This is Going to Bug You

Eat more bugs; they’re good for you. That’s the message the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations promoted in a 200-page report from a Rome, 2013 conference. There’s even a spiffy name for the practice … entomophagy. I kid you not! Here’s the link, http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e00.htm.

As school kids, our angry retort to each other would often be, “I hope you eat a bug and die.” Is this what the UN is telling the world? After all, they predict that by 2050 there will be some 9 billion people on the planet. That’s 2 billion more than we now have. And every one of those 9 billion people will be addicted to food.

Sure, feeding that many people will be a problem. Contrary to the belief of many city folks, food doesn’t originate at the grocery store. It all comes from land – arable land or water. With 9 billion people, that resource is bound to become a scarce commodity. At what point do we get serious about controlling the population?

Nearly every country has a certain population that are either starving or on the brink of it. Many already include insects in their diet. The FAO report states that, “it is estimated that insect-eating is practiced regularly by at least 2 billion people worldwide. More than 1900 insect species have been documented in literature as edible, most of them in tropical countries. The most commonly eaten insect groups are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and planthoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies.”

I suspect there aren’t many of those 2 billion entomophagers in our country. You don’t often see cans of caterpillars and buckets of beetles on the supermarket shelves, unless they are in the process of being closed down by the local health department.

As repulsive as the thought of eating insects may be to most of us, they are apparently nutritious. The UN report even talks about disguising the fact that they are bugs by grinding them up and mixing then with other foods. Don’t we have laws against that? The Food and Drug Administration regulates how many insect parts can now go into our food. If the UN gets their wish, that number could go to 100-percent.

I am a confirmed omnivore, but the “omni” doesn’t include intentionally devouring insects. I like meat – red meat, white meat, fowl – it’s all good. I even cringe at the thought of veggie-burgers, and tofu. Now they want us to eat bugs! Enough! Quit messing with food! I can’t even imagine what wine goes with grasshoppers or beetles.

The next time you see cockroaches in a restaurant they may actually be on the menu, and the old gag about complaining to the waiter about a fly in your soup will no longer be funny. I have little doubt that school cafeterias would be lonely places with termites and dragonflies as lunch staples.

Once again, and in true form, the United Nations has come up with an absurd one-size-fits-all notion that is bound to fail.

Global Whating?

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Mark Twain (1835–1910). While the exact author of that statement is subject to debate, the arrogance of the line cannot be disputed. Nobody does anything about it because we puny humans are absolutely powerless to do anything about the weather. At best, we can only pray to a much higher power for more clement weather.

The human race is an arrogant bunch. When one views the forces of nature and realizes that we cannot even fully explain them, you then begin to understand just how impotent we mere mortals are. Have we ever been able to cause a volcanic eruption or stop one? Can we even make rain fall to end a drought or stop a rainfall causing flooding? Can we make high or low atmospheric pressure disperse? In all the forces of nature, humankind is merely flotsam.

Why then are we arrogant enough to believe we are causing our planet to warm to the point of disaster? “Scientists” along with the UN climatologists, planetologists, and alarmologists like Al Gore, and maybe one or more shamans with a bone in their noses, would all have us believe that man-made “greenhouse gasses” are causing the planet to grow warmer.

In 2012 they pointed to the alarming loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice – save the Polar Bears -- as proof that we are in a warming period i.e. implicitly caused by greenhouse gasses. Yet, in 2013 the Arctic ice has grown by 60%. Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013, as compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded on Sept. 16, 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

I certainly did nothing to cause this change. I burn wood in my fireplace, drive the same two vehicles (one of them diesel), and use my diesel tractor. Although one of my farting horses did die this year, I doubt that had much affect on the climate, though.

According to scientific sources, the Last 10,000 years have seen some 1500 volcanoes on this planet, of which no fewer than 60 erupted from 1990 to 1999. At any moment in time, there are at least 20 eruptions going on worldwide. The gasses constantly belched out by any one of these volcanoes makes that produced by entire 405 freeway at the height of rush hour look like a pigeon passing gas in a hurricane by comparison.

We can do nothing about erupting volcanoes, so the hubris of powerful people dictates that they place controls on whatever they can. Do humans generate components of what they call greenhouse gas? Undeniably, yes. Do we contribute the major portion of the gas? Debatable. Is greenhouse gas causing “global warming?” Not likely, since we still have greenhouse gas and haven’t warmed in 15 years.

Somewhere deep in some cave around 50,000 years ago, a human noticed that his bunions hurt when the weather changed. It was then that climatology was born. While great advancements have been made since then, we still don’t know exactly what causes the phenomenon we call weather. Mainstream scientific research ties much of the cause to changes in solar radiation and our own magnetosphere – two more forces we are impotent to change.

The tirade against man-made greenhouse gas is merely the product of people whose power has led them to the megalomaniacal idea that since they are powerless against the forces of nature, they can at least control the puny forces of man. Humility is a rare element in the halls of power. And yet here they are still able to only talk about the weather.

Is the First Lady All Wet?

Water; it’s not just for mixing with whiskey anymore. Or so the Obama administration would have us believe. USA Today, that scholarly organ of trivial information, recently reported on yet another world shattering issue from the White House. Michelle Obama wants us to drink more water. "Drink just one more glass of water a day and you can make a real difference for your health, your energy, and the way you feel," Obama said. "So Drink Up and see for yourself."

Yep, that’s a straight line, if I ever saw one. I will, however, resist the temptation to make reference to the states with water rationing, the possible horrors of telling those getting their water from Lake Erie to drink more, and the nasty things fish do in that stuff.

This reproach to the American public was made without caveat, and without actual knowledge of how much water any individual now drinks. My wife insists that I must drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Is that big or little glasses? She points to the ones in the cupboard the size of buckets. But now the current occupant of the White House is telling me to drink more. Somehow, I doubt even fish drink that much.

One “expert” Stanley Goldfarb, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania went so far as to say, "The idea drinking water increases energy, the word I've used to describe it is: quixotic," he said. "We're designed to drink when we're thirsty. ... There's no need to have more than that." That’s exactly what I told the guys down at the bar … right before I ordered another round.

Seriously folks, everyone knows water is necessary for all life on earth to exist – especially someone hiking in Death Valley in July. My doctor is a big fan of drinking water. He even discourages prescribing a diuretic to people in Southern California. He says most of us lose enough water just walking around in the warm, low humidity So-Cal climate.

Most of us get more water than we realize, though. There’s water in coffee, tea, fruit drinks, and just about any other liquid you drink. Even beer is made with water – although, I’ve been warned against drinking alcohol when thirsty. In fact, that is why beer was invented several thousand years ago. The water was so bad, people were dying from drinking it, and they found that fermented barley actually killed the germs in the water. Egyptians building the pyramids were even paid in beer. Although, without refrigeration, I suspect they didn’t wait for the mountains to turn blue.

It seems that First Ladies must grow weary of sitting around the White House watching their husbands tackle knotty issues day-in and day-out. They want to put their mark on the administration. Eleanor Roosevelt continually pushed FDR for a socialist agenda. Nancy Reagan told everyone to just say no to drugs. Hillary Clinton told Bill to just say no to the White House interns. And now Michelle Obama, fresh from her latest taxpayer paid multi-million dollar vacation, is promoting the health benefits of drinking … water.

This campaign can’t turn out any worse than the one where she promoted fresh fruit and vegetables in schools. You know, the one where one school reported throwing out $75,000 worth of uneaten fruit and vegetables a day. Kids will eat what they like and people will drink what they like. 

Maybe after her next multi-million dollar vacation, she might get us to breathe more air. Until then, I guess I’ll have to drink a few more Jack-and-waters. Can’t disappoint the White House.

Say What?

Is American English an endangered species? I guess that depends on whom you ask. The folks at the Merriam-Webster Company would like you to believe American English is alive and thriving. Every year they add definitions for utterings that heretofore had no official place in the American English language. Apparently, all it takes is a popular usage – or misusage – of words to be added to their dictionary. Do you have any idea what f-bomb, copernicium, gastropub, or sexting mean? Don’t ask me! I’ve never used the words, but you can look them up; they’re in the dictionary.

To the distress of some Germans, the popularity of English words has even made inroads to Duden, the German dictionary. I learned to speak German as a child from my stepfather. When I read German newspapers today, I am often confused. I’m not sure if I am reading an American news article with German words or a German news article with English words. In truth, though, both are the same language. They share a common Anglo-Saxon root.

The language I hear from our young ones today is nothing akin to the English I was taught in school. Okay, if I’m strolling through Harlem, Detroit or Watts and hear ebonics, I’m not surprised – I have no idea what is being said, but I suppose it’s a dialect used in those locations. But when young kids begin using that slang outside of the inner-city environment, I begin to wonder if American English is dying or evolving – maybe devolving – into another language. The vernacular is even popping up more frequently in children’s television programs and even on mainstream programs. Today’s music is infested with words unintelligible to most English speakers.

Then there is the Tweet. Ah yes, that 140 character jumble of ambiguous and confusing abbreviations, insinuations, and emoticons. Come on folks, does LOL mean laughing out loud, lots of luck, left of left, lack of libido, or lost our language? OMG! When I see something that looks like it might be a sentence ended with a mixture of strange punctuations, I am now aware they are trying to convey an emotion in what is called an emoticon. I just turn my head sideways, squint, and try to imagine that odd jumble as being some sort of face. It rarely works, but the sender thought he or she was being clever.

A lot of the Tweet jargon evolved from Instant Messaging, where the senders were just too lazy to use proper sentence structure. All right, I’ll grant you that English grammar is not altogether an easy proposition. For every rule there exists any number of exceptions. Capitalization, punctuation, subjects, verbs, objects, prepositions, split infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition … it’s all very confusing. But if you were paying attention in grade school, this is what you were taught. We all had twelve years to learn to write and speak correctly, didn’t we?

One thing that irritates me to no end is the email from a person known to be literate that contains all lower case characters, no punctuation, and obscure abbreviations. It makes me want to shout to the sender that all of the necessary keys are on every keyboard to make at least a stab at writing something coherent. The network provider doesn’t charge more for Capitals or correctly placed punctuation. Give me a break! Write something I can read!

English is the (unfortunately) unofficial language of this country. Sure there are a multitude of non-English speakers in the US. I am bi-lingual, and every once in a while a German word or phrase will slip out without me catching it. Usually the person I’m talking to at the time has no clue to what I just said, and I need to correct it. No problem. I apologize and say it in English.

The hard fact is that to be understood, you need to use American English in this country. Don’t expect others to learn to speak your language. There are just too many different languages for one person to understand. Long ago our forefathers chose to use English as a common form of communication in this land – not ebonics, Spanglish, Chinglish, or Janglish, just plain old English. I believe the lingua Franca that is taught in our schools is still English. It is not dead yet, so please use the correct form. You will appear much smarter.

Get Serious Not Syria

Civil war is appalling. Our own Civil War cost about 625,000 lives. Appalling! The Rwandan Civil War lasted from 1990 to 1993 in which some 800,000 people were hacked and shot to death. Appalling! The Kosovo Civil War waged from 1991 through 1999 leaving thousands of civilians dead and missing. Appalling!  There have been a reported 59 Civil Wars throughout the world since 1945. Nine of them are listed as still waging. Appalling!

“War is hell,” but do we need to send our best and brightest, not to mention our tax dollars, to hell each time the people of some country can’t “ just get along?” For some mysterious reason, every time folks start fighting within their own country, we wind up sending troops to subdue one side or another, and then make an unappreciated attempt at nation building. Have we not learned through tragic experience that no one will thank us for risking our own lives to help others?

It is sad that chemical weapons have been brought out of the closet and used against civilians in Syria. But who deployed them? Assad says he didn’t do it. If he had decided to use chemical weapons, why would he stop at just 100 or so casualties? On the other hand, what better way to get the West involved that to gas a few of your own “martyrs?”

The Syrian “rebels” have been crying for our help since the first shot was fired, and the West just sets on the fence. Obama publicly drew a “red line” at the use of chemical weapons. Okay, dig up the stash Saddam hid and lob a small one into a non-critical spot, then blame it on the government. Who knows? Could have happened.

I’m no “peacenick.” I am a study of classical war strategists Carl Von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, though. Both advocate only waging war for political gains. By political, they don’t mean Democrat over Republican. Here, they mean some real gains for your country or state.

There are no gains to be had in Syria for the United States. We have virtually nothing to gain by intervening in the civil matters of the Syrian nation. In fact, it is a lose-lose situation all around.

If we support Assad, we leave a dictator in charge. If we support the rebels, we risk arming terrorists and handing them another place from which to stage attacks on us.

Then there are the monetary costs. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clearly outlined to US congressional leaders the risks associated with a fourth major military intervention in a Muslim country. Dempsey listed five options: training the Syrian opposition, launching limited airstrikes on Assad's heavy weapons, implementing a no-fly zone, creating buffer zones, and securing chemical weapons. A training mission would cost at least $500 million initially, according to Dempsey, and the other more aggressive options would likely cost at least $1 billion a month.

Let me reiterate that number: For boots-on-the-ground it would cost you and me ONE-BILLION DOLLARS a month. I suppose that number includes the cost of body bags too.

Now, I like a good war as much as the next guy. In WWI and WWII we came off looking like heroes. In Korea we drew to a stalemate, and in Vietnam we had our rears handed to us, thanks mainly to our indecisive, wishy-washy “leadership.” We just finished feeding American lives to the ungrateful Iraqis, and are about to stop the conveyor belt loaded with American lives and dollars to the meat-grinder in Afghanistan – does anyone have the odds of Karzi lasting the week when we leave?

I know the military has a dilemma of what to do with all the surplus weapons and seasoned soldiers in Afghanistan in 2014, but shipping them to Syria is not a solution. Let those people sort out their own differences. They don’t need us telling them how to build a nation, or foisting our “values” on them. We also don’t need to keep one side or the other in power by dropping off bags of money on the leader’s desk every month. Let’s save the money and American lives for our own problems here at home. God knows we have enough of them.

Keeping Secrets

I tried to think of a card game where opponents display all of their cards, and I couldn’t think of one. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any; I just don’t know of one. So why do the opponents keep their cards secret? Well duh, it wouldn’t be much of a game if your opponent knew your hand! Of course! You wouldn’t want to give your opponent unfair advantage over you by revealing your hand. But it’s just a game. If you lose the game the worst case may be a loss of money.

The game of governments is far more serious than a game of cards, and secrecy is even more important. If our government reveals its hand and loses the game, our people suffer.

There are some who promote the likes of Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as heroes for revealing our government’s secrets. It’s like playing a high-stakes game of poker with someone standing behind you displaying cue cards of your hand to all of your opponents. While the others at the table may consider the person with the cue cards a hero, I doubt you would.

On the other hand, when we were kids on the school playground and saw others whispering, did we not suspect it was about us? This could easily be considered a form of paranoia. Are we paranoid that our government is keeping secrets about us? If they are is there anything they might know that would harm us as individuals? Was any of that revealed in the recent spate of leaks?

I can think of a lot of private information we willingly give the government that ultimately goes into a database somewhere – private financial information, party affiliation, gun ownership, health information, the list goes on. I’m sure none of us would like that information to be made public. Yet, we willingly reveal this information to our government. Do we trust our government? About 80 percent say no. Do we trust our government enough to willingly give them our most personal information? Apparently, we do.

If Bradley Manning had posted our names, addresses and social security numbers on Wikileaks, would people be so quick to pronounce him (or her, or it) a hero? Yet leaking state secrets can be far more devastating to a wide number of people than the inconvenience of ID theft. People could lose their lives.

I am amazed that the revelation by Edward Snowden that our government is spying on us comes as such a shock. No, I am not attempting to defend his actions; they are equally despicable as Manning’s. I am just astonished that someone, anyone, didn’t already believe the government was collecting data on us. The FBI has been using their Carnivore software to snoop on our email and Internet usage since 1997.

Regardless whether you were surprised by Snowden’s leak, the simple fact that someone with access to secret NSA data would globally publish information labeled as being any level of secret is an appalling, treasonous act.

These are dishonorable people who have violated numerous oaths they have taken and committed acts of treason. They no longer deserve to breathe the free air of the country they have betrayed.

Manning will pay for his betrayal with anywhere from seven to thirty-five years in a federal prison. (Thank God it won’t be in California, where he might get to choose a women or men’s prison.) Snowden is living a self-imposed exile, probably in Russia. I say good riddance to both of them. To my way of thinking, they have both gotten off light.

The big question now is, will they be pardoned? Manning’s attorney was shown wearing a Tee shirt emblazoned with the words, “President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning.” A lot of illogical pardoning usually takes place when presidents and governors leave office. We need to keep a sharp eye out in January 2017, if Obama doesn’t pardon them sooner.

Census and Nonsense

“Vee haf vays of making you talk. You vill tell us efry tink.” Sounds like an old NAZI spy movie with a greasy Gestapo interrogator in a bad German accent salivating over the prospect of torturing the hapless hero for information. But wait, that’s not the Gestapo, it’s… it’s…the US Census Bureau! And they are here to make me fill out the mandatory American Community census survey.

That’s right folks; it is MANDATORY. Section 221 of the US Code Title 13 states:

“Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or

    willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any

    other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce

    or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the

    Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his

    knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in

    connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I,

    II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to

    the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or

    farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not

    more than $100.”

I guess they figure they’re giving us a break. Until 1976, that section carried a $250 fine and sixty days jail sentence. The penalty jumps to $500 if you get any of the answers wrong -- and I thought college exams were tough.

Title 13, enacted on Aug. 31, 1954, chapter 1158, 68 Statute 1012, seems reasonable enough. The US Constitution calls for an “enumeration” every ten years. That would certainly give congress authority to enact a law that pertains to taking the necessary head count. After all, we are a republic. A head count is necessary to fairly allocate the required representatives.

In true government fashion, though, they seem to have taken their authority a step beyond what was intended in that pesky Constitution. No longer do they just want to know how many people live where. They can ask absolutely anything that comes to their narrow little minds, and they can do it whenever they want. Here’s the real kicker, it’s required by law!

I’m no lawyer, but I can read. The language in the US Constitution is clear on this matter. An enumeration is to be taken every ten years for the express purpose of determining the allocation of representatives in congress. There is nothing in the Constitution about requiring the populous to divulge the number of toilets in their house or any other personal data whenever the bureaucrats decide to squeeze us for information.

This law is right up there  with removing tags from mattresses in the asinine factor. At a time when our government is surreptitiously collection our phone information and requiring Internet companies to reveal data on their subscribers, it is difficult to believe they don’t already know everything about us from our birth date to our sock size.

I, for one, have nothing to hide, but the idea that our government can REQUIRE me to divulge personal information without the constitutional authority to do so cuts against my grain.

The Census form is still sitting in my office. The Census Bureau continues to send letters and emails prodding me to fill it out. The other day a nice lady from the local Census Bureau office showed up at my gate to “help” me fill out the form. As politely as I could, I informed her that I needed no help, and am not inclined to divulge my personal information to her or the Census Bureau. I gave the necessary information on their head count in 2010. There is no constitutional requirement to volunteer any other information until 2020.

She was very nice, and told me she doesn’t enforce Title 13, but that participation in all censuses is a requirement.

Maybe they will send the Gestapo to interrogate me. I’ll grant them this much though, they are persistent. For all the tax dollars they wasted on trying to squeeze information out of me, they could have help fund another Obama vacation. Gee, I hope he doesn’t suffer because of me.