favor jobs every time. If Obama reflects this sentiment, environmentalists will be tree-sitting on the White House grounds before you know it.

Another area likely to get the incoming president in trouble is immigration. This may be a delicate subject, but my experience tells me that there is no love loss between the black and Spanish-speaking communities. Blacks often see latino workers as job stealers, newcomers who are willing to work for lower wages. Will Obama liberalize immigration policy on our southern border, or will his policy reflect the black community's desire to protect American jobs from the onslaught of impoverished Mexican workers?

As I write this, another issue comes to mind. History has proven that one of the most color blind institutions in the United States is the military. Black men and women have been able to find opportunities and achieve rank in the military in times when the civilian world was less open to them. White liberals would like to see the military go away. Shrinking the military would decrease opportunities for minorities. How will Obama balance this one?

I have always believed that on almost every social issue, affirmative action and maybe welfare policy being the major exceptions, black Americans aligned better with Republican ideals than those of the Democrats. The incredible irony of Obama's success is that this truth may now be exposed and if Republicans are smart enough, many blacks might take a serious look at the GOP in future elections.

Cooling proves Warming (I didn't make this one up)

2008-12-16T07:35:00.000-06:00

Several months ago I wrote that increased evidence of global cooling was going to cause a panic in the media that has so much invested in global warming:

"...it looks like we are already in the early stages of global cooling.... If this turns out to be the case, it creates a unique condition in the mass media biosphere in which global warming and global cooling scares may be forced to coexist."

We are already seeing the signs of the media's feeble attempts to square cooling and warming. Here's what one AP writer had the audacity to write:

"Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government's machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming."

So cooling actually illustrates how fast we are warming. Gotta love it. Read the whole article here.

Way-Broke Government Steps in to Save Going-Broke Automakers

2008-12-11T06:18:00.000-06:00

Does anyone else see the irony, and potential catastrophe, in our government, whose debt now stands at $10.6 trillion, attempting to "bail out" a few car companies who say they will run out of cash sometime next year? Our government is spending amost $4 billion more each day than it takes it. What makes it think it is in any position to prop up the automakers?

Even funnier than this is the fact that the lawmakers want to create a Car Czar who will oversee the automakers' efforts to regain profitability: A Washington bureaucrat telling a Detroit auto executive how to run a lean, mean profit-making machine.

"Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

How about our lawmakers in DC first coming up with a plan to operate the federal government without going more in the hole year after year?

Jurassic Park Detroit Style

Since it's the Christmas season and our government is in the giving mood, why stop at trying to save the (really misnamed) Big Three? Why don't the geniuses in Washington bring back some of the other defunct major car manufacturers like Hudson, Packard, and Studebaker, just to name a few. If "saving" GM, Chrysler and Ford (which, by the way, apparently doesn't need to be saved) is a good idea, wouldn't it be just that much better to expand the program and create even more jobs by bringing them back to life? I'm sure Al Gore could make a strong case to revive the Stanley Steamer! Is anyone in the Office Of The President Elect listening?

And on a serious note, shouldn't Ford, which seems to be in a position to weather this storm, be rewarded for good management by allowing the other two to take their knocks without the this massive government largess? Come on Barack, where's that tough stand against corporate welfare?

(Perhaps the funniest part of the whole drama was the testimony from the auto executives that they can't use the bankruptcy system to reorganize because declaring bankruptcy would "hurt sales." Nobody broke out laughing! Surely that was offered tongue-in-cheek.)

Das Kapital

It looks like Washington will cut Detroit a big check, if not now, certainly after the new Congress is seated. It's very possible that the US government will take some kind of ownership position in these automakers, just as it did with the banks.

I just wish Karl Marx and Frederich Engels were alive to see it. They'd be so happy.

GWIX: The Update

2008-12-07T08:22:00.000-06:00

The Global Warming Index (GWIX) went up to 7.34 when I gathered the data this morning. Indexed by Google news were 27,816 stories that mentioned global warming and 3,790 stories that mentioned global cooling. When I last checked on November 17, the index stood at 6.74. This indicates that global warming is being mentioned somewhat more often in news stories now than in November.

The total amount of mentions today—we'll call this the Composite Climate Story Index (CCSI)—stands at 31,606. I'm going to keep track of this data as well. As the press loses interest in climate change, I predict that this will go down significantly. I'm trying to find a way to develop an "Al Gore" filter, so I can take all Al Gore references out of the raw data. This would make the index a much better indicator of reality. No offense intended, Al.

Auto Maker Execs and Rodney King

2008-11-26T10:50:00.000-06:00

To bring an old adage up to date, it's a sure sign of imminent insanity/senility when you:

write letters to the editor
comment on Internet news stories, or
create your own blog.

So I'm going two-outta-three in this blog, as I'd like to share with you a comment I just made on an Internet news story.

In this excerpt from a Barbara WaWa interview with Barack ObaWa, the incoming president put the leaders of corporate America on notice for their extravagant behavior and perks. Here's what I said:

I didn't vote for Obama a couple of weeks ago; I wouldn't vote for him tomorrow. But he seems to understand how to use the "bully pulpit"--something Bush never caught onto. Corporate CEOs etc. need to understand that their leadership must stretch beyond next quarter's results and that ultimately their companies can't be successful unless the American economy as a whole is successful.

I like to keep my rants on other sites short, so I didn't make a few observations that I think pertain to this point. But I will now.

American corporate leaders have increasingly turned to foreign markets when making profits in the USA has become difficult. They feel no responsibility for what happens to the folks who live down the street from them. This is because the United States has become a post Christian nation. Any Christian who takes the teaching of Jesus seriously would know what He taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Leaders of corporate America are like those who just walk past the man in trouble.

This is the result of the MBAization of our economy. CEOs and the like are quite adept at reading balance sheets and making clever moves in the marketplace, but they know nothing of scripture. They have gained incredible business acumen and lost their moral anchor. In Matthew 16:26, Jesus asks, "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?"

This is why we can have a bunch of bankrupt Detroit auto industry execs fly to Washington D.C. in their corporate jets to beg for taxpayer (our) money and be completely oblivious to the message they are sending to the American public.

It has been my generation that has turned MBAs into some kind of golden promise. I've worked for a couple of major corporations and I remember the talk in the hallways about how MBAs from certain colleges were guaranteed huge salaries starting at their date of hire. Soon after this, anyone who wanted to get to upper-middle management had to have an MBA from somewhere, often a night school enterprise such as University of Phoenix.

You may object to my assertion that as a country we have lost our moral center because we have turned away from Christ. You might say that we just need to reassert morality into our society. But whose morality? In the absence of an ultimate authority there can be no common morality.

I teach middle school students. They like to ask "why?" a lot.

"Don't get up from your seat unless you first raise your hand and I give you permission."
"Why?"
"That's one of my classroom rules."

If the students do not recognize my ultimate authority within the classroom, they are not going to obey the rules. They will just make up their own rules as they go along. You might argue that certainly there are rules upon which the class, as a whole, would agree. It is human nature that the individual members of the class would abide by these "agreed upon" rules--in the absence of a higher authority--only to the point at which they feel they are better served by disobeying the rules.

If we do not recognize a higher authority we are reduced to Rodney King morality:

"People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?"

Well Rodney, I think clearly the answer to your question is, "No."

Looks like apple juice...

2008-11-24T12:57:00.000-06:00

The astronauts on the space station will soon be drinking recycled urine to quench their thirst. But these are the days of designer water, so NASA needs to put a catchy moniker on this new beverage.

Starting with already established water brand names, I have compiled a list of suggested labels NASA might consider.

Agua Vida, Agua Peeda
Crystal Geyser, Yellow Geyser
Highland Spring, Festering Bog
Penta Water, Pent-up-inside-me-like-forever Water
Real Canadian Natural Spring Water, Real Canadian’s Natural Spring Water
San Pellegrino, Dan Marino (I don't get this one either)
Sierra Springs, Septic Springs
Trump Ice, Donald Dew
Vittel, Piddle
WHET Water, WHIZ Water
Zephyrhills, Syphyrillis, and finally
Arrowhead Water; no name change needed.

GWIX: The Hot New Climate Index

2008-11-17T14:56:00.000-06:00

After consulting with our research department, I've fine tuned my GWIX: Global Warming Insanity indeX. From this point forward, I will use the google news search as the basis for the index, rather than the generic google search. Also, I have created a ratio between global warming and global cooling stories and this number, rounded to two decimal places, will be the actual "index." If the GWIX goes down, it would indicate that the disparity between warming and cooling stories is decreasing.

On Nov. 11, 2008 the index and raw data were:

GWIX: 6.74

Global warming stories: 24,955

Global cooling stories: 3,705

Hydrogen Super Highway $7 million billion; Gas $1.99/gal

2008-11-13T11:54:00.000-06:00

How smart/lucky (choose one) are Pam and I? Smart/lucky (choose one) enough to move to Tennessee where the Republicans actually gained control of the state legislature from the Democrats while the rest of the country was marching leftward in lock step to the Obamamantra. Consider this: Republicans took both houses of the state legislature for the first time in 140 years. Read all about it.

However, there would have certainly been plusses to staying in California. First, we could say we were part of the biggest state budget deficit ever. Woot, makin' history! Second, we could truly enjoy driving up and down Schwarzenegger's imaginary hydrogen-fuel highway. Third, we could enjoy the biannual "odds are 50-50 that California will suffer a devastating earthquake within the next 30 years. Starting now!" newspaper story.

•••

I can't believe another newspaper publishes a story just to get me all upset! According to the Law Vegas Sun, paranoia is on the rise. The good news? Paranoia isn't just for schizophrenics anymore!

Two former students of mine have started writing their own blogs. Nice work guys! Check them out: Kristen is here and you can find Joe's here. I don't know if they learned anything from me, but at least I didn't kill their caustic wit. Kristen's comments about the high esteem current college students have for Jimmy Carter (the 11th worst president on one highly-regarded list) is more than worth the click.

•••

Well, we finally know who the "winners" are with the "Pickens Plan." Ad agencies and the television networks. Despite all of Pickens' hot air, there wasn't enough to make his massive wind project economical so he has quietly canned the whole thing. And by the way, what happened to all the people who were wringing their hands over the obscene oil company profits when oil prices were spiking? Remember the charges about market manipulation? Where's your manipulation now? Gas here is under two bucks a gallon. I won't even comment about the Democrats' plan to reinstate the ban on offshore drilling the second Obama is sworn in...

No. I will comment on that. Obama and his party were all for increased offshore drilling when people were about to riot in the streets over gas prices, but now that offshore exploration and drilling would just be the prudent thing to do to be ready for future energy demands, they can the idea. Hmmm, do ya think their energy "policy" bears any relationship to what is best for the nation...?

Let's Call Africa Africa!

2008-11-11T17:17:00.000-06:00

I'm still backing Sarah Palin for the 2012 presidential race, even though she apparently thinks Africa is a country.

Let me tell you this, I've been teaching school for several years now and I promise you that despite the best efforts of our geography teachers about 87 percent of US high school grads share Palin's belief that Africa is a country.

I think it's time we just declare Africa a country and be done with this issue. We already have South Africa, right? Certainly if there is a country called South Africa, there must be a country called plain old Africa. After all, we have a state called West Virginia and nobody would think for even a fleeting moment that Virginia was anything other than a state itself.

No one can keep track of those oddly named countries that make up most of continental Africa anyway. From what I gather they all pretty much share the same problems of disease, corruption, and economic chaos.

Further, the label "African American" would make a lot more sense. Us white guys don't get called a "European American." We get labels like "Irish American" or "Italian American." Give the whole continent that generic country name of "Africa" and, bam, problem solved.

And finally, this one little change would instantly make our high school grads just that much smarter.

Only trying to be helpful.

Save the Auto Makers!

2008-11-09T16:57:00.000-06:00

News item: In a letter to Hank Paulson, treasury secretary, sent on Saturday, Nov. 9, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi,Speaker of the House, wrote: “We left the meetings convinced that our nation’s automobile industry - the heart of our manufacturing sector - and the jobs of tens of thousands of Americans are at risk." Then they begged that some of the $700 billion earmarked to fix the credit crunch be siphoned off to the auto industry.

At the heart of the Democratic Party's political-environmental-economic philosophy is the notion that the internal combustion engine is the mechanical Anti-Christ, threatening the very survival of mankind. How ironic then, that with Barack Obama about ready to take over the helm, the Democratic leaders of Congress are sweating bullets worrying about the fortunes of the big three automakers. If they really want to save the auto industry, they should break the unions and throw out excessive regulatory obligations they have saddled the auto industry with the last 30 years.

Of course, if this were Republicans rallying to save the Big Three, it would just be another piece of evidence that the GOP is in the pocket of Korporate Amerika. A person more cynical than I would suspect that the Democrats want to save the auto industry in 2008 just so they can destroy it with the mandatory manufacture of electric cars in 2010.

Warming vs Cooling

2008-11-08T15:54:00.000-06:00

Sitting around on Saturday afternoon, decided to do a google search. Here are the results:

global warming = 44,800,000 hits
global cooling = 4,340,000 hits

Date: 11/8/08

About a 10-to-1 ration in favor of warming. Let's check this out every so often and see how long it takes the world of popular culture to catch on to the fact that we're in a cooling cycle now.

Reach across the aisle and get your hand cut off

2008-11-05T17:37:00.000-06:00

Journalists everywhere are falling over themselves praising the successful campaign of Barack Obama. And it certainly was a well run campaign. But why aren't any charging that he virtually purchased the office of the presidency? When Republicans outspend Democrats there is always an undercurrent that their victories are tainted by their big spending.

Obama outspent McCain three-to-one (I'm hearing 4-1 and 5-1 now). Do you think he would have won had he spent the same amount as McCain? It's a good question. Further, it came to light near the end of the campaign that many donations to the Obama campaign are untraceable and, frankly, suspect due to the abuse of those charge cards that can be loaded with funds. Not illegal, but a huge loophole in the law. Anyone surprised that politicians would write a law and leave such a huge loophole?

But above all, isn't it poetic justice that McCain sealed his own destiny in 2002 when he ushered the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform through Congress? Being an old navy man, I think McCain is in a perfect position to appreciate the old adage of being "hoisted by one's own petard."

I just hope Republicans see how little there is to gain politically by "reaching across the aisle." In this election a very moderate Republican with a long history of working with Democrats was trounced by the second most liberal Democrat in the Senate. In addition, they paid the price for caving in on all the legislation that virtually eliminated any reasonable voter eligibility requirements. Who knows how much fraud there was in this election, but who cares? Apparently no one. Until the Republicans learn to play hardball in the same league as the Democrats, they are dead in the water. If you can't control the country's borders, you don't have a proper country. If you can't control who votes, you don't have a legitimate government.

Republicans need to understand they will always be severely criticized by the press. Just get used to it. Cut them off when necessary. Obama had no problem kicking his critics in the press off his campaign plane.

I join all the Obama supporters in their joy of having a black man as president. In that respect this is truly a historic day. I just wish it woulda been a black conservative...

Jefferson and Madison Endorse McCain

2008-10-30T08:17:00.000-05:00

On an earlier blog I poked fun at Barack Obama because of his shameless "tax cut" that is really nothing more than an attempt to buy votes. In recent days he has really ratcheted up the sales pitch on television and with his online "calculator." I wonder how far ahead in the polls he would be if he wasn't able to outspend John McCain about 3-to-1...

It's interesting that just at the same time Obama is calling his tax hike on the so-called rich "neighborly," new information on his relatives is coming to light. It seems that some of his African immigrant relatives are living in various levels of extreme poverty not too far from Harvard where Obama became the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review.

If neighborliness is a desirable character attribute, it seems that helping his impoverished relatives would have been a good place to start. The problem with contemporary liberals is they want to do all sorts of "good deeds" with other people's money. Let's take a short walk down memory lane:

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
James Madison

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, part of the vast right-wing conspiracy! Who woulda thunk it?

Our Patriotic Neighbors

2008-07-11T23:19:00.001-05:00

Only a fool would deny that Barack Obama and his political allies are fully in favor of using tax policy to redistribute the wealth of this country. His own comments, past and present, prove this. In an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Obama called it, "neighborliness." His running mate recently called paying higher taxes, "patriotic."

This shows their intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy. When I voluntarily send a monthly donation to the local rescue mission it might rightfully be called "neighborly" or even "patriotic." But when the US government, with its confiscatory powers, extracts taxes from the citizens, their payments can never be called "neighborly" or "patriotic."

And yes, their underlying philosophy is Marxist, no matter how hard Biden tries to laugh off the point. "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs." The "rich" have the means and the poor have the "needs."

If it worked, I wouldn't care, but it doesn't work. This approach creates an incentive to stay in poverty and a disincentive to accumulate wealth. Now there's a plan for economic success! Here's an idea: set the so-called progressive tax scheme on its head. Tax low income brackets at a high rate then decrease the rate as incomes increase. I think we might end poverty overnight if we had a tax policy that discouraged it. It's not as absurd as it sounds. The government tries to discourage activities such as smoking by placing high taxes on cigarettes. Why not tax poverty out of existence?

Our liberal intelligentsia is always looking to Europe for what the US should do next. Do they want to exchange our low unemployment rate for Europe's chronically high unemployment? All throughout progressive Europe, socialized health care is about to collapse. As terrible as capitalism is, it is by far the best economic system.

Candidate says he will cut taxes for largest voting bloc

2008-06-16T00:21:00.000-05:00

Although claiming to be all about change, presumed Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama is promising to cut taxes for American's single largest voting bloc: the middle class. I genned up a spreadsheet with all the promised middle class tax cuts made by successful presidential candidates during my life time and discovered that if they all had been actually enacted, the government would send each member of the middle class about $1742 at the end of each year.

Apparently middle class tax cuts aren't all that they're cracked up to be.

•••

California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger is unusually quiet about the sudden doubling of gasoline prices. And this time it's not because he is so gawd-awful rich that he hasn't noticed. This doubling of gas prices is really helping the state budget crunch. You see, Californians pay state sales tax on gasoline. State coffers are pulling in about twice the revenue they did a year ago off gas sales.

Oil speculators have done to Californians what politicians were to chicken to do: raise everyone's taxes. You won't hear anyone in Sacramento complain.

•••

Even though Senator McCain has finally seen the wisdom in drilling for offshore oil, he hasn't yet come around in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So if being held hostage to OPEC and market speculators isn't enough, I have one more reason to go full steam ahead that no one can argue with, and I'll sum it up in two words: reality TV.

Let's face it, Ice Road Truckers is OK, and so is Blackgold. But Ice Road Truckers meets Blackgold with caribou thundering across the small screen would be incredible!

Sure, the environmentalists make the point that even with ANWR, we're still a third-rate oil producing nation, but with "Ice Road Blackgold Truckers" I think we could assure our number one position in the world of reality TV for years to come. I can even envision a certain "Man Vs Wild" element to the production.

Come on! You know I'm on to something here. Please sit down today and write a letter to your representative, senator, and cable TV programmer, urging them to open ANWR to oil exploration.

I thank you. The nation thanks you.

Supercomputing and Heavy Breathing

2008-06-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

It looks like archeologists in Jordan have found the oldest church in the world. They know it was used in the third century AD and believe that earlier it was used by 70 disciples immediately following the death and resurrection of Jesus. Pretty fantastic.

But what I want to point out is how our best, most powerful computers, coupled with the brightest programmers in the world are dumber than your average fifth grader.

You may have noticed how the words in some online news stories become links and if you follow the link you get more information about that word. If you were reading a story on the Taliban, for example, the word "Taliban" might be a link and if you were to click on it you would get to an encyclopedia, dictionary, or some other online information.

Check out what this advanced software did with the word "dating" as in the phrase "dating back 2,000 years."

Maybe it's a homage to that classic Mel Brooks character...

•••

My wife and I quit our jobs and are moving out of California. We are, of course, now madly looking for new jobs. At the same time, however, I’ve been thinking of business ideas. Finally I’ve come up with a good one, and all it takes to get my foot in the door is a smallish piece of cardboard and a felt tip marker.

If the next time you exit the freeway and pass a fairly well-groomed guy standing at the end of the off ramp with a sign that reads, “Will Hold Breath for $$,” that’s me.

I’ve decided to go into the home-based carbon offset business.

The average person takes about 20 breaths a minute. I won’t bore you with the math, but that means you generate a half a ton of CO2 each year. The way I look at it, you are global warming! You probably killed a polar bear or two yesterday and didn’t even know it.

I’m here to unburden you from all that guilt. For a very nominal fee, I will hold my breath on a per-miunte basis, cutting my respiration rate in half (Paypal accepted). If you’re feeling really guilty, I’ll have my wife and two sons hold their breath for you too. This home-based business if family owned and operated.

Further, if you want to engage in an activity that might result in a certain amount of heavy breathing, that puts your carbon footprint off the chart! But not to worry, for a modest fee I’ll hold my breath in such a way as to slow my respiration down by half to offset your increased CO2 production. And if you really want to go on a jag, I’ll nap a good portion of the afternoon. Just let me know (Paypal accepted).

And the beauty of my solution is that it is all market-based! McCain, are you listening?

Practicing my free throws to help the Lakers

2008-06-07T10:05:00.000-05:00

The Senate was unable to pass its "climate" bill. Excuse me while I exhale a CO2 laden sigh of relief and say a prayer of thanks for having a "do-nothing" Congress.

The bill seemed to wend its way through the Senate on the idea that doing "anything" was better than doing "nothing" even though there are plenty of climate scientists who say that man's contribution to the warming trend is so insignificant that even if we do the "most" we can do the effect would probably be outside of our ability to measure. It would be like thinking my free throw practice at the schoolyard down the road would somehow help the Lakers win the NBA title. It's better than doing nothing at all, right!?

Let's examine the language in the Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin that appeared in my local paper:

The outcome highlighted the obstacles that will stand in the way of enacting meaningful cuts in greenhouses gases, even with a new president and Congress next year.

First, were these cuts "meaningful"? Eilperin seems to think so, yet in the next paragraph she writes:

The Lieberman-Warner bill would have cut greenhouse gas emissions 18 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and nearly 70 percent by mid-century, a significant reduction but still short of what most climate scientists say is needed to moderate global warming.

Can we talk? Does anyone really believe that a small group of people in Washington, D.C. can write this on a piece of paper and make it happen? With people flooding across our border with Mexico, our population growing at a quick pace, and no new nuclear power plants springing up, there is no way that in "real terms" this nation can cut its CO2 emissions below 2005 levels. And why 2005? In case the honorable senators haven't checked, it's 2008 already!

Take note of the phrase "most climate scientists say...." Really? Does she actually know this? I don't think so. This is one of those "big lies" the corporate media has mindlessly repeated so often it has achieved an urban myth status on par with the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie story.

For a few days about three months ago, I thought it was only a matter of a year or two before the press would begin to sort out the true truth of man's role in "global warming." I'm less convinced now.

However, all is not lost. I am writing a personal "bill" that will require me to get to 18 percent of my former level of confidence by Novemember and achieve 70 percent of my former confidence by next summer.

I hope to pass this bill by 2010.

I Now Pronounce You Husband and Husband?

2008-06-05T09:26:00.000-05:00

Same sex couples around the late-great state of California are burning up the phone lines to their wedding planners at the same time as the type is being set on the ballot measure that would prohibit gay marriage. It's an emotional issue where adherents of "traditional values" and proponents of the "sexual (r)evolution" speak at cross purposes.

So let's calm down for just a moment and look at the issue. The first area to explore is the state's rightful place or interest in the institution of marriage. Everyone seems to think that marriage is some glorious union of two loving individuals, and ideally that may be part of what it is, or at least what it has become. But if we accept that romantic view of marriage, what business does the government have in it? I think we would all agree that the government cannot judge how "loving" any couple is. Should the state find some way of testing the love between individuals as it tests knowledge of the vehicle code before it issues driving licenses?

The only legitimate reason the state should be concerned about the institution of marriage is if there is a societal issue at stake that warrants its involvement. The state gets involved in issuing drivers licenses because public safety is at stake. As a driver, I need to be reasonably assured that we all agree on what our behavior behind the wheel will be when we come to red lights. The government doesn't need to issue licenses to operate the remote controls of our television sets. Whether or not I know how to properly use the "MTS/SAP" button on my remote control is of no consequence to society.

With this principle in mind, what is at stake in society to give the government grounds to define and regulate marriage? First and foremost is the continuation of the society itself. The population of any state needs to reproduce itself to survive. This may seem trivial, but it isn't. Currently there are many western nations where the birthrate is below the "replacement" level. Russia is encouraging its youth to have babies. To maintain its place in the world, a country needs a stable population.

Nature has provided the way for society to maintain its population. A man and a woman engage in intercourse. This often results in children. Thousands of years of human history, common sense, and research tell us that the best way to rear these children is through the cooperative efforts of the parents. The government then has a rightful interest in whether or not these procreating couples stay together. When they break apart, the consequences to society are enormous. Therefore, the civil contract we call "marriage" serves to protect all of us. I don't think the government cares one whit about honoring or celebrating the supposed love between the married people.

We also know that by nature the man is more prone to abandon the union, and that, again by nature, the woman is more prone to be left caring for the child. The marriage contract serves to protect the woman who is at something of a "natural" disadvantage with regards to the family situation.

This is where government's "natural" and "rightful" interests end. Any taxation or financial issues do not matter as they only deal with situations the government itself has created. Let's use "inheritance" as an example. Currently in the United States, a spouse gets a bigger break when it comes to estate taxes than a non-family member. But that's only because the government decided to confiscate dead people's property in the first place. Eliminate the estate tax and any fiscal imbalance between married versus non-married individuals disappears. So this is not a "definition or marriage" issue, it's a tax policy issue.

After listening to this debate for some time now, I find it ironic that what the homosexual couples seem to truly desire is to command the same respect, honor, and esteem as married heterosexual couples, which is exactly what the government cannot give them. It is our religious institutions that give couples—through the marriage ceremony—this high level of regard, but I suspect religion plays a rather minor role in the lives of most gay couples.

Scientists as Liars

2008-06-02T09:09:00.000-05:00

We have another Mars probe on the Red Planet and again "scientists" expose their completely unscientific bias and, if you think about it for a moment, their unbridled willingness to spend taxpayers money to pursue their childhood fantasies. This video captures it. Also note in this video that in every "artist's conception" there is snow and ice laying on the surface of the planet. They know this isn't the case, but the NASA artists can't keep their fantasies out of their work and their bosses apparently don't care about the truth enough to make them properly render their artwork.

Ray Arvidson says there are two possible explanations for what they are seeing. It could be either rock or ice. Arvidson contines, "We are pushing for ice." We are supposed to believe that scientists go into their research with open minds. Not so. Arvidson knows what he wants to find. I am thankful he was honest enough to say it publicly. I have no idea whether what they are seeing is rock or ice. I'll wait until the data are in.

Evolutionary materialistic scientists always accuse creationists of distorting the data to fit their theories, I suggest they are equally, if not more, guilty. I can't count the number of stories that talk about water and carbon compounds being the "building blocks of life." This shows a complete misunderstanding of what "life" is. Someday I'll be dead and gone from this temporal world. The lump of chemical compounds I leave behind are in no way the "building blocks of life."

Life is intangible. It's a creative force that animates and empowers reproduction. Calling the chemicals which are animated by this power the "building blocks of life" is like calling a truckload of spools of copper wire "the building blocks of electricity." Bricks are the "building blocks" of houses because when you put them together they actually "build" a house. Not so with the carbon compounds and amino acids that our bodies are made from.

I am a great believer in "pure" scientific research. But how much money should we let our government spend flying probes around the universe trying to find these phony "building blocks of life." If they find the chemicals they are looking for, so what? How many billions is it worth to you? Now, if they go to Mars looking for a new source of crude oil, I'm all for it.

•••

In case you need any more proof the US is going the way of the Roman Empire, consider the rise of spectacles such as ultimate fighting, American Gladiator and now, mixed martial arts. MMA made its primetime network debut on CBS recently. This sort of public barbarity is always a sign of decline. See for yourself.

A Cure for Being Wrong

2008-05-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

Over two-thirds of what you believe is wrong, 68.7 percent to be exact. Among the things most wrong are the things you believe that I would tend to disagree with. How do I know this? I polled myself last night. Well, wait. That doesn't sound the way I wanted it to sound. You may be getting the wrong, or another wrong idea. You're back up to 68.7 percent.

You may be asking yourself at this point something like, "Well, if more than two-thirds of what I believe is wrong, how can I know what things are in the less than one-third of things I know that are actually true?" You can't, and that's where I come in. I will now begin publishing ideas with a 100 percent not-wrong guarantee.

These ideas, while not obvious to the casual observer, are bedrock truth: Ideas, or notions, you could "bet the farm on," if you happen to be an absentee corporate farm owner looking off your penthouse balcony as you collect checks from the federal government for not growing anything that would help the current world food shortage, or at least enable people to buy more than 100 pounds of rice at Costco. But I digress.

My first surefire, take it to the bank idea: Giorgio Battistelli's opera of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," set to open at La Scala in 2011 will be viewed as a humorous retelling of a 2005 urban myth. The only person who will not understand this will be the production's director, Al Gore himself, whose totally straight, staid approach to staging and direction will put have the audience rolling in the aisles. Gore will be lauded as a "comic genius," finally receiving praise actually due.

Okay, one more. Despite her promise, Susan Sarandon will not move to Italy or America's cap if John McCain is elected president. And believe me folks, this is one where I wish I were wrong.

Come on Teddy! Take One for the Team!

2008-05-09T14:01:00.001-05:00

I emailed John McCain the other day with a suggestion on health care. His health care initiative, and I use the word "initiative" in the loosest sense of the word, is a joke. He wants to give people $5000 to spend on their own health care, apparently to make them better consumers. How $5000 in the hands of people would suddenly result in a revamped and efficient health care system, I don't know.

I told McCain to attack the problem from the supply side instead of the demand side. Our country needs to increase the number of health care providers. Building more medical schools would be a legitimate role for the federal government. Fund more nursing programs. Establish a new level of health care professional that would deal with less critical health problems. Find a way to take advantage of army medics.

And because medical conditions get more expensive to treat the longer they are allowed to go without treatment, the feds should fund full body scans for everyone over the age of 40 or 50.

And while we're on the topic. Teddy, if your listening, it would really help promote your party's nationalized healthcare proposal if you'd get in line up in Canada or over in France to treat that brain tumor. Come on! Take one for the team!

•••

I read that the University of Colorado at Boulder may establish an endowed position for a conservative thinker. Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson realizes his campus is so far left that they need to do something to preserve intellectual diversity. And I use the word "preserve" here in the same way a natural history museum might preserve a virtually extinct salamander.

Listen to this comment from CU teaching assistant Curtis Bell: “Why set aside money specifically for a conservative? I’d rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective.”

Listen Curtis, that argument falls on deaf ears whenever conservatives use it to object to "minority" set asides, so why don't you just stick it in your ear?

•••

The second writer's strike of the year is about to hit. Hillary and Barack are almost out of primaries. SNL executives are going off the deep end wondering where their really funny stuff will come from. Sure they'll still be able to pump out the lame "concept" skits, but the stuff that actually makes people laugh will be much harder to come by. Check out this clip. There's no way you can make this stuff up:

Fill 'er up with that stuff that worked so well for the Hindenburg

2008-05-01T11:49:00.000-05:00

Poor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Santa Monica city council may ban jets from landing at the local airport. Arnold uses that runway to commute to his day gig in Sacramento.

I saw Arnold on Leno last week touting Earth Day. The only thing green about Schwarzenegger is his money and the tie he wore on Leno. Why does he commute back and forth the length of the state on a daily basis in a private jet? Simple. He can afford to.

Schwarzenegger stomps around the formerly-golden state leaving his Terminator-sized carbon footprints everywhere, spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars to build hydrogen refueling stations for cars that exist mainly in his imagination, and calling for state-funded universal health care while the California budget is about $20 billion in the hole. Arnold, dip into that billion-dollar personal bank account, log onto eBay and see if Nero's violin is for sale.

•••

Am I the only person how has noticed that Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Pastor John Hagee have the same biblical perspective with regards to God’s judgment on the United States?

Wright said that God used the 9/11 terrorists to punish the United States for this country’s foreign policy. Hagee suggested God used Katrina to punish the United States for its unabashed homosexuality. The politics may be different, but the theology’s the same.

•••

With all the candidates clamoring to be on SNL, Hillary appearing with Bill O’Riley, and Obama’s endless Top 10 lists on Letterman, I think we should cap off this primary season not with another debate, but with a showdown on Are You Smarter than a 5^th Grader? Or if that is too intellectually taxing, have Clinton and Obama appear on Deal or No Deal and instead of money, pack the briefcases with superdelegates.

•••

With gasoline prices pushing $4.00 a gallon and crude oil going for more than $120 a barrel, I think it’s time the current fed chairman do to the hot crude oil market what his predecessor did to the hot stock market in 1996. Addressing the American Enterprise Institute, Alan Greenspan commenting on the steep rise in stock prices said, “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions…?”

If this crude oil market isn’t being driven by “irrational exuberance” you can run me down with a Prius. So-called economic growth in China and India doesn’t explain why crude has gone up from about $25 a barrel in 2001 to about $125 today. Speculators are running wild.

I also think a good case could be made that would place the blame for the steep increase in crude prices on the war in Iraq. In that case—and I’m no dove when it comes to the war—Americans are paying for the war three times over: with the lives of our young soldiers, with a ballooning budget deficit, and at the gas pumps.

Misspoken Missive

2008-04-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

"Senator Rockefeller, the editorial board would like to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to sit down with us and review the political situation in our nation. You've served with Senator McCain for many years. What insights might you have about the presumptive Republican candidate?"

The senator eases forward in his chair a few inches and gathers his thoughts.

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) got to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues," Sen. Jay Rockefeller says shooting a knowing look to the gathered reporters.

I wasn't there, but I don't think I'm too far off capturing the scene. Rockefeller wasn't ambushed on the street corner by some Michael Moore type. He was at a formal discussion with editorial writers. His retraction went something like this:

"Well, when I said McCain was a fighter pilot who cavalierly dropped missiles from 35,000 feet with a flagrant disregard for the damage they caused and the innocent people they killed, what I meant to say was that Senator McCain is a true American hero. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify my point."

If the nation were to vote on the best "misspoken" comments from a politician, the race would be crowded and close.

The other day Barack Obama said referring to the American people, "It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Here's a man who has made his faith the centerpiece of his political rise to prominence. I'm one of those who "clings to religion," but I don't see it as a negative. One's faith should be the source of strength in difficult times and humility and generosity in prosperous times.

Backpedaling the following day, Obama said, "...well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on." A lot of Americans would agree with him here: While we we can't count on our politicians, we can count on our guns. But I don't think that's exactly what Obama had in mind.

The candidate follows in the rich tradition established by his wife earlier in the campaign when she took a broad swipe at the country with her remark, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

But, of course, neither of the Obamas can hold a candle to their pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who didn't hold anything back when it was time for him to declare his attitude about the United States:

“God damn America … for killing innocent people. God damn America for threatening citizens as less than humans. God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and supreme.”

I praise Rev. Wright for having the courage of his convictions. He is the only one of the four mentioned here who, to my knowledge, didn't try to claim he misspoke. He has some gripes against this country and he was honest about them.

When I think about Michelle Obama's lack of pride in the United States, and Barack Obama's picture of mindless middle America clinging to religions and guns (Why didn't he throw in Nascar and beer to boot?), I have to believe that they sat through more than a few of Rev. Wrights anti-American rants, despite their claims to the contrary.

Now excuse me, I've got to get out of here, my office is coming under sniper fire.

And no...I am not a homosexual.

Arab Oil States Control Our Coastal Waters

2008-04-03T17:17:00.000-05:00

The headline in my local paper heralded Congress last week for passing a bill to "protect" the north coast here in California. The headline just as easily could have read, "Congress Cedes control of North Coast to United Oil Emirates" because closing off our national territory to oil exploration is exactly what the Arabian oil producing nations want us to do.

Here is just how twisted this situation is, and if you understand it, please let me know. Congress gives oil companies depletion tax credits so they will find new sources of oil. Congress then systematically closes off all the potential sources of new oil from exploration.

Congress threatens to take away the tax credits and a large group of people jump for joy thinking that the nasty oil companies will finally get it stuck to them. Of course, anyone with half a brain knows that the corporations don't pay the taxes, they charge their customers whatever is needed to cover their tax burden. So consumers will pay the tax, which is completely regressive.

And isn't it interesting that the liberals who loathe "regressive"or flat income taxes, love regressive gasoline taxes? How can this be? It's simple. Liberals favor "progressive" income taxes because they discourage individuals from pursuing economic advancement. A high standard of living for people is bad. But any tax on gas, however regressive it may be, is seen as protecting plants and animals, whose "standard of living" is far more important than ours. The dirty little truth is, however, that as society increases its measure of material wealth, it is able to invest more to protect the environment.

Then, because the situation isn't ridiculous enough, Congress tries to "shame" the oil companies into lowering gas prices. Yeah, that’ll work.

To recap: Congress won't let oil companies drill new wells; Congress gives oil companies tax credits explore for new oil; Congress threatens to take away these tax breaks; Congress tells the oil companies they really should lower their prices. (The presidential candidates from the party that controls Congress, by the way, are promising to raise the price of government immediately if elected. High oil prices bad; High government prices good!)

Gov. Richard's Man Crush on Obama: Typical White Person T-Shirt

2008-03-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

“There’s something special about this guy,” Governor Richardson said as he announced his support for Barack Obama. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but it’s very good.”

Two words, governor: Man crush.

Just the way Michael Scott used to get all giddy around Ryan the temp, any semblance of common sense you may have possessed went out the window the first time you caught a whiff of Obama's aftershave. You dumped your old girlfriend, Hillary, like the political skank she is. Then, like the least pretty cheerleader on the squad, you threw yourself at the hunky freshman quarterback who hadn't even tossed a pass in a league game yet.

Well governor, you've had your 15 minutes of fame. I hope it was worth it.

Now on to important things.

Inspired by the prophet of our time, Barack Obama, my wife and I have designed a t-shirt that caputures one of his most inspiring phrases, "Typical white person." That pretty much describes me and, I'm guessing, you. We're hoping that our shirt will garner enough enthusiastic support to make middle class white folks everywhere forget smiley faces, Che Guevara and Hollister.

But for you, the highly favored readers of this blog, both of you, we have a special treat. When we submitted our design, we had to give it a name and make a few comments about it. I came up with four variations. Here they are:

Plain and Proud of It. Typical, but not stereotypical! We may be the western world's fastest fading unethic majority, but we still have a lot to be proud of.
Melanin Shmelanin! Favored by employers and policy makers for years, the typical white person may be be temporarily out of style, but we'll be back, baby!
Hold the Pigment! Save money, hire the typical white person, the generic Homo Sapien!
Proud To Be Pale. Just like ethic people, but without the garish skin pigmentation and melodious speech patterns.

Unfortunately, the folks at Threadless.com thought our entry was really just "word" shirt and didn't have complicated enough art. We may resubmit it as a type only entry. So, your challenge is to let me know which of the above witticisms would go best under "Typical White Person" on a t-shirt.

Flash: Dems Criticize Bush! Dolphins Just Love Plastic Wal-Mart Bags!

2008-03-20T13:43:00.000-05:00

I am beginning to think I can't trust my hometown newspaper, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, which is owned by the New York Times. (Please excuse me while I take a moment to run and get a mop to wipe up all the sarcasm dripping from that last sentence...there, now I can continue.)

I poured over a story the other day that the PD picked up from the LA Times (bad idea) headlined, "Bush's Grasp of Crisis Questioned: Critics Say President Needs to Pay More Attention to Economy." I'll give you a few moments to recover from the incredible impact of that extraordinarily deep insight.

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080318/WIRE/803180424/1033/NEWS

But I started to read the article looking for the "critics." I read it twice. There was only one, maybe two "critics": the, ahem, unbiased Barney Frank and Jack Reed, both just every-so-slightly liberal democrats. (Excuse me again. Mop time.)

I wonder what reporter Maura Reynolds's personal point of view is on this matter. We might get a clue when she writes--without attribution to any source--that comments Bush made "suggested a comparison to another disaster in which he was accused of acting too slowly: Hurricane Katrina." Gee, a little heavy handed do you suppose?

And another thing: did you read that for about 20 years now, "scientists" have been misquoting a study that supposedly connected marine mammal and avian deaths to plastic shopping bags? It turns out the study found that sea life is sometimes killed by discarded plastic fishing gear, not Wal-Mart bags. Somewhere the wording got twisted and an urban myth was born.

The problem is that greenies all through the civilized world are working their little knuckles to the bone to get the scourge of plastic bags banned forever, lest we destroy the fragile oceans.

The PD just reported that communities in my area are considering proposals to ban the bags, in part because they "remain dangerous to birds and marine life." Does anyone except me remember that German Nazi Joseph Goebbels said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

The American press is proving Goebbels right every day.

It was Honolulu, not Harlem; Poehler Rescues Hillary

2008-03-05T20:10:00.000-06:00

I'm thinking of releasing my delegates and throwing my support to the white Christian candidate: Barack Obama. If his mom is white, he's white. If being raised by a white single mother doesn't make him white, consider these facts: He grew up in Honolulu, not Harlem. He went to a high-priced private Christian school, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School. He's got to be white. Endemic, institutionalized racism prevents blacks from enjoying such a blessed life. Right?

Maybe I shouldn't have brought it up.

The big political news the last two weeks, of course, centered around Hillary's boost after winning in both Ohio and Texas. I think, all tolled, it drew her about a dozen votes closer to Barack. Then, last weekend, the two heavyweights duked it out in Wyoming with Barack winning back most of what Hillary gained the previous week.

The biggest winner through all this, however, is neither Hillary nor Barack, but Saturday Night Live which has emerged as the only Saturday political network TV series with any influence on the people of this great nation. Forget the fossilized network political talking-torso shows. Ten thousand words of serious political pundit commentary doesn't sway voters nearly as much as one good SNL spit take.

In no more than five minutes, SNL cast member Amy Poehler made Hillary seem sympathetic and almost likable, a feat the real Hillary hasn't been able to pull off in 25 years. Hillary's real challenge will come this summer when SNL goes on hiatus and isn't there to sway the super-delegates just before the convention. Hillary might consider taking some of the dough Bill has made off his Arab connections and underwriting an extended SNL season. Bill could even play sax in the band. At least then Hillary would know where he was on Saturday nights. Hillary should also consider putting Poehler on the payroll so the comedian could hit the campaign trail at her side.

The Obama camp, on the other hand, has a huge problem. Fred Armisen, who plays Barack, isn't nearly as funny or appealing as Poehler. Al Sharpton should keep his mouth shut about the fact that a white actor is playing a black (or black-ish) man and turn his attention to the real display of NBC's rampant racism: Armisen's Obama is totally forgettable. Sharpton should amass his minions in front of 30 Rock with signs reading, "Armisen Must Go!" and chanting "1-2-3-4! Give Obama a real comic AC-TOR!”

Barackoholics Anonymous

2008-03-03T08:26:00.000-06:00

Many of you who read this need help. Or you know someone who needs help. So I'm urging you to let down your guard. Set your pride aside and admit publicly that you are a Barackoholic. Come on, just say it:

"Hello, I'm [your name here], and I'm a Barakoholic."

There. Doesn't that feel better? You've taken the first step toward recovery. Congratulations.

Of course that's just the first step of my Twelve Step Program for Barackoholics, but honestly, the first step is the hardest. After you've taken this first step, tell someone. Especially tell other Barackoholics you know. They may not want to admit their problem, but you've seen the effect it is having on their lives. They swoon when their candidate thrusts his arms into the air and utters the word "change." Their finely honed sense of indignity disappears when their candidate is caught plagiarizing but unexpectedly reappears when their candidate is accused of plagiarizing.

I suppose, in the interest of future of our nation, I should outline all 12 steps here, but then few of you would buy my book, "I Used to be a Barakoholic and You Can Too! A 12-Step Program To Cure Your Addiction to a Meaningless, but Charismatic, Candidate."

Step two is quite problematic however because here the Barackoholics must come to believe that a power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity. Unfortunately this is exactly what they already believe, except that the "power greater than themselves" actually is Barack Obama. This leads to confusion. In my book, I lay out ways to overcome this difficulty. Although it is far too complicated to go into here, it suffices to say that when the real God of the universe spoke, unlike Barack Obama, He tended to go into specific details about His plans for the future.

It is my sincere hope that the legions of Barackoholics will soon turn to my program because it is far better to deal with this mind-numbing addiction now than to elect the man president and have to deal with it later. If we let this go much longer can you imagine the chaos when the American electorate has a sudden awakening and tries to deal with the requirements of step eight:

Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and be willing to make amends to them all.

I just don't think we'll have the time.

Poll Finds Most Americans Believe Poll Results Not Real News

2008-02-15T18:12:00.000-06:00

A recent poll found that 71 percent of all Americans believe that the results of opinion polls should not be reported as "news" among the media.

"Look, all they're doing is asking what I think. That's meaningless. Like today around 11:30 I told a guy I work with that I felt like ham and cheese for lunch, but when I got to the deli I ordered pastrami," explained one respondent.

A pollster who did not want to be identified explained it this way:

"The point this respondent is making is that it didn't really matter what he thought he was going to have for lunch earlier in the day. It wasn't reality or what we call an ‘actualization.’ His brain synapses were just firing in a certain way at a certain point of time. The only thing that was real, if I may use that term, is what he actually did."

In a somewhat unusual alliance, environmentalists joined the debate siding with those who would like to see opinion poll based news eliminated.

"We estimate 4.7 million trees would be spared each year due to the decreased demand there would be for newsprint," said Hiram Feinsmith of Save Our Unbelievable Planet. "Those trees, left standing, would eliminate about 73 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and have a positive impact on global warming overall."

Researchers at SOUP estimate the retreat of the global ice pack would be lessened by several centimeters over the next decade by this one measure alone.

"Putting it in layman's terms, banning polls from the newspapers could save penguin lives," Feinsmith said.

"Public concern for threatened wildlife may the thing that brings this debate to a head. Most Americans are willing to take such severe measures if they benefit endangered species," Feinsmith said citing recently published polls.

Unusual Media Cycle Threatens World

2008-02-11T16:01:00.000-06:00

Observers have noted a dramatic quickening in the pace of media climate scare cycles which, if not corrected soon, could have a damaging and lasting impact on global media sources. First world media, women, and minorities are most at risk.

Prior to the global warming scare of the last several years, the global cooling scare of the 1970s was the last case of unfounded media climate hype, or UMCH. But with the recent call by Canadian Scientists to study the possibility of global cooling due to decreased sunspot activity, it looks like we are already in the early stages of global cooling UMCH. If this turns out to be the case, it creates a unique condition in the mass media biosphere in which global warming and global cooling scares may be forced to coexist.

Such a condition is likely to result in widespread panic and confusion within the normally stable media biosphere. "It could get so bad," said one media expert, "that the New York Times and other prestigious media groups could endorse republican candidates."

Other experts don't believe the situation is that grim.

"At most it could take some of our major newspapers about two weeks longer to endorse the democratic candidate for president, but I don't think it's would ever get so bad that they would endorse a republican," said another highly-placed media critic.

"And don't sell the media short. They may be able to design a scenario which advocates curtailing western economic growth to combat both global cooling and global warming at the same time. If you carefully study the history of the media you will see that they have propagated notions far more absurd than this," one expert noted.

"For example, they spread the idea that Bill Clinton was the first black president and didn't even crack a smile," he continued. "This will be a piece of cake."

NEXT STORY: Global Climate Stasis Goes Unchecked

(Re)bate and switch; Biofools

2008-02-06T22:52:00.000-06:00

Nancy Pelosi is overjoyed that republicans have, for the first time, agreed with the democrats in Congress to send tax rebates to people who haven't paid income tax. Now listen folks, if they haven't paid taxes, it isn't a rebate it's just a "bate."

Gee, do you think the fact that it's an election year has anything to do with this? Sure it does. They're taking your money and (re)baitin' some hooks with it in hopes to snag a few voters. Republicans know they won't win any votes. But they realize they could lose a few independent voters during the general election if they give democrats the chance to make them look like Scrooge for being tightfisted with your money.

The New York Times noted that Congress "moved with unusual speed" to pass the measure. Finally something Washington can do quickly and efficiently: give away money it doesn't have.

• • •

On a different note, you may have read about the research on the burgeoning use of "biofuels" and that in reality, they are worse for the environment than fossil fuels in terms of the greenhouse gases that supposedly cause global warming.

Here's the headline from the next day's paper in my hometown: Biofuel Users Say It's Still a Good Alternative. The story continues, "Advocates of the fuels said the studies do nothing to alter their opinion that biofuels are better for the environment than burning gasoline."

I used to run around with a group of friends and we often kidded one another with, "Don't confuse me with the facts!" We were being funny; these environment advocates are serious. It exposes the truth that the biofools' desire to muck up economic development is much stronger than their concern for the environment.

The Big Lie

2008-02-05T18:45:00.000-06:00

"Everyone knows that global warming is real, but we cannot solve it alone," said Bill Clinton.

I teach at a Christian high school. One of my jobs is to prepare students for the inevitable assaults on their faith and values they will have to endure after graduation. In class we look at current events and and I try to sensitize the students to overstatement, because usually a big lie is cloaked in overstatement, to wit, President Clinton's proclamation that, "Everyone knows that global warming is real...."

Everyone? Really?

The number of scientists questioning the Gorified global warming scare scenario is increasing daily. Unfortunately for the purveyors of paranoia, it looks like the period of warming peaked about 10 years ago. Man's contribution to the phenomena is very questionable and if man didn't have much--or anything--to do with the "problem," man cannot "fix" it. So in that sense, Clinton is correct: we cannot solve it alone, it'll take an act of God. Or perhaps God decided about ten years ago that the climate had warmed up enough, for the time being at least.

The real objective of the global warming scare-mongers, however, is to slow down, or reverse, economic growth. A perceived worldwide temperature increase is just the latest issue for the saboteurs of economic progress to hang their shoes on...so to speak. Thirty years ago it was global cooling. A few years before that it was the "population bomb." Since then we've had HIV-AIDS and a few rounds of animal-born killer diseases, just to name a couple.

I agree that we might destroy ourselves one of these days, but I have a hunch it won't be due to increased worldwide material prosperity; it will happen for exactly the opposite reason.

Life Support Two Ways

2008-02-02T00:05:00.000-06:00

The signs of illness have been obvious for months. All indicators have pointed to an ever-worsening condition. The experts have been consulting one another to decide what to do and finally they've settled on a series of desperately needed transfusions. The treatment regimen was put the hands of the care givers and sometime in four to six months they'll get right on it.

The fact that our economy is on the brink of collapse has been common knowledge on the street for months. When Washington finally got on board and our lawmakers decided immediate action was necessary, they resolved to inject some cold cash into the still slightly warm corpse of an economy. Of course, ASAP for the government means that sometime this summer, and I'm not evening feeling a hint of spring yet, cash will get into the hands of the consumers.

By that time we'll either be pulling out of the recession without the government's help, or we'll be stranded so far out in the dry lakebed of vaporized consumer spending that the paltry $600 refund won't even pay for the first session with a bankruptcy attorney.

But don't worry about that too much, if Obamary gets elected, the same government apparatus that took 6 months to cut you a $600 check to "save" the economy will be scheduling your cancer treatment.

To quote Country Joe MacDonald, "Whoopie! We're all gonna die!"

George W. Bush ageless?

2008-01-30T12:59:00.000-06:00

After the State of the Union speech, our local paper ran a series of pictures of President Bush taken at each of his seven SoTU speeches. We poured over them at work and couldn't see any discernible aging. The Dorian Gray comments were made. Some of us think that Bush actually looks younger now than he did when he first took office.

There are only a few possible explanations for this.

He's hopped up on human growth hormone and bouncing back from those gut-wrenching, make-your-hair-fall-out decisions faster than a Tour de France rider leading the pack through the Alps.
He's more oblivious to the implications of his decisions than even his worst critics have charged.
He has a steely inner strength, ice water for blood, and nearly comatose central nervous system he developed through years and years of flying Texas Air National Guard combat missions over the enemy infested skies of Lubbock (at least when he showed up).

On the other hand, his days in the White House haven't been so kind to Barney. It's almost like he's aged seven years for every year Bush has been in office.

http://www/whitehouse.gov/barney/

Very sad.

Race doesn't matter. Right.

2008-01-27T15:37:00.000-06:00

As his landslide victory in South Carolina became apparent, Barack Obama declared to the crowd that the election wasn’t “about black versus white.”

The throng chanted, “Race doesn’t matter!”

Three out of four blacks voted for Obama. Three out of four whites voted for one of the white candidates. Race doesn’t matter...NOT!

Are conservatives the only ones who see the irony in the fact that the party of affirmative action and civil rights legislation can’t honestly acknowledge that its electorate is voting straight down racial lines? In a week when Americans celebrated a man who dreamt of a country where people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” the media interviewed voters fretting over whether to cast their ballots for the black or the woman. Hey, what about health care?

I believe it is an absolute truth—but would never be conceded by liberals—that conservatives would be proud to vote for a conservative black candidate and would judge him (or her!) on the basis of shared values.

[Vote Condi ’12!]

Where is the Tiger Woods of politics?

2008-01-26T16:22:00.000-06:00

So Tiger is ahead in his first golf tournament of the year by about a dozen strokes while none of our politicians seem to be able to put together back-to-back birdies on the course where the final fairway leads to the White House.

Hillary. Can you imagine having to spend four years listening to that shrew? She's touting her experience which amounts to less than two terms in the senate and being married to Bill. If the experience of being a politician's wife transfers to presidential proficiencey, Barbara Bush should be running. Her husband, after all, was a congressman, ran the CIA, served as ambassador to China, did the veep job under Reagan, and capped it all off with a term in the White House.

Obama. Positives: great smile. Negatives: smoker. 'Nuff said.

McCain. Here's a geniune hero. Worst mistake in his career was not being born into the "Greatest Generation" or sponsoring the failed immigration reform bill. Close call.

Romney. One term governor. Makes Hillary's experience look significant. Successful businessman and we all know how well business savvy transfers to government work. How much of his business success depended on his Mormon contacts?

Giuliani. Unable to capitalize on 9/11 Twin Tower disaster well enough to prevent 1/29 Florida disaster.

Huckabee. See Obama. Nonsmoker.

Edwards. Could be "kingmaker" at the convention. Will he pick the yet-untamed "Shrew" or the young Hamlet figure?

Tiger just finished up his Saturday round, about two-score strokes ahead. Asked about the final round on Sunday, he said it wasn't over, of course, we all know that it is. If only we could say the same thing about these primaries...