OK, make up your minds environmentalists!

So I was talking to a friend today.  She takes issue with the fact that I take issue with environmentalism.  Our discussion today was caused by this article about Arizona spending $1.25 million to save some endangered squirrels.

She argued that spending the money was a good thing because of the whole circle of life thing, saying you never know what bad things will happen if this particular breed of squirrel goes extinct.  I countered with extinction being a PART of the circle of life, and to name one bad thing that has happened because the dinosaurs became extinct.  Her counter was that dinosaurs became extinct because of a natural event, not because we were building roads through their habitats.

That got me thinking about life and common sense.  According to environmentalists, we (humans) are the product of a billion years or so of evolution.  If this is true, what is humankind but a very evolved animal – the king of the animal kingdom if you will, the top of the evolutionary ladder.

Now the other side of the argument is creationism.  God said, and it came to pass.  End of story.  We are created, we didn’t come from no monkey.  God created the earth, planted a garden, and then created man to care for the garden.  Expand the metaphor of the garden to the planet, and God gave us the earth and wants us to take care of it.

Which leads to the question: why is it that conservative religious groups who believe in the literal words of the Bible don’t seem to care about the planet?  Why is it that eco-leftists who believe we are just another animal care about the planet more than anything else? 

So, my question to eco-leftists and environmentalists is, if humans really are just highly evolved animals, then we are a PART of nature and everything we do is an act of nature.  The answer is simple: ALL SPECIES CHANGE THEIR ENVORONMENT TO THEIR BENEFIT: as sure as that dam built by beavers causing flooding in a valley is a part of nature, that road through the mountains is a part of nature because we are a part of nature (according to environmentalists).

As for creationism, I am not sure what I believe.  Intelligent design, day equals age, seven literal days, evolution, I honestly don’t know any more.  I prefer to focus on the here and now, and spending $1.25 million to save a squirrel population of 250 from extinction really doesn’t matter in the world of the here and now.

Congratulations, Mr. Jobs, It’s a Fad

There are those people. Those … Apple people. They are people who watch the podcasts of Steve Jobs introducing a new product and have an overwhelming desire to touch themselves in naughty places. They buy every new apple product no matter how useless it is.

I work with two guys who are solid Apple guys. Between them they own everything that has ever come out of Cuppertino. One of them has an Apple TV for cryin’ out loud (talk about a useless product. You buy an Apple TV, and then you use it to buy videos … from Apple!) Well, both of my Mac Guys have decided to pass on the iPad until they had proof it was worth buying. Both of them have admitted that the iPad doesn’t really seem to have any real world use.

But, the iPad will be an initial success. Why? this guy in a Bloomberg online article said it best: “It’s ridiculously expensive, way overpriced,” said Josh Klenert, a 36-year-old graphic designer, who still went ahead and bought one. “You may call it a dumb computer or a smart telephone --it’s in between. It’s a unique, sexier device.”

Five hundred bucks for an electronic paperweight seems a little steep to me.

It all started with a bumper sticker …

The Name Game.  Liberal, liberal fee-fi-iberal.  Conservative, conservative moo-oink-ervative.  Lets get real.  Republican?  Democrat?  Liberal? Conservative?  Those terms have become irrelevant.  They have been stripped of all meaning by history and a press that is quick to cast the fog of war on politicians they don’t like.

Many, many years ago, I remember a bumper sticker that said “I’m not anti-abortion, I’m PRO-LIFE”.  This set off a revolution over political naming rights.  Who has the right to determine what a person is called politically?  Pro-Life has such a  … well, positive, sound to it.  Of course, so as not to be considered “anti-life”, abortions rights people decided to describe themselves as “pro-choice”.

Republicans haven’t always been conservatives, and conservatives haven't always been American in their ideals.  A conservative is one who believes that the established order should be maintained and protected, while a liberal wants to change the established order (usually  in the name of reforming it).

By those definitions, the American Patriots fighting for independence were liberals, and the loyalists were conservative.  The Confederates, fighting for states rights and against federal intervention in property laws were conservatives and the abolitionists were liberals.

I think that one of the weaknesses of political discourse today is a lack of absolute terminology.  Mark Levin in his book Liberty and Tyranny prefers the term “statist” to describe the main body of the current Democratic party.  A statist is one who believes in “giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy” (dictionary.com definition of statism).

I am anti-statist.  I believe that the best thing government can do is get off our backs and let the American People be free and prosperous again.  This is something you will unlikely get with Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives in the United States today.

What conservatives need to win …

This will be short and sweet in honor of Valentine’s Day.  If conservatives really want to win this November, they need something.  They need specificity.  The democrats won by whining and complaining.  The American people, now that they are seeing specifics of the democrats ideas and plans, they don’t like it.

So, for the republicans to win… for conservatives to take the government back, they need to put forth to the people a unified, SPECIFIC plan and message, much like the Contract with America from 1994.  Call it the American Plan for Prosperity or something.  Here is my wish list for the plan:

• Include in it a simplified tax code with three brackets (starting at $18,000.00 and eliminate the EIC at the same time) and close the current loopholes the tax code is riddled with. 
• Include in it a tax subsidy for homeowners who add solar and wind electrical generation systems to their homes if those systems feed power back to the grid.
• Include in it a cap on punitive damages in medical malpractice cases at the amount of the $500,000.00 or the ten-year average of the doctor’s annual salary, whichever is more.
• Include in it a ten-year plan of spending and construction to retrofit all existing federal buildings with green technology.
• Include in it a portability law which allows workers to take their health insurance with them when they change jobs, and allow people to purchase insurance across state lines.

By providing a simple, straightforward plan, with specific, measurable goals, we can take our country back from the democrats who seem hell-bent on destroying it.

Meghan McCain: Defiantly hot, but do we want her? NOT!

Meghan McCain is many things.  In the days after the campaign, she was put up as the face of a newer, younger, hipper Republican Party.  Sure, she's mattressable, but beyond that, does she have anything to offer a conservative like me?  Let's see, she hates the teabag movement. She favors gay rights (I am not anti-gay-rights, I m pro-civil rights, no one group deserves special rights).  She can't tell the difference between original sources (Rham Emanuel saying liberals were "retarded") and secondary reporting (Rush Limbaugh quoting Emanuel).  She is basically an empty-headed socialite who is, like Paris Hilton, famous only for being famous.  She has nothing in her resume that makes me believe in her as an individual.

I believe that she is a Republican only because of her family, and once John passes on, she will probably switch parties.  To that I say, fine.  Go Ahead Meghan.  Stop pretending and go be a Democrat.  Trust me, you will fit right in since I doubt your professed belief in conservative fiscal principles is very genuine.  You will fit in with all the other showy socialites.  Meanwhile, those of us who stand on principles will be rid of your poisonous influence.  And after the sad day that your father does leave this world, you will, thankfully, fade into the obscurity from which you came.

Environmentalism as religion.

Sadly, we lost a great mind several years ago when Michael Chrichton left us.  Aside from great books like Jurassic Park,  Congo and Sphere … aside from ER, the greatest medical drama ever to grace our TV sets … he gave us something most interesting.  He gave us the theory of Environmentalism as a religion.

In a very provocative speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, he drew a parallel between Judeo-Christian belief and environmentalism.  Consider his explanation:

“There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.” (Read the whole article at http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html)

Environmentalism … the religion of choice for 21st century urban atheists.  Scary, huh?

Weapons of Mass Distraction

OK, so this post comes a little early (cutting and pasting the entries I had was all of a ten-minute job).  I just can’t get this out of my head, so I figured I would blog about it.

We just finished our chapter on Political Elections in my class.  I wrapped it up by showing clips from a great movie: Man of the Year.  In this movie, Robin Williams plays a comedian who does a politically-based comedy “news” show on cable (like John Stewart or Stephen Colbert) who decides to run for President.

During the campaign, he speaks about something he calls “weapons of mass distraction.”  These are political “hot button” issues that politicians use to distract the public from other things that would, quite frankly, piss them off.  So, to save themselves the grief of a pissed-off electorate, politicians use these issues as a kind of smoke screen to keep the public away from the issues that are bad for the politician (I hope you understood that explanation).

Anyways, two of the issues he calls “weapons of mass distraction” are flag desecration amendments and same-sex marriage amendments.  However, you can see this far more clearly in the current administration.  Granted, when President Obama entered office on Jan 20, 2009, he inherited an economy that was in a shambles.  However, when it comes to the economy, Presidents often get blamed for things that are not their fault, and they often take credit for things they did not do.  What happened in ‘08 has been referred to as the “perfect financial storm”.  It had all of the ingredients for a major meltdown, but no one was able to connect the dots, and people who did and tried to warn us, well, we called them doomsayers and ignored them.

So, President Obama wins election based, in part, on his ability to link the poor economy to the previous administration.  Once he became President, it became HIS problem though.  Enter the Stimulus Bill.  It spent money we didn’t have on things that would have happened anyways, albeit perhaps more slowly.  He promised us that if the Stimulus Bill passed, unemployment would not go above 8%.  Now we sit at 9.7% (an artificially low number because of how the government counts unemployment, I will probably post about that topic in a later post), and we were as high as 10% before about half a million unemployed persons simply gave up looking for work.

So, what does the President focus his energies on?  Fixing the economy?  No, he focuses instead on healthcare.  Get the people riled up about healthcare, and they won’t notice the continuing degradation of the economy.  And it has worked.  How many people have realized that in the past three weeks, the Dow has lost pretty much all of the gains it has made in the past six months?  Not many.  Why?  We are worried about our insurance plans, whether or not we will lose our family doctors and whether or not we will be able to care for ourselves in the future with the insurance we will have.  All while polls show that the majority of Americans are happy with their health insurance.

Now THAT, is a weapon of mass distraction.