STRANGELAND.NET

It seems that both the US House of Representative and the North Carolina General Assembly are moving us more and more toward a Nanny State where we look to the Government to make decisions for us, hand hold us through the good and bad times, and make sure we have to take responsibility for our actions. All part and parcel with the populace becoming completely beholden to the Government for everything, thus greatly increasing the power of the politicians.

So let’s start with a little bill coming out of the US House. It seems that there are Representatives who believe that someone shouldn’t be allowed to make the decision to use their credit card at an on-line gambling establishment. The quote I heard is that someone shouldn’t be able to “lose their house in a single click.” Sounds like a good idea, right? After all, no one wants to lose their house because of out of control gambling. The problem is that this isn’t the Government’s place. If I want to go to PokerStars one night and play poker online with Wil Wheaton, then I should be able to do so with whatever form of legal payment I have available, up to and including my credit card. If I get into a situation where Wil is beating me every hand with bullets over my cowboys, that’s my problem, not anyone else’s. It’s my money to do with as I will and I don’t need Mommy Government taking that card out of my hand because I might hurt myself.

On top of this, you have the North Carolina General Assembly that has decided they need to make sure we don’t get hurt while riding in the backseat of a car and have pushed through a requirement for everyone in a car to wear a seatbelt. For me, seatbelt laws fall into the same category as helmet laws for motorcycles. For anyone over the age of 18, I do not believe they should be there. I believe it’s government interference in a personal choice. Now, don’t get me wrong. I personally think someone that doesn’t wear a helmet on a motorcycle or a seatbelt in a car is just a Darwin Award waiting to happen, but I don’t feel that the Government should step in and take that decision out of the hands of the person who will reap the rewards of that decision. Personally, I wouldn’t ride a motorcycle without a helmet and given that I’ve had my life saved by seatbelts, I won’t ride in the front seat of a car without wearing it (backseat is a coin toss). Regardless, it’s my decision and my place to suffer the consequences of opting not to wear my seatbelt if I’m just running up to the corner store.

If I’m considered an adult by the Government, they need to back off and actually treat me as such. If I’m running down the street and trip, skinning my knee, I can do one of two things. I can either pick myself up, patch up my knee, and make sure not to do what caused the accident in the future, or I can opt to ignore the cause and expect someone else to take care of it for me, ignoring the reality of the situation. Everytime we allow something like this go through without comment, then we’re giving more and more of our independene and personal control to the Government. Yes, the idea of perfect security and safety is seductive at times. It sounds like a good idea until you realize you’d end up stuck in a padded cell and unable to go anywhere because you might hurt yourself.

Of course, how many people actually think the masses of the country (or state) will actually stand up and make a hue and cry over this? After all, most of them don’t gamble online and they wear their seatbelts for a variety of reasons. However, that’s the same mentality that gets us the line “You’re not doing anything wrong, so why do you care if the government looks into your personal life?”

To that I simply answer, “Because it’s my life, not theirs.”

stranger Uncategorized

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last day or so regarding the Fourth of July, what it means, and what has or hasn’t changed over the course of the last two hundred thirty years. In recent years, I’ve been attempting to actually put some thought into what the day means rather than just seeing it as a day off from work where we grill burgers and shoot off fireworks.

As part of my thought process, I give you this from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We therefore solemnly publish and declare that these are and of right ought to be free and independent states. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

You’ll notice that I bolded part of what I quoted. I did this for a very important reason: to hi-lite something that is often missed by the people in the United States on both sides of the issue of the focus of Government.

You will often hear people who have issue with the government of the United States (or, more to the point, those who currently provide for its make up) quoting the third paragraph. In my opinion, they do so justifiably. Jefferson made it very clear that if the Governed come to find that the government no longer suits the needs and aims of the Governed, then it is their right and duty to change that government by whatever means necessary. I think it is safe to say, given the actions following the Declaration, that those means were up to and including violent conflict–but not before all other options had been exhausted.

I am actually one of those that is coming more and more to believe that we have strayed so far from the aims of the founders of this country that we should seriously consider a complete overhaul of the system. The problem, however, comes in with the second paragraph quoted above. I’ll quote it here again just so re-enforce the point:

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The key phrase here is in the last four words of the above quote: consent of the governed. How do we give our consent in this Republic? By voting. Our consent is denoted by the results of an election. By casting our vote, we are consenting to be governed by the winner of that race. For any who do not vote, they are consenting to live by the will of others and consenting to those results by their silence.

This brings me to two points regarding consent of the governed. First and foremost is my belief that if you do not vote, then you are freely giving up your right to complain about who is elected. If you’re not willing to go forward with the simple task of going to vote when you have the option, then you are giving up your free will to the direction of others and you have no one to blame but yourself.

I can hear the out cry from various places now stating how all of the choices are simply a matter of the lesser of two evils and how a vote for third party who may fit your beliefs more is a wasted vote. I could go on for pages regarding the idea of a ‘wasted’ vote, but I’ll leave that for now with a simple comment that I do not believe there is not any such thing as a wasted vote. Instead, I will go to my last point which is if you’re not satisfied with any of the candidates, then you should do something about it.

By doing something about it, I mean one of two very simple things. Either you should be finding someone you support and throwing your efforts into seeing them in office and rallying others to that cause, or you should be getting out there yourself and running if you believe that your way of doing things is better than the current choices. In my opinion, a vote that amounts to none of the above is not a proper choice. If you’re willing to vote none of the above, then you should be out there running yourself.

In the end, apathy is unspoken consent. If you’re not willing to put your neck on the line to get things changed, then you are giving your consent to be governed by the will of those who are. If that’s what you’re willing to do, don’t be surprised when you find yourself the sheep talking to two wolves about what to have for dinner.

stranger Uncategorized

Global warming is today’s most prevalent false controversy. The current scientific consensus is that increased temperatures over the past fifty years are caused by the increased release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the widespread burning of fossil fuels. Ice core samples from over the past 450,000 years show that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide occur at the same time as increases in global temperature. There is little doubt among scientists that we have caused the most recent rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus global temperature. But the media has been giving equal time to non-scientific skeptics and have confused the issue among the people in the United States. This confusion has sapped the political will of our leaders to take any action to stop this destructive trend, and every year that we do not take action increases the cost of reversing the damage done that our children will have to pay.

As an example of just how out of step the media consensus is with the scientific consensus; a study in the December 2004 edition of “Science” found that of the 928 articles about climate change published in peer reviewed scientific journals over the past ten years, not a single one disputed the idea of anthropogenic global warming. A similar study of major media articles on climate change studied 626 randomly selected articles in the same time period and found that 53% of those cast doubt upon the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Just to make sure that people understand, the methodology of these studies was disputed by a British social scientist named Benny Peiser, his work though has been discredited because the “consensus breaking abstracts” that he cited were in fact on papers which were testing climatology models and statistical uncertainty of climate change experiments.

How could the media be so out of touch with the scientific consensus concerning global warming as to openly question its validity in the same breath as they report empirical evidence proving it? Because the media is lobbied constantly by groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank based in Washington DC that presents itself as an advocate for “sound science”. The fact is though that CEI is a well funded, media savvy, PR front group for Exxon-Mobile (which has reported giving the think-tank over $2 million between 1998 and 2005). CEI has most recently begun an ad campaign advocating for carbon dioxide emissions with the almost Swiftian tag line “Carbon Dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life”. It should be noted that carbon dioxide is classified as a narcotic poison and in concentrations above 8% by volume causes hypercapnia and death in human beings.

The scientific community does not have media consultants, public opinion pollsters, or professional spokespeople to present the fifty years of data that has been collected which points to an alarmingly rapid warming trend in the world’s climate. The scientific community is not a large business with deep pockets and it does not have well heeled supporters donating large sums of cash to assist it in raising the warning flags about the anthropogenic source of the warming trend. In fact the scientists who are making the most money in climatology studies are the small few who are publicly voicing skepticism about the anthropogenic source of global warming. Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have presented a hypothesis that variations in solar intensity may be triggering global warming, but they do not presently have observational data proving their claim. Dr. Tim Patterson, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Ottawa has evidence showing that a period of ice age activity 450 million years ago had carbon dioxide levels ten times that of today to claim that the gas has no effect on global temperatures. The issue with his evidence is that the period he is measuring from is known as the Ordovician extinction, the second most devastating mass extinction in Earth’s history. And while the Ordovician period did have very high carbon dioxide levels and temperatures, at the end of the period there was an unexplained drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the a sudden freezing of the super continent of Gondwana, plunging the planet into one of its most dramatic ice age.

Other than skepticism over anthropogenic Global Warming these three scientists, have another less honorable thing in common, they are all contributors for a non-peer reviewed journal called Tech Central Station (TCS), which is published by DCI Group. DCI Group is a Republican lobbying group which specializes in creating astroturf organizations (false grassroots organizations created through mass mailing schemes). TCS is a satellite operation of DCI which generates scientific articles to order for paying clients to further that client’s agenda. One of DCI major clients is none other than Exxon Mobile. DCI and TCS are only part of a network of organizations (which include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and many others) that receive money for Exxon Mobile and distribute it to scientists in the US, Canada, and UK who are willing to openly deny Global Warming. Exxon Mobile gives almost $5 million a year to these organizations to make sure that there is always a choir of doubters, because they predict that they have the most to lose if the major industrialized nations start to move away from greenhouse gas producing fuels and technologies in favor of cleaner alternatives.

These media outlets that exist just for the purpose of spreading misinformation also disseminate misquotes of real scientific studies. For instance there is a quote that has been floating around recently concerning glacier melt in Greenland. The quote has been used to suggest that counter to global warming, inland glaciers in Greenland are thickening instead of melting as would be suggested by global warming. The full study though shows that the thickening ice in the center of the island is actually a sign of the effects of global warming. What is occurring is that lakes are forming on the surface of the glaciers, collecting energy and melting the ice underneath them further. The water in these lakes drill holes through the glacier down to the bed rock and refreeze at the bottom, filling the crevices and cracks that exist at the bottom of the glacier, thus causing the glacier to thicken. The ice at the coasts of Greenland though is rapidly becoming thinner because of the same mechanism carries the melt water out from under the glaciers into the sea.

Global Warming is happening, and it is because of human activity… of this there is no doubt. There are means by which we can slow or even reverse the growing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Changing the atmosphere of the entire planet may seem like a daunting task, but the fact is we did it accidentally before. And as proven by the shrinking ozone hole over the Antarctic we have the capability of undoing past mistakes. We have just as much power of turning from our current path as we did with the shrinking ozone layer a little over ten years ago, we just need to summon up the will to act.

code_archaeologist Uncategorized