Common Sense in New Jersey?

Looks like someone else has figured it out too...and he's in government to boot. New Jersey in fact.

“With this growing level of scientific uncertainty, it makes no sense to enact a new set of economically damaging regulations prompted by the global warming hysteria of recent years.”

This was said by Assemblyman Michael Doherty. Go here for more. He even mentions the incredibly low sunspot numbers I've been talking about and their possible contribution to lower global temperatures.

Over the past year, the sun keeps getting less and less active. The average sunspot number for July 2008 was 0.5. The last time that happened was Feb. of 1954. My guess is that the month of August will be below 1 and for 2008-2010, we'll be looking at global average temperatures that are low enough that even the media will notice the discrepancy between global warming and reality.

We can only hope.

The EPA, fire, and government

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

This quote has been attributed to George Washington and it is very much applicable in this case. If you are interested in hearing about a horrible injustice in Driggs, Idaho, please read this article about a hard working, diligent man named Lynn Moses who went to prison for following the instructions of local government involving flood control. What happened to common sense in government? Oh yeah, government is like fire.

We hear again and again from the government that they want to pass some sort of law restricting our freedoms and while the law could be used to harass innocent people, we are told that it will only be used to go after the bad guys. That may be true for a year or two, but after a while, government forgets and starts using said law to solidify their own power or just to harass innocent civilians because they can. The story above represents an incredible miscarriage of justice. This didn't happen in California or New York City, but right here in Idaho. Please read it and prepare to be amazed.

When you combine that with the fact that over the past 7 years we have been adding about 1 federal crime per week, it is cause for concern. Read more about it here.

Then get on the horn and tell your congressmen to stop passing crime legislation at the federal level unless it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise we all run the risk of committing a federal crime.

Universal Health Care -- Not Good.

When you think of Universal Health Care, do you think of it as a good thing or a bad thing? It's a good thing in that it offers health care to those who otherwise could not afford it. It's a bad thing in that it taxes those who make money in order to provide extremely structured care to those who request it. By extremely structured care, I mean the "government plan" determines what benefits you can and can not receive and how those benefits are paid for.

My wife needs a certain kind of medication and must take a brand name version and the recommendation is to stick with one or the other. There are two brands that are essentially the same and cost the same if purchased without any kind of insurance. Lucky us, we have some insurance, however, medicare reimburses one type much more than the other. Our insurance company matches medicare, therefore, we are burdened with some of the same non-nonsensical requirements determined by Medicare. We can either pay twice the amount or make a non-recommended switch to the other brand. The pharmacy emphasized with us, but they are not able to get the insurance company to listen to anything approaching reason since it all goes back to what the government decides.

So, even with the system we have, things are screwed up from an economic/health perspective and currently the government has a fairly small role compared to providing "Universal Health Care".

But wait, it gets worse, much worse. The government already wants to control your actions in regards to recycling, burning, fireworks, car seats, and emissions testing to name a few. What happens when the government is paying for your health care? Then we get laws banning things like, eating too much, lack of exercise, driving instead of walking short distances, rationing of fats, etc.

Read this article from Reuters and you can see where it is going. Here is a short excerpt:

"The findings highlight a need for widespread efforts to improve Americans' lifestyles and keep their weight in check, according to the researchers. Simply telling people to eat less and exercise more is not enough, Liang noted.

Broader social changes are needed as well, she said -- such as making communities more pedestrian-friendly so that people can walk regularly, or getting the food industry to offer healthier, calorie-conscious choices."

If people wanted the food industry to offer healthier, calorie-conscious choices, the food industry would offer them. If people wanted to live in pedestrian-friendly communities, they would create them and live there.

Do we really want to encourage the government to be overly concerned about what we eat, where we live, and how much we exercise? If you are pro "Universal Health Care" that is exactly what you are encouraging.

Why is it such a problem to work for money and spend money on the things you want/need? Why must we run 40% of our income through the government so they can grudgingly parcel out 10% back to us if we jump through their series of hoops?

I'm a lot like the kid. He doesn't like hoops either.

Chickens or Ducks

We recently were given some chickens and are enjoying their ability to eat zucchini and lay eggs. The kid also likes to feed them and watch them eat. He sits on top of the enclosure and tosses handfuls of corn down to them. His previous exposure to winged animals has been a farm game on the fridge that involves a duck, a farm book about ducks, and the occasional duck that flies into our yard and hangs out for a bit.

For the last week, ever since the chickens arrived, the little bugger has been calling the chickens ducks. In the morning, first thing, he wants to go look at the ducks. When we drive into the driveway he wants to go see the ducks. After lunch, he wants to go see the ducks. Upon further questioning, since we don't have any ducks, he points towards the back door or directly at the chicken coop.

Time and again we let him know that they are really chickens and he still calls them ducks. He won't even say the word chicken. Hopefully he learns about chickens soon because its hard not to call them ducks when he is so persistent. Like many in our society, he thinks that if he truly believes that it is a duck then it will be a duck.

In case you were wondering, chickens like apples, zucchini, pork bones, zucchini casserole, cracked corn, and scratching up weeds. So far they have reduced 60 square feet of weeds to dust and are working on their next 60 square feet. What useful creatures!

Economic Justice

So, what do you think of when you hear the phrase "economic justice". Justice is a good thing, therefore economic justice is probably also a good thing?

Suffice to say, it is not. Economic justice is socialism. Time and time again we have seen from history that taxing the rich to provide for the poor encourages both groups to work less rather than more.

Why is this important? We have an opportunity in November to elect a socialist or a moderate. The socialist makes statements like,

"I've been working my entire adult life to help build an America where economic justice is being served,"

A wonderful article about this can be found at ibdeditorials.com. Please read it and learn a bit more about the desires of the most liberal senator in the Senate who desires to become president.

As a side note, the moderate isn't much to get excited about either, but at least he has enough sense not to accidentally do something catastrophic to our great nation.

Odd Sunspot behavior

It's fairly well understood that solar cycles have some impact upon global temperatures, although how much is a matter of some contention. The little Ice Age indicates it is possible there can be considerable impact as this period coincided with the Maunder Minimum, a period of extremely low sunspot activity. Currently, we see sunspot activity similar to that seen during the Maunder Minimum, but while the Maunder Minimum lasted from 1645 to 1710, so far we have only seen corresponding low activity from 2007 to the present.

Interestingly enough, sunspots form when the sun is more active. The more sunspots there are, the more active the sun is. Typically the sun cycles from many sunspots to just a few and back to many every 11 years or so.

Since my tax dollars pay for some fairly sophisticated gear that observes the sun, I like to track the numbers of sunspots every few days. If you are interested, you can view historical information along with current info and predictions from NOAA here, updated weekly around Wednesday. For a real time view, you can visit spaceweather.com and see an image of the sun with the sunspots listed. There have been zero most of the days I've checked for the past several months.

While examining the NOAA data, I noticed something interesting. There is a note at the bottom of page 6 from PRF 1717 from July 29th 2008 that contains this line. RI represents a standard method for measuring the number of sunspots.

"The lowest smoothed sunspot index number for Cycle 22, RI = 8.0, occurred in May 1996. The highest smoothed sunspot number for Cycle 23, RI= 120.8, occurred April 2000."

We are currently at the end of Cycle 23, waiting for Cycle 24 to begin and it is taking its time.
This note tells us a couple things. The first is that the lowest sunspot value detected at the transition from cycle 22 to 23 was 8.0, averaged over a month in May of 1996. Adding our 11 year cycle to this we should have cycle 24 beginning around May of 2007. However, since May of 2007, we have had 9 months with average monthly sunspot values below 8. Not only that, but the last 3 months have been 2.9, 2.9, and 3.1 respectively. So we're currently at less than half the minimum from the previous cycle with little change in sight.

As I'm sure you have noticed, this year has been unusually cooler than in years past. I've heard reports of a hard winter in China, we had much more snow than normal in South Idaho, a friend of mine returned from fishing in Alaska reporting colder than normal temperatures and haying season is about 2 weeks behind previous years. It seems possible it is due to the fact that the sun is counteracting a period of increased activity over the past several cycles (1950's -2000) with reduced activity now. How long it will last is anyone's guess, but if we continue with these very low sunspot numbers we'll be heading for much cooler temperatures which will make us wish Global Warming was really happening and that it was caused by humans. If we could just keep the Greenies from destroying the world's economy in the meantime, we could prepare for the coming time of cooling by storing wheat and other kinds of food on a global scale, but I don't see that happening.

We're going to look back on this and wonder how we could have been so stupid as to listen to the liberal media. With their encouragement we are running cars on food and trying to solve a nonexistent problem some think is caused by CO2. I can only pray that our nation will turn back to God and learn how to distinguish truth from fiction.

God's creation is absolutely amazing and no matter how advanced we become, we will always be able to learn more about how it works. We should not make assumptions based upon a faulty understanding of creation. As a nation, let's trade our belief in the religion of Global Warming and worship of the environment for belief in Jesus. We would be much better off in both the short and long run.

Unhappiness in America

This article from the the U.K., written by a self described "very bad Roman Catholic", explains the difference between the "pursuit of happiness" and the "right to be happy" and why this makes a difference. Many of our current problems in this area came from the 60's and folks who thought Christian living restrained people from true happiness and acted to destroy the importance of the Christian life in what they thought was the pursuit of happiness. Now, that people realize all the problems this has caused, they have forgotten about how Christian living contributed to the "good life" in the first place.

"The paradox is that if you think of life as a series of duties (as she always has) - and of happiness as an undeserved blessing, rather than a right - you are likely to be much happier than if you think happiness is yours by right.

That's a sense that most of my generation have lost, if we ever had it.

All the emphasis, since the liberal reforms of the 1960s, has been on replacing Christian duties with human rights.

In the process, I believe, we have diminished the stock of human happiness rather than increasing it."

from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1038461/Last-rites-dear-old-mum-bedside-farce-rights-culture-robs-happiness.html

Teaching the child that happiness comes from the pursuit and is not handed to you without effort is why we're planning to home school the kid. It's also a contributing factor towards having a garden and living where we do. It provides the child a chance to work with his hands.

He's less than two years old, and he can vacuum the stairs, pull weeds, identify Canadian thistles, pick grapes, and fetch tools. Labor, using the hands and mind, is a useful tool in the pursuit of happiness.

That is the way God made us and there is not much use in fighting it, contrary to what socialists would have you believe.

It's a first

Today, the kid, for the first time ever, peed into his toilet. He has a bit of extra incentive because he gets to empty it into the real toilet and then flush. It's all good.

Other, slightly less exciting things that have happened.

Earlier this morning we were awoken at 7:30 by a screaming child. This wasn't a normal screaming child scream, but more of a, I'm trapped and going to die, kind of scream. We entered his room expecting to fend off a hoard of wild child eating wolves (redundancy alert) and found him with his leg jammed through the slats of the crib past the knee. It was jammed tight and pretty much unmovable. I tried tugging, but it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be removed with the knee still attached that way. Then we sat back and tried to figure out how it had gotten into that position. We ended up pushing the leg through to just before the kneecap and then twisting the child onto his side and then extracting the leg. It's bruised in a nice little ring, but doesn't appear to be broken or otherwise damaged as he's moving about and if he notices the damaged leg, he doesn't seem to mind.

As another slightly dated update, the night before last, we watched an episode of The Dukes of Hazard with the kid. He really likes the music, but doesn't quite get the story line yet. Usually he doesn't last through an entire episode of anything, but with the Dukes, he did. Erin would be so proud.

Lastly, he has learned that saying "ma-ma" repeatably earns him the attention of ma-ma. He really likes that. We're still waiting for Uncle Dave to teach him the word spatula!

Great understanding?

The kid had been pulling bark off the cedar tree yesterday while the wife was pulling weeds in her herb garden. At some point she turned to check on him and scratched her eye on the piece of bark he was showing her. Naturally she continued pulling weeds, but later that evening thought it was hurting a bit more than it should.

This morning she called the eye doctor and got an appointment to see him. I went along to keep track of the kid, who still has a runny nose. We had great fun playing with the blocks and other toys while the wife had her eye checked out.

After the wife got done, the kid and I put the toys away and I noticed his nose was running so I said, "You need your nose wiped!" and then proceeded to check my pocket for the nose rag that the wife had given me earlier. Before I could extract it, the receptionist appeared out of nowhere with a box of Kleenex and I pulled out a couple to wipe the kid's nose.

Then I handed him the kleenex and asked him to throw it in the garbage. Like a gung-ho kid, he started walking before he even looked for the garbage can and there wasn't one in sight. I reached out for his arm and said, "It's not over there, its in the bathroom." Then I pointed down the hall and said, "It's the first door on your left." I should point out that he hadn't been down that hallway yet. He then took off, took the first left, threw the Kleenex in the garbage and then came back. Better watch what trade secrets you spill around this kid.

Memory

I was momentarily stunned last night when reading a book to the kid. It was a book about colors and had examples of 9 items on each page that were of a particular color. On the 2nd or 3rd page, I decided to ask him to point to the socks before I read any of the page. He pointed to the socks. Then I asked him to point to the tractor and he pointed to the tractor. He pointed correctly to three different objects on different pages when asked. At first I thought it might be random chance, but as he kept picking correctly, I realized he either recognized the picture, or knew where on the page that item was. Later I found out that the wife reads him that book and goes through the pictures with him. She hadn't ever had him point to anything though.

A related incident also occurred last night. We normally have been heading into town to go to Costco after picking up the kid from his sitter. This happens once a week and for the past month or so after the Costco trip we would stop and get a polish sausage and a slice of cheese pizza. The kid loves to eat cheese pizza while sitting in the shopping cart.

Well, last night we went to Costco, but decided to purchase a chicken instead of the typical polish and cheese pizza. We paid for our items and made it past the food court and halfway to the outside door when the child started fussing a bit. The wife and I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but he kept pointing behind us towards the food court. Then we realized that he thought we were going to eat there and was disappointed to not get his cheese pizza. That means he can remember specific events from a week ago, possibly more. Once we told him we were going to eat at home he seemed content. It was kind of like he thought we were forgetting something like when I forget my hat and he alerts me to the fact. He has been quite helpful in that regard.

What a smart kid!

Camping on Easter

Oh boy, its been a bit since I posted anything. We did make it back from Africa in case anyone was wondering.

Well, we decided to get an early start on the camping season this year and went to Succor creek over this past weekend. We had a good time and the child learned how to climb on rocks and travel over ground that wasn't level. He also learned to sleep in sub-freezing temperatures and did fairly well at that. During a hike in Leslie Gulch, he walked about 3/4 of a mile down a fairly nice sandy path and was carried a little bit. For the trip out, we learned to bribe him with raisins. The wife would go ahead 50 feet or so and the child would walk/run towards her and she would keep walking slowly and eventually the child would catch up with her and politely request a raisin. It was a good time.

Yesterday, I got home from work, and the wife said the child had done something amazing. This is pretty standard and usually refers to a new way to cause mischief. In this case though it meant that he could climb into his highchair without any help. I found this truly amazing and had to watch him do it once before I really believed it was possible. So, now, he can seat himself, which is a helpful thing.