I’ve heard this charge leveled at the US many times before, but recently I heard it leveled from a Christian from the left side of the political aisle. He adds, to the usual concern about wasted natural resources, that consuming so much in disproportion to our numbers is immoral and unjust.

But this is only one side of the equation. I came up with a parallel situation to demonstrate the problem.

I spend most of my money on a very few things. My biggest expense is no doubt my house. I pay so much money to one person; my mortgage banker. He and my grocer, between them, probably get the biggest chunks of change out of my annual income. I have a family doctor who, too, gets a significant portion of my resources. And, as my kids have started going to college, two colleges have been getting a bigger slice of the pie.

(At this point, I quote a paragraph from his post and apply it to my parallel situation.) As a matter of justice, it would not be reasonable to think that it’s morally acceptable for those few people to consume more than half of my resources. Even though the laws were written in such a way that they are allowed to acquire those resources legally, it makes for an immoral and unjust situation, does it not?

If all you’re looking at is the percentage of resources consumed (and that’s all his bullet points cover) and using only that criteria to determine whether it’s just or not, then my mortgage banker, my grocer, my doctor and two colleges are acting unjustly with my resources.

Except that, for those resources, I’m getting shelter, food, health care and education. I’m getting a disproportionate percentage of what I need to live from this small number of people. Perhaps they could charge less for some things and not take as many of my resources for their lifestyle, but on balance I’m getting some essentials from these few folks.

In the same way, while it is true that the US consumes a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, and while it is also true that many of us could do with less, the world gets quite a bit out of the bargain. Medical advances for longer and better lives. Educational opportunities that people come from all over to take advantage of. Technological advances in energy production to bring a higher standard of living around the world (and higher standards of living almost always result in better health). Agricultural advancements that let vegetables grow in the desert and other inhospitable conditions. And on top of all this, when the world needs protection from enemies or help during calamities, who’s the first place they turn for a shield or a helping hand? And who has the armaments and money to help out?

We do. The world’s getting quite a lot for the money.

Ask the illegal immigrant risking what he has to come to America for work. Ask the African who now has a garden courtesy of a charitable organization. Ask the Libyan who may soon be out from under a dictator. Ask the Dani tribesman in Papua, Indonesia who won’t die from an infection that is now easily curable. Ask the survivors of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

So unless he’s ready to start laying into his grocer for the "unjust" use of his resources, it might be best to reconsider this pronouncement of immorality and unjustness.

Do you agree or disagree? My main point is that you can’t just look at the consumption side; there’s so much more to the question than that. While we consume more than our share, we produce so much from that consumption, and the benefits absolutely do not stay within our own borders. I believe the religious (question of how moral this consumption is) is being colored by the political. Not "going green" as much as you may wish me to is not, by itself (and this post isolates consumption by itself) a moral failing, or certainly can’t be used to solely just the overall morality.

I believe the Christian Left falls into this trap more often than they care to admit; conflating the political with the moral. Being against Cap & Trade or the Kyoto Protocol, or not following the Green Othodoxy is somehow immoral. We should be good stewards of our resources; I’m not denying that. But to look at the "bad" side of the equation without looking at the "good" side results in fatally flawed policies. We need to deal with the bad without damaging the good.

A new experiment suggests that the Sun may play a bigger part than first though in climate change. But since this challenges the current orthodoxy, "The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions" from that experiment. Further, a peer-reviewed study using NASA satellite data shows that the Earth is releasing more heat into space than climate computer models assumed.

Anders Breivik, the madman who was responsible for the recent massacre in Norway, is often referred to as a "Christian terrorist". Granted, he called himself "Christian", but his aims were political. But the Left really, really wants to use him to equate radical Islamic terrorism and so-called "Christian terrorism". The Blaze asks,

Have any churches or clergymen openly celebrated Breivik’s slaughter of innocents? Are young Christian children dancing in the streets anywhere in Europe, as young Muslims did in Gaza on September 11, 2001? Could any honest observer of the world over the past 30 years believe that Christianity and Islam have played equal parts in terrorist attacks?

And Chuck Colson notes, the secularization of Europe, with its refusing to understand the problem of evil and sin inherent in human nature, is not helping Norway work through this or prevent it happening again.

More rationing of health care in England. This will happen here under ObamaCare. History has already spoken.

What G. K. Chesterton had to say about the Tea Party. (Sort of.)

Obama may have inherited a mess from Bush, but y’know Reagan inherited a similar mess (in some cases, a worse mess) from Carter. And he did far better with it.

The US accuses Iran of aiding Al Qaeda. Are pitiful sanctions really helping things out here? AQ would love to get its hand on a nuke, and so would Iran.

Government, apparently in the pocket of Big Agriculture, bringing more red tape and expense to the family farm.

The Obama administration admits "the White House doesn’t create jobs". It’s about time you realized that, guys. Congress doesn’t either. Government can get out of the way (or get in the way) of business, which does create jobs.

When Sarah Palin came onto the scene, with her history of speaking truth to power, even within her own political party, I noted that the Democrats, who purport to love that sort of thing, went on the attack instead. Like watching "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and rooting against Jimmy Stewart. Now, the same Dems who purport to want grass-roots groups to help fix Washington ask the media to ignore the biggest grass-roots effort in a long time. True colors: Shown!

And speaking of "terrorists" (click for a larger version):

Post-war (i.e. WWII) marginal tax rates (the top individual tax bracket) have fluctuated from above 90% to below 30%, but W. Kurt Hauser noted that, in 1993, the total tax revenue, as a percentage of GDP, stayed virtually constant. Really. The data has been updated to 2007 and the observation holds. You can’t soak the rich. Raise their rates, and GDP goes down to match, in addition to the tax shelters that suddenly become very popular. Social engineers who want to use the tax code to implement what they want ought to be very disturbed, if they even know about this.

In terms of absolute dollars, federal revenues have tripled in the last 50 years (quadrupled if you consider the amount just before the recession). The problem is, federal spending has outpaced even that. Ed Morrissey has the charts to show that we don’t have a revenue problem.

Homeschooling is such a success that liberals at the NEA, in the Dept. of Education and in Congress are "troubled" and "concerned" by it, and of course consider it racist. Yes, really.

The pro-life cause continues to advance, recently in Ohio. And Americans United for Life has put out a scathing 181-page report on abuses and law-breaking at Planned Parenthood, and is taking it to Congress.

Global warming seems to have stopped. Well, Scientific American says, "Blame Asia!"

Obama, in prosecuting war, embraces his inner Dubya.

Just like the press (and the anti-war movement) has gone very quiet about wars, old and new, being prosecuted by this President, the NY Time even notices that the press has been ignoring the poor during this recession. And they’re part of the press to blame for it! What a difference a Democratic President makes!

Andres Oppenheimer says it best. "What Chavez has done in Venezuela over the last 12 years is nothing short of an economic miracle: Despite benefiting from the biggest oil boom in Venezuela’s history, he has somehow managed to turn the country into a shambles." Read the whole thing. It’s amazing to see truly how much money socialism can spend on people, only to make their lives worse.

Comparing and contrasting the economic stimulus under Clinton (that got rejected) to the economic stimulus under Obama (which passed) and which was actually better for unemployment.

If the debt ceiling is not raised by August, we would still have enough money coming in to not default on interest payments on the debt, and cover Social Security, Medicare, and "essential" defense. Don’t let Obama’s threat about withholding Grandma’s check scare you.

The ban on circumcision that will be on the San Francisco ballot in November is rife with anti-Semitism. That’s just about all you need to know about it, but here’s more.

And some more slipper slope for you. (Click for a larger image.)

When you politicize health care, you get government-style efficiency. "NHS budget squeeze to blame for longer waiting times, say doctors."  And for those already in hospitals, doctors are having to prescribe water to make sure the elderly stay hydrated.

If the liberals are to be believed, poverty causes crime. And yet, in this tough economic time, the FBI reports a 5.5% drop in violent crime.

In economic news, Democrats are dead set against voting for any 2011 budget. There’s been a lot of hoopla surrounding the "repayment" of the General Motors loan from the auto bailout, except that it’s just a lot of smoke and mirrors. Indeed, GM has a sweetheart tax deal that is saving it $14 billion, not to mention another $14 billion is being lost in general on those bailouts.

The Obama economic "recovery" turned 2 years old in May. Upwards of a trillion dollars spent, for what? The number of people with jobs hasn’t changed, unemployment is far worse than they said it would be if we did nothing, median incomes are down, housing prices are down 10%, and I don’t need to tell you about gas prices. If George W. Bush were President, you just know he’d be personally blamed for this, but Obama gets a pass.

Canada, by the way, has been leading the US out of this mire by reducing debt and spending, even with a socialized medicine albatross around its neck.

Immigrants are turning to that "racist" Tea Party.

When we elected Obama, that was when "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal", right? So why does he not get slammed for not signing the updated Kyoto Protocol? Bush got criticized for it, even though it was Clinton who originally didn’t sign it. Nah, couldn’t be the double-standard, liberal media.

When you make entitlements untouchable, you risk hurting those you purport to be concerned about because economic collapse hurts us all, including and especially the poor. The idea that it couldn’t happen here is severely myopic.

And finally, "smart" diplomacy". (Click for a larger version.)

Commenter Boonton has on a few occaisons mused about complex industrial accidents and the avoidence of the same.

Complex project development, in a book which came out in the 80s (Have Fun At Work, by Mr Livingstone) was an interesting read. The main thesis of the book was that complex projects (those are too large basically to fit in one smart persons brain … and he gave specific concrete ways to recognize those projects) fail. They all fail (or at the best have horrible delays and massive cost overruns). Much of the book devoted itself to orienting tech/engineer personel to recognize if your project was one of those which would fail and how to prevent that from career or psychic injury to self. As a sidelight he noted the only way that complex projects succeed. Complex projects succeed if heirarchical information pathways are removed and replaced with a model in which everyone can talk (and does talk) to everone. The cannonical such project is the Lockheed Skunkworks, which developed the SR-71, the U-2, and stealth combat aircraft. In their working environment, aerodynamicists and systems engineers sat next to draftsmen and machinists. “Can this …?” questions didn’t filter up and down the chain but you would ask the guy who might know the answer directly.

Big systems with complex working parts are put in place all over the world. Refineries, airplans, chemical plants, nuclear power plants and so on are all complex working systems. One way in which one might approach minimizing the occurance of complex accidents is to follow the Kelly Johnson/Skunkworks approach and shift it from project development to ongoing system operations. Why isn’t this done?

One reasons might be tied to morale. The Skunkworks team was a high morale operation. They had an impossible (basically) cutting edge project. They worked rediculous hours because of their excitement and the demands of the project and the basic urge human urge for success and to win, defined in this case as completion of the project, to scale that technical mountain. How can this translate to a multi-decade task of keeping equipment running safely, a far more mundane and routine task? If one identifies a clear difference in the two tasks as one of morale. High morale is essential for the operation of a non-heirarchical task/team project. High morale might also be an essential telling point in the operation of a long term operational facillity if one were to attempt to shift it to a more skunkworks-like approach to management. You can’t do that without high morale.

Ultimately government “regulation” of industrial workplace might be better served not trying to pretend it knows better how to drill offshore, run nuclear plants, and so on. It can on the other hand, have a better shot a spotting any number of ways in which workplaces are poisoned by poor morale and other working conditions conducive to failure (reckless risk taking has its own signature on morale). The point is, inspectors might be better served watching dynamics of workplace (social) chemistry and less on technical questions which they have, likely, less (or captive) expertise (not to speak of other agenda).  

When the minimum wage goes up, low-wage jobs are lost. This isn’t a prediction, it’s an observation. The Wall St. Journal notes it’s happening again, at the worst time for it, and mostly for minorities.

Syria pulled out of the running for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. The problem is that they pulled out rather than being pushed. Given the number of human rights violators on that council, they could have easily been approved.

"I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic." Read why here.

The headline says it all: "WikiLeaks Threatens Its Own Leakers With $20 Million Penalty If They Leak Elsewhere". Transparency for thee but not for me.

Green energy losing green: A solar farm in Texas is losing money because the property taxes are so high.

High-speed rail losing speed: "California’s much-vaunted high-speed rail project is, to put it bluntly, a train wreck." Of course, the solution, according to the LA Times, is do it over, throwing good money after bad ($43 billion of bad money).

What a shock! "Autotrader survey shows most motorists go green to ‘save money, not the environment’." Make green energy affordable, and the world will beat a path to your door.

A big reason health care costs are rising so fast is because of central planning (aka Medicare, Medicaid). The Democrats solution? More central planning.

Civility Watch: Wisconsin Attorney General releases 100 pages of threats against lawmakers during the budget battle.

The White House shut out a reporter from the Boston Herald because of a critical editorial that the Herald put on their front page. The issue with Obama is not Fox News; it’s anyone who disagrees with him. But if you didn’t know about this, it’s not your fault. The rest of the media, who you’d think would be all over this treatment of colleagues, were virtually silent on the matter.

The anti-war crowd has seemingly melted away into the woodwork with the election of President Obama. I mean, if George W. Bush had violated federal law by invading a country without, within 60 days, getting congressional approval, how loud would the outcry have been, from the Left and the Media? Instead, a collective yawn.

(Sorry, no cartoon this week.)

NewsBusters has done a study on how the media covers Earth Day vs how it covers Easter.

Major Findings:

Media Undermine Christian Holiday: Nearly two thirds of all stories about Easter were negative (22 out of 34).

Easter Used to Attack Catholic Church: Ninety-one percent of the negative Easter stories were about the pedophilia scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Love That Mother Nature: 100 percent of Earth Day stories were positive.

Easter is the quintessential Christian holiday – the celebration of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Although it has been celebrated by billions of people around the world for nearly 2,000 years, the mainstream media would rather celebrate the liberal holiday known as "Earth Day" and connect Easter to the abuse scandal that surrounded the Roman Catholic Church.

Holy Week marks the seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Christians around the world mark it by attending services, praying and piously observing the holiday.

But in 2010, ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows mentioned "Easter" primarily in connection to the pedophilia scandals that swirled around the Vatican last year, being sure to highlight the "gravest outrage," "scandal," "sexual abuse" and "crisis."

Instead, the networks chose to worship something else: Mother Earth. In contrast to Easter, the 40-year-old eco-holiday Earth Day that focuses on the "plastic lying around the earth" and "going green," managed to get nothing but positive attention from the broadcast media.

The Culture and Media Institute examined reports during Holy Week (Mar. 28 through Apr. 4, 2010) and Apr. 15, 2010, through Earth Day to contrast the two weeks of media coverage.

More at the link.

Last week was Spring Break for us, but that doesn’t mean I stopped reading the news.

The long arm of “Pastor” Terry Jones. Obama bombs a Muslim country, and all’s quiet, but one nut half a world away burns a Koran, and gets disproportional media coverage for it, and Afghans riot, killing at least a dozen people.  Jones may be overreacting, but he’s got nothing on the angry mullahs in Afghanistan. And after all, according to NBC, burning the Koran is worse than burning the Bible because the Bible was written by men, not God. (Where do they get their religion experts?)

A new Broadway musical attacks Muslims! This could spawn more riots! Oh, wait. It attacks Mormons. Well then, never mind.

Say it isn’t so! The New York Times is getting its “facts” from left-wing websites and not checking said “facts” for accuracy. Oh, that liberal media.

The Obama Doctrine; looking more and more like the Bush Doctrine. (And the Bush Doctrine is really just common sense.)

Name the Senator who used to think that a war without congressional authority would be “monarchist”? Click here for the video.

Carbon emissions dropped 21% from 2000-2009, without cap-and-trade. Gee, wonder who the President was during that time.

Jimmy Carter equates Christianity with Islam in how both religions view women as inferior. Really, Jimmy? I guess if nations that are (or were) historically Christian would do things like, oh, allow women to vote, or hold jobs, or drive, or not have to cover their entire bodies with tents, then perhaps we can revisit this question.

And finally, two nuclear questions. (Click for a larger image.)

Six out of ten politicians in don’t think you know enough about the issues facing Washington to form a reasonable opinion. More telling to me is that, broken down by party, most Republicans trust you but way more Democrats don’t.

Another example of why it’s hard for government to cut spending (and why conservatives try to hard to hold back increases); Between 400,000 and 500,000 protest against government spending cuts in the UK.

Media Matters becomes a parody of itself, ignoring the media in general and concentrating solely on Fox News. James Taranto wonders:

Does a group that proclaims its purpose to be industrial sabotage qualify [for tax-exempt status]? It’s hard to imagine the answer is yes. Could, say, AT&T set up an organization to sabotage Sprint and do the whole thing free of taxes?

Did you know that opting out of Medicare (not asking for your tax money back, just not taking advantage of it and paying the tab yourself) will cause you to forfeit Social Security? Big, big government, anyone?

The European Union has an idea for clean air; ban all cars.

Irony Alert: President Obama accepted a transparency award from the open government community, in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House.

Barack Obama was against wars against brutal dictators that did not directly threaten the United State or its interests, before he was for them.

A salute to the men and women of Japan — the Fukushima 50 — who are putting their health and, indeed, lives on the line to bring the reactors under control.

Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.

“He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long-term.

And finally, "regulating relationships". (Click for a larger image.)

Via Hot Air, Senator Rand Paul schools administration officials on the issue of “choice”. Under liberals’ logic, it’s okay to kill babies but we can’t buy light bulbs we want or a toilet that will flush. Click the image to watch.

From way back in the year 2000 CE (which, by the way, converts to AD 2000), the Independent ran the following story, Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past,

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

…

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Now? From last December, on FoxNews, Anger Rises as Snow, Ice Snarls Britain,

Winter storms forced British government ministers and bank executives to postpone their meeting Monday on the politically touchy issue of bank bonuses. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did not announce a new date but said it hoped the meeting could be rescheduled later this week.

Forecasters have said Britain is experiencing some of the most severe winter weather in a century, with continued freezing temperatures and snowfall accumulations expected Monday afternoon and evening.

I recall a co-worker telling me a story of when he went on a school fieldtrip, in the late 1960s / early 1970s, to a nature preserve. This time was the genesis of the Earth Day movement, and at this particular preserve the school kids were told of the impending doom that awaited mankind. One statement that remained with him was the admonition / prediction that, if they didn’t take care of the earth, then their grandchildren wouldn’t know what a tree was.

As Christians we should be all about cherishing and managing the environment God has not only created, but given to us to take care of. Yet we should never fall into the trap of thinking we have the power or ability to save that environment – the laws of physics simply prove us wrong. Worse still, we should be wary of ever slipping into a modern-day worship of Mother Earth.

The book of Genesis has made clear where and from whom our environment has come.

School officer shooting – a hoax
Oh, this is just icing on the cake for homeschoolers. Remember the school officer shooting that resulted in a pee-deprived 5 hour LOCKDOWN, for up to 9 schools, in a 7 square mile area? Well it appears that the “shooting” was orchestrated by the officer who was “shot”.

Keep incidents like this in mind whenever someone advocates that ordinary citizens should have sensible gun-control laws foisted on them, because we can only trust those who have been trained to be responsible with firearms. Incidents like these do not indicate that all law enforcement is bad, but merely that they are human.

If you think parents were peeved before…

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It was green in every way – except that of money
Huntington Beach’s [California] first ‘green’ home is seized by bank.

The first ‘green’ home in Huntington Beach, debuting to much fanfare a little more than a year ago before having its asking price chopped dramatically and becoming a short sale, has gone back to the bank.

You’d think someone like… Robert Redford, might have cared enough to pick it up.

I suppose that some enviros have yet to understand the concept of free market economics.

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Green in name, but not in deed? Must be due to Big Oil Greed?
And in the same Huntington Beach, we have a middle school protest over the installation of solar panels on school property. Why? Because said panels will be installed by – shudder! – Chevron.

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Hey, Wally?
For some lighter Huntington Beach news, it seems that The Beaver just got married in the H.B.

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A common sense lib
From the Huffington Post,

As a liberal Democrat, I worry about the damage we might do by rushing toward a fresh raft of gun-control laws. It’s very hard to demonstrate that most of them — registration, waiting periods, one-gun-a-month laws, closing the gun-show loophole, large-capacity-magazine restrictions, assault-rifle bans — have ever saved a life. It’s a hard thing to accept, but in a country of 350 million privately owned guns, the people who are inclined to do bad things with guns will always be able to get them. One might as well combat air crashes by repealing gravity.

If you didn’t hear anything, or very little, about thousands who attended the March for Life last weekend in DC, that’s understandable. The media routinely ignores it.

And speaking of a liberal media, Jay Carney, who used to write for Time magazine, is now Obama’s new press secretary. His new job description — putting Obama in the most positive light possible — is very much like his old job description.

And still speaking of a liberal media, they’re getting rather disappointed that Obama is not doing what he said he would. Well, they’ve just joined those of us who have been paying attention for 2 years.

Headline from USA Today: “When unwed births hit 41%, it’s just not right”. But it’s OK at 40%? Seriously though, look at the graph showing how fast the out-of-wedlock births have jumped since the notorious “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s.

Civil Discourse Watch:

“They’re going to hang themselves,” said Belknap [New Hampshire] Democratic Chair Ed Allard of Republicans. “And we’re going to help them.”

Allard’s threat came during a meeting of despondent Democrats in Belknap County on Thursday evening. The meeting was hosted by President Obama’s Organizing for America.

The IPCC said that the glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range would be gone by 2035 due to climate change. The latest word? “Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.” Um, who’s popular belief are they talking about?

And finally, a shorter version of the State of the Union speech, from Rick McKee:

That was then.

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

That was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in 2008.  This is now.

New York City and Newark, N.J., picked up a whopping 19 inches snow. For the month, both cities now have piled on 36-38 inches, making January 2011 the snowiest January on record! Bridgeport, Conn., Islip, N.Y. and New York-La Guardia airport have also now seen their snowiest Januaries.

Congratulations to both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Ski Areas Association for making a difference. In 2003 the environmental outfit and the trade group teamed up on a campaign called Keep Winter Cool, aimed at "highlighting the impact of global warming on winter recreation and the opportunities both resort operators and their guests have to start solving the problem." They liked the snow and wanted to keep it, but global warming was threatening to turn off the spigots and dry up the slopes. “We can fix the problem”, they said, “as long as we start soon.“

Well, they fixed it. Eight winters later, as Time magazine and the New York Times have reported, global warming is making the weather colder and snowier than ever. Good job, fellas! The Keep Winter Cool campaign seems to have decided to rest on its laurels and call its effort a success; its last press release is dated April 2007. But we thought we should highlight the good work of the NRDC and the NSAA, who were combating global warming before global warming was literally cool.

(Hat tip: James Taranto)

So… where’s my blessing?
I’m particularly touchy on # 2, although it does take some of your own understanding to grapple with # 6.

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Grandma would command a lot more respect in one of these babies!

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Estimates vary, but do the math
The country has gotten riled up over a lone madman using a firearm to kill 6 people, somehow coming to the conclusion that we need to implement stricter gun control laws. Consider that if 0.001% (that’s one thousandth of one percent) of the firearm owners in the U.S. decided today to shoot and kill 6 people, we’d have 4,800 people killed. Seems to me that, under current laws, over 99.99% of firearms owners in the U.S. pretty much keep control of their actions.

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Now this is cool
One thing, though… might it be done to our infrastructure as well?

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Another advertisement for the home school industry.

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Global Warming Denier?
From the New Mexico Independent, Martinez picks former astronaut, global warming denier to head energy, natural resources department. Alternate title, “Martinez picks first and only scientist to walk on the moon, global warming realist to head energy, natural resources department”.