No Panic Here

A lot of experience has taught me that when it comes to the so-called "news," the stuff that seems to get people in some kind of uproar, be it outrage, morbid curiosity, or panic, is usually a distraction.

Take the Ebola thing.

I've read comments at various sites regarding the people in Dallas who have had relatively close contact with the victims, how the vomit was handled, etc.  A lot of the comments reflect fear and panic.  While a healthy respect for danger is a good thing, panic never accomplishes anything, and sometimes it just gets you dead more quickly.  Experienced pilots know this.  Survivalists know this.

The equatorial and tropical regions of Africa are not known for education or intelligence.  This has nothing to do with bigotry, it's just fact.  Just as you are not likely to find to many people with I.Q.s over 65 in most trailer parks in the U.S., even if you only surveyed people with lily white skin.

Viruses and bacteria are very different biologically, but there are certain things that microscopic biological entities share, at least in the category of those that threaten human life.  They tend to be susceptible to at least three things:  Ultra-Violet light (Sunshine), Ozone (a very reactive triplet oxygen molecule), and extreme ranges of Ph (alkaline or acid).

I've spent more than a couple of decades being an amateur practitioner of holistic and natural medicine.  Not quackery or old wives tales, but the stuff of double-blind studies, real science, and understanding how and why biological systems work at the microscopic level.

So, before I began to wonder if I should run around screaming like Chicken Little, I thought it might be a good idea to scrounge around for some solid facts and study the situation.  First, I wanted to know how fast or slow this "epidemic" was moving along.  So I looked at a few timelines.  Here is just one timeline you can look at.  Combined with what we can know about the lifestyles of the people involved, the timeline tells me Ebola just plain doesn't move that fast because it just isn't all that robust. 

The fact that it has an incubation period of between 2 and 21 days tells me that an individual's immune system is a huge determining factor on the infection and possible mortality rate.  That and about a dozen other facts by this doctor are enough for me to know that this Ebola "outbreak" is nothing for me to get all gunched up over.  Read the whole article carefully.

I am a hundred thousand times more afraid of having an immunization shot forced on me, than I would be at finding out there are 50 cases of Ebola in the state where I live. 

Take a look at this table of causes of death  to help you put this Ebola scare into perspective.


Then if you want some really interesting information on Ebola, take the time to search through related articles at Jon Rappaport's site.

Was Paul Crazy?

This is post number nine in the series: Why I Am Not A Christian.

Outside of those laws that directly pertain to Temple service and worship by the priesthood (Kohanim), you really can't point to any of Adonai's laws in Torah and say that it makes no sense to follow them, or that by following them you will not be upholding the two greatest commandments, and again, I point to what the Master Himself said in Matthew 5:17-19:

"Do not think that I came to abolish the Law (Torah) or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.  For truly I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished.  Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and so teaches others, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

Instead of seeking out the opinions of people who lived hundreds or thousands of years after the resurrection of Yeshua, doesn't it make more sense to search the Scriptures to find the correct view on how to obey God's commands?  If you are a Christian who claims to believe in the authority of Scripture as inspired directly by the Holy Spirit, should you not then read the New Testament and take its instruction as having more weight and authority than any church tradition?  I find it rather ironic that there are Protestant churches who only exist because Martin Luther said that his conscience was held captive by the Scripture, which gave rise to the Latin phrase: Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, Soli Deo Gloria. (by faith alone, by Scripture alone, to God alone be the Glory),  but all that really served to do was allow a breaking away from the horribly corrupt Roman Catholic tyranny.  As Luther continued on, he fomented horrendous hatred against the Jews and gave rise to the concept of "replacement theology."  The new Protestant church beginning with the Anglicans or Church of England kept the vast majority of traditions of pagan origin.  Maybe some of the clergy understood what they were doing wrong, but the churches had all pretty much become political structures with immense power and most of the masses simply did not question such authority.

We simply refer to it as the book of Acts.  Its complete name is the "Acts of the Apostles."  I've heard more than a couple of people say it should more properly be called the "Acts of the Holy Spirit," and I agree with that sentiment.  Luke, the author of the gospel that bears his name, was a careful and thoughtful historian.  No one in any of the sciences dealing with history or archaeology has ever found a flaw in any of Luke's work, but then what would you expect from someone writing under the influence of the Holy Spirit?  The last time I referenced Acts was in regard to the misunderstanding I often encounter about the tenth chapter, as if that was to tell us that believers no longer had to worry about the dietary laws of Torah.  Regarding Acts chapter fifteen I pointed out that the elders and Apostles simply assumed that the new converts from the gentiles would begin learning how to obey Torah.  It was rather shocking to their system that gentiles could have received the Holy Spirit without first learning Torah and engaging in circumcision and ritual baptism, but the Holy Spirit made it obvious that they could be received first and learn later, just like what happened to the people at Mt. Sinai in Exodus.  In other words, the leaders of this new body of believers in Messiah had to reach back for the lesson that had been given in Torah and realize that the precedent had already been set.  God wants sincere seekers and believers who are willing to learn His ways, rather than those who think they already know.

Therefore, with the idea in mind that we should look to the example and words of those who actually walked with and were disciples of the Master, let's look at what the 21st chapter of Acts has to tell us.  At this point in time,  Paul finally got back to Jerusalem after travelling around and evangelizing and he reports to the elders of the congregation, apparently led by James.  This account can be found in Acts 21:17-26.  This is an event that you just won't hear preached about from any Christian pulpit, because what it really teaches just throws a monkey wrench in the typical Christian interpretation of how we are to live.  I'm going to paraphrase this in plain modern English.

Paul returns after what might be a couple of years of travelling around to the synagogues.  This is well after the leadership of the body of believers in Messiah or "the people of The Way" have swollen in numbers to several thousand, having observed the Holy Spirit perfoming miracle after miracle through these men and women who walked with Yeshua.  The Temple is still standing, but the Talmud records ( I love a hostile witness proving my case), that ever since they crucified that troublemaker from Nazareth, the scarlet cord that they cut from the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement no longer turns white as a sign that God has accepted this offering.  The doors to the Temple swing open by themselves, and disturbing voices will continue to be heard until the Temple finally is destroyed by Titus in 70 AD.  The Sanhedrin and other skeptical Jewish leaders are probably beside themselves because it's even worse now than it was when the upstart from Galilee was walking around.  This body of believers is an enigma to everyone outside of belief in Messiah.  These believers in the Nazarene continue to come worship and pray in the Temple and even bring sacrifices and offerings.   . . . .  .  er, . . . uh . . . .  what?   Yeah, what it says.

Luke writing:  "And when we had come to Jerusalem, the brethren received us gladly. And now the following day Paul went in with us to James and all the elders were present.  And after he had greeted them, he began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.  And when they heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, "You see, brother, how many  thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law [Torah]  ----   [Yep, that's right.  Go check your own translation.]   ----  and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs."   Acts 21:17-21

Read it again and let it sink in.  Does it sound like they think this is a good thing?  If there is any question in your mind, let's continue on in the text, and let the text, the Words of the Holy Spirit, speak for themselves.

"What, then, is to be done?  They will certainly hear that you have come.  Therefore do this that we tell you.  We have four men who are under a vow; take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses in order that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law [Torah]."   Acts 21:22-24

And Paul did exactly as he was told.  Yep.  That Paul.  The guy who single handedly wrote almost half of the New Testament.  The guy who wrote the letter to the Romans, which gets twisted into whatever meaning any particular preacher wants to give it by lifting select verses out of context.  Notice that Paul didn't reply to them by saying, "Wait a minute, you guys.  You've got it all wrong.  We no longer have to worry about all that stuff.  We are now under grace and don't have to worry about keeping the Law."   Is that what Paul said?  No.  So we need to stop and think.  We need to make up our minds on this issue.  Was Paul schizophrenic?   Was he crazy?  If he was, then we should just forget all this stuff about wanting to be disciples of this Jewish Messiah, because this religion makes no sense.

I will choose a better way.  I will choose to believe that the Scripture is right in all that it says and that I need to correct my human, fallible thinking by conforming my thoughts to Scripture.

Now, as if that wasn't enough to make the case for Torah observance, the story continues.  Paul goes to carry out the very thing that will prove that he is also zealous for the Law and it creates an uproar in the Temple because those who accuse him of breaking the Law and teaching the same, are there assuming that he has brought uncircumcised men into the Temple area beyond the court of the Gentiles.  Paul is arrested for his own protection and to prevent a riot.  Asking for an opportunity to speak to the crowd, Paul appeals to them on the basis of having always been a Torah observant Jew, "educated under Gamaliel, strictly according to the law of our fathers, being zealous for God, just as you all are today."  Acts 22:3  

Paul doesn't take this opportunity while under Roman guard to tell the Jews that Torah observance is no longer important now that Messiah has shed His blood.  On the contrary, he appeals to his own zealousness for Torah and to correct the misconception that he would ever condone the breaking of any of the commandments of God in order to have righteous standing before these men to then proclaim the gospel of Yeshua the Messiah.

Let's become mature in our thinking when it comes to understanding Scripture. God is not a God of confusion or capriciousness.  He didn't give us all those commandments only to later on say, "Just kidding."  And you can find nothing, anywhere, in all of the New Testament to prove that the Torah is no longer in effect.  Oh, you can certainly take individual verses out of context to try and make such a case, but you would be engaging in eisegesis, or "reading into" the text what you want to infer.

In the next installment, I hope to bring to light what really upset the Jews and has been twisted to mean something entirely different.  Click on "What Upset The Jews" to go there.

Peterson Postmodern Connection

The issue of gun control and individual freedom can bring about some discussions that drive logical people to want to tear our hair out.  The apparent inability of some people to use linear logic and reason to come to rational conclusions in spite of feelings and emotion has given rise to Joe Huffman coining a name for the condition Peterson Syndrome, in "honor" of Joan Peterson of  the Brady Campaign.

Some of us have spent some time discussing how it is possible to be so disconnected from reality.  While Huffman and myself, as well as others seem to be able to describe Peterson Syndrome, we would still like to understand where it comes from.  After all, you want to know if it's organic or communicable, and if it is communicable, you want to be able to take all possible precautions against it.  I never got around to writing an in depth post explaining how I believed it was the result of postmodern education. But then, today, I started at Smallest Minority, where Kevin led me to Labrat's post at Atomic Nerds.  His post led me to MaxedOutMama.

Wading through all of this seemed to confirm for me that what I originally suspected.  That Joan Peterson and this professor Venkatesan have the condition we now call Peterson Syndrome as a result of postmodern indoctrination.  This is a very subtle form of solipsism.  It is very subtle because you have to let someone like the professor, or Peterson, talk long enough for the origin of their irrationality to manifest itself because neither of these women would consciously be aware of, let alone admit, that they were steeped in solipsism.

I can understand that Peterson has succumbed to her mental disorder because she lost a family member to a violent predator using a gun.  I would liken it to a child getting thrown by a horse, who then is afraid to ever go near a horse  from that day forward.  She allows her emotions to completely override rational thought, and gets support from like-minded individuals.

The postmodern thinking described by the two citations at MaxedOutMama's blog, as well as her explanation got me thinking again about how people like Joan Peterson become the way they are.  The best quote from the professor that drove it home for me, was the following:

In graduate school, I was inculcated in the tenets of a field known as science studies, which teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth and that science is motivated by politics and human interest. This is known as social constructivism and is the reigning mantra in science studies, which considers historical and sociological understandings of science. From the vantage point of social constructivism, scientific facts are not discovered but rather created within a social framework. In other words, scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.

Wow.  Just, Wow.  No wonder her students were making fun of her.  The first part of that statement isn't completely bizarre, but the last statement is whacko.  Let's break it down.

You are not in any kind of reality if you think that facts are created rather than discovered in the realm of science.  That there are people who believe such a concept would explain why so many buy into the global warming hoax.  If your social framework is that capitalism and free markets are bad, there is no better idea than to make naturally occurring gases that are good for plant growth into some kind of evil pollutant. If you want people to believe that biochemical molecules can somehow defy the laws of physics and that complex, coded information simply arises out of inanimate matter, I suppose the view of the professor makes sense to you.

Since the world began, scientific discovery by humans has been driven mostly by need.  Need for better ideas, tools, and techniques in everything from agriculture to warfare. That there may have been a political (warfare) reason to try to figure out a trebuchet or discover the chemistry of gunpowder doesn't make the facts of chemistry work differently because of why you need it.  Food plants don't sit around thinking about whether or not you have the right historical and sociological motivations or understandings about how to cultivate them. Ergo, to make the outrageous leap to concluding that last sentence just makes me want to find whoever passed on that idea and drop them in the Australian outback.

As someone who passionately defends the truth of the Bible based on hard, proveable science and history, I find it hard enough to have discussions with people about real science and the scientific method even when they haven't had their minds warped by ideas like that.  How then do you have a rational discussion about scientific facts versus theory with someone who thinks that social construct determines facts?  In short, you don't.  Facts that conform to a social construct are not facts at all.

If there are people with the title of professor in colleges and universities spreading this kind of mental disease, it's no wonder we can't have any civil discourse on politics.  We can't have any discourse.  It's no wonder I run across comments on various blogs that reflect complete ignorance of historical facts on the constitution.  It's no wonder that so many people don't, or simply can not, distinguish between raw facts and interpretations of evidence.

Because we didn't make a concerted effort to embarrass people like that professor out of the classroom long ago, we end up with people like the person Kevin Baker is engaging in this post.  People who a hundred years ago we would have just pointed at and laughed at, because even a sixth grade child could have explained why what they were espousing was sheer nonsense.  Now such people are numerous enough to have elected a president to what once was the most powerful country on the planet.

A Moderate Danger

I had been thinking of posting on this subject for a couple of months now, but I suppose I hadn't had enough of a push until the past couple of days.  I don't believe in coincidences.

First, the lovely Daphne over at Jaded Haven simply opened up a thread on gun control.  Most of those who come to her sight seem to be of an intelligent conservative bent.  I hate to seem redundant, but we live in a world of newspeak, so, in case someone is surfing by here who isn't adequately educated I wish to provide clarity. Two particular commentators caused me to deem this post necessary.

"The Phantom" is to most of us, an obvious lefty.  He came with this typical nonsense:

NRA-Occupied America is incapable of speaking rationally about guns.

Pay no attention to the fact that the USA has a gun murder rate that is ten times higher than our neighbor Canada, which has sensible gun controls.

And an overall homicide rate that is ten times higher than Canada’s

Screw the dead kids. Fuck ‘em. They’re a small price to pay. The NRA comes first, that’s what I say.

Everybody repeat after me ” Guns make us safe “!

Of course, after that, he tried to bring statistics that came from sources he liked and ergo, not worth paying any attention to.  There are much better sources of information by those with rational and scientific methods, and if you spend any time with experienced law enforcement people who generally aren't into seeking political office, they will tell you that criminals absolutely hate the idea of citizens commonly being armed. But all of that is not the real purpose of this post.

My point is in comparing The Phantom to someone with the handle of "mahons."  I'm sure mahons is a great guy.  Daphne seems to like him a lot.  Toward the end of the thread things seemed to devolve because some people who like to think of themselves as centrist or moderate seem offended by what I said or Gal Spunes said.

Now, I certainly believe that language, and that includes labels, gets abused on a regular basis.  Nobody likes to get mislabeled and so they protest at being labeled at all.  Problem is, humans live in a world that requires language and we can't make sense of our world without labels.  As someone pointed out on the thread, "centrist" and "moderate" are difficult labels because they apply to moving targets.  Political chameleons.

Do all conservatives fit neatly in any given profile?  Of course not.  People labeled conservative can range from John McCain to Barry Goldwater.  On the liberal side you have people on a continuum from Joe Scarborough to Alan Grayson.  So, if there is that much diversity in those two sides, how much more so does it exist in people who call themselves moderates?

The other thing that got me to write this post was, last night, watching An American Carol, the movie by David Zucker. It was just a couple of hours after leaving the thread at Jaded Haven.  In the movie is a scene where "Michael Malone" is on the Bill O'Reilly show with "Rosie O'Connell," in which Rosie comes off like the completely loony, nutcase leftist that she is, and "Michael" begins to realize that he doesn't want to be compared or connected with that level of crazy.  Bill O'Reilly makes the observation that "Michael" is more of a problem because some people like him and listen to what he says.  This just reaffirmed something I had said on the thread.

Trolls who come to blogs and say the kinds of things that Phantom say are quite easy to point to and laugh because what they say is so easily disproven and their rhetoric is so over-the-top.  The "mahons" on the other hand are another matter because they seem so reasonable and intelligent.  Their sarcasm is subdued and very deflective.  For those of us on the deeply conservative side (remember, check the glossary), he is a very dangerous political animal, because when he talks about destroying freedom, it comes off as reasonable and without a hint of malice.  Indeed, a wolf in a sheepskin.

You see, we didn't get this far down the socialist road in America because of the Barak Obamas and the Bill Clintons.  We got this far precisely because of the Richard Nixons, the John McCains, and the George Bushs, both father and son.  We bought into the lies that, seeming to be against the obvious left made you a conservative.  Nixon was power hungry egomaniac who gave the left a whipping boy that would keep conservatives on the defensive for decades.  Bush 41 messed up many of the gains made by Reagan and paved the way for the country to let Bill Clinton use the White House as a playground.  Bush 43 came in and proceeded to let Ted Kennedy write expansive education legislation, signed the McCain/Feingold assault on the 1st Amendment into law, massively expanded medical welfare where it wasn't needed.

Perhaps George W. Bush's greatest damage to any possible conservative presidency was his failure to explain his actions in the "war on terror."  The name itself was a colossal mistake.  You cannot make war on a tactic. Perhaps it is because he had all the wrong advisors on this issue or he simply chose to ignore good advice.  We have never been at war with terror.  We didn't start the war.  Islam declared war on us a long time ago.  Since it's inception, Islam has been on a campaign to dominate the entire world for their god, Allah.  Failure to recognize this fact was a crucial mistake. I remember an article by a Jewish writer dated between Sep. 12, 2001 and Sep. 16, 2001 that said we may have lost this war already because of that.

I'll never understand why he did not at least have his press secretary hammer on the facts. That many prominent democrats, especially senators with access to the intelligence reports insisted that Saddam Hussein had access to WMDs and that it was documented that Saddam had WMD's because he had used them on his own people and Iran. British intelligence never backed down from its report on the uranium story.  Former Iraqi general Georges Sada has been touring the United States, testifying that the WMDs were there, that they had been moved north into Syria.  He knows the names.  He knows the details.  None of this is classified.
These and many other facts lead me to believe that George Bush and many like him are nothing more than loyal opposition and marionettes for the real government behind the scenes. The Bushes, the McCains and the Boehners are simply there for the right-wing drones to think they are supporting conservatives.

In hindsight, I believe Saddam Hussein was removed from power because he was a megalomaniac dictator who wouldn't go along with the New World Order plans of the other government powers.  Was he a threat to peace? Yes.  Should he have been removed for being a brutal dictator to his own people? Yes. Do I believe the United Nations and the powers that be, authorized Bush and the other coalition forces to remove him for the benefit of the general populace? Not at all.

But in getting back to my point about moderates, it is this pretending to rationality that is so irritating.  They are the people who will agree that we can't just sit and do nothing while the enemy is trying to overrun us, but they'll nitpick every tactic you might employ to fight the enemy.  They will chime in on agreeing that reasonable gun control measures are a good thing, but when you point out that there is no such thing, they simply repeat the premise again as if that is an answer.  They help the leftist/progressive side while appearing to remain neutral.  They believe in compromise for the sake of peace, but each little compromise is ALWAYS toward socialist and tyrannical ends.

I remember my argument with a moderate friend over McCain/Feingold.
"It's a direct violation of the first amendment of the worst kind, because it specifically targets political speech."
"But we have to do something."
"Why?  To protect incumbents?  How does limiting free speech help when what the people need is more information and not less?"
"But the money is corrupting the system."
"Nonsense.  Money is an inanimate object.  It doesn't have magical powers. People can be corrupted if they want to be.  It doesn't matter what the system is.  What we need is more transparency.  There should be no limits on campaign contributions so long as there is open access to the names and sources of every dollar given to a politician.  Then the people can decide for themselves who is worthy of their vote and why."
"But at least it's a step in the right direction."
"No, it's a step toward giving the government more power to shut people up who don't go along with the narrative."
"Oh, you just sound like a crazy right-winger.  It's just about trying to bring some moderation to the debate and curb the special interests."
"Special interests being anybody who doesn't agree with the liberal agenda; who tries to point out the voting record or history of someone like McCain or Kerry or anybody for that matter."
"You just won't give it a chance, will you?"
"No.  Because every time you surrender just a little bit of freedom, you never get it back."
"Why can't you just be reasonable?"

No logic. No evidence that he wanted to move past stage one thinking on this. It's the same old "We've got to do something!" without ever stopping to think about where it really leads; that it might end in disaster.  No real cognitive depth on such an important subject, but he sounded so "reasonable."  And because he has an MBA and is former military and seems conservative in other areas, no telling how many others he influenced with that crap. The true-believers in statism will be right out there where I can see them and see what they're up to.  But the moderates might be flanking me while smiling and nodding.  While I'm focused on the obvious enemy in front of me, I'm getting a thousand little cuts from the "reasonable" guy next to me.  To hell with that.

I understand the appeal of the centrist.  Nobody wants to be hated or viewed as a hater.  As Alison Armstrong points out, the drive to be liked is especially strong in women.  They are hard-wired that way for good reason.  Thank God!  Baruch HaShem!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why moderates are so dangerous.  The devil won't come to you in a red suit with horns, a pointy tale and a pitchfork.  He will come to you as an angel of light or as the object of your desire to feel good.

Must Be On Drugs . . .

. . .  to believe that we need more bureaucracy.

Over at Bayou Renaissance Man, there is another new post about the shenanigans of the incestuous relationship between government and the pharmaceutical companies.  Oh, it isn't labeled as such, and I'm quite sure that the average person reading the story will come away with the idea that, "Big Pharma bad, Big Government punishing  Big Pharma good, let's go eat at McDonald's."

I know that what I'm about to say is just so foreign to most people because we've lived for several generations now with the idea that government is supposed to be like a parent to us, but just in case someone wanders by here and might be open to some radically OLD ideas that go back thousands of years, mainly because they worked and made sense, read on.

If you ask the average person if they think there should be a Food and Drug Administration, I'm sure they would naturally answer, "Of course."  If you asked them why, you might get some vague answer about protecting the public.  Now this may seem really strange to switch gears on you so drastically now, but do you think that the purpose of law enforcement agencies are to protect the public?  If you answered yes, you'd be wrong. The Supreme Court has ruled more than once that it is not even the purpose of law enforcement agencies to be preemptive.  They make very logical arguments for why that is so. People have tried to sue various law enforcement agencies for failing to protect them from criminals, and it was explained to them that that's not how government works.  Now I ask you, what in the world makes anyone think that other bureaucracies can be held accountable for protecting us from anything else?

Americans, and most citizens of modern countries operate under the silly notion that we need the vast bureaucracies to "protect" us from the big impersonal corporations, keeping them from foisting products on us that might kill or injure us. Before you go thinking that I'm some big lover of corporations, you need to read my previous post on this matter.  Do I think that all big corporations are out to kill and injure people in order to make a profit?  No.  Why not? Because it would be stupid.  Especially in a truly free market, companies are extremely sensitive to competitive pressure and guarding their market share.  I remember in 1982, someone had taken bottles of Tylenol and put poison in them, it created a crisis for the company. Even though it wasn't their fault, their sales plummeted.  Could the FDA have done anything about that?  No.  It was just in 2009 that we had an even worse event with people dying of salmonella poisoning, not because of tampering at the retail end of the supply, but because of contamination at the source of production.  You would have thought that the FDA was supposed to be on top of things, but no.  The evidence available to the public seemed to show a picture of corporate officers who had a callous disregard for consumer safety.

Should those responsible at the company be punished accordingly?  Only an idiot would disagree.  But why no outrage when the reaction at the FDA is to request even more money to hire more bureaucrats?  Are you kidding me?  You see, it turns out that the FDA had at least some idea that something was going on at the plant that was producing bad product going back to 2007, according to this article in the NY Times.  Once enough cases of salmonella had been reported and enough people died, we find out that everybody that worked in the plant knew how shoddy and unsanitary the conditions were.  Are you telling me that just a brief walk-through by some FDA or USDA inspector wouldn't have raised some red flags?  Why aren't we asking why some bureaucrats at the FDA aren't getting perp-walked to a jail cell over this?

But that's not really what I want.  I just want all the useless, black-hole-for-tax-dollars agencies abolished and the power-hungry, do-nothing, paper-pushing weasels bureaucrats to have to get real jobs in the productive areas of society.

UPDATE:  Over at Samizdata, there was a recent post about regulation on the airlines and how it was more about limiting competition, but of course the safety issue came up.  Even a man I once admired for his often staunch defenses of liberty took me by surprise by his defense of regulation, proving that even the best of us don't often think things through well enough.  Better minds on this topic prevailed on the comment thread and it is so useful to my points here that I lifted some of it for you to see below.

The moderate view:

The uncomfortable reality of the market is that someone can ALWAYS find a cheaper way to offer a product, but the other uncomfortable reality is that this discount has to come at the expense of one of the legs of the Iron Triangle (cost, quality, time). Once the efficiency curve has flattened, as it must, one of the three is ALWAYS compromised for the sake of market share.

I'm not a huge fan of government regulation: quite often, the regulations are gamed by the major players to their own advantage.

But I'm absolutely in favor of SOME government regulation. If the No-Regulation Fairy waved her magic wand tomorrow and made all government regulations disappear, planes would be falling out of the skies like hailstones within a matter of months, once the finance departments started running their little actuarial scenarios which triangulate the risk/reward/cost/benefit factors.

The only people who would benefit greatly would be the tort lawyers, and who wants to give THEM more money/influence?

As with all things, the trick is determining where on the "Over-Regulation/No Regulation" line one has to set the optimum, because neither extreme is desirable. Letting "the market" set the optimum is not desirable, because, as noted above, there are always people (and I mean passengers) who are prepared to risk their own safety for the sake of accessibility, cost or circumstance. And as long as there are those people, 'the market" will find a way to accommodate them.

 The intelligent, freedom view:

It's not a new argument; it's trotted out all the time by authoritarians and their apologists. And despite its presentation here as an undeniable truth, it's palpably false. As has already been noted by others in this thread, private certification bodies would most certainly take over the job, as they did in the days before the professional busybodies started their radical expansion of government and its regulatory powers.

What is also invariably overlooked by fans of government regulation is that regulatory agencies are invariably captured by the industry they purport to monitor. The same is not true of private certification bodies, who have a vested (read: financial) interest in doing a good job. Government bureaucrats have no such direct, personal interest in the quality of their work; their incentives lie completely elsewhere.

Kim du Toit is just wrong, on several levels. First of all, in the absence of government regulation planes would most certainly not be "falling out of the skies like hailstones within a matter of months." It's just not good business, as even the much-vilified finance departments would recognize. Second, even assuming that were true, and accepting his dictum that "there are always people (and I mean passengers) who are prepared to risk their own safety for the sake of accessibility, cost or circumstance," by what right does he (or anyone else) deny them that choice? Whose business is it if I want to assume greater risk in exchange for a lower price or more convenience?

In the end, government handles regulation just as it does everything else it attempts: poorly, inefficiently, and at high cost (both direct and indirect). If this quote is representative of the book it's a poor inducement for me to read it. I expect that I'll pass.

Another person in that same comment thread brought up something I wish I had thought of earlier.  His whole comment was: "Two words: Underwriters' Laboratories."    Bingo.

Now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw a UL logo on a product. But apparently they are still in business.  Government still can't do the job they do.  Underwriters' Laboratories was started by insurance companies because they wanted a non biased way to estimate whether or not it was worth it to them to insure various products.  So, some enterprising engineers and such saw a need and filled it.  They set up facilities to throughly test everything from kitchen gadgets to hand tools to make sure that they had no inherent defects to make them unsafe for the purpose they were designed for.  The folks at UL knew that they needed to take their testing seriously because if they didn't, in a free market, some other company could rise up and take the business away from them.  And if they were negligent enough, they could be sued.  Neither of those two things apply to government agencies.



You see, as we've allowed the liberals/progressive/leftist/statist types to gradually wean us off of the concepts of caveat emptor and personal responsibility and into the idea that government is there to coddle us and oversee every aspect of our lives, from how much water goes through our toilet, to the idea that we shouldn't need to be armed against criminals, we've become like little children.  "Why, I shouldn't have to think about eating a balanced diet of healthy and nutritious food.  Why should I read labels and think about what kinds of ingredients or chemicals are being processed into my food?  If the government thinks it's okay, it must be fine."

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies look for every possible avenue to do what any and all companies in business do, from the mom & pop hardware store or restaurant to Microsoft: increase profits. Nothing at all wrong with that per se. However, big corporations have the money and resources to lobby legislators to get regulation that favors them whenever possible.  Worse than that, when companies get big enough, certain things become normal in the cost of doing business.  Like retaining enormous staffs of lawyers to fight off lawsuits that may or may not have any merit and reserving enormous amounts of cash for paying fines when it makes more sense to risk breaking the rules and get caught, instead of doing what's best for the consumer.

The public takes the ignorant attitude that the government will act like a conscientious watch-dog on their behalf.  What if that's not in the best interest of the bureaucracy?  What if the powers in control of the bureaucracy stop and think:  "It's not such a bad thing to have billions of dollars rolling in from fines and penalties from these companies."    Think about it.  Even if the bureaucracy doesn't directly receive the money from penalties, they can still go to the legislators and justify ever increasing budgets by pointing to revenue that they helped bring in. The salmonella in peanut products fiasco proved that the FDA is willing to let a lot of stuff slide until some people die, and then take advantage of that fact to ask for even more money.

Every single government bureaucracy, whether it's city, county, state, or federal, lives by two over-arching rules:  1. Protect the bureaucracy.  2. Grow the bureaucracy.  All other considerations are subservient to those two rules.  That's why, at the end of the fiscal year, heads of agencies scramble to spend every last cent in their accounts whether they need to or not, so they can claim that they didn't have enough money to do all the things that needed to be done. Never mind that they spent the money on new desks, chairs, carpeting, re-decorating, and all kinds of things that really didn't have to be replaced.

Ultimately, what thinking people in a free society need to understand is that we don't need 90% of the bureaucracies that exist now.  Does it make you feel good to know that the person that cuts or styles your hair has a license?  Why?  Are you not capable of discerning whether or not someone has a track record of doing good work?  If somebody does botch the job, do you pay them and then recommend them to your friends and acquaintances?

Why do you need a local "Health Department" to inspect restaurants?  Seriously.  I've walked into several eating establishments and after about five minutes had enough visual information to decide it wasn't worth the risk, in spite of the licenses and inspection certificates on the wall.  I've seen places where I wondered if a broom or mop had touched the floor in days, let alone since the last shift. Restaurants go out of business all the time because customers vote with their dollars and their feet; not because some bureaucrat was doing his job.  And when some major outbreak of food borne illness happens, it's the CDC that is playing detective agency to figure out where it came from, not the FDA or the USDA.  Leaving the intelligent person to ask: "What the hell good are you?"

Why even license doctors?  There are lots of great doctors, and I've talked to a lot of them in various specialties.  It usually takes me about five minutes of talking to them to figure out whether or not I'd put my life or my health care in their hands.  And while I think that there are many cases of ambulance chasing low-life lawyers like John Edwards bringing worse than frivolous lawsuits, I also know of plenty of cases of unconscionable malpractice.  Did licensing ever prevent a case of malpractice?  If you are a lousy doctor who didn't get weeded out during medical school or during internship, why would licensing matter?

When I was a licensed mortgage broker in the State of Florida in the late 1980s, I learned the dirty little secret about licensing.  A big part of the licensing test for becoming a broker involved a set of complicated math equations that made the quadratic equation look simple by comparison. I had been working as a loan processor and doing truth-in-lending statements and all kinds of calculations for mortgage files, and none of the math required for that was even vaguely similar.  I asked the VP of the company I was working for why we need to learn all of these equations for this test when none of it was ever used in finances or the mortgage industry.  He laughed.  Then he told me how, when the existing big dogs in the mortgage industry figured out that licensing would be great way to cull a lot of the competition, they went to a math professor in the State University system and asked him to come up with these convoluted formulas to make it very hard for anyone to pass the licensing test.

Two things came to light in my research over that.  Existing industries always lobbied the politicians to introduce licensing under the guise of protecting the public while they themselves would be "grandfathered" in, only needing to pay the fee.  Secondly, I discovered that the lawyers who made up the Florida legislature always put a paragraph in at the end of a law that exempted lawyers from the requirements and regulations of the bill itself.  The more I investigated the more I uncovered that this was true in almost every industry.  Then I realized that it didn't matter how much training or expertise I had in any field; if I wanted to open any kind of business and be immune from the licensing requirements, all I had to do was go to law school and pass the Florida bar.  How many other States are that way?

Licensing does nothing to protect the public from negligence or incompetence, and it certainly does nothing to protect against fraud.  There is no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on someone when they pay the government for a license. They can rip you off just as easily as another guy. I know first hand.  I've had it happen to me, and I was there during the 1987 housing bubble bust.  We in the mortgage business then knew that it was due to changes in the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae underwriting rules.  It made it too easy to create borderline fraudulent loans or loans that would be too susceptible to default.

 But there is another way that licensed professionals can subtly take extra money from you.  Most of the people in a specialized, licensed profession have a vested interest in forming clubs, societies, associations, call it what you will.  Then they all informally talk amongst each other to come to a loose consensus of what the going rates for products and services ought to be.  One guy might be dedicated to performing his service with the highest of standards, while somebody else in that trade association does "the same basic thing," but cuts a lot of corners or uses cheaper, substandard materials.  If you as the consumer don't know the difference, you can pay a lot more for less, just because you relied on licensing and maybe some kind of trade membership, rather than doing your homework for referrals and such.

The advent of consumer clubs have arisen out of the need for something better, thereby proving the point that government licensing does nothing more than raise revenue for the government and help the businesses limit their own competition.

Quit buying into the idea that government is there to protect you.  Government helps create and perpetuate the problems and the ultimate victimization of the people.  First, don't be intellectually lazy.  It's not that hard be careful about spending your money.  The reason medical care is so outrageously expensive is a confluence of two things. The gradual indoctrination of society to believe that medical insurance or somebody else paying for your medical care is some kind of right, and the fraud that results from disrupting the free market system, and the interference of government making laws to fix problems that wouldn't exist if it was a free market.

That's an entire blog post by itself.  But I can state briefly that if government didn't regulate insurance companies, which they have no Constitutional right to do anyway, everybody would buy  insurance on the basis of need and affordability.  It would be treated like car insurance.  You would take a keen interest in how much value you were getting for your dollar and you wouldn't let a doctor run tests you don't need.  More people would have to think twice about how much and what they ate and whether or not that smoking habit was really worth it if the insurance companies could base their rates on your lifestyle choices.  You can live your life any way you want, but I shouldn't have to subsidize your risky behavior by paying higher premiums out of some sense of "fairness" or "wealth redistribution."

Just eliminate half of the cabinet positions in the Federal government and in thirty days you would see an economic boom that would shake the world, and we would be so much better off.

Medical Right

I've written about this before, but who knows who comes by here or when and how many people think like Dr. Ronald Pies, MD?  How does one have enough intellect to graduate medical school and yet be so ignorant about basic facts and reality?  It doth boggle the mind.  I like seeing good responses to stupid ideas wherever and whenever possible.

George Mason U. economist Don Boudreaux has an incisive letter to the Boston Globe yesterday that helps one to understand what real rights and “rights ” that consist of forcing others to do one’s bidding are:

Here’s a letter to the Boston Globe:

Ronald Pies, MD, asserts that every individual has a “right” to “basic health care” – meaning, a right to receive such care without paying for it (Letters, Dec. 26).

The rights that Americans wisely cherish as being essential for a free society require only the refraining from action.  Your right to speak freely requires me simply not to stop you from speaking; it does not require me to supply your megaphone.

Not so with a “right” to “basic health care.”  Elevating free access to a scarce good into a “right” imposes on strangers all manner of ill-defined positive obligations – obligations that necessarily violate other, proper rights.  For example, perhaps my “right” to basic health care means that I can force Dr. Pies away from his worship service in order that he attend (free of charge!) to my ruptured spleen.  Or perhaps it means that I have the “right” to pay for my health care by confiscating part of his income.  If so, how much of his income does my “right” entitle me to confiscate?  Who knows?

And if Dr. Pies is planning to retire, do I have the “right” to force him to continue to work so that the supply of basic health care doesn’t shrink?  If Dr. Pies should die, am I entitled – again, to keep the supply of basic health care from shrinking – to force his children to study and practice medicine?

Does my right to basic health care imply that I can force my neighbor to pay for my cross-country skiing vacation on grounds that keeping fit is part of basic health care?

Talking about “rights” to scarce goods and services sounds right only to persons who are economically illiterate, politically naive, and suffering the juvenile delusion that reality is optional.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Knowing God: Part 2

This is part 2.  Click here to read Part One.

It was the following day that I took time after class to go to the biggest Christian book store in Tampa.  This place had been in business a long time.  A free standing building about a third of the size of your average Barnes and Nobles, maybe a little smaller.  It wasn't just some little shop in a strip mall.  I figured if any place has some books with the answers to help me with all of the doubts and questions, surely this was the place.

My assumption was totally wrong.  There was a big section that had lots of different translations of the Bible.  At that time, I didn't understand why that was necessary.  Of the most popular translations, you even had different variations: red-letter, chain reference, topical, etc.Nobody to explain why all that was necessary, but it was all there.  Then there's all the different binding, and, oh-my-goodness!,  the selection of very fancy covers or carriers to tote them around in. A whole corner of the book area was devoted to such paraphernalia. Then there was a huge section that had to do with "Spirituality." Then an area about "self-improvement." Biographies took up another section.  There was a section with Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias and other large reference works. Of course there were books about end time prophecy.  Everybody wants to know what's going to happen and when. Smaller sections covered evangelism and church organization, and of course there were lots of books about current events and culture and what was wrong with the world. There were books on single topics or areas that I don't even remember.There was a large section of the store devoted to popular or contemporary gospel music, both recorded and sheet music.  Then there's the clothing.  Tee shirts, jewelry, choir robes.  Sunday school supplies, lesson books, felt boards, posters.  Artwork, paintings, candlesticks, knick-knacks, whatever.

I think I'd spent over two hours browsing the titles and reading the jackets to find something that dealt with just the basic questions I had.  In the reference section there was some fat volume about Bible criticism.  Perhaps it was Gleason Archer's When Critics Ask or some such, but that's the kind of stuff for second and third year seminary students and dealt with internal textual minutia that didn't have anything to do with answering any of my deeply held belief in evolution.  It seemed like I was wasting my time and I was coming to the conclusion that I wasn't going to find anything because there was nothing to find.

Let me back up a bit here.  As I was being made fun of for my new faith, I was asking questions of the priest and the other people I went to church with.  A lot of those people had gone to church all their lives and seemed to have great faith, and for heaven's sake, what's the point of getting a seminary degree and becoming ordained if you aren't going to learn how to answer people's questions about why we should believe in this stuff.  But when I would ask my questions, pointing out the glaring contradictions in what we accepted as fact from science versus what the Bible said, the only responses I got were pretty much one of three kinds:  "What's important is just having faith." "The accounts in the Bible are just parables or allegories, they're not to be taken as literal history."  "Evolution is just God's way of doing things."

The problem is, all of those answers mean that you couldn't trust what the Bible said about anything.  My logical mind wouldn't let me come to any other conclusion.  Especially since the Bible itself claims over and over again that it is the truth. I was not about to buy into any solipsistic nonsense about it.  And if you are one of those idiots who believes in solipsism, you might as well stop reading and go someplace else, because I got no use for you, unless you want to be disabused of that garbage.

Some people can somehow find a way to shut down that part of their mind that demands to know; "How did we get here, and why are we here?"  I really don't understand how someone of even average intelligence can do that, but that's a whole new post.  Those fundamental questions are why we spend trillions of dollars all over the planet,  building superconducting super colliders  and engaging in quantum physics research.  It's why we keep peering farther and farther out into space and launched Voyager and have radio telescopes listening for aliens.  I have a strong suspicion that even the people who claim not to care about the basic issue of human origins really do care when faced with their own mortality or deep personal crisis.

It would also be another thing if the Bible didn't deal with the issue of our origins, but it does.  It doesn't simply tell us, "God just created everything you see, and He really doesn't want to be bothered with telling you how He did it."  Quite the contrary.  It not only tells us the order that certain things were made, but defines what a day is and how long it lasts, and the order in which things were created made no sense according to everything I'd been taught in school.  And that was just scratching the surface of all the problems I had with the stories in the Bible.  I walked out of that store feeling pretty let down.

As I went to pull out of the parking lot the radio was playing something I found very irritating at that moment and so I hit another preset, to land on a station that carried Dr. D. James Kennedy's Truths That Transform just in time to hear that the program was about a book that was full of evidence that countered evolution.  It  seemed to have basic rebuttals to some things that I'd always just accepted as fact: Carbon dating, how primitive early man was, billions of years of geological evidence, etc.

Wow, why hadn't I ever heard anything like that before?  Even so, it sounded like stuff that should be pretty easy to falsify if it was just typical Christian propaganda.  I ordered it.  The book itself was pretty simple and seemed to be written for a general audience, but with lots of references.  I no longer have it in my library, having loaned it out many years ago and never gotten it back, but its footnotes and bibliography got me started on research, and within a couple of months I was spending a lot of money buying books from other sources, and finding out some really amazing things.

Like the fact that some of the best and brightest scientists with advanced degrees, all over the world, not only believed that the Bible was true, but that the earth was very young.  I'm not talking about crackpot, or fringe scientists, but guys with Ph.D.s from major universities and who were well respected and even taught at such places or were doing cutting edge research.  Like Dr. Richard Damadian who invented the MRI., Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith a holder of three separate doctorates in the medical field; Dr. Russell Humphreys who was once the lead scientist in high energy plasma physics.

Those are just modern scientists.  I'm sure nobody cares that Isaac Newton, or Michael Faraday, or Louis Pasteur or most of the scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries were devout believers in the Bible and believed that the pursuit of science was, as Faraday put it, "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

All of this information really shook me up.  I read volumes and volumes of material.  I read the criticisms of these men and their research and conclusions and found myself having to agree with them.  I discovered Dr. Robert Gentry's work on polonium radio halos in granite and how none of the evolutionary scientists could find a flaw in his logic of what the implications were.  It actually made me angry for weeks.  I'd been misled for a long time.  I'd been lied to.  I thought "all" scientists were in agreement that evolution was a fact and that there was no mitigating evidence to the contrary. You see, it's one thing to present both sides of an argument fairly and let the audience decide, but that's not what goes on out there.  I would get to experience it first hand for myself, long before Ben Stein would come out with his documentary, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.  I have been in college classrooms and in churches and parties where, once I began laying out evidence that made evolution easily falsifiable, my opponents would say I was nuts, but couldn't produce or cite a single piece of evidence to refute me.

This post, and even this entire blog is not for the purpose of laying out over 24 years of my experience and research into the debate and the evidence.  I've been a subscriber to Creation and now Answers magazine, as well as the scientific, peer reviewed journals of the Creation Research Society, and Answers In Genesis' Technical Journal.  I've listened and read, over, and over, and over to the evolutionists talk about how creationism isn't science, but then they never deal with the science.  Their argument always gets reduced to being about religious people trying to impose their beliefs on everybody else.  This has become so routine, that I have never been afraid to engage in debate with any doctor of any discipline anywhere at anytime regarding creation versus evolution. I'll try to keep to the topic of how the decay theorem proves that radiometric dating is always just a guess, or really a SWAG, and they'll just tell me it's "settled" science, without dealing with the mathematical equation.  They have nothing, and they prove it every single time.  Maybe I should share some of those encounters in other posts, but that's not the purpose of this particular post.  Here, I am just wanting to deal with the idea of knowing God. The background is important, however, because we are not talking about God as just anybody wants to understand Him.  The God that you understand on your terms is no god at all.

Once again, my logical, science loving mind was very concerned with the question of: Which God?  Is there just God and all roads lead to him?  Is the god of the Hindus and Buddhists and the Muslims and even the Mormons all the same entity?  Is religion just this big, complex salad bar that we all slide our tray along and get to pick and choose what we like, but we all end up eating in the same dining room?  All of these religions contradict each other on so many points and so many levels.  They can't all be right.  The universal language of the Universe is mathematics.  All the laws that govern this Universe are very exact and precise.  It stood to reason in my mind that a God who created all of this must have some very well defined rules.  It also made sense to me that any entity or religion that claimed to know God would not reflect any characteristics of a God that were inconsistent with nature.

Being logical, I asked myself: "What if I were God?"  Would I create a universe with very precise and logical mathematical laws, incredible beauty, mind-boggling diversity, then create sentient beings capable of tremendous abstract thought and deep emotional capability, and then leave them to their own devices and not provide a way for them to find out about me?  Maybe it's just me, but I find that line of thinking stupid beyond words.  So, now a big part of my journey was going to be about discovering whether or not I could know if I had the right God.  This would prove to be my journey on the road called epistemology.

I had already had enough experience from as far back as I can remember of experiencing the most asinine and moronic behavior in churches.  It still goes on to this day.  One need only turn on the TV and experience the clownish antics of the prosperity hucksters and simple-minded "evangelists."  Way too much of what the world encounters under the label of "Christianity" on television looks like a combination of Ringling Brothers and Saturday Night Live.  I would have to find out, apart from the "church" that God is not afraid of the toughest questions I can put to Him.  I would also have to learn that the vast majority of stuff done in His name had nothing to do with Him.

The next post on this theme is going to deal with,  "How do we find  the real God?"

You can move to the next post by clicking on Knowing God: Part 3

It's The Sun, Stupid

Back in about the mid 1980s the crap was starting about CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons destroying the ozone.  In spite of my incredibly boring high school classes, I was fascinated by chemistry and physics and biology, so I had done a lot of self-study in those areas.  At that time I still believed in evolution as well, but that's another story.  The point is, I sought out good sources that really made clear in my mind how these things worked and why they were important. Pretty much the opposite of what went on in the government school, memorizing a lot of abstract facts and formulas long enough to pass a test so you can forget about it the following week or semester.  BTW, it was in my high school years in the late 70s I think, that we were being warned in the papers and magazines about a coming ice age.  I seem to recall a TIME magazine cover to that effect.

Then came that period where I learned to be a mechanic, learning all I could about everything from brakes to engine rebuild, electrical systems and air conditioning. In order to understand and diagnose HVAC systems, you need to understand at least some basics of chemistry and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  A thorough understanding of the 2nd Law will seriously mess up any belief in evolution, unless you can fool yourself into thinking that the two things can somehow exist in the same universe.  But I digress.  Let me just insert this quote from the British media that I found via BMEWS, and then I'll explain what I'm getting at.

Throughout the 20th century the sun was unusually active, peaking in the 1950s and the late 1980s. Recently sunspot activity has all but disappeared.

Gavin said: “It is the sun’s energy which keeps the earth warm and the amount of energy the earth receives isn’t always the same. I’ve looked at the evidence for global warming and while I understand and agree with a lot of it, there has been a lot missed out. A major factor is the activity of the sun.”

There is also solar wind – streams of particles from the sun – which are at their weakest since records began. In addition, the Sun’s magnetic axis is tilted at an unusual degree. This is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on earth and force what for many is unthinkable – a reappraisal of the science behind global warming.

It was thought that carbon dioxide emissions rather than the sun was the bigger effect on climate change. Now a major re-think is taking place.

The upshot is that Gavin is not alone in predicting we face another 30 frozen years, each getting progressively colder than the last.

You can read more about it here.

What first got me questioning the "management by crisis" stuff going on in the world, was that I had learned about earth science in general.  I was working on my private pilot license when I was sixteen, and you have to really learn about weather and navigation.  In navigation you discover that the earth wobbles on its axis. That magnetic North doesn't stay in the same spot from year to year.  You discover that solar activity can play havoc with radio equipment.  You learn all kinds of things that you just won't learn to be a cog in the average labor force.  So when I first heard the nonsense about CFCs destroying the ozone layer, I said, "You have got to be kidding."  First of all, the little ozone layer is but a small part of protecting us from various forms of cosmic radiation.  The magnetic field and water vapor play a much greater role.  Secondly, CFCs are complex and denser molecules that are heavier than air.  In order to successfully find a freon leak in an air conditioning system, you had to keep the sensing probe below any possible slow seeping leaks or you would miss them, so how in the world could CFC be finding it's way up to the upper atmosphere where the ozone is?  I smelled a rat.  Then I find out that the patent that DuPont had on standard R12 and R22 freon was running out.  We must invent a new formula to patent on the premise that "something's gotta be done."   Anybody want to guess who funded studies to show that CFCs are harmful to the environment?  Anyone?  Beuller?

What really irritates me is how many people, and a lot of them with college degrees can be so foolish.  Let's just take this one statement:

“It is the sun’s energy which keeps the earth warm and the amount of energy the earth receives isn’t always the same. I’ve looked at the evidence for global warming and while I understand and agree with a lot of it, there has been a lot missed out.

First question:  What evidence?  Computer models that have failed dramatically?  Mitigating evidence that has purposely been suppressed by East Anglia University and others who have a vested interest in not looking stupid, or worse, deceptive?  Second: You understand and agree with it, and then you say that a lot  -- not a little, not a piece or two -- has been missed out.  Wow.  In the scientific world, I mean the real scientific world as opposed to the one of consensus, where people with Ph.D.s vote on what they want to believe is true, it only takes one piece of evidence to falsify a theory and cause it to be thrown out.  Tell me again WHY I should take anything you say seriously?

I suppose the unwashed masses just need to understand that critical thinking has become as extinct as the dodo bird in the halls of academe.  Thou shalt not question the keepers of the faith in "science."  To do so makes you a, a, **GASP**  "DENIER."  You shall be cast down with the xenophobes, homophobes, racists, bigots, and all manner of subhuman life forms.  "Evidence?  We don't need no stinking evidence!"

Sorry, dude, but it really is the sun.  And because of the fact that we know the sun is shrinking, and because of the laws of physics, and especially the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  It is a lot more likely that we are going to experience more cold.  We should be hoping that solar flares start kicking in again.

Here's a little experiment that you can do at home.  Get yourself a couple of mason jars, quart or half gallon size, with lids.  The bigger the better.  Get a little dry ice; sold at many grocery stores.  You'll need a couple of small non-electronic thermometers, alcohol or mercury type.  In the first one, put in one thermometer and put in the dry ice and put on the lid LOOSELY enough that the sublimating gas can escape as it expands until you don't see any more solid dry ice.  The expanding CO2 should displace most all of the standard air in the jar.  You can then tighten the lid.  In the other jar, put a thermometer and about a teaspoon or tablespoon of water. Screw the lid on tight.  Set both jars out in the sun in the morning.  By about 3:PM local time, check the temperature in the jars.  Then write to me and tell me how much you think that carbon dioxide can contribute to "global warming."

Fighting Revisionist History

I have spent about 24 hours fighting the urge to fisk this one little section of the very long screed by Mark Ames. I mentioned it in this post earlier.  It had me going around the web and looking up information I already knew, but needed to check references on.


Let me just get on with it.  Mr. Ames' words are highlighted.  

"Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest."

For those of us who actually know the history of the United States and actually read the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers; you read a statement like that and your mouth drops open. It's like the reaction you have to followers of Louis Farrakhan who believe in that mother-ship stuff, or that the Apollo moon landings were faked.  The statement is so ridiculously wrong.  It almost seems silly to point out why it is so wrong, but then I realized; if Mark Ames is this clueless, there's a good chance that others are as well.  I was watching Glenn Beck the other night and he pointed out that one in four Americans don't know who we won our independence from, so how could they know why?  So, in the off chance that one of them comes to this blog, I want them to be exposed to the truth.


The events leading up to the Revolutionary War, the war for independence from Great Britain, was all about liberty, and if there was one thing that the founders of the United States saw as a fundamental right, it was private property.  Don't believe me?  That's okay, they spoke for themselves.

"Among the natural rights  of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can."  -- Samuel Adams

"The constitutions of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property and freedom of the press."

 -- Thomas Jefferson

"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."  --  John Adams

"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions."

-- James Madison, National Gazette essay, March 27, 1792

There are many more quotes, but that should suffice.  Even if I didn't have those, one of the most well known slogans of the Revolution was "No taxation without representation!"  What are taxes?  Taxes are a way to take some of the fruits of one's labor, their property.  If a person doesn't understand that simple concept, they'd better hope that someone else is going to be available to bring a tray of food on occasion and change their diaper regularly.


Then there's the issue of self-interest.  It would have been amazing enough had Ames only mentioned property, but to then assert that the Preamble was written without regard to or that it wasn't about individual self-interest is mind-boggling.  How much dope does one have to smoke to come up with that conclusion?  If the founders weren't concerned with self-interest, then what was it?  Ames is really begging the question.  What is the opposite of self-interest?  The collective?  All this talk about freedom and liberty is so we can then create a government powerful enough to enforce neighborhood covenants and deed restrictions?  Make sure that nobody earns too much money or eats what they want?   Are there some secret writings of the founders that we don't know about?  Is there a secret decoder ring or enigma box that tells us what the founders really meant?


The entire contents of the Declaration of Independence is about the freedom of the people as individuals to pursue their own interests without interference from government. In essence, freedom is about being left alone.  Freedom to associate or -- and this is important -- NOT associate with anybody you choose.  Liberty is about not having to worry that someone is going to demand part of your life, embodied in the fruits of your labor, for the benefit of others, regardless of your consent.


What taxes needed to be collected, were for very restricted and well defined purposes.  
 In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, 

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

-- James Madison, 4 Annals of congress 179 (1794)

This was said by James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution because of his leading effort in writing the document.  He was also the 4th President.  Notice he is saying that such a right was not granted to Congress.  Yet we live in this upside down world today, where when someone asks the former Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, where they [Congress] think it is in the Constitution that they have the authority to pass the totalitarian medical care bill known as "Obamacare,"  the best she can come up with is: "Are you kidding?" 

Mark Ames continues:

This country, by contract, was founded in order to strive for a “more Perfect Union”—that’s “union,” as in the pairing of the words “perfect” and “union”—not sovereign, not states, not local, not selfish, but “union.”

What would Thomas Jefferson say about that?  Here you go:

“The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government.”

That is a complete, in-your-face refutation of Mr. Ames' assumption or assertion.  There may have been some arguments among the founders early on about some details, but the States would never have ratified the Constitution had it been common knowledge that the purpose of the contract was to make them subject to a powerful centralized government that would forge them and hammer them into someone's utopian idea of a "perfect union" as seen through the eyes of a socialist.  It took three years of publicly pleading with the States via the Federalist Papers to get them to ratify the Constitution by 1789.

Now here is where Mark Ames really proves himself to be either totally ignorant about U.S. history, or he is a liar:

And that other purpose at the end of the Constitution’s contractual obligations: promote the “General Welfare.” That means “welfare.” Not “everyone for himself” but “General Welfare.” That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it.

"Our tenet ever was that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money. "

-- Thomas Jefferson letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817 

 "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one...."

-- James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792 

 "With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted."  

-- James Madison in a letter to James Robertson

It really doesn't take a lot of effort to go and read the words of the founders and understand the plain meaning of what they said.  In fact, they made it a point to be well understood by the populace precisely because they were counting on the populace to agree to the system of governance that they had created.  How important was this concept of making the law clear and simple?  Let's hear from James Madison:

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what is will be tomorrow."

-- James Madison, Federalist no. 62, February 27, 1788

That tells me that if Mr. Madison were here today, he would be leading the march on Washington to burn the entire contents of the U.S. Code and dissolving every cabinet post and bureau save but maybe three or four.  It is with the utmost confidence from studying the words of the founders, that I can say that their concept of freedom was to only tolerate the most minimum of government.  The highest aim of this experiment in self-rule was for all men to be left alone to live  their lives as they saw fit, as long as they didn't encroach upon the rights and freedom of others.


So, now that we can see the truth in the words of the very men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, what should we do about it?  Let me use Mark Ames own words:

Now, our problem is that there are a lot of people in this country who have dedicated their entire lives to subverting the stated purpose of this country. We must be prepared to identify those who disrupt and sabotage our national purpose of creating this “more perfect union” identifying those who sabotage our national goal of “promoting the General Welfare”—and calling them by their name: traitors.

Mark Ames, if you are merely ignorant, and willing to admit it, then let us forgive you and help you to rectify your delusions.  If you insist on holding to your beliefs which are destructive and counter to all that the founders said and wrote, then you have made yourself to be a most loathsome creature in the eyes of those who yearn for freedom.  You have made yourself a lover and friend to the state and champion of the statist, and as such, you have made yourself an enemy of any people who wish to remain free.


Those of us who understand real liberty do not wish to impose anything upon you other than for you to leave us the hell alone.  If you can attract enough people to engage in your ideals of how a society should function, go and get it done. Take California or New York. They are almost completely there already.  I'm sure it won't matter to you if I tell you that it's been tried over and over and over, in places like the former Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. etc. etc.  The definition of insanity has never been a deterrent to those who believe in your cause.  As history shows, every time the schemes of creating a socialist utopian dream fails, the response of you and people like you is always to double down.  As Kevin Baker has elaborated:  "Do it again, only HARDER!"


Do what you have to do, Mr. Ames.  Just don't expect those of us with a sincere and lucid understanding of what this country was founded to be, to just roll over and let you do it.  Molan Labe.