License people to have children …

I know, I can almost hear a collective gasp. 

How dare anyone suggest that people be licensed to have children? 

Nobody wants to admit it, but that’s the answer to so many social ills. Draconian, sure.

But tell me:  Haven’t there been times when you read or see something that compels you to think that not everyone should be allowed to have children? 

Be honest.  When you hear about somebody marketing their child to pedophiles in return for drugs, or abandoning their kids while they gamble at a casino, tell me you’ve never had that thought.  When you read about some couple torturing and then killing their child in a drug-induced frenzy, or murdering and putting their child’s body out with the trash, can you honestly say you still believe everybody has a “right” to bear children? 

While much of the political debate still focuses on abortion, the rights of the unborn, and a woman’s right to choose, aren’t we all sidestepping the bigger issue?

Nailing down precisely when conception begins and a life is created is ultimately far less important than preventing conception by some people in the first place.

If a child is brought into this world by loving, caring parents it’s a wonderful event. Yet far too many innocent children are condemned by irresponsible and emotionally unstable parents to a life of unspeakable abuse and possibly murder at the hands of their parents. 

What’s worse? Infringing on people’s rights to bear as many children as they are now biologically capable or preventing people who couldn’t take care of a pet rock responsibly from producing children?  I know I care more about the protection of a living, breathing child than I do about anybody’s freedom to conceive whenever and how often that happens.      

That does not make me pro-abortion.  Nor does it mean I believe in selective breeding to improve society as a whole; I’m not in favor of weeding out the handicapped or the poor to create some genetic utopia.  I’m not trying to interfere with love and natural attraction.

I simply want to stop those who have no business having children, and no interest in raising and protecting a child, from conceiving. Conceiving shouldn’t be an accident, or an act of defiance or indifference, or done to prove you’re an “adult” or to save a bad relationship. 

Instead, it should be a conscious thought-through decision by an adult to bring another human into this world and care for it responsibly for at least 18 years, sacrificing at times what you want to provide what they need.  If someone is not willing to make that commitment with all their heart, and prove they will follow through on it, they shouldn’t be allowed to conceive.   

That’s right.  I said it.  They shouldn’t be allowed to conceive.     

Many will say there must be other, less severe answers, like education and abstinence.

The education advocates argue that better sex education about contraceptives and the like will persuade people to have sex more responsibly.  That’s betting that people don’t understand how they get pregnant or how to prevent pregnancies. 

I maintain everybody from age 10 on today knows how people get pregnant and knows how to prevent pregnancy. You can do demonstrations using bananas and condoms, and hand out free condoms to everybody until hell freezes over and they won’t always get used. It also ignores a cultural aberration that teenagers get other teenagers pregnant for a host of other reasons – like boasting rights or to set up their own household -- none of which has anything to do with having condoms handy.    

It’s also proven pointless to preach abstinence.  You can’t stop anyone from having sex – whether they are a 13 year old girl or boy, a 35 year old crack addict, or a raving psychopath. 

You can, however, stop them from conceiving.  And we must. 

I’m sure some responsible scientists somewhere have figured out how to make a safe, non-invasive negative-option form of temporary birth control for either men or women or perhaps both. It’s probably already been tested in countries with serious population issues like India and China.  And if they haven’t created this yet, they should. 

I’m not a Malthusian, Nazi, or eugenics proponent like a lot of progressives in the 20^th Century such as Hitler and Margaret Sanger.  I don’t worry about overpopulation, a weakening gene pool, or the sick and poor overwhelming us.  I simply want to put in a few hurdles to make conceiving a more considered and rational choice than a mistake or a passing whim. 

If you need a license to drive a car, you should need a license to bear a child. If background checks and in many states a waiting period are required to buy a firearm, why wouldn’t we do something similar for conceiving?  If you need to be an adult to purchase cigarettes or liquor, why would it be unreasonable to keep people who aren’t adults from getting pregnant? 

I know, the first thought most will have is who gets to make the call whether someone is or isn’t allowed to conceive. That’s the most dangerous part of this. 

So there need to be some basic restrictions up front, the first and most important being that you must be at least 18 years old to conceive.  You have to pass a drug screening.  You also need a signed contract between the prospective biological mother and biological father that makes both parties irrevocably and jointly responsible for all actions of their prospective child until that child reaches the age of 18 and jointly responsible for the support and care of that child until then.  Finally, you have to wait 30 days from applying before you may be licensed to conceive.  

I don’t think that’s too much to require.  

Don’t build there …

Barrier islands are temporary.  All the beaches along the New Jersey shore are as well.  What Mother Nature giveth, Mother Nature also taketh away. 

Is it just me, or does it seem like a stupid, wasteful idea to dump sand on beaches to replace the sand that gets washed away by every big storm? And at taxpayer expense? 

Talk about insanity. 

Maybe I’d think differently if I owned beachfront property. Or maybe I would have thought about that before I bought or built a place where there’s a history of beach erosion. 

I guess what’s most troubling to me is that we are picking up the tab repeatedly to indulge some communities’ desire to have nice beaches to support their local businesses.  If it’s that important to their local businesses, don’t you think those businesses should pick up the tab? Why are Federal and state funds paying for this?

Beach erosion happens naturally.  Without government intervention some beaches lose their sand; other beaches get that sand.  So some beaches lose, while others win.  Artificially shuffling sand from one beach to another at the cost of millions every time is just crazy. 

If that’s not enough, there are also beach communities that file lawsuits to prevent Federal and state efforts like building dunes to lessen erosion – not because these would be wasteful, which they would – but because some property owners’ ocean views would be compromised.

This is crazy squared.   

I feel the same about people who build on barrier islands anywhere along the Atlantic or Gulf Coast, and especially those who choose to live below sea level – like parts of New Orleans – and those who expect us to pay for their decision to live near a river that often floods.  Mother Nature will eventually win.  Thinking you’ll somehow be spared is stupid. 

If you’re smart enough to have earned the money to build a million-dollar property right on the shoreline or next to that scenic river, then you should be smart enough to understand that you’re not really an owner, but merely a renter.  Eventually the forces that created that land will take it away.  It’s just what happens over time. 

And I don’t care if a property has been in your family for years or even generations and is now under siege by rising tides, land subsidence, or some other natural phenomenon, it’s time to move on, or triple down on your insurance.  You’ll need it.

There’s a great Michener book all about the Chesapeake Bay area.  Near the end there’s a prophetic passage about a barrier island central to much of the book.

It was vanishing; being eaten away by the never-ending tides. 

If someone wants to indulge their fantasy of living right on the beach or on the banks of the Chesapeake, more power to them.  It’s their money. 

But when things turn out badly – as they inevitably will in time – don’t look to the rest of us to make you whole again and save your investment.  If you need to pour in more sand to replenish your beach, or build jetties or bulkheads to stem erosion, that should be on you.   

The same goes for boardwalks, popular at the Jersey Shore.  If the business interests in your town rely on boardwalk traffic for a living, and the boardwalk gets destroyed, let them pay for restoring it and leave the rest of us out of it. 

The argument is always that it will hurt the local economy if the beach is not restored, or the boardwalk’s not rebuilt, or whatever.  And the cost is far too great for the local community alone to fix.  They need Federal and state dollars to get them back on their feet. 

My question is why.  If every few years Mother Nature takes away part of your beach or destroys your boardwalk, aren’t you getting the message? 

You’re not supposed to be there. 

Why Benghazi won’t hurt Hillary …

Look, Americans know the Obama Administration lied about what happened in Benghazi. We are all fully aware that the video didn’t cause a spontaneous protest.  We all know Hillary knew that was a false narrative from the start yet repeated it even to the grieving families of those killed.

There’s no reason to think there’s anything else there. That should have been enough. 

Rather than accept an open and shut case of lies, deception and cover-ups so obvious to everyone, Republicans have once again managed to screw this up. Their endless hearings and stupid gaffes have convinced the public they are only focused on hurting Hillary’s Presidential aspirations.

Which is what Democrats have been saying from the get-go. 

The 11-hour trial by ordeal hearing yesterday produced nothing new. Hillary looked composed and ready. Republicans looked obnoxious. Republican after Republican on the panel tried to get that next-campaign soundbite for themselves and only succeeded in appearing nasty.  They didn’t come off as investigators as much as inquisitors, inserting snide comments and invectives before even posing their question.  Meanwhile, Hillary didn’t bite. 

Goebbels made a point one time that if you repeat a lie often enough it starts to gain traction. However in our age of short attention spans, the reverse can also be true: if you restate the same information over and over – no matter how true – it can lose impact.  People will simply start tuning it out as something they’ve already heard before.  Call it the point of diminishing astonishment or whatever but that’s one reason most people have moved on from Benghazi. 

The whole Benghazi thing is starting to take on the feel of the Web Hubbell / Whitewater / Rose Law Firm investigations.  Of course, people actually died in Benghazi while no one – except perhaps Vince Foster – died in any of those.  But the public got investigation fatigue on those, plus it was too complicated for most to follow.

I think what happened in Benghazi was tragic.  I think the cover-ups are unforgiveable and belie a tendency by the Obama Administration to simply bury inconvenient facts hoping whatever will eventually blow over.  Obama and his minions know the media will help them spin things to that end, and they rely on the public to tire quickly.  All of that speaks to a dangerous Nixonian scenario where lying to the public becomes accepted policy.

There’s no doubt Hillary knows exactly what happened.  But right now she has plausible deniability, to continue the Nixon metaphor.  The bigger issue is that she lied so effortlessly – and shamelessly – to the families of those killed in Benghazi. That’s a serious character flaw. 

Then again, she’s never been known to have integrity, whether she was getting a rapist off the hook in her Rose days, trashing the women Bill had sex with or even those he allegedly assaulted.  That’s just Hillary; no one is surprised she lied about Benghazi. 

Benghazi won’t hurt Hillary because the public already knows she’s a liar and the Republicans haven’t been able to lay a glove on her. If anything, I agree with Democrats that the Benghazi investigations – and especially that fiasco yesterday – actually helped Hillary.  If Benghazi comes up again she'll just shake her head and say that she’s testified time and again and there’s nothing more to say that hasn’t been said already and completely investigated.  Next …

We can thank bone-headed Republicans for giving Hillary and Obama a free pass on Benghazi; they won’t have to deal with it again anytime soon.   

I’m still hoping the FBI comes through for us.

Quota politics …

That’s what we’re headed toward. 

Americans have elected a black President.

Now Hillary is running to become the first female President. 

Given Hillary’s pathological aversion to the truth and her pathetic lack of accomplishments as a Senator and then Secretary of State, she doesn’t have much else to run on.  I suspect people are lining up to support her so they can tell their kids they helped elect America’s first female President; there can’t be any other reason. Becoming the first female President is all she’s got. 

But then again, that’s how Obama got elected. People wanted to prove they weren’t racists by voting for the black guy. Forget that he was a do-nothing backbencher first-term Senator. Forget that he was the product of corrupt Chicago politics, or that his only real work experience was as a community organizer and a college professor.  He had nothing else going for him. 

But he beat out Hillary in the primaries. Based on what, precisely? 

Well he was a fresh face, and she wasn’t. She certainly had more experience than he did yet he held a stronger trump card – he was black and she wasn’t. 

To give the devil her due, Hillary would likely have been a better, more rational and measured President than Obama. Probably, at that time, more like her moderate husband Bill had been.

But in quota politics, black beats female, even though females are more than half the voting public, while blacks are only about 13%. However, that only applies to liberals; black and/or female conservatives don’t count. Liberals dismiss any black and/or female conservatives as no more than race and gender traitors. 

So far there’s no black Democrat running for President.  Just old white Hillary.  In the absence of a black Democrat contender, any female trumps any white male.  In the last Democrat debates the white guys on stage didn’t have a prayer. Biden wouldn’t either.    

So let’s review the bidding to establish a liberal hierarchy using a poker analogy:

One pair:

Sufficiently liberal except on one or two things, like gun control or abortion

One pair, Aces or face cards:

Proven liberal but hawkish on defense

Two pairs: 

Liberal with antiwar, anti-military history

Three of a kind: 

Liberal with antiwar, anti-military history who marched with Dr. King

Straight: 

Liberal, with antiwar, anti-military history, marched with Dr. King, beaten by police

Flush:

Black or bi-racial liberal, with anti-war, anti-military history; raised by single mother

4 of a kind: 

Black or bi-racial female liberal, with anti-war, anti-military history; raised in the ghetto by single mother on welfare

Straight Flush: 

Black or bi-racial female liberal, with anti-war, anti-military history; raised in the ghetto by single illegal immigrant mother on welfare

Royal Flush:

I can’t imagine …

According to this chart, Hillary is currently only holding a max of two pairs, but being female adds the top spin to make those pairs Aces and Kings.  Because of age, it’s getting harder to find some Democrat holding three of a kind or a straight still interested in running for President; there simply aren’t that many Elijah Cummings, Al Sharptons, or Jesse Jacksons around anymore. 

Also, as you can see by this chart, she would beat Biden who would only be holding one pair because he owns guns, plus he’s a white male.

Hillary supporters believe it’s “her turn” and Hillary herself promotes the view that “it’s about time we had a female President.” 

This is simply amazing.  Nobody “deserves” the Presidency just because of their race or, in Hillary’s case, their gender. Nobody should get elected because we haven’t had someone like them as President yet.  Where does this quota mentality end? Will we keep running through various groups – like Native Americans, Orthodox Jews, Pacific Islanders, or the Kardashians – until everybody has their “turn” at being President? 

We’re not discussing something silly like T-ball, where everybody on the team – regardless of ability – automatically gets to play.  We’re talking about the job of President of the United States, not a contestant on American Idol or DTWTS.  This has real impact on us and the world.  Some jerkoff in that office can cause disaster around the globe and get us all killed.    

Then what will be our response?  Whoops? Maybe proving we don’t discriminate against the transgendered by electing Caitlyn Jenner wasn’t wise?  Maybe making a dyslexic person President just to show our support for the learning disabled may not have been our best move? 

I don’t think the world will understand. I know I don’t. Choosing a President should be a very serious business because it has very serious consequences.  The President should never be just the “flavor of the month” or get there on a misguided sympathy vote to right perceived wrongs. 

American voters have tried that and look how well it worked with Obama 

By playing the quota card Hillary may get elected.  If so, for me, I will always feel she got there for all the wrong reasons, as I felt about Obama’s election. 

If someone wins a TV reality show contest they get a nice set of prizes. If someone wins the Presidency they become the most powerful leader of the most powerful nation in the world.

The former is a popularity contest where people often vote for a contestant just because they want to help the perceived underdog. The latter should never be. 

But that’s how too many in the voting public – egged on by a complicit media – see voting for a President.  And we all pay the price.     

Built-in tips …

Recently I read that some big city restaurants are doing away with tips. They will automatically add 15-20% to the bill instead, and, so they say, will share the extra money among more of the restaurant staff – like the bus boys and kitchen staff, as well as the waiters and waitresses.   

Two things come to mind.

First, the last class of people in the business world I’d expect to handle money properly and equitably is restaurant owners. These are the same folks who hire illegals off the books at slave wages to increase their take. They are also most likely to go under leaving unpaid bills and back taxes in their wake. Cooking the books and not reporting cash receipts is a time-honored tradition. So in what universe would you trust them?

That’s not to say there aren’t honest restaurant owners.  But if you think they’re reporting all the cash they get, you’re naïve.     

Next, this is just stupid. Deciding what to tip your waiter or waitress is the only real opportunity you get to reward them for providing good service. Conversely, within reason, it’s also the only way the average diner has to send a message for bad service. 

I’m not talking about the burnt steak or dry pork chop – that’s not their fault. 

I’m referring to waiting an hour for your drinks, seeing your order cooling on the pickup counter for a half hour, bungling your order altogether, a snotty attitude, or ignoring your requests for simple things like butter or water. That’s their fault. 

A confession:  I routinely tip at least 20% for decent service; significantly more on low-priced meals where that percentage doesn’t seem fair. A $6 breakfast with good and friendly service warrants a $3 to $4 tip, to me.  I know people depend on tips to make a living – if they are working in a place with $6 breakfasts they need all the help you can give them.

It’s the same reason I don’t factor in discounts when I tip. If some restaurant sends you a card for 50% off your next meal for two it’s not fair to tip based solely on your reduced bill; the person waiting on you shouldn’t take a hit because you got a deal.  Fair’s fair. 

So my tipping threshold isn’t that tough. The waiter or waitress is always going to get at least 20% just for doing a reasonable job. To get less they have to work at being bad.   

I can remember only one time in my adult life I didn’t leave a tip.  It was at an Outback near me and the service was so truly awful, and the waitress so incompetent and completely and aggressively rude, I couldn’t reward her bad behavior. I still regret that, however.   

Okay, so why am I so opposed to built-in tips? To me it’s just another example of taking away penalties for doing a bad job.  

When you leave a good tip for a waiter or waitress as a reward they connect good service with better tips.  If they get the same amount automatically – assuming the restaurant owner actually does split the take, which isn’t a given – you, the customer, don’t matter as much.  If there’s no change in the reward for doing a good job or a poor job, why bother to do better? 

I know there are many people who think restaurant workers are woefully underpaid and that it’s demeaning to have to work for tips. 

I have news for you – waiting tables in a decent restaurant is a performance art.  When you’re good at it you make more money; when you suck at it you don’t. That’s life.  Some wait staff make very, very good money because they are excellent at their job; they really are professionals and deserve all the money they get in tips. 

Others just go through the motions. They shouldn’t automatically be rewarded just for showing up.  But then again, that’s part of the problem with our culture today. People demand more money because they feel entitled to it just for showing up, not because they’ve earned it or added value.

It’s no wonder that the news media thinks built-in tips are a great idea. They also believe every slacker in a paper hat at Mickey Ds should get $15 an hour. 

For what?  

Here comes Santa Claus …

Only his name is Bernie Sanders.  And he’s not at all concerned whether you’ve been naughty or nice, unless you are a billionaire. 

If you’ve not been following Bernie, he’s been drawing record crowds with a campaign based almost entirely on the most powerful word in marketing: Free. 

Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. Free comprehensive healthcare for all.  Free pre-school and kindergarten for everyone.   

How does he expect to pay for all this? Why by making the rich pay their “fair share” – in other words by raising taxes on the rich when they are alive, and again when the rich die and pass on their estates to others.

Bernie’s an old-school class warrior from the way-back machine. His solution to income inequality is Robin Hood simple: take from the rich and give to everybody who isn’t. That has a lot of appeal for folks who want other people to pay for their stuff.  

As someone online posted: If you’d like to steal from your neighbors but don’t have the guts, you’re probably voting for Bernie Sanders. 

Bernie’s running as a Democrat, although he isn’t a Democrat (he’s a self-proclaimed Socialist), but that doesn’t seem to bother anybody at the DNC.      

Now, in fairness, Bernie has some ideas that make sense.

Right now you only pay the Social Security tax on income up to $250,000; he wants to remove that cap so all income beyond that is also subject to the same Social Security tax rate. That seems somewhat reasonable. He also wants to cut the student loan interest rate to a bit more than 2% from the current rate of about 4.3%; again, not a terrible idea.   

Like a lot of Democrats he wants to spend big on infrastructure, make-work programs for young people, and education. He’s also on record for making it easier for unions to organize, and against any laws or regulations that give individual employees the right to choose not to be a part of a union, or force unions rather than the employer to collect their dues.  So unions love him.  He’s also in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, so low-wage, low-skill workers in retail, food service and hospitality love him, too. 

He’s Santa Claus.  He’s got something for just about everyone. Except the mean old rich.  

What’s not to like about Bernie?  He’s passionate about his beliefs. He’s sincere.  He even looks like a nice old guy. It’s not surprising he’s getting big crowds, especially among those who long for the days when the United States finally is more like Europe.

Well, not the REAL Europe, but the one idealized by the media and Euro-wannabe politicians like John Kerry – you know, the travel-poster Hallmark-card version. The Disneyworld version.  In their Europe there’s cradle-to-grave everything.  Free.  Everybody – rich or poor – takes modern trains or rides bikes everywhere, appreciates good food, lounges in quaint cafes sipping espresso, and is happy to share what they have with the less fortunate among them.   

Their Europe is like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon: “Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” And just as unrealistic.    

The REAL Europe is a bit different from that lofty vision. There’s massive unemployment.  Unions routinely grind everyday life to a standstill. Productivity is low. Higher education is free – but only if you pass rigorous tests. Healthcare is free but rationed. The reason people take trains and ride bikes is because fuel prices are through the roof, and after taxes so is the price of a car.  

The social structure is ossified – there’s little hope of moving beyond the class you were born into. At the bottom or middle of the social and economic strata, there’s no reason to work harder than you absolutely have to; your opportunities for advancement are limited.  If you want to make more money, and do, high taxes on everything you earn or buy will take most of that away.

It’s the European way. It’s how they fund all the other free stuff.   

This must be very appealing to immigrants now flooding Europe in a headlong rush to jump on that gravy train.  They know they don’t have to learn to speak a new language, become a citizen, or try to assimilate. That’s not part of the rules for getting on the dole in many countries. 

However, faced with this crush, the mythical welcoming Europe is starting to have second thoughts. Many Europeans worry about being conquered from within by groups that once there may attempt to substitute their culture and laws for those of the host country. 

It’s already happened in several places. Islamist immigrants want their own enclaves where Sharia law supersedes local laws. Local law enforcement authorities have been instructed not to enter those enclaves unless invited.   

What results in a patchwork of feudal fiefdoms where accepted cultural traditions of some immigrant groups – such as honor killings, child brides, and sex slavery – happen every day out of view of law enforcement. And no one in those communities will speak out.

In Great Britain, for example, a group of Pakistanis ran a sex-trafficking operation of underage sex slaves for years within the tight-knit Pakistani community.  Many in that community knew all about it but never reported it to local authorities. It was a cultural thing.     

The same reasons folks like Bernie Sanders and Obama envy European-style governance are the principal reasons why Europe is such a mess today. Free this, free that, bending over backward to appease everyone, cultural diversity run amuck – these are a few of their favorite things. 

I wonder how many American’s would really like giving up as much as 50-70% of their income in taxes to remake America into the Europe envied by progressives here? 

In the recent Democrat debates Bernie Sanders said he would like to see America more like Sweden and Denmark.  The income tax rates for both Denmark and Sweden are about 56%.  The highest income-tax rate in the U.S. is about 39%, with the highest effective tax rate being about 33%. Big difference.  

Funny, that never comes up when Bernie is making sweeping promises of free stuff.    

I guess Santa likes to keep his secrets.   

It’s not our government anymore …

Government of the people, by the people, for the people. 

We all grew up believing this. It’s simply not true these days. 

The proof is all around us.

Secret Service agents acted to discredit Senator Chaffetz as retaliation for investigating that agency’s misdeeds.  IRS e-mails which might show criminal conduct on the part of Lois Lerner have been conveniently “lost.” Other IRS employees have received bonuses, even though they’ve owed back taxes themselves.  Still others have been caught pulling up tax returns of ex-spouses and celebrities for no official reason.  State Department e-mails related to on-going Senate investigations have been withheld as not relevant by the person withholding them.

And before I forget, someone in Homeland Security altered Representative Kevin McCarthy's Wikipedia page to allude to an extramarital affair between McCarthy and another member of the House, timed to hit as he was running for Speaker.  

These are all the work of government employees; the people who are supposed to be working for us. It’s evident that they are working for the government, and themselves, not us. 

The U.S. government has become its own institution, above the people. The millions employed in the government serve the government’s interests – which become their own as well – at our expense. And they are essentially untouchable. They have no fear of retribution for unlawful or unethical acts.  Other government bureaucrats judge whether they have acted properly, and, not surprisingly, most often come down on the side of the government employees. 

We the people are powerless. We can’t kick them out of office because they aren’t elected. We can’t successfully sue them because of governmental immunity.  In many cases, we can’t even determine precisely who is responsible because they close ranks to protect each other.    

Politics permeate everything. Democrats are loath to discuss holding government employees accountable because government employee unions contribute heavily to Democrats. The Republican establishment doesn’t want to address out-of-control government employees for fear of retaliation, plus it’s always convenient for fundraising to have a perpetual villain.

Meanwhile, the government keeps getting more intrusive. Government employees are becoming more arrogant and abusive. They are now a privileged class above the law increasingly separated from the general public paying their salaries. They have accumulated enough power – through political activities and campaign contributions, and by sheer numbers – to make bloated government departments and agencies “too big to fail.”

If anyone dares to talk about cutting departments and reducing headcounts by any other means than attrition, except in the military, they are faced with ultimately increasing unemployment by hundreds of thousands. Just think about the uproar over the temporary government “shut down” over the debt ceiling impasse. Thousands of “non-essential” government employees didn’t get paid on time and everybody went completely nuts.

It was a temporary event.  But the way it was reported, and demagogued by Democrats, you would have thought we were pulling the plug on life support for crippled orphans.  The relatively few government workers affected got all their back pay in full, which was never in doubt, but the entire event cemented the power of government workers. They all got a paid vacation; nobody lost their jobs as a result, except for some Republican legislators.       

It only showed that government employees are more entrenched and entitled than ever before. And since government exerts more and more control over our everyday lives, I don’t see government employees willingly giving up the power they wield over all of us. 

It’s intoxicating for many, I’m sure, to have great power over ordinary citizens with little to no fear of ever being held accountable for your actions, except by other unelected bureaucrats who sympathize with you. You can thumb your nose at Congress, make up the rules as you go along, and even if you get caught in something blatantly illegal or unethical, you can just retire.   

That’s what I’m seeing.  Unfortunately, I don’t see a simple solution.

In the private sector, you could use bankruptcy to reorganize and invalidate or at least renegotiate union contracts in the process.  That avenue isn’t open to us when it comes to the Federal government, although it’s a nice idea. 

Too bad.    

No one denies the climate is changing …

A popular attack by liberals is to accuse someone of being a “climate-change denier.” Like many of their claims, it’s baseless.  Worse yet, it’s disingenuous. 

Nobody with any sense at all denies the climate is changing. The science is pretty clear.

The reason why the climate is changing – or what we can realistically do about it – is where reasonable people can disagree. 

It’s also where unreasonable people with an agenda use snapshots out of time to advance their causes. Right now, it’s global warming melting the ice caps, raising ocean temperatures, and paradoxically causing droughts and floods as well as extreme heat and cold. 

In the 1970s it was the threat of global cooling, leading to an imminent ice age, crop failures and mass starvation around the world. That even made the cover of Time Magazine. 

That’s why activists switched to “climate change” from global warming or cooling; every time they did their doom and gloom about the planet cooling down or heating up, Mother Nature threw a curve and made them look like idiots.  We had record cold when we were supposed to be warming and record heat when we were supposed to be cooling. 

I remember not long ago when protesters in DC urging Congress to act on measures to curb global warming found themselves holding their event while a blizzard raged.  Awkward. 

I’ve made the point before about the difference between correlation and causation. Correlation is when things appear to be connected; causation is much tougher to prove. You can correlate just about anything – the rise of automobiles and world wars for example – but that doesn’t mean automobiles caused those wars. 

The point here is simple. It’s easy to confuse things that seem to coincide with what’s really causing something to happen. In terms of Earth science our knowledge of why the global climate fluctuates from decade to decade, or century to century, is very limited.  For all of our science we still can’t accurately predict weather from week to week or season to season, much less in years to come.   

We have fossil records dating back millions of years showing alternating cycles of warming and cooling.  But scientists really don’t know why or how the climate could shift so much, back and forth. Some blame volcanic eruptions; others blame meteor strikes, but the simple truth is that the Earth is a very complex biosphere.  Our weather, our climate is influenced by everything from solar flares, the pull of the Moon, shifting tectonic plates, changes in the Earth’s tilt, and the fact that Earth’s surface is largely covered by oceans with their own scarcely understood patterns that affect the weather. 

Consequently, I find most climatology assertions from climate-change activists to be about as revelatory as looking at a rock outside my window:  if the rock is wet, it’s raining; if it’s dry, it’s not raining; if the rock throws a shadow it’s sunny; if there’s no shadow it’s cloudy.  

I guess that makes me an expert, too. 

Trust me I believe in science.  But it annoys the Hell out of me when people claim “science” proves their point when, in fact, it proves just the opposite. 

In reality you cannot prove a negative hypothesis.  In other words, you can’t prove that something will never happen. You can look at probabilities and say something is likely or unlikely based on the information you have right now, but that’s still speculation only as valid as your facts.    

And that’s the crux of the matter with climate-change Cassandras. They base their predictions on things no one fully understands, measured over a ridiculously short period of a few years.  Then they conveniently ignore all the other possible factors that don’t agree with their foregone conclusion that man is solely at fault.  

It’s important to know that humans have only been around for about 200,000 years or less. That’s not even a nanosecond in geologic time. It’s a real stretch to draw a straight line between the rise of humans and climate change, especially since there were numerous Ice Age events long before modern humans arrived and after, too.  Scientists have also determined that glaciation occurs naturally about every 40,000 to 100,000 years, with or without humans, for example.

Humans may contribute to global warming over a short time, but historically – according to scientists – global warming and cooling happens naturally, with or without us. 

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to limit greenhouse gases and pollution, but whether the planet gets colder or warmer is largely out of our control. Especially since the United States is a relatively small part of the overall problem, even if you believe that this is all about greenhouse gases.  We could cut our CO₂  and other emissions to practically zero but the rest of the world – like China and India in particular – will continue to burn coal and pump out pollutants in far greater amounts than us. 

The climate-change activists don’t like to admit that, because they actually have other agendas. Much of the climate-change mania masks much deeper motives.   

As Rahm Emanuel so famously said: never let a crisis go to waste. Apparently this applies to invented crises as well as real ones.  

So what’s really behind the whole climate-change confederation?

First, there are the alternative-energy activists who hate fossil fuels of any kind. They’re frustrated because in the 70s they predicted we’d run out of oil and natural gas, and we haven’t; in fact we’ve found much more oil and natural gas. So then instead of prices of fossil fuels soaring because of their predicted scarcity, making alternative energy more attractive, prices have fallen because of abundance, while alternative energy costs remain higher.

They are the same ones trying to block the Keystone Pipeline because it might bring down oil prices even more and continue our dependence on what they see as the enemy of renewable energy.  But they can’t say that out loud.  So they blame fossil fuel use for a large part of global warming because combustion releases carbon dioxide. (So does burning wood to keep warm in their Earth-friendly cabin off the grid, but no matter.)

The reality is they want solar and renewable energy forms to prevail for philosophical, not scientific, or economic reasons. They despise oil companies. They hate utility companies. They dislike manufacturing businesses of any kind.  Their mantra is that all of these cause pollution by burning or using byproducts of oil and coal, which leads to a greenhouse effect, which leads to global warming. 

Now that there’s an abundance of cheap, clean-burning natural gas, and major manufacturers and utilities are switching from oil and coal to natural gas, they are beside themselves.  So they’ve decided to blame mankind in general, but Americans in particular.

Next there are the one-world, redistribution-of-wealth types. They want us to give our money to less developed countries to help them use more environmentally friendly (read: solar) forms of energy.  In short, they want more developed nations to pay less-developed countries because, well, we have too much money and they don’t have enough. 

Of course, what they overlook is that developed nations have been trying to help less developed nations for decades with abysmal results.  Most often our aid goes into the pockets of whatever head-man or dictator and never gets used for its intended purpose.

Unless you consider building palaces in the middle of the jungle, or buying limousines and private jets for the tyrant du jour boosting economic development.

Finally, there are the craven opportunists like Al Gore.  Al made an even bigger name for himself by making a documentary that would have made Thomas Malthus blush with its prediction of imminent global disaster. With edited footage and a reckless disregard for the facts Al made it appear that all life on Earth would essentially cease to exist because of manmade pollution.

Now, what Al failed to disclose in his award-winning film was that he was heavily involved in profiting off what’s known as cap and trade – where companies would buy the right to pollute from companies that reduced their pollution. So he, too, had a hidden agenda. 

Al’s no stranger to hypocrisy.  He continues to speak out on the perils of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels at speaking engagements he gets to in his private jet.

To sum up: the climate is changing, and always will.  But exactly why, and what to do about it – if anything – is too wrapped up in pseudo-science and hidden agendas to be taken seriously. It’s reminiscent of the religious fervor that greeted the year 1000, when zealots believed the world would end, or, perhaps, Christ would return to launch a new age. Either or.   

Or, as happened, neither.

In terms of predictions about climate change, I’ll keep looking at the rock outside my window.

It’s never let me down.