Plastic Waste in the Ocean - The False Narrative

Four massive garbage scows leave New York headed out to sea.

I post this here with the full knowledge that had I posted it on Facebook, the Facebook Gestapo (FBG) would likely take it down and suspend my account. They are kind of sensitive about this sort of thing. This way I hope I can post the link and avoid being suspended again.  I checked the source of this chart and it's solid.

This link is to a Politifact article, that is often cited in the fact-check take-downs, claims that, though the numbers are real, it is missing some "nuance." They claim it was long ago (2010) and we've "probably" done a lot worse since then and/or did a lot worse before that and that much of the vast Chinese plastic waste "may" come from products manufactured in the United States. The article waffles a lot and Politifact claims there has to be more mismanaged waste in the ocean without evidence that there is. It also leaves out the fact that not only have we taken steps to reduce plastic waste, the pre-2010 plastic waste they worry about has come largely from Democrat run cities dumping their trash onto big barges and dumping it into the ocean rather than disposing of it sustainably. Even National Geographic, toeing the environmentalist's histrionic line claims the US is responsible for 20% of the world's waste, a dubious figure at best.

I don't see how the US can be blamed because China (which doesn't buy a lot of stuff from us in the first place) dumps US made plastic stuff in the ocean. Shredding and/or recycling it and/or burying it in landfills for future archaeologists to sift through works pretty well and from personal experience digging up buried plastic stuff, it breaks down a whole lot faster than the environmentalists claim it does.

While I agree, we shouldn't dump our plastic in the ocean on purpose, we shouldn't be held responsible for the rest of the planet's irresponsible habits. We've cleaned up our air, developed better ways to dispose of our trash and even forced ourselves to recycle, even though in many cases recycling turns out to be a scam. Remember who likes to run waste disposal companies (Guido, Salvatore, Tony, and guys like that). 

Instead of wringing your hands and making people feel guilty in order to manipulate them into giving up a little more control of their own life, why not fix the problem?  Start with the trash barges progressive coastal cities ship out to mid-ocean and scatter without concern for the environment. Why do those of us in the heartland have to pay for the sins of the coastal dwellers. If wealthy progressives want clean beaches in front of their oceanfront mansions, maybe they need to convince progressive cities to clean up their messes. 

Those of us who live inland have been figuring out ways to safely dispose of our garbage a long time before it became a political tool.

Biden Threatens to Ban the American Chef's Favorite Kind of Cooking Stove

 

 

 When more than 80 some odd million owners of 40 plus million gas stoves complained about the cost of rewiring their kitchen for an electric stove, President Clueless J. Puddinhead offered this advice (above). Guided by his ideology protection detail His Fecklessness rambled on about global climate change for 30 minutes without accidentally revealing whether the climate would be warming, cooling or remaining the same but with a different hairdo. White House staff called the speech an historical moment that ranks right up there with the times he fell up and/or down the stairs to Air Force One, got lost in the Rose Garden or pooped his pants while visiting the pope in the Vatican.

Environmentalist Shaming

I note the youth of those who are the most militant of the environmental lobby. Their behavior reflects their youth. They do NOT want change unless that change preserves things the way they are. If you ever had to make a move because of a new job and had teens in the house, you have heard the lamentations of kids being forced to change to a new school. It's really pitiful. And it explains why, despite some very rational arguments against the leftist position that climate must NOT change, they cling to that idea and resist any notion that their world should be any different in 50 years than it is now. I do pity them if we ever get hit by a big asteroid. Talk about ruining their world. Their instinctive reaction to those who offer an argument that contradicts the heard belief in the doctrines of the First Environmentalist Church of Gaia is, of course, to shame the nay-sayers into submission. After all, shaming works particularly well with people who desperately want to belong to the herd. And frankly, most of these young snowflakes cannot imagine anyone who doesn't want to belong to the herd and accept their shared beliefs. To live outside the herd is unimaginable to a child.

Like children, they tend to resort to some form of shaming to defend their fundamentalist environmental religion when challenged.  I recently posted this little note. Frankly I did it to get a rise out of my lefty buds from the militant environmentalist save-the-world-through socialism wing of the Democrat and Green Parties. Here's what I asked:

CO2 is what plants breathe. So why do you guys hate plants?

It was targeted at the environmentalist narrative that CO2 is bad, which seems to me a little strange. After all, an abundance of CO2 makes plants grow really really well and they, in turn, enrich the atmosphere with oxygen. It's a lovely thing. One of my friends, who I do not lump in with the fanatic progressive left as he debates with a remarkable level of fairness, commented. He objected that he didn't hate plants, it was the people cutting down the rain forests. Of course they are doing that to grow crops and grass for cattle to eat, so they don't exactly hate plants. They just want to grow more of a certain kind of plants. I pointed this out. The discussion is ongoing.

So what I find strange is that the environmentalist true-believers want to preserve dense rain forests and at the same time want to reduce the carbon dioxide gas the rain forest plants need to survive and grow well.  And, as progressives are so fond of saying when we try to end some intrusive government program, "Well, what are you going to replace our program of increased government and anti-people initiatives with if we're going to 'save' the planet."

How about nothing? The question assumes we need to "save" the planet. Okay, make polluters clean up after themselves. I can get behind that, but to return human civilization to some Luddite agrarian pre-technology human civilization would require millions of people to die off because we can't afford them. It certainly explains the progressive infatuation with abortion.

As to what you can do practically to "save" the rain forests, I don't think the environmentalist left has a good plan. Unless the forces of environmentalism plan to invade Brazil and physically stop all those indigenous peoples and their willing corporate allies and Brazilian ranchers and farmers from clearing farmland, I don't see that there's a lot they can do about it. AND if they do plant crops instead of trees, those plants will likely be CO2 breathers like the rain forest trees so it's not a total loss of biomass.

Something similar has happened in the USA. Today there are more trees in North America than there were when Columbus' started the invasion of evil white people. We fight wildfires nowadays instead of letting them burn down areas the size of states like they used to when indigenous peoples were doing forestry management. We plant trees along every street and hedges and green lawns around every house, even in places that were barren save for some barely alive dry grass before we moved in. We have crops instead of grasslands, but, hey, we're feeding people who because they eat better are now living long enough to complain because we don't go back to total wildness and do the decent thing. The "decent thing" is, of course, to go ahead and die off by the billions and reduce the surplus population (defined as mainly anyone who is not a progressive). Of course, what people that are left after the deplorables are sifted out of the populations*, will starve because progressives tend to not be a bunch of hick farmers and protesting doesn't create much in the way of food.

I'm sorry. I get started when someone takes a side track to deflect from the point - which is:

1. A rise in CO2 levels, as science has shown, follows rather than leads periods of warming. So rising CO2 levels are likely a result of a rise in global temperatures rather than the cause of it.
2. A rise in CO2 levels leads to an explosion of plant growth of all kinds, which leads to a rise in oxygen levels due to the plants CO2 scrubbing proclivities.
3. As CO2 levels rise, the rain forests will thicken and spread into areas where people aren't fighting it, so Mama Nature won't be going gently into that good night.
4. Socialism won't fix that. (See the missing Aral Sea, The Caspian and very Black Seas - thank you Soviet Union and Communist China).
5. CO2 is good for the plants. Crops grow better, rain forests grow thicker and your houseplants are happier. God has built into the Earth some amazing automatic climate control mechanisms.
6. That said, no one has figured out how to put a thermostat on the sun and climate temperatures rise and fall at the whim of merry old Sol. Nothing we can do about that. It's a NUCLEAR furnace 93 million miles away. And who is to say that the temperature we have now should be locked in as the one and only ideal temperature. Climate has changed a lot throughout the ages in response to many factors. Volcanoes are pretty good at blocking out sunlight and cooling things off or at pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the air. We haven't figured out a control thermostat mechanism for volcanoes yet either.
7. No one will starve if the temps go up. I know you've heard that we'll have vast desert wastelands if temps rise just a degree or so. Well, what they don't tell you is that a few degrees rise will open up vast acres of farmland in Canada, Siberia, and northern Europe to potential cultivation. We'll just have to move around a bit to adapt, but that is why God gave us two legs and UHaul gave us rental trucks and trailers.

Just sayin'
 
© 2018 by Tom King
 
* Can you say "gulags".

Trumpocalypse Now!

Trump is expanding drilling areas into ANWR and extending offshore drilling permits.  He's already approved the Keystone Pipeline project. This move will increase domestic oil supplies and make us less dependent on foreign oil leaving more for the rest of the world. I think that's a good thing. My progressive buddies think there will be massive disasters and the world will likely end with global warming, seas rising and only Mt. Everest sticking up out of the ocean.

Apparently, any softening of restrictions on drilling will cause the evil oil companies to ravage and pillage the environment, according to the environmentalist talking points that are flying back and forth across the Internet like cruise missiles. Oil guys, they say, are evil. Well, I used to run with oil guys. The so-called Big Oil companies are increasingly redefining themselves as "energy" companies. That includes alternative energy sources. What that means is they are looking for a way to transition to other forms of energy so that when oil supplies run low, there will be more energy to sell because that's what keeps them in business - having energy to sell. If they don't adapt to changing conditions they die as companies. So these guys are not averse to clean energy technologies. They just need to be profitable.

One of my progressive buddies mentioned oil spills as one of those horrors that will surely happen. Ironically, in a recent major spill, it wasn't evil oil companies responsible. In this case, the bearings cracked on a windmill generator and poured lots of oil out onto the ground. Given the number of train derailments that happen in the US, pipelines are actually safer. There was a recent pipeline spill near Keystone. It was a relatively minor spill and was quickly cleaned up without permanent damage. It wasn't the Keystone pipeline itself, which is part of one of the talking points. Keystone, though, hasn't been built yet.

Deepwater Horizon, which was another environmental disaster that happened, was a British Petroleum project, not an American one.  Trump is expanding drilling for American companies who have a pretty good track record. The Deepwater Horizon cleanup could have been done much more quickly before damage to Gulf beaches would have been serious. Instead, American unions demanded that only companies staffed by American union workers be allowed to clean up the spill. There was a Dutch ship close by that was designed to clean up spills and could have jumped on the spill almost immediately. Instead, the administration knuckled under and refused the Dutch help. The spill removal did not begin immediately as authorities waited the extra time needed to get American cleanup resources on the job. As a result, the damage wound up being much greater.

Another talking point is that oil companies hate alternative energies and that Trump is willing to aid them by allowing them to ravage the environment. But, the mean old oil companies don't care if you put a solar panel on your roof. That's the electric companies. Interesting note, my Dad worked for Brown & Root building the Alaska Pipeline. A bunch of electrical engineers built windchargers for their homes in Washington State. They hooked them into the power lines and discovered that, when the chargers were making more power than they used, it ran the meter backward. The electric company ordered the chargers removed claiming damage to the electrical system. The electric company sued when they balked. The non-union electrical engineers counter-sued and the judge ruled in their favor and forced the electric company to not only allow the wind chargers, but also to pay the engineers for "generating electricity". These were guys building that evil oil pipeline in Alaska. Hardly the evil environmental destroyers progressives portray them. These were non-union guys working with a contractor for the oil companies. Brown & Root is part of Halliburton if you can believe that. Hardly the sort of evil corporation to be part of this quite successful green energy initiative.

The trouble is that almost nobody wants to destroy the environment, not even corporations. Corporations don't want the bad publicity. Yes, some jerks will sacrifice the environment for profit, but just because a company makes money doesn't make it inevitably evil. Usually the evil comes when companies and politicians get in bed together. That's a big Democrat deal - increase regulation to protect the markets of your supporters. It's why the super rich hardly ever get hurt by major tax increases. The Dems always build in huge loopholes for their supporters. Eighteen out of the top 20 richest Americans pour money into Democrat candidates - guess why?).

Trump is only allowing drilling, not "removing all environmental restrictions" - another anti-drilling talking point. Trump just doesn't have the power or the interest in wiping out the environmental gains and protections we've gained over the years - gains Republicans supported.

It isn't that black and white my progressive friends. You can't extend progressive talking points to cover permission to explore for oil into areas liberals have staked out as places where the world will end if anyone drills for oil. The Progressive "Trump is super evil/Republicans are all bad" narrative is far too black and white. Let's stick to what's actually happening.

Trump is extending permissions to drill in areas sacred to environmentalists. They've staked their arguments on protecting these areas. If oil companies drill there and no massive environmental disaster ensues, it kind of kills the argument that the only way to save the world is through socialist style central planning.

Even though it's never worked before, progressives still believed that a strong central government can make our lives better and that THIS time, their leaders will be good and selfless people and not tyrannical despots. Yeah, like that'll work. It always goes wrong whenever you give that much power to government. Somebody always tries to grab it for himself.

This is not the cliche' about power inevitably corrupting people. I don't believe it does. What I am saying is that power corrupts. That's too easy. Power, in fact, attracts the corruptible. It's virtually the only thing that obeys the "Field of Dreams" principle - you know that Kevin Costner line from the movie, "If you build it they will come."  Tens of thousands of projects go belly up following that principle. Only socialism obeys that principle in its own twisted way. Instead, socialism follows this principle.

If you build it (power) they (the corruptible) will come! Sadly, there are socialism sycophants out there who are such true believers that they will pass along any bit of propaganda that supports the ideology and won't look too closely at whether or not it is true. The radical right does the same thing. Also the far left and radical right both support the legalization of pot. I think there's a connection there. It may be the only way these people can relax!

© 2017 by Tom King

Environmentalist to Denier: "What about stewardship?"

Who's going to have the whole world in their hands?
That's the real question and militant environmentalists
believe they have the answer - more power in fewer hands.

In expressing my skepticism as to whether human-caused (anthropomorphic) climate change, someone who knows me for a Christian asked, "What about stewardship?

Well, what about it?

I believe in stewardship. I do. I think therefore that all of us should clean up our own messes. That doesn't mean we all have to become one giant Marxist collective and give up our freedom to decide for ourselves whether we want to drive a car or use public transportation, live in the city or the country, or start a business or work for a corporation or the government. 

What it's really all about is who makes the decisions. I believe decision-making should happen as close to the individual and his community as possible. I don't believe collectives are good for individuals or, for that matter, the Earth. We err when we place the kind of power a socialist government needs into the hands of the central planners who run it. And trust me when I tell you, the bulk of the environmentalist movement are died-in-the-wool progressive socialists who believe that the solution to the threat to the planet is collectivist global government and a massive reduction in population, mostly in Western nations for some reason. 

To save the planet we are told we must give up power to those who are smarter than we are and obey their directives as to where to live, what to eat, how to get around and how to educate our kids. In other words just grant them power and they will save us from a threat I frankly do not believe is so great we should bow to their golden ideological image.  The lust for power to, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden put it, "...be like gods" is dangerous. While most of those trying to put into place a kindly and benevolent powerful government may actually have the best of intentions, we must remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Karl Marx truly believed that the rich were evil and that workers, if placed in charge of everything, would be good and benevolent. Turns out power attracts the corruptible and the finest most trusted leader in the world must one day hand off power to another, if someone doesn't stick a knife in him first and seize that power for himself. Do you see the danger?

The idea that some giant collectivist government can "save the planet" is merely propaganda designed to convince people to give up their freedom in exchange for the illusion of safety. It's all been tried before. The death toll was horrific and the destruction to the environment appalling. All at the hands of what was to have been a worker's paradise. Putting power in the hands of corruptible humans for whatever ostensible reason (saving the planet, saving the poor, saving the peace) is always a mistake. As CS Lewis put it:

Just sayin'

© 2016 by Tom King

Exploiting the Injuns - Again!

Liberal environmentalists hijack Native American issue.
That's them back there in the crowd..

Well, once again, the white man is exploiting the first peoples.  And where better to do so than in the hills of South Dakota where we're seeing video after video of poor downtrodden native Americans, often in colorful Injun dress, weeping over the evil being done to them by the terrible white Republicans who want to poison their water and take their land?

Okay, before you start in on me, I can use the word "Injun" - it's allowed. If black people can use the n-word to refer to themselves, then I can use the "i" word. I have way more Cherokee blood in me than Elizabeth Warren has in her pasty white self. One of my great grandmother was half or a quarter native American and she wasn't the only one. I know this because the racist side of my family didn't allow you to talk about it. They would marry Injun women; they just didn't like to talk about it. 

I use the word "Injun" because it was often used to refer to my ancestors by the sorts of white supremacist racists that created the KKK, Jim Crow laws, hosed Dr. Martin Luther King, and fought a bloody civil war to preserve their right to oppress black people. Instead of Injuns, however, or "redskins", today's racists refer to them in a paternalistic effort to protect their delicate feelings as "native Americans" or "first peoples". Today's racists have a much better public relations/propaganda department than the pre-1960s Democrats did.

Honestly, you should be very wary of stories like the one about the oppression of first Americans in the Dakotas. Environmentalist groups jumped on the Native American connection to the pipeline story because it was great propaganda for the progressive/socialist/environmentalist cause. Slate inadvertently lifted the lid on the environmentalist agenda in a recent article. The environmental lobby is on the case. Busloads of outside agitators have been brought in specifically to initiate a confrontation with police and generate footage for the media. The actual "peaceful" protestors have been caught up in violence initiated by white racist outside agitators from the radical environmentalist movement who view native Americans as a simple, therefore easy to manipulate, people and useful for propaganda purposes.

It's not that the tribes don't have a complaint. They clearly do and as in past cases the native Americans have a legal remedy and have won their cases where they were in the right. Let's face it, Americans really feel guilty about how some (not all) of our ancestors treated the first peoples (see I too can be politically correct). But there are better ways to solve this problem than to turn it into a referendum on whether or not we should use fossil fuels. That's not a native American issue. It's the issue du jour for liberal white progressives seeking to push a complex socialist agenda of their own. Given the history of socialism's treatment of native peoples, the native American community might want to choose their allies a little more carefully.

Some facts you should know.

1. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved this pipeline project after doing an environmental impact study as well as an archaeological study, but, due to objections from the native American community have initiated a review of the both impact studies before the pipeline crosses the river. This was worked out after the tribes filed complaints and made requests to halt the project till further studies could be done. General Custer did not ride in and lead the bulldozers at sword point through Indian villages and burial grounds as some of the more hysterical headlines would lead you to believe. Even Slate admitted that there were better ways for the tribes to negotiate this issue. 
2. The pipeline is not on reservation land, but crosses the river above the reservation. Pictures of bulldozers ripping up Indian burial grounds are largely fake. They are pictures of bulldozers gleaned from the web of construction projects hundreds and even thousands of miles away or along other areas of the pipeline project not disputed.
3. The pipeline is a safer alternative for transporting oil (fracked or otherwise) than transporting it on trains. Trains derail with alarming frequency as our transportation infrastructure has deteriorated under a Democrat administration obsessed with social programs designed to attract new Democrat voters. And derailed oil cars make a frightful environmental mess.
4. Fracking gets brought up because it's the latest environmentalist buzz word for generating nameless horror out of nothing. The oil being pumped out of the ground is by no means largely fracked.
5. The violent agitators who have triggered the government response are largely white outside agitators shipped in for just that purpose. It's an old communist revolutionary's trick.
6. The complaints about violent government and police thuggery are coming from the same people who want to disarm the entire populace leaving only those same government "thugs" they are complaining about to be the only ones with weapons against an unarmed and helpless "proletariat". This is not about government bullying. It's about furthering an agenda in which the political elites have enough power to bully everyone without fear of pushback. They just need us to vote the right way and images of oppressed peaceful native Americans is a handy tool to get us to do that.

White liberal environmentalists provide paternalistic
support for poor helpless native Americans.
At least that's what they want you to believe.

I use the term proletariat because progressive socialist elitists see people as a big old stupid herd to be controlled for their own good. This generation of collectivists is a little more subtle than their racist forebears, the eugenicists and Democrats. They are still intent on separating us by race, but they are calling it multiculturalism and asking us to herd ourselves into separate racial pens. It's a sort of political breeding program designed to weed out the troublesome.

The collectivist left and their environmentalist toadies are pressing for a society in which only the self-styled smart leaders have guns and troops while we give up our own means of self-defense should our leaders dare to impinge upon our liberties. What a wonderful world that will be!  The progressive dream is a world in which the ignorant masses are herded into cities where they can be watched by an armed government, onto public transportation where their movements can be tracked, into government healthcare monitored by the IRS in order to better decide who is worth spending healthcare dollars on, and into government jobs (all jobs are to eventually become government jobs).  The idea is that we will all be generally treated as nearly the same as possible, much like your mother tried to do when you were a toddler. 

Our elite smart people leaders believe that equality and fairness is the equivalent of sameness. It's the best they can do in order to be able to manage something as complex as a nation's people and economy. It's an old plan that dates back to ancient times. You have a noble special class that runs things and a vast peasantry to do the work. Unfortunately for the peasants, what this ancient scheme always winds up doing is creating a vast shared misery for the peons who serving the lords and ladies of the elite classes in their shiny castles.

The left is using our emotions and propaganda stunts like this one and the black lives matter riots to gradually nudge us into the corrals and sheep pens they are building for us. Even more ironic, they are using our own money to do it. Our taxes are building the social slaughterhouses they will use against us to make us less troublesome. The self-styled intelligent environmentalist elite wish to vastly reduce the number of people on the earth. Ideally, there would be enough left in the collectives to serve the needs of the leader class and leave vast stretches of the planet to return to "nature", the new god that they claim to worship.

In reality, in the narcissistic world of the "progressive", the only gods they worship are themselves. It dates back to Eden and the first lie. "Eat of this fruit and you will be like gods," said Satan, who was, by the way, the first "progressive" and the first socialist. He has always disagreed with God on the issue of free will. Throughout history, the dark one has shown that he believes that external control of the human race is essential to peace and safety and his own twisted idea of perfection.

In concert with Lucifer's original population management theories, the progressive movement seeks to create a heaven on Earth without the bother of, as Donald Trump memorably put it, "....having to bring God into it." The model embraces Darwin's survival of the fittest evolutionary model, BF Skinner's idea that external rewards and punishment, properly applied, can make people into whatever we want, and Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Basically the Marxist theory is this:

• Some people are genetically better than others and should rightfully rise to a position of leadership over the masses. (Darwin) These persons should work to eliminate genetic types that are proven to be undesirable through abortion, population control, and in extreme cases, genocide.
• It is possible to make people better through the application of law and by other external means. (Skinner). That's why socialism is always big on re-education camps, for if you disagree with the collective, you by definition, don't understand the goodness and wisdom of the collective (i.e. government).
• If you provide people's basic needs in an orderly way, they will naturally be happy and seek to be productive for the good of the collective. (Maslow) This belief explains why it's always a mystery to socialists when the worker class quits doing any sort of quality work and the economy collapses. The basic food, housing and crappy medical care was, according to the ideology, supposed to make the masses happy, productive and content.

We face a looming future in which for the next four years we are likely to be led by either an open socialist or a closet socialist, both of whom are anxious to test the power of government to do what they believe God has failed to do - create an Earthly Utopia. Either way the power of the government will grow stronger. The power of the people to exercise self-determination will fade away.

I believe we are in the final days of Earth's history. I am not afraid. Even so, come Lord Jesus is my prayer. I am ready to become a citizen of a New Earth in which freedom, love, joy, peace and plenty reign and death is no more - a land without governors, presidents, senators, congressmen, regulators and tax collectors. For eternity, no more filing 1040s. How cool is that?

God bless you all.

© 2016 by Tom King

Conservation vs. Environmentalism

I think I would describe myself as a conservationist rather than an environmentalist. Conservation suggests an active human role in caring for our planet - the role God gave us in the Garden of Eden when he told us to name the animals and care for the garden. Environmentalism suggest a religious or political "ism" a worship of nature itself rather than nature's Creator.


Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham has a bit in his Achmed the Terrorist routine where he asks Achmed what he does.

Achmed replies, "I'm a terrorist."
"What kind of terrorist?" Dunham asks.

"A terrifying terrorist!" says Achmed.

Well I'm a conservationist.

"What kind of conservationist?" you ask.

"A conservative conservationist!"

I'm just saying. You may now talk amongst yourselves....

The False Premise

Progressives love to start an argument with a false premise.  "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no?"  Rigged questions are the tools of the con man and flim-flam artist.  Take the argument against the existence of God, for instance.

The Argument Begins

"You can show me no direct proof that God exists, therefore, God does not exist!"

This statement depends entirely on the false premise that a thing cannot exist unless it can be seen and touched or directly observed.  Plenty of things we know to exist based on indirect observation.  Black holes, for instance, cannot be seen, but only inferred from theories about gravity and astro-physics and by their effect on nearby objects in space.

It is almost axiomatic in the news media that the health care system in America is badly broken. I believe this to be a false premise.  From this false premise, the left makes the Socratic argument that "If the health care system is badly broken, then we must fix it and that if we must fix it, the government is the only entity that can do the job.

The flaw in that argument is three-fold.  (1) The US health care system is not broken, only oppressed by too much government regulation and interference.  (2) We must NOT fix it because attempts by central planners to fix things like health care only results in disaster again and again.  (3) The government is NOT the only entity that can fix the problem.  Government is, in fact, THE PROBLEM ITSELF.  Government diddling through Medicaid and Medicare is largely responsible for the bureaucratic tangle the health care system faces.

Then there is the cry for a national energy policy.  Why?  Have we not messed up our energy delivery system already.  We killed nuclear power plants - an excellent source of clean energy by regulating it to death. We have hamstrung oil, gas and coal producers so they cannot even prospect for oil off our own shores, but must give way to China and Brazil and the like. I can give you an energy policy.  Do not let the government diddle with energy production!

We must save the planet!  Another false premise.  Who says.  For one thing, we do not have the ability to save the planet and there is precious little evidence that we are the reason it is heating up anyway. Jupiter, Venus and Mars are all heating up too.  I don't think humans had anything to do with that. Besides, if we bankrupt ourselves, turn the US into a third world country and destroy Western civilization, we aren't going to make more than a fraction of a degree's impact on the world's temperature anyway.  And who says putting San Francisco and New York underwater is such a bad thing anyway?

Sometimes what we MUST do to fix problems is to stop meddling.  An ancient proverb says too many cooks spoil the stew. That applies to governments.  Why do we need endless task forces and select committees aided by battalions of politicians and legions of bureaucrats to do what we can do individually in our own communities, quite without help from the feds?

When I had a wound that had scabbed over, my Mom always told me "Don't pick at it or it will never heal!"

Good advice for the current administration and congress when faced with a bad economy.  Leave it alone or it will never heal.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Flint, TX