Even if one accepts as word-of-god that more CO2 causes higher temperatures, is there actually a rational reason to demonize the release of carbon?  All the rantings and ravings about how CO2 is destroying the planet seem to ignore something. Where did that carbon come from?  “We pulled it out of the earth.”  Oookay… and I suppose the planet formed with these evil pockets of carbon lurking beneath the surface, just yearning to be free to destroy everything, hm?  A basic science lesson:   Fossil fuels are the remnants of living things from ages past.  That means all this evil carbon was topside a very long time ago, a time when life was, to the best of our knowledge, thriving.

A central point in the plot of an episode of The Equalizer (which you should check out if you haven’t seen it before) got me thinking about a problem in our legal system.  In the episode, a man is trying to take revenge on two men who raped and beat (with a lead pipe) his pregnant wife, leaving her in a coma.  The point catching my attention was that these men had all charges dismissed against them due to the search that turned up the murder weapon in their vehicle being based on a recently-vacated warrant.  Unfortunately, this sort of event, criminals being released after technicalities void evidence against them, is entirely too common in this country.   My question is this:  Why does our legal system ignore reality?  Evidence should not be dismissed as though it does not exist simply because it was acquired in an illegal act or breach of rights.  It still exists, it still serves to prove something, and tossing it aside on a technicality no more serves justice than vigilantes taking the law into their own hands.

… the voting roll, that is. Not to get ahead of myself, however, let’s look at the state of affairs leading to this necessity. There’s a quote by one Alexis de Tocqueville with which many people are familiar:  “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.“  Obviously, we passed that particular threshold most of a century ago, if not even earlier, and the next few years under O-n-Co are promising to drastically increase the level of public bribery.  Watching our new administration disregard laws, the Constitution, and the Founders’ intent, it seems the result in de Tocqueville’s quote has also fully come to pass.  We are no longer a republic, a nation of law.  Instead, we are now a nation ruled by a Democratic (hardly democratic) aristocracy that wields massive federal power in addition to an enamored and irresponsible media to mold the ductile masses and beat down the opposition with cries of “Racist!”.  In short, we are an aristocracy masquerading as a mobocracy, and the law has been made passé.

I’m still hashing this out, but I figure input from others can’t hurt.

Today’s political lingo is wholly inept at actually representing a person’s ideology.  Rather, it seems almost intended to simply antagonize a two-party war of words.  “Liberal” and “conservative” are probably the best examples of the problem. Nobody’s entirely sure how to define them anymore due to their continued application to certain groups that have changed their ideals tremendously since popularization of the terms.

UPDATE AT BOTTOM: O-n-Co deny the public evidence that Mr. Cheney has a point.

An article in today’s Washington Post came to my attention regarding the outspokenness of one Mr. Cheney.  Needless to say, I promptly became incensed at the unfair handling of the subject by the author, Dan Balz.  Flaying was in order, and, due to the distinct unavailability of Balz, I decided to flay his hit piece instead.  If you’re the sort who thinks Mr. Cheney should shut up or that he should not be addressed as “Mr. Cheney”, begone with you.  You’ll only be offended, then mocked mercilessly should you make the mistake of addressing to me your grievance.  For everyone else, enjoy.

As vice president, Richard B. Cheney famously spent much of the past eight years in undisclosed locations and offering private advice to President George W. Bush. But past was not prologue.

In other words, even with the media trying to make his life a “candid camera” hell, the Vice-President was working behind the scenes to keep the country safe and the President informed (you know, his job), unlike the new guy who seems to think being VP means making sure everyone on the planet knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is unafraid to sound like an utter moron on a regular basis.  Do they make Tinactin in a mouthwash?

While cruising one of my favorite haunts, I noticed an article about a certain, former editor of the New Yorker appearing on MSNBC and declaring that former Vice President Dick Cheney is on a “crazy jihad”.  Does anyone believe, even for a second, that Tina Brown would ever describe real jihadis as being on a “crazy jihad”?  This is just insane!  Our faux news companies have effectively banned the use of this word, created by Muslims to mean a “holy war”, in regards to that very group, but a partisan hack feels completely at ease using it to slander a former VP.

You know, I think I understand these people.  It’s all just politics to them, isn’t it?  Never let a good crisis go to waste, and never let a good pejorative go unused against your opponents.  Never mind the fact that real people out there want us all dead.  Never mind that those people view “jihad” as an absolute order from their god to convert or kill the targets.  Never mind that the man to be slandered has done nothing but exercise his First Amendment rights and status as former VP to make known how dangerous the current administration’s actions are.  All that matters is that this word, right now, can be used to make him sound bad, reality be damned.  They.  Are.  Children.  Eternally stuck in the phase of playground insults and gossip, they can’t even grasp how pathetically narrow-minded they truly are.

This is what our media, the primary source of information for a large part of the country, has become:  Nothing more than childish political hacks myopically dedicated to attacking anyone who dissents with their side.  They play their games of politics under the guise of news and critical commentary, utterly oblivious to the very real consequences.  Any tactic, any lie, any attack is fully justified in their minds because those minds are forever stuck in the childish world where they are good, and their opponents are evil.  For all the accusations that conservatives live in a world devoid of grays, the liberal mind is home of the starkest contrast, an arbitrary one at that.  I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like living in a world where every disagreement is cast, not in facts and logic, but in terms of good and evil.  However, it becomes ever more clear that a disturbingly large number of people in all manner of stations, most disturbingly the ones in positions to shape public opinion, are very much at home in that world.

(Thanks to Giovanni’s World for bringing this up and doing so a second time to make me realize what’s really going on.)

About a week ago, a particular bill in the House came to my attention.  To wit, they want to create a number of “protected classes”, against which the committal of a crime would carry greater punishment via prosecution as a “hate crime”.  I won’t get into the specific classes protected because I realized that they really are irrelevant.  The clamor over the rejection of an amendment that would exclude pedophiles from the protected classes?  Irrelevant.  My satire, at the time, of the rejection of amendments to protect the elderly, our troops, pregnant women, and the unborn; avoid excessive federal interference; and require an element of proof for conviction?  Irrelevant.  The fact that this bill, should it become law, will be selectively applied to single out and further punish anyone who attacks the protected classes, regardless of actual motivation?  Irrelevant.  All of these issues serve only to hide the terrifying reality.

This is just a repository for some of my posts on other sites, on the off-chance that they get deleted at some point in the future.  I hope to take a day or two and put together a single, coherent post on the subject soon.  Then I can just link it instead of repeating myself so often.  I’ll also be including whatever spawned the posts.  Context is good.  All posts were on one of my favorite haunts, and the birth-place of my appellation, NewsBusters.org.

…whenever I get the time.  For now, this is just a placeholder awaiting the divine touch of my imagination.  Or something.