Cooler Weather

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On the heels of a huge wildfire now, Vegas has had significant rain this past week. We even set a record for the most rainfall at the airport in a single 24 hour period this week, beating a record set in 1951. Of course, the Church of Climate Change will ignore that information because they insist that things are getting inexorably warmer. They are committed to pseudoscience and investigate what supports the conclusions they already reached while ignoring everything else.

The rest of the country already knows why it’s cooler there than in Vegas. It was cooler in Vegas (in terms of degrees) this week because of the rain. It even dipped down to 89F one day as our July high, but they will still talk about the early 115F day even though it wasn’t a record. This has happened before. It’s just normally not that early, and the rest of July has been so much more temperate that I will spend only 75% of the money on Electric Air Conditioning this year compared to last. Why? This happened because in the rest of the company humidity keeps the temperature low. Nevada has very little water, hence low humiditiy, hence high temperatures, because water has a significantly higher specific heat compared to other molecules and then absorbs and retains things. This is one reason why we have a 20-30 degree temperature shift from day to night, because there is no water to release low amounts of heat all night long. The rocks release rapidly whatever thermoenergy they acquire, and we cool off until the sun peaks over the mountains in the morning.

Water vapor is the major regulator of atmospheric temperature. Venus, which has no water, is a whopping 5000F on the dark side of the planet, and Mars, which has no atmosphere, is cold because there is nothing to trap the energy. Between them, the earth sits, regulating its temperatures with the water on its surface. Water vapor is far more significant as a percentage of atmospheric gas than CO2, which has a statistically insignificant specific heat when accounting for significant figures compared to water.

Vegas had a mild summer in July because we had some good thunderstorms. The clouds radiated the heat back away from the state, and the rains picked up some of the heat from the area, even though they then evaporated into a sticky humid mess. It’s not as hot, just like in New Orleans, but it’s far less pleasant in my opinion. Even the children go outside to cool off in the water- sprinklers, pools, puddles, etc. It’s water that cools us like it cools our houses, our cars, and our bodies. Everything else is pseudoscience (images below courtesy of Weather.com).

“It won’t be as hot today because it will be more humid.” –KXNT news reporter

Official Use Only

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Last Friday night, while heading to Utah to go boating, we passed a car on the freeway that made me pause. It was 7:21 PM on a Friday night, and a White Dodge Caravan license NV EX 48654 was driving along the freeway. The driver, a male of significantly high melanin content in his early fifties, was driving at an excessive rate of speed. I wondered what official business in which he might be engaged at that hour, given that these vehicles are conspicuously marked “for official use only”. I know it is such a pain for me to obtain permission to use a motorpool vehicle when transporting hazardous chemicals that I frequently throw them in my own car and take the risk to avoid the hassle.

I doubt very much that this person was on official business. I think, like so many others in government, he was using a government vehicle on personal time for personal reasons. Of course I can’t prove it, but what government agency has business on a Friday evening? My own department came down on us lately for doing work outside normal business hours because the liability insurance only covers us during our regularly scheduled work day. Consequently, my boss makes sure we are gone when it’s time to go home unless we obtain express prior written consent to do something outside those hours due to time or something similar.

This incident made me reflect on what I do during my day. Years ago, a woman I sort of liked but who really liked me angrily called me after I ignored a series of text messages from her. When I answered, I told her that the state pays me to work at work, not to talk to her, and she reluctantly ceded the issue. Frequently I use personal items for work like my car, and I used to donate time to get work done when there was work to do, but with extra scrutiny and tighter budgets, I make sure that I do what I am supposed to and no more. Even on days when there is little to actually do because we have no students around, they insist that we are at or near our desks all day, and I had one “desk audit” a week or so back, just to make sure I wasn’t skipping out early.

We are stewards in government of tax money. I try very hard to spend it wisely. Some people think it constitutes a way to save or advance themselves. When I heard about the people in Detroit complaining about their pensions being cut, I heard claims that “if we had known this, we would have taken better paying jobs and saved on our own.” Hogwash. If you were a saver, you would save regardless of your wage; I am not relying on the government to pay me in perpetuity. They took these jobs because they wanted a safety net, possibly because nobody else would pay them to use company stuff to do personal work.

Although not unique to government, these miscreants aggregate there. One of my students told me a sad story of corruption in the private sector of a contractor he had who stole things from the Rampart casino to do work at a private resident and then charged the resident. This person’s deeds have caught up with him, and so now he cant get a job, but if he were in government, it would be very difficult if not impossible to fire him, depending on his melanin and estrogen content. This next week, I am transporting microscopes to different locations, and I am careful to make sure the paperwork is in so that people don’t think I’m taking them for personal use. They don’t belong to me. They belong to you.

Bitterly Clinging

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Today, I am pondering why so many in the UK hate Americans so much. I've been watching quite a few BBC programs on Youtube about UK history, and the sidebar suggests a plethora of anit-American videos for my next choice, and I wonder at why there are so many. Our fates like our histories are tied together by a plethora of confluence and circumstance, but we allow ourselves to be balkanized by the overemphasis of stereotypes. People need to be taken as individuals or not at all, because they are far too complicated to be boiled down to a few subjective adjectives.

Jealousy? Why are they jealous? I hear a lot of things about Americans that you hate. It makes very little sense to envy someone you hate. More to me it sounds like they are bitter because they are no longer as important as they wish they were. What makes you think I want to be important? America was not always so, and truth be told I wish someone else would belly up to the bar and pay the tab.

Irresponsibility? Clearly the British have forgotten that they tried to press us as colonists for responsibility of foreign wars. I’m sorry, but since we didn’t have any say in parliament, we couldn’t stop those wars. Why should our language be corrupt? Who says they speak British perfectly? What exactly is the origin of your language? You claim our way is silly and stupid, as if your language were pure. I can understand Firesian and the language of Schliesswig-Holstein because they resemble English, which contains some French as well because of the Norman influence and Aquitaine and Brittainy. English changes with time, and the preferred parlance provides perchance for pernicious and persnickety purloinment of new phraseology.

Ignorance? I think that mainly depends on whether or not you educate yourselves. As a largely agrarian society from the get-go, there was little need for that in America, but I have now seen two BBC documentaries that are mutually exclusive, one detailing the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the other attempting to debunk it. You have however never bothered to ask me about Walton on Thames or Wessex or Worchester nor looked at my library to see I have books by Bacon, Lock, More, Burke, Smith, Newton, Whitehead, ad infinitum including a copy of the Royal Standard English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Furthermore I actually lived and attended school in Britain, so if I’m ignorant, you’re at least partially negligent. Stop interviewing politicians or broadcasting the most asinine of impromptu answers as if they are reflective of the entire population. I’m sure that same treatment could be tendered your neighbors to the same result evincing ignorance on the isles.

Fox news v. the BBC? I watch far more BBC than fox news, but I mostly watch BBC shows that I find on the zarkin’ internet. Perhaps what you mean by “news” is “what corroborates my preconceived notions”, in which case you are probably correct. I have come to realize that most journalists, most scientists, most politicians, and indeed most people have an agenda if not an ulterior motive. Most of them are not looking for what is actually true; they secretly hope the truth will corroborate what they already happen to believe. Any profession is only as virtuous as those who profess it. How is the BBC impartial because it’s public funded without advertisements? Do you honestly think that Al Jazeera is impartial just because it’s compulsorily funded by ‘the people’ without commercial interests? Studies have shown that people will believe almost anything prefaced with the phrase, ‘studies have shown’.

So many of you engage in stereotyping, comparing their strengths to our weaknesses. As if it’s our fault that we don’t “have a history”. We have their history too, excuse me. Plus we have our own. They talk of their restraint as if it’s a virtue in itself. I think the Zulu would argue the notion that you’re restrained or perhaps the Algiers. What was restrained about your treatment of Arabia in 1919? Just how many wives did Henry VIII have or how many illegitimate children did John Lackland bear? As for war mongering, yes, we have been engaged in many wars. From which would you have us abstain? Perhaps from war with Ferdinand’s Austria or Hitler’s Germany? Should we have given Napoleon more help? Maybe the world would be better without the Emancipation Proclamation. History is not a la cart.

On occasion, I have been ashamed of my countrymen. I find it hard to believe that every Brit is proud of every other Brit ever. That strikes me as somewhat Neville Chamberlain of them. You might find it interesting to know that my only friend at church is from Sussex; I have other fine British friends. In fact, the further your origin from mine, the more likely we are to be friends; familiarity with my own people sometimes breeds contempt. I am very fond of Burke and More and Newton and Tennyson, all of whom are yours as well as Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson who were all British before they were American. Our heroes are actually some of YOUR people. I have a rich British heritage from Ireland, Scottland, and Essex most predominantly, and I can trace my lineage back to 1028AD in body of Wlm the Conqueror. This means that like you I have black marks in my family tree. They are offenses I did not give against people who are not alive to be offended. However, it is perhaps natural albeit bad form to whitewash your own side and paint the other as villains or miscreants. That is how most people rise to power, by conflating the misdeeds of “others” to make your own beneficence appear greater. Pointing out the mistakes made by others does nothing to fix you own.

Ignorance and enlightenment do not correspond to strictly geographical domains. Other people manufacture labels to describe us quickly without having to get to know us. Each man is far too complicated in his facets to be so accurately distilled. I will agree that my knowledge of some things is limited. It is not because I don't study at all; I study specific things of personal interest. Regional stereotypes are often as unproductive as the rest because they are not predictive. Who could have seen Oliver Cromwell coming or Thomas More or Eric Liddel? They were as equally unlikely based on stereotypes as Ivarr the Boneless’s rise to prominence or Pope Benedict’s resignation or Joan of Arc or the defense of Jerusalem by Balien of Ibelin. The localized supposition of virtue requires only shifting our view of the door, and the more subjective the angle the more subversive the adjective’s objective. As Franklin suggested to his fellows, I suggest to my friends across the pond: in these troublesome and turbulent times, all descendents of Britain must hang together or assuredly we must hang separately.

Spared Suffering

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For the Fourth of July, a friend and I intended to hike up to Mt. Charleston (12 miles) and watch the fireworks from far above the city. It just so happens that this turned out to be a bad idea. Just prior to Independence Day, I felt disinclined to go and thought it was just lazy. Then, we learned about the fire.

At about 3PM local, the Carpenter Canyon Fire, which was 18 acres on Tuesday, crossed the escarpment into Kyle Canyon, which is where the trail is where we would have been hiking. The fire is now 1300 acres and 0% contained with 40mph sustained winds out of the west fanning it forward. Highway patrol closed the highway to Mt. Charleston 10 minutes before we arrived, turning us back, and by sunset, the plume was high, thick, and reddish hanging over the north end of the city with its black color and putrid odor. Our bushes evoke dangerous chemicals when they burn.

Here is a collage from the escarpment. The trail runs near the ridge now engulfed in flame.

It turns out that it was a good thing I didn't go hike this trail this week. If we had gone, we would have been up in exposed country without anyone knowing exactly where we were without many supplies and very near the flames. It might have been a good view under other circumstances, but I thank God for being spared the suffering and stress of trying to escape a wildfire, particularly after the 19 hotshots died in AZ just the previous week. I hope that things go better for our folks, and I even wish the inmates who may assist best wishes and Godspeed.

My Decor

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When you walk into my house, my decor will tell you almost everything you need to know about me. I specifically chose some things to communicate certain messages of importance, and I keep most of my treasured brick-a-brac in the first room. However, the library tells you a lot more about me, and since it's unlikely you'll see that, I share this picture. On days like today, it makes me very pleased to think that this is on permanent display in my library. Vive le libertie!

Growing up with Star Trek

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Although I didn’t grow up with Star Trek per se, Star Trek grew up with me. Interestingly enough, my father was the same age when Kirk commanded the Enterprise as I was when Picard assumed command. Both of us were interested in the Roddenbury universe at about the same age in the formative pre-teen years of our lives. Trek was something that we had in common at the same time in our lives and at the same year of age, and so it was something that helped me bond with my father evenings and weekends.

While watching Star Trek VI yesterday, I realized just how much of my beliefs and rhetoric were inspired by the Roddenbury universe. Many of my ideas, values and norms were influenced by the depictions in Star Trek. Trek addressed things that I knew well, that I would see as an adult, and that influenced me without my knowledge. It showed me how people could choose in certain circumstances and what the consequences might be, and it depicted situations that are difficult to handle and helped me think about them before I faced them as an adult. Moreover, the Roddenbury universe was one in which virtue was rewarded and in which money held very little sway (Scotty did after all somehow manage to ‘buy’ a boat even though he wasn’t paid by Starfleet).

As I grew, the crew of the Enterprise boldly grew. They faced more and bigger enemies, went further, expanded the diversity of crewmembers, captains, villains, and plots. They incorporated Shakespeare and symphony, discussed what it meant to be human, what good and evil really might mean, and explored things I never thought to explore. Sometimes that wasn’t a good thing. In any case, I left high school perhaps more prepared because I had seen things solved in ways I might not consider, and when I met the Wil Wheatons of my life, I knew it was ok to say, “Shut up, Wesley.” I grew tired of Data, found Q interesting albeit frustrating, and was only afraid of the Borg, but even there, I saw them resist anyway, and that inspired me.

By the time I was an adult, Star Trek had produced four different storylines spanning the balance of my formative life. It prepared me for the notion that I would enjoy parts of life and be glad when other parts were finished. It taught me that I could have good and lasting friends, but it also taught me that all things can come to an end. Star Trek even gave me the motivation I needed to get into shape when my metabolism stopped keeping me thin. My parents bought me the original series on DVD, and I watched them while I ran on the treadmill, because the episodes were precisely the right length. Trek literally helped me boldly go where I had never been before.

It’s hard to believe that world was so long ago. Picard became captain in 1989. Kirk’s last movie with everyone was in 1991. I have students who were not even born yet at that time. They do not know or love or understand that world like I do. Some of them think I’m odd because I do. Few of them look to the stars with the same wonder as I, and now that NASA is gutted, fewer still will dream of going to the stars. As Star Trek designed and built prototypes for products being manufactured by Apple and Google before those companies were anything, I grew in wisdom, in stature, and in vision. As Star Trek grew, I grew up, and I hope that when the call to command comes to me, I will also be able to Boldly Go.

Heat of the Moment

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Las Vegas temperatures are in the news around the country, although I don’t know why. Those of us who live here in the summer know that it’s hot, and what’s more, we expect it to be so. The funny thing for us while most of you make a mountain out of this molehill is the realization that we get that hot every year. What’s abnormal in my experience is that it’s three weeks earlier than previously, and while annoying, it’s not necessarily odd. I have no idea why it’s newsworthy that the desert is hot.

Mostly, I think this is media hype, potentially driven towards assisting the tripe known as “global warming”. The fact that we didn’t break the record for Saturday means that this has happened before. This means it will happen again. In fact, rather than thinking about breaking records, we should think about the notion that fewer annual records are broken now than in say 1890 when, after only a decade or so of records, an off year could easily skew things. Add to that recent articles about solar activity being different than expected or how the sun is responsible for warming the earth, and you enter the realm of Captain Obvious. Thank you for that duh moment.

The summer temperatures really revolve around water. Take Europe for example. Parts of Europe are so wet that they are still cold, and some of them may not even have a summer due to the extended winter precipitation. Contrarily, Las Vegas is running behind on its annual meager precipitation, and so we have higher temperatures earlier. In fact, I would like to see if the hottest years and if the earliest onset of high temperatures correlates with drought years, because I have a theory.

Most of the temperature changes on earth are modulated by water vapor. Water molecules absorb 4.184 calories/g, and you get more molecules per gram than many other more massive substances, and so it means that most of the heat absorbed on earth is absorbed and released by water. In other parts of the country, when the temperatures rise, water evaporates and raises the humidity. The water vapor modulates the temperatures and keeps them from reaching 117F like they predicted in Las Vegas or 129F like predicted in Death Valley, which has 1% of our total rainfall annually. Since the desert southwest saw very little precipitation this year, there is very little to modulate the heat, and our temperatures may be hotter longer than normal.

On the other hand, it’s possible that this is a shift in when the high temperatures occur. If the desert cools down three weeks earlier than normal, will the news register and realize that? If we manage to get a significant amount of regular albeit small thunderstorms, it could drop the temperatures and keep us in the mid to high 90s, which is where most of the rest of the nation sits in July. Besides, tomorrow is the first of July, which is typically our hottest month. So, is this really newsworthy, or is it only news in the moment of the heat?

Canned Communication

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All of us seem to prefer certain phrases when we speak. Perhaps you have noticed that I often employ assonance and alliteration in my posts. I remember back in college being held after class by my professor because he was absolutely certain I plagiarized my essay after I used rhetorical and literary techniques uncommon to the student body. They could not possibly be spoken by a student! When he learned about my upbringing, origination, and education, he realized that I was not like the kitten caboodle, but I do have my preferred way of doing things.

To some degree, my communication comes from my religious upbringing. Just this morning while reading scripture, I reread some of the phrases that I love to use like “unjustly ascribed to God” or “expressly repugnant” or even “nevertheless”, all of which are accurate albeit archaic applications of the English language. Some of our phrases bother me. It seems like all too often in church, when members rise to pray it’s as if we open up some canned phrases and let the contents spew into the room without much thought. This kind of “vain repetitions” is not limited to words; it is evident in our cadence, our tone, and the rhythm of our communication. It got so bad at one point growing up with one of my brothers that my parents asked him to change it up. As an adult, I still see that people get up and apply the same phrases without giving it much thought, and when I say things to which they are unaccustomed they grow uncomfortable.

Partly, this is why I can’t listen to the president for more than a minute or two. He overexercises the same tired phrases without knowing it. Perhaps this is because he doesn’t seem able to articulate anything without a speech writer or a teleprompter present, and the person who puts words thereon for him to read is certainly into canned phrases. Even when Obama speaks his own mind or speaks at all, he almost always speaks in a consistent manner. His tone and meter are very ingenious; he tries to talk from his throat, which gives the appearance of control and calm and reason, and he ends with a rise in pitch, effectively lifting up his voice. This has the effect of rendering him as if he is a reasonable and uplifting individual. It appears to me that someone taught him to speak this way intentionally, because it can be effective, provided you don’t do it all the livelong day. Since he does it all the time, he wears it out, and it became something that I frequently mock when I impersonate him because it’s all he knows. It has become a sort of sing-song spectacle, in which you can count on the president to repeat tired phrases, sort of like listening to Sheriff Barney Fife. Some media pundits in other countries have noticed that he tells dignitaries the exact same things sometimes. Apparently, all NATO nations except Denmark are close and strong allies, but even Denmark, like a dozen other nations “punches above its weight class”. He looks like it’s earnest, heartfelt and unique, when it is anything other than that- it’s generic canned phraseology and isn’t worth the breath it takes to utter it. That indicates to me that it’s a “vain repetition” and that he doesn’t really mean what he says.

Vain repetitions evince a lack of forethought or meaning in what we say. So maybe I surprise people when I ask God to help us properly process our poop, but I really mean it, and people pay attention. When I visited a high school biotechnology program four years ago and spoke to the students, one of them pointed out that I said “saved my bacon” in lieu of “saved my a**”, and I pointed out that perhaps my colorful metaphors were more effective because they registered and resonated regularly with the audience. I get tired of listening to what amounts to a long extension of jejune, ruderal, asinine banalities as people blah blah blah through their blah blah blah lives.

Words offer the means to meaning. Most people do not appear to know how to use words. We know how to form our mouth and make sounds, but all too often we don’t mean what we say or communicate with any degree of effectiveness. I have noticed that many people only know one definition for a word or one instance in which it’s applicable, but some politicians use a different one knowing that most of us will assume it means something else. For example, Governor Sandoval (R-NV) said he would “end the furlough program”; none of us thought when he promised this that he meant to “make your paycuts permanent in perpetuity”. We thought he would restore our pay with an end to furloughs. On a larger scale, Senators keep promising to “fix” immigration; they do not seem to mean fix as in “repair or make right” but fix as in “put in the fix; make it permanent in its current place”. It’s very clever, diabolically clever, to communicate with guile, but that seems to be what politicians do- throw words at us not because they mean them but because they know we do. Don’t even get me started about the words “love” or “friends”. When we use canned phrases or limit our rhetoric, we strip communication of meaning. Meanwhile, I learned how to recognize when people open up a canned phrase, and I hope that as you register that you will be better able to ascertain actual meaning from those who, although they still talk, have actually ceased to speak.

**The image in this post is proprietary, and the unauthorized use carries civil as well as criminal penalties.

Society and Substance

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Over the weekend, I reread a handful of Isaac Asimov novels. Most of them deal with robots, all of whom seem ironically enough interested in becoming more human. In fact, I can’t recall any story in which the robot does not desire more humanity; I actually grew tired of the focus on Commander Data’s quest for humanity. It is the desire of any automaton apparently to find increased liberty through life.

At the same time that science fiction and philosophy endorse enlargement of the soul, government applies greater constraints upon it. They ignore the notion that once constrained we will “yearn to breathe free” and break free and return to a greater degree of liberty. Politicians seem to wish we were robots- taking orders, accomplishing tasks, asking nothing, and allowing ourselves to be abused like the servants in stories that robots usually appear to be. Elitists want us going through life lame-brained, not asking any questions, not acting of our own volition, waiting for the government to come around and tell us what to eat and where to live and whom to take to wife (or husband or whatever). They educate you what to think rather than how, report half the truth without the other half to back it up, and fight every effort they can at self reliance.

I heard from a reputable source about a series of efforts taken against my Faith by the government that attest to this. I call upon my elected representatives to look into this. My Faith has historically shipped a huge amount of goods overseas to disaster areas as well as to domestic sites without any remuneration or assistance from FEMA. When Germany surrendered, George Albert Smith went to Harry Truman and offered help; Truman asked when it could be ready, and Smith told him it already was. Meanwhile, the government has attempted to force the Church to put the milk from their Missouri dairy into the general milk population. Meanwhile, the government has required that anyone working in the dry pack cannery go through a training and certification process. In fact, you can’t even touch foodstuffs anymore without showing certificates out the wazoo that show you have been trained to handle food, even if you’re sending it to war-torn Somalia. I used to work at the storehouse Friday afternoons in graduate school giving away food to people, but I don’t think the government will let me anymore. I used to give out food to the homeless at Owens and Las Vegas Blvd, until the North Las Vegas police shut that down (I don’t blame the police; I smell politicians). After the tornadoes in OK, the government came through and confiscated food from people who had more than two weeks’ supply on the auspice that they were “hoarding”. The church was able to resist that, but only just. One of the highlights of high school was when a dozen of us from my congregation traveled to hurricane-ravaged areas to help. I think those days may be limited because I’m not a licensed contractor.

The government does not want us to help anyone, including ourselves. They want us reliant on them. Their egos are so big that they want to BE gods. It reminds me of the woman I helped for a while in Vienna who went to Tibet with donations from good denizens of Austria and told the Tibetans that the gifts were from HER. She didn’t build that. Like that woman, too many people in government want you to pray to them. You can’t go hunt and fish to feed your family without a license, but you can vote and collect welfare without one, particularly if you speak Spanish. It’s right out of the dark ages of medieval Britannia, when John Lackland made it illegal to kill the “king’s deer”. I’m sorry, but before there was a Congress, there were deer, so the deer don’t belong to Congress. I’m afraid to stock up; if you look in my pantry, I have more than two weeks’ because I know that Las Vegas doesn’t produce enough of anything to be reliable in a disaster. So, I have toilet paper and canned goods and water and other supplies far beyond my needs so that I can help people I know. I had to fight the HOA to put a garden in MY BACK YARD, not because I want to live off of it but because I love the superior taste and quality of home-grown produce. I worry that keeping that produce off the market will “affect commerce”, which is another joke supreme court decision (Wickard v Filburn).

Instead of that, the government wants to waste and wear out my substance propping up losers. We waste an inordinate amount of substance and time propping up the weakest among us so that we don’t seem inhuman. Most of my students want to go into health care where their clients will demand the very best of care, even after some of them abused and neglected their own responsibility to care for their own health or in many cases actively wasted it away. It is however actually inhuman to take from a father the bread he stores for his own children and give it to those of a stranger. I remember growing up the story of the grasshopper and the ant; the grasshopper didn’t prepare, but nobody forced the ants to share. Moreover, as politicians profess their Christianity, I remind them of the Parable of the Foolish Virgins; the Wise didn’t give them of their oil; the foolish were foolish because they didn’t plan ahead. As a scout, I was taught to plan ahead with clichés like “failing to prepare is preparing to fail”, but I believed that and live my life so that I am prepared. With 76% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, I am appalled, but my savings would be gone in an hour if they took it to supplement my neighbors. This just delays the suffering of everyone else and makes mine immediate. This deserves careful scrutiny.

You would think the government would want people to be able to handle things without their help. The only way I can conceive that having us reliant on them is because it gives government power over us. It evinces a spirit of abject insecurity for one groups security to be dependent on the abject lack thereof in their neighbors. I have seen with my own eyes how long some people must wait without relief for the government to finally get around to helping them. You see, the government primarily helps the people who have means and materials to continue to prop up the politicians. Government has become a self-licking ice cream cone that is only interested in more of itself. Wrote the patriot Thomas Paine “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” Government truly is a mode made necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world. Let us alone, and true Americans will fight any evil, right any wrong, feed the homeless, clothe the destitute and reach out and restore their neighbors and neighborhoods. That’s why you don’t hear about FEMA in “flyover country”; the good folks there don’t need government because they have the society and substance of heaven.

Cowardly Commentators

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Yesterday, I received an email from youreascumbag@yahoo.com that amounted to a personal insult. I found it illuminating that this person used a fake email and a fake name in order to share a real, albeit unfounded, opinion. As I share my thoughts and feelings online, I find it very common that people try to hide behind fake avatars and fake names and anonymous email addresses because, while they are unafraid to share how they feel, they fear desperately that anyone knows who they are and can confront them elsewhere. I believe that the consistent use of anonymous commentary and hiding behind fake information to be very cowardly, and it is also debilitating to discussion and crushing to character. Just ask Ta’O.

A few years back, one of my students said that she thought I was exceptionally opinionated. I quickly told her that I was no more opinionated than she, but that unlike me, she chose to keep hers quiet. I don’t feel the need to be ashamed or afraid of my opinions. After all, whose opinions should I have? Whose thoughts should I share? Whose words should I speak? If not mine, then why those of someone else? It doesn’t do the discussion any service when we are parsimonious with the truth. I speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve because a great man once taught me that this is the only way to arrive at truth and fulfill the great responsibility we have to God and our country.

God’s mouthpieces, which I do not claim to be, spoke forth the truth boldly and nobly. I have enjoyed reading about Moses this past month, admiring his courage, determination and fortitude in the recalcitrant wrath of Ramses and under the snivelling snide squawking of the Israelites. It is all too often that rather than face up to responsibility “great” men send lackies to do the work, but Moses took it upon himself to be himself, to own his Hebrew heritage, to speak directly to Pharaoh under threat of death, and to march at the head of the throng into the desert of Sinai.

From recent news, we know that there’s really no such thing as anonymity on the internet. The NSA knows what you’re typing while you type it in some cases. Even years back when I visited the National Archives, I realized that they keep almost everything sent to Congress or the President, and when the Archives announced they’d archive tweets, my response was to change from my avatar to my real name and say “Bring it on.” I said it; I own it. If I’m wrong, I will correct it. If I believe that I am right, with firmness in the right as God gives me to see it, I will go on, straight on and press forward until He tells me to change. My picture, my name, and the email address used here all go to me and are answered by me, and much as I may not like the hate mail and what not, I am willing to stand for what I believe. As for the cavalcade of cowardly commentators: back it up or back it off. When you attack the messenger, you show your argument to be weak, for if you could argue on substance, you would do so without the need to conceal yourself behind a mask. “To any of you who wish to die, come forward; I will take your names. To the first, I will build a monument.” –Cyrano de Bergerac

EDIT:  The email address was actually "yourascumbag@yahoo.com" which is misspelled.  Please do not spam this person back.  Obviously they have problems since they can't even insult me with correct grammar and punctuation.