I, Polluter!

Today I am a polluter. To paraphrase Voltaire, "I breathe, therefore I pollute."

Today the Environmental Protection Agency in its infinite wisdom, has declared that Carbon Dioxide, good old CO2 is a pollutant and a health hazard for all Americans. As a result of this ruling, the EPA has given itself the power to regulate anything that produces carbon dioxide no matter whether the Congress approves anti-CO2 legislation or not.

Wait a minute. Didn't I read in my 8th grade science book that plants need CO2 to live?

So is the EPA going to get rid of CO2? Are the plants going to die? Are they afraid that excess CO2 will make the plants grow faster? Are we in danger of being overwhelmed by angry masses of carbon dioxide sucking vines? Are intoxicated trees going to uproot themselves and come after us, drunk on all this extra CO2 we're generating.

"Wait a minute!"

Didn't I read in my 9th grade Biology book that people breathe out carbon dioxide whenever we breathe? So, I AM A SOURCE OF POLLUTION WHEN I BREATHE?

Does this mean that now the EPA is going to regulate me? What's next?

Are we going to ration exhaling? I know, we'll do it like they did during the Carter Administration. If you have an odd numbered social security card you can only exhale on odd numbered dates. If you have an even numbered social security card you only get to exhale on even numbered dates.

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If you're an illegal alien, you get to breathe whenever you want since your social security card is a fake anyway!

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That ought to clear out the riff raff!

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I'm just sayin'...

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Tom "Breath of Death" King

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WEBMASTER!!!!!

Well, I'll be a webmaster if we get the project funded. Sounds a little sinister. "I AM THE WEBMASTER!" Actually, if we do it right, it'll be more like the web herder or the web coaxer. A bunch of us nonprofit types have come up with an idea for an on-line social/professional network for people like us in faith and community based organizations so we can get together on our computers to plot and plan how to take over the world.

Ultimately, that's what we'd like to do - in a good way of course. Sadly, though we all want pretty much the same thing, the disagreements over how we get those things can get pretty violent. I heard a talk show host disagree with the idea that we want the same things. He says people on the left want power!!

He's half right. The leaders on the left do want power any way they can get it, anyhow they can hang on to it. The problem is, there are just as many people on the right who only want power too! They all seem to fall to corruption one by one....

I've long believed that the rank and file folks could get along fine if we could just ditch our leaders. We could hold a lottery or something to pick new ones. It should be somebody who doesn't want to be in charge. Somebody smart and talented and stable who isn't crazy or vain enough to want to run for public office.

It's that separate elite group - people who have made themselves our leaders that's the problem. They lust for power and will do anything to get it.

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky. We're going to try and take over the world!"

Like Brain, our leaders set their followers out to do the dirty work. These guys know full well they are using their followers to tear our country apart. They don't care. It's a big old game to these guys. They play the game every day in the halls of power and then they gather for steak and lobster dinners in the Senate restaurants at night to drink and congratulate themselves on having made fools of us all.

My friend the talk show host is wrong. I used to watch the Pinky and the Brain cartoons a lot when my kids were little. Pinky never had a clue, he just went along with Brain wherever he went. Most of us are far too much like Pinky. We mean well, but the Brains of this world feed us with platitudes and rhetoric, convince us to follow them and then reap the rewards of our labor - either by taxing it out of us or through fees or surcharges or any one of a thousand ways our leaders have of living off the sweat of all of our backs - rich, poor, liberal or conservative.

The best way I've ever found to get anything worthwhile done is to get folks together without the politicians and their lackeys and just do it. That's what the new Virtual Village Website is about. I hope once we get it up, that many of you will join us in this nifty experiment in Internet-based collaboration.

The politicians are going to hate it. People banding together to make their communities better without the permission of the powers that be! What a wonderful and terrifying thing that could be.

I'm just sayin'

Tom

Whatcha think? Why does anyone else care?

Somebody on one of my on-line hangouts started a controversial thread asking what everybody thinks about Ouija Boards, the toy that purports to help you communicate with the "spirit world" and whether they really work or not.

The respondents broke down into two groups. The first group said, "Uh, uh, no way, I ain't gettin' anywhere near one of those things - they're evil!" The second group, scoffs and calls Ouija Board communications a mass delusion, a toy or "harmless".

So what is the right answer? Do dead people or evil spirits communicate with us through a wooden board and a mysteriously moving planchette (the teardrop shaped indicator that jerks around the board when two users touch it and points out the letters of the message)? Spirits or a big hoax? The answer, I'm afraid is not very satisfying if you try to puzzle out the truth of the matter with anything remotely resembling an open mind.

It is as likely that there are creatures we cannot see existing in dimensions or planes of existence we cannot comprehend as not. Physicists have postulated parallel dimensions many steps beyond our own. There is no reason that intelligent creatures should not inhabit those planes of existence.

Science believes what it can prove and supposedly keeps an open mind about the rest. Unfortunately, scientists rather often violate this principle and openly laugh at people who don't subscribe to whatever the current popular view of the cosmos happens to be this week.

But to laugh at the experience of people whom you know to be reliably honest and truthful is, I believe, to discount evidence merely because you don't like it.

For some reason, I have heard many stories from ordinarily very truthful persons that recount messages through manipulation of a Ouija board that were evil, manipulative, terrifying and extraordinarily similar. My own wife who is painfully truthful by habit (often much to my discomfort), tells a frightening story of a "conversation" she and another teenaged friend had with an entity communicating through the board. She began to smell a rat given the story it was telling and she asked it "Are you Satan?" The planchette began to jerk back and forth from 'H' to 'A' to 'H' to 'A' over and over - laughing maniacally at her. She got rid of the board fast.

Before I discount stories like that, I would have to assume that all of those individuals were either (1) Insane OR (2) telling uncharacteristically silly lies OR (3) victims of an almost identical subconscious prank by their own brains that makes the thing appear to work. The fact that Penn & Teller couldn't make it work in their presence proves nothing to me. If the "spirits" possess free will and are able to conciously decide whether or not they wish to reveal themselves to these guys, then it's every bit as likely that that they may keep their secrets to themselves as it is that they speak on command.
Assuming malevolent purpose, it's very possible that they might not want to talk to a Las Vegas magician. Pretty pompous of Penn Gillette to assume he can make "spirits" perform like trained seals.

I'm just sayin'

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. I was drummed out of grad school because they discovered that I was a Christian and therefore I was "not a good scientist" by definition. I was told, if asked, "Is there a God?" the proper reply they explained was "No"

Not even "Maybe". There could be no God because Professor Silver couldn't prove there was one. Well, she couldn't prove there wasn't either, truth be told, but the nonexistence of God was a tenant of her particular religion (atheism) and like the most arbitrary priest or pastor she demanded that all her students accept this precept as well - by faith or suffer excommunication from graduate school.

Scientists can be such fundamentalists and these guys were psychologists yet - a branch of study that mathematicians and physicists call a "soft science". See even in science you get the old "Holier than thou" treatment! This bolsters my argument that science is a religion.

I do not believe that there is evidence sufficient to fully prove or disprove whether anyone can communicate with noncorporeal creatures using a Ouija Board. It's one of those interesting little mysteries of life that each of us must solve for ourselves to our own satisfaction and usually without convincing evidence except our own experience.

Ultimately the universe is so vast and so complex that much of what we think we know we must take on an educated faith.

Hey, whatever makes you able to get up in the morning and live a decent and useful life! Nobody has any business belittling you for what you have come to believe based on your own experiences. Ultimately, it's all you have with which to figure out the world.

A little more "Treat others the way you want to be treated" would go a long way to ending all kinds of wars and stupid arguments where neither side can prove its point anyway.

I'm not arguing for or against religion here or even that Ouija boards actually work. Truth is the answer there may be "It depends on who is using it." Nobody can answer that kind of question for anybody else. You have to figure that out all by your lonesome and nobody has any right to belittle you for the answer you get!

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

The Firing Squad as a Political Metaphor

There was a book once called "Droodles". It consisted of a series of off perspective line drawings that were difficult to identify - a combination of a doodle and a riddle - therfore, A DROODLE!

You tried to guess what they were. I remember this was one of them....

It's a bear climbing up a tree as seen from the other side...

A bunch of us in college used to do them as an intellectual exercise. One of my favorite is this one. In the original it was an "Aggie" firing squad (Texas version of the blonde joke). I like this title better - An Aerial view of a Congressional Firing Squad.
The way the presidential race is going, it could be a presidential campaign firing squad.

This one is a church or nonprofit firing squad..

If you've ever sat on a church or nonprofit board, you understand this one.

This one's an environmentalist firing squad....
A firing squad as done by Academia...

...A United Nations Firing Squad (the ones in the blue helmets)

Finally, a firing squad as done by the US military!!!

Now that's what I call "point & shoot".

Simple, goal-directed, effective!

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

P.S. Somebody asked me what a Texas Firing Squad would look like.

Something like this......

Immigration Policy We Can Live With

I got one of those e-mail petitions today against the idea that illegal aliens who pay social security taxes should be allowed to draw social security. Admittedly this is kind of a goofy idea. It's one law that contradicts a whole host of others. How do you pay social security if you're working illegally.

This petition is doomed to failure because it's an email petition. There is no way for it to reliably reach an elected official. I'm sure the president won't ever get one in his e-mail box. There's no way for the "signatures" to be authenticated. Because it's sent out scattergun fashion, most of the copies of this will have duplicate signatures. Who's going to sort through all those? The only reason for an e-mail like this is that it's an excuse to rag on illegal aliens and portray them as criminals, illiterates and sponges.

The only way you can effectively register such a complaint is to send a personal message directly to your congressional delegation, the presidents or heads of government agencies. Even then, you'll be speaking to an aid who counts them up as "for" and "agin" and informs his or her boss as to the tally.

It is true that the immigration reform bill passed by the U.S. Senate in May 2006 included a provision allowing undocumented immigrants to collect Social Security benefits accrued if they paid taxes while working in the United States. You may disagree with this bill, but characterizing all illegals as criminals doesn't solve that problem.

E-mail petitions like this are completely ineffective because there’s no way to collect them once they’ve got enough signatures. We still have to do things the old fashioned “hard way”.

As to the illegal immigration issue, I’ve seen precious few “illegals” living in the lap of luxury as described in some of these e-mails and pushing ahead of little old people to buy expensive name brand stuff while grandma (who lived through the depression) eats catfood.

There are 38 colonias in the 14 counties served by East Texas Council of Governments – cardboard villages where these people live without running water, sewers, transportation or electricity. The rose growers and nurseries send a pickup in the morning to pick up the men and take them to the fields and greenhouses. If their families are with them, mama pays $40-80 to get a ride to town to buy groceries - enriching an unscrupulous Americano who preys on illegals because they are vulnerable and afraid and don't have cars. These folks are living in their own depression right now and IT’S BETTER THAN HOW THEY LIVED IN MEXICO!!!

I’ve seen these guys work. Many are skilled and it's a myth that they don't want to learn English. When Peggy Lustig’s folks at Gateway to American Opportunities offered them a chance to learn English, 150 showed up for class the first night at one place. A bunch of them walked some serious mileage to get there too!

While I understand that some people feel they ought to be run out on a rail, I’m not so sure. If they’re working and staying out of trouble, give ‘em a green card and a fair shot at becoming a citizen. The gain is ours. In earlier immigration waves, we depleted many countries of some of their best people.

The problem is not with the laws anyway. The problem is we don’t enforce the laws we have. Writing new laws is a racket by which lawmakers convince you they are doing something about the problem so you will re-elect them. They don't intend that such laws will actually be enforced. We tie the hands of our border patrol agents, so they can’t stop them at the border. We hire them because they work cheap, so we encourage them to stay. I understand why they come across too. If you lived in the pesthole they did, you’d try and get out too.

Also, remember the great lie that liberals use to hold on to political power – the idea that the economy is a zero-sum game. We’ve been suckered into believing for all these years that if someone does well, he or she must be causing someone else to be poorer.

This is not true! An economy is healthy when it is active. The more people that work, the more money is moving through the economy. A business generating a million dollar payroll contributes about 7 million dollars worth of activity to the economy of its community as the payroll gets spent and respent in the community. The more people working and spending their earnings, the more money there is flowing through the stores and shops and services in the community and the more other people are working. Rich people spend money hiring people to do work for them. They create factories and jobs and businesses. In the same way, illegal aliens, allowed to work simply increase the activity within the economy. They don't really take anything away from us, whether we want the kinds of jobs they do or not. Working people create jobs, simply by working and spending.

I agree we shouldn’t be providing extensive support for folks who are in the country illegally, but from what I’ve seen, these guys aren’t looking for a handout. They’re looking for a job. They are very often religious, family oriented and hard-working. Those who aren’t can easily be taken care of simply by enforcing the existing laws that are on the books. They aren’t stealing from us by and large. They contribute to the economy. If we make it so that hard working Mexicans can come in as guest workers and bring their families, we won’t see the drain of cash going back to Mexico. When we had vast immigrant waves from China, Ireland, Italy, Germany and France, the influx of workers served only to deplete those countries of their hardest working citizens and to give our economy a badly needed kick in the pants. Not only that, but we got some great restaurants and nifty inventions from immigrants like ice cream, hot dogs, hamburgers, Chop Suey and Tex-Mex food.

I say, to solve the problem, we don’t need new laws. We need to simply enforce the ones we’ve got. We need to lock down the border and gently but firmly take anyone who tries to cross back to their own side. We need a generous guest worker program that allows them to come across legally. And we need a no hanky panky policy that deports anyone who causes trouble.

President Reagan tried that, but the strict enforcement part got watered down by the Democrats so badly, it didn’t work!

He had the right idea though. We just need to try the whole thing and that’s what the President has proposed this time around. If we want to help, we should send overwhelming numbers of letters to our senators and congressmen and to the president, stating we want enforcement, the border locked down, a guest worker program and a one strike you’re out policy for convictions for serious crimes.

Just one man's opinion...

Tom

I Never Got My Confirmation Number

A dear friend sent me an e-mail telling me if I forwarded this to just 9 friends, Applebees would send me a 50 dollar gift certificate. Poor trusting thing got snoogered on this one like some tens of thousands before her. PT Barnum knew whereof he spoke.

But I would disagree with Barnum on one thing. It's not a sucker that's born every minute. Okay maybe every other minute, but it's not just the greedy and self-seeking that are easy prey to con-men and frauds. It's also the innocent and trusting as well and I say, "Shame on anyone who would take advantage of a trusting person." It's a vile thing to do and you should develop a rash for treating a nice person like that.

As you've probably guessed, the Applebees 50 dollar gift certification confirmation number e-mail doesn’t work (It's appended below without everybody’s e-mail addresses just in case). Somebody is trying to see how many people they can fool into forwarding this e-mail.

Here are some ways you can tell when you’re being hood-winked on one of these.

1. Logic - There is no way for Applebees to confirm that you sent the requisite e-mails without putting some sort of tracking software on your computer to verify that you actually forwarded those messages. They’d have to do it with a virus or Trojan-like program without your knowledge or they’d have to set up an auto-install program that asks your permission to put tracking software on your computer – in which case you’d know it was there. It’s exactly like if you were to send 9 letters via the post office. How would anyone track that unless they watched you put the letters in the mailbox. If it does work, it means something bad has attached itself to your computer…

2. Go to the bottom and look at the first person to post this message – in this case it was one Roger Wilson. I looked down the list of every previous post and in every case but one, the poster’s e-mail address is shown. Guess who's name did not yield and address when clicke - OUR BUDDY ROGER WILSON’S. That’s a dead giveaway. He doesn’t want some anti-spam vigilante tracking him down and bonking him on the head. I once tracked down one of those websites that hijack your computer and make it inoperable unless you buy something. He had an office in Austin, Texas. I went to visit with a baseball bat. Someone else had the same idea first evidently, because when I got there, the place was abandoned and there was some pretty radical damage to the premises.

3. Rule of thumb – If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: Doing this would break Applebees virtually overnight. If this worked, you could have this scenario. First e-mailer sends to 9 people. Those send to 9 each (that’s 81 so far). At 50 each, Applebees would be in for 4050 dollars. The version of this e-mail had gone through 11 rounds. Let’s say only 1/3 of the people actually forwarded it from there on out and only a third of those responded and so on.. Let’s see what kind of damage that does.

3rd round – 81x3= 243
4th round – 243x3= 729
5th round – 729x3= 2187
6th round – 2187x3=6561
7th round – 6561x3=19,683
8th round – 19,683x3=59049
9th round – 59049x3=177147
10th round – 177,147x3=531,441
11th round - 531,441x3=1,594,323

Now at 50 dollars each that’s - 50 x 1,594,323 = 79,716,150

That means that after only 11 rounds, this e-mail would have already cost Applebee's close to 80 MILLION dollars and that’s if only a third of the people who receive this actually forward it to someone who hasn’t received it already. You can reach far more people with your message for far less cost than that by buying commercials during the Superbowl.

If all 9 responded at every level, the total would be a devastating 31,381,059,609. That’s over 31 BILLION dollars Applebees would lose on that little deal in just a few weeks.

4. Rule of thumb #2 – If it looks too good to pass up, there’s probably a hook in it. That’s how you catch fish. Remember this: One day, this e-mail may come back to this guy (since he started circulating it first among people whose e-mail he actually knows and who probably know his, only not as “Roger Wilson, but by his real name. When he gets hold of it, with all those forwards, he can harvest all the e-mail addresses (which are probably good addresses since the people sent them to people they know). He can then sell them to spammers or use them to spam himself or to send you viruses if he’s a mean person. AND every time he gets it back, he gets a whole knew tree of e-mail addresses because of the way pyramid forwarding works. Remember after only 11 rounds it could have passed through 1.5 million e-mail boxes. He’s set out what amounts to an e-mail drift net and when he comes upon it again, the e-mail address he harvests from that net may be yours or mine.

Also notice about midway through the list, there’s a note that says “it works!” That’ can’t be real because you wouldn’t know it works till after you send the e-mail, so how could you have said “it works” when you sent it in the first place, since you hadn’t found out yet whether it works or not, huh? The spammer is probably the one who sent it although the e-mail address may be disguised or phony.

5. Look it up on Snopes.com or About.com's urban legends/hoaxes site: They've always got the straight poop on the latest of these. Do that before you pass anything along!

NICE PEOPLE SHOULD BE ABLE TO TRUST WHAT THEIR FRIENDS SEND THEM WITHOUT HAVING TO THINK LIKE A CROOK. SADLY, WE DON’T LIVE IN THAT SORT OF WORLD YET. EVERYTHING WE RECEIVE, FORWARD AND OPEN HAS TO BE VIEWED WITH SUSPICION ANY MORE.

THAT’S KIND OF SAD WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

I HOPE ROGER WILSON GETS A VIRUS.

If you want to do some good, e-mail this column to 9 people. I bet it doesn’t make it past the first round. That’s just human nature.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King

"Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is."

. - Will Rogers

Evil in Uganda - Ineffectual Response!

Every night thousands of children travel through the night hiding in churches, shelters and abandoned buildings seeking to avoid capture by the Lord's Resistance Army's brutal commander, Joseph Kony. Kony reportedly makes sex slaves out of the children, tortures them and turns them into murderers and soldiers and slaves. The war between the Ugandan government and the rebels has been going on for 20 years with a death toll of tens of thousands of victims. The insurgency has mutilated, cooked and eaten, brutalized and raped indiscriminately. Now thanks to folks like Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, several thousand folks nationwide are planning a gigantic rally called Global Night Commute to increase awareness of the crisis in Uganda. The rally proposes to raise awareness for two purposes. 1. To raise funds for the 'effort' (no surprise there) and 2. To register outrage and demand that the U.S. government "do something".

Like what?

Now, I know these folks mean well, but providing humanitarian aid is only going to accomplish what it did in Somalia - provide the warlords with further supplies for their troops and point out clearly who need to be targets for their depredations. Women making money for their families and healthy children are only going to infuriate these guys. Don't forget - they're evil. That was pointed out in yesterday's Oprah segment. You know they are going to try and take out anyone who is not afraid of them and tries to stand up to them. Will people be heroic and stand up for what's right - you bet! Will many of them die tragically for it - of course!

Where I get crossways with Hollywood types trying to solve world problems is with their stubborn insistence that you can do something about evil by hosting house parties and talking about how awful it is and that giving money is as good as actually doing something.

You can't just sit around and talk about how bad it is and expect things to change. You can't just sit around a nice round table and negotiate and expect bad people to lay down their guns and stop being naughty. You can't send supplies and teachers and rest assured that everything's gonna be all right. You've got to put boots on the ground and make a mess before you can clean up something like this. Unless you take out the bad guys, they're going to keep on doing bad things. Did we learn nothing from Osama, Saddam, Tojo and Adolph?

The problem is the soft-hearted folks in the U.S. (and I count myself one of them) who look at this stuff and are apalled, haven't learned much from our experience trying to clean up these messes. We've thrown money at this stuff for years and only managed to strengthen the bad guys. If Oprah and George want to do some real good, they need to hire some mercenaries and send them into Northern Uganda to take out the LRA leadership and liberate the kids they are holding as prisoners.

Let me hear a call for the U.S. to offer military aid to the government of Uganda and neighboring countries like the Congo and put some divisions and equipment in there with the Africans and help them clean up this mess the only way you can deal with armed evil people.

If the liberals and conservatives in this country could unite in a call for a realistic solution to the problem of evil little armies running around helpless little countries in the third world - namely multi-national armed intervention (and by that I don't mean blue helmeted UN Peacekeepers). Lets send some Seal teams after Joseph Kony. Lets negotiate with the Congo and other neighbors where Ugandas tormentors go to hide out and let us give this pervert a real war.

Let's let the Seals show how it's done. Let them go in and help the villagers, bring them food, technical assistance, dig wells and plant fields. Watch how quickly the guerillas would be ratted out and exterminated if we went in there full up.

But you know why that won't happen? It's because everybody's afraid we might encourage the Christian religion or do some missionary work while we're at it or something. A lot of this is part of the ongoing conflict in that part of the world between Muslims and Christians (or more precisely between the perverse offshoots of both faiths). The world will demand that we go in and clean up the mess and then step aside so the persecution can commence once more.

We're handicapped because we don't want to get in the middle of a religious war. The problem is that we're already in one. And don't get me wrong, it's not with Muslims, it's with fanatic elements of Mohammedanism that claim to speak for their more moderate brethren and it's they who have declared war on us.

Why don't we put our troops on the ground? One of the reasons is it's so hard to figure out who to shoot! The good guys are very hard to identify in the third world. Often its both sides of the conflict who are doing evil things. Who wants to go through all that mess again.

The Uganda-CAN website lists 10 things you can do to help. They include lots of petition signing, various fund-raisers and prayer. Of all of those things, the last might just be the most effective thing we can do.

When I look at this kind of tragedy, I have to believe Jesus must be coming back soon. I can't think of any other way to get this all sorted out other than to take home the good guys and leave the evil ones behind to wipe each other out. I personally believe hell will be the nuclear holocaust that happens when God withdraws his people and his spirit from the Earth at the end of time. Seems like that's already happening in some places.

As the Kingston Trio once sang, "Then, some lucky person on some lucky day; someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away."

Very sad...

Tom