Monthly Archives: April 2005

Everyone’s talking about high gasoline prices, and unlike the weather, maybe we CAN do something about it. The answer, you see, is conservation, but this is conservation unlike what the enviro-loonies usually suggest. No, you won’t have to buy a hybrid automobile, and no, you won’t have to forgo your car trip, in favor of a Greyhound bus or crowded public transit.

But, before I get into my solution, allow me one digression. Remember back in the “energy crisis” early 1970’s, when we were hearing about alternative sources of oil? Back in those halcyon days (by today’s standards) we were told that once the price of oil went above $15 a barrel, then it would be profitable to exploit the vast resources of tar sands and oil shale. Once that barrier was crossed, the goal posts magically shifted to $25, then $35. Today, the price of oil stands at about $55 per barrel, and we still haven’t done much with tar sands and oil shale.

We were also told that Mexico had petroleum resources that matched the Saudis, and maybe it does, but this has never helped us. Despite the high gasoline prices, we are currently in a pitched battle about whether to open up a small area in Alaska to exploration and production. It seems that the natives are all for it, but I wonder if this will ever happen, since the gliterati and their experts, along with the rest of the useful idiots are against it. Meanwhile, there are so many oversize gas-guzzling SUV’s on the road, that you’d think we had time-traveled back to the 1960’s when gas prices were about 24 cents per gallon. To say that Americans are conflicted on this issue, and to note that the experts don’t seem to know jack about anything, is to have a firm grasp of the obvious.

OK. What to do, then?

Consider how many people commute from home, to work in an office every day. Tens of millions, right? Once they arrive, they log on from their office workstations to a server, and perform their assigned tasks. Certainly, a goodly number of these same folks could just as easily log on from home. Even if they would telecommute in this manner two or three days a week, untold millions of gallons of gasoline could be saved. In other words, the demand for gasoline would finally drop, and so would prices. What’s not to like?

One objection is that it would be difficult to supervise these telecommuters, and they might goof off too much. This assumes that they are presently models of productivity at the office, and I guess that anyone who thought that the movie Office Space (1999) was a fantasy, rather than a fairly accurate portrayal of the American work environment, could get hung up on this. Clearly, whether an employee works at home or at the office, there are ways to measure productivity and performance, so this objection falls flat.

Another objection would focus on opening up the office network to the vagaries of full Internet access, but this becomes simply a matter of security, and it hardly approaches rocket science to implement the necessary precautions. A further complaint would be to harp on the “synergy” that exists when all these wonderful people come together in the workplace. Assuming that this is true—and it probably is not—this could still be accomplished via video conferencing, or weekly meetings at the office.

But wait! There’s more. With millions of cars off the road at peak times, we’ve also just solved the problem of traffic congestion at rush hour.

As to implementation of this plan, it may take even higher gasoline prices, and even worse traffic. Trust me. Economics and human misery, as always, will force us into this long overdue paradigm shift.

People of faith have good reason to fear those atheistic forces in our society that strive to expunge every trace of religion from public life. The excesses of our judicial system in this regard are quite well known, and need not be detailed here.

Yet, many of these same people don’t seem to realize that the inaction of other branches of government against this onslaught—and even horrific instances when they aid and abet it, including allowing a forced abortion on a teenager—is really very logical. There IS no place for religion in public life, since religion is completely incompatible with our current form of government—an intrusive socialistic oligarchy. Despite the existence of two major political parties, the end result of every election has always been the same: more government and less freedom.

Since religion, at the very least, gives us a different way of looking at the world, it is a serious threat to the current power structure. Until recently, it was unquestioned that human rights were derived from God, or absent God, were simply part of the natural law. Nowadays, a large precept, although usually not stated as directly as this, is that all of these same rights are derived from the government. The proliferation of civil rights laws, definitions of hate crimes, and effete harassment statutes are only the obvious examples. The existence of a confiscatory tax system, whereby people talk more about what they get to keep, rather than what is being taken from them, is another slightly more subtle manifestation.

One more illustration of the freedom-killing government leviathan, misallocating untold billions in resources, and creating massive amounts of crime where it never existed, is the so-called War on Drugs. In the past 80 or so years, did you, your ancestors, or your elected representatives for that matter, ever vote on initially going forward, and then continuing with reckless abandon this absurd enterprise? The fruits of this tragic and misguided effort, besides being an affirmative action and welfare program for law enforcement agencies and the courts, have been wanton destruction, affecting especially those less fortunate classes that these programs were supposedly designed to protect. Clearly, if alcoholic beverages are legal, given all the negatives, then no rational argument can be proffered in favor of drugs being illegal.

What would Jesus do about drugs? While this specific issue is not addressed in the Gospels, of course, Jesus does take on many problems of society, including adultery, divorce, revenge, greed, and false prophets, in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew Chapters 5-7). His answers are always based on faith and dependence on God. There simply are no passages where He recommends that Caesar or the Jewish authorities get more involved in the lives of the people, for any “good” reason.

However, the mere non-existence of these and other passages, used by the “Christian” Left to justify their misguided positions is never seen as an impediment. Which brings us to those who would destroy religion from within.

As if the Episcopal Church needed any more controversy, in June, 2003, after venue shopping three times, V. Gene Robinson became the nation’s first gay bishop, in New Hampshire. Showing a real spirit of emulating the suffering servant, Robinson left his wife and two young daughters, to live with a man, in 1986. In a mind-numbing disconnect at the time, Rev. David Jones, rector of St. Paul’s in Concord, N.H., said he was thrilled with Mr. Robinson’s selection even though he recognizes that the Bible denounces homosexuality.

Now, less than two years later, this same bishop is backing Planned Parenthood, urging this organization to “…target people of faith to promote abortion rights…” It is difficult to imagine the most ardent proponent of unlimited abortion invoking God in the taking of innocent life. To an unrepentant hard-core atheist, these matters would be mutually exclusive.

The Catholic Church is still reeling, and rightly so, from the pedophile scandals, but what Robinson is doing here is the equivalent of a Catholic bishop endorsing the North American Man Boy Love Association.

How did this happen? Under a climate of the most perverse political correctness, where nearly everything is allowed (except dissent to political correctness) standards are abolished. Why worry, they say, if no one is hurt? I expect that Robinson’s wife and daughters were hurt by his desertion, even as he comforts the abortionists:

“I know, in the end, that I’m going to heaven, and so are you. You and I can do this work no matter how hard it gets, because we know we’re going home.”

It’s one thing for him to assert that he “knows” he’s going to heaven, reflecting mindless pseudo-theology at its most extreme, but it is a whole other matter to sanctify a group of miserable abortionists that he hardly knows at the same time. If everyone is going to heaven, why have any churches at all, why even have Scripture? A more fundamental misreading of Christianity is hard to imagine.

St. Paul’s epistles mentioned threats and problems both inside and outside the Church. We too can take comfort—cold comfort—that little has changed in nearly 2000 years.

Visitors to our nation’s capital might be surprised to see that most cars registered in the District of Columbia carry a license plate containing the ringing protest “Taxation Without Representation.” Advocates of full statehood for the District have arranged for this to be the standard plate, and even have a nominal fee ($10.00) trade-in policy, for holders of older plates not so emblazoned. (Non-protest plates are available, by special arrangement.)

Technically, the District does have federal representation, albeit of non-voting status, in the person of multi-term delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC at-large), and a DC Congressional Shadow Delegation, consisting of Shadow Senator Paul Strauss, Shadow Senator Florence Pendleton, and Shadow Representative Ray Browne. The current status of Washington, DC government is that is has certain components of a standard municipal jurisdiction, but is under ultimate control of the US Congress.

Thus, the residents of DC can make the argument that they are disfranchised, beyond their vote for president.

However, don’t be in a big hurry to shed any tears for Washingtonians—at least regarding representation. Any objective observer will note that as progress toward so-called home rule has played out since the structure was liberalized under President Nixon in 1973, there is little to celebrate. Crime is an ongoing problem; the DC school district simultaneously boasts one of the highest per capita costs in the country, while it is rated as one of the worst; a former mayor and current councilman was caught up in several scandals, that seemed to improve his popularity; municipal financial irregularities are reported nearly every day, along with peccadilloes of this or that city official; and the historic have/have-not divide of Washington, supposedly a thing of the past, surely played into the outrageous situation whereby there is no Metro station anywhere near Georgetown.

As to the slogan “Taxation Without Representation,” this is taken from a declaration issued by the First Continental Congress in 1774, produced in response to various “intolerable” acts of the British government, that make the complaints of Washingtonians pale by comparison. It is more than a bit unseemly that this colonial era rallying cry should be hijacked by an effete group of overpaid, underworked municipal bureaucrats, who would be better occupied trying to improve the quality of life for their many downtrodden citizens.

One good reason for the lack of autonomy of the District is that its status is quite unique, and more so these days, given our concerns for national security. What goes on in the District’s Federal facilities affects all Americans, and many people who work in town for the Feds are not residents of Washington. Additionally, many who are employed by the Feds and do live in town are hardly long-termers. Why shouldn’t Congress have the final say? Or, to put it differently, how close could DC approach full statehood without either undermining the operations of the Federal government, or being unfair to the rest of the country?

Besides, whom are they trying to fool? Do Washingtonians believe that their Federal taxes are too high? Would they vote to lower them? When you consider that any elected representative would be Democrat, and no doubt a liberal Democrat at that, this whole process looks suspiciously like a fool’s errand, or simply a way to get more Democrats into Congress.

But, what need is there for all this analysis, anyway? Frankly, at first blush, the entire thing is off-putting. This is civic pride? To issue the only license plate with a negative sentiment to be found anywhere in the known world? Berserkely in the 1960’s could hardly have topped this.

Thus, we have a prima facie argument to keep DC under adult supervision.