Category Archives: Society

Conservation of Resources

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It is more important to honor Martin Luther King Jr. than to honor blacks.

It is also more important to honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln than to honor “Presidents.”

And it is more important to honor Mollie Beattie than to honor women.

What? You’ve never heard of Mollie Beattie?

Black History Month is celebrated each February in the United States and Canada and in October in the UK. This month-long homage highlights contributions of black people and events.

Presidents Day (note the lack of an apostrophe) is a federal holiday here in the United States. We celebrate not on February 12 or February 22 but rather on the third Monday of the month so we can have a three day weekend.

Women’s History Month in March is major commemoration of the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that American women can now own entire properties by bequest or outright purchase. The farmhouse we bought in Vermont came with an interesting history: the first Mrs. Stevens to live here outlived the first Mr. Stevens to live here (this was originally the Stevens farm). Mr. Stevens, apparently worried that his children would turn their mother out, bequeathed to her the use of a bedroom, “cooking facilities,” and the cellar for storage.

I’m glad that American politicians can now spend endless time on world-altering events like declaring holidays and then going on them.

And I’m glad that Americans, whether black or white or purple or green can now buy houses, build businesses, go to school, marry, and vote. When I lived in New Jersey, the election judge who signed me in was a black man named Harper. He looked at my ID, looked at his name badge, and looked at my ID again.

“Oh,” he said, “You’re from the other side of the family.”

I was pleased but someday, we won’t notice which side of the family we came from.

We certainly need Presidents. Without them, Congress would have run amok with all this holidaying far sooner and the now-233 year history of this particular democratic experiment would have been written in about 87 years.

Martin Luther King Jr. started out as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Alabama. As arguably the strongest voice for civil rights, he was first a man people might never heard of.

Mollie Beattie was a Vermonter and the first woman to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As arguably the strongest single voice for wildlife conservation, she was a woman most people still have never heard of.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are larger than life now but they were just George and Abe to their families and to the people nearest them.

They all gave us something more. George and Abe share two important traits with Martin and Mollie: they did more than they thought they would and they all inspired us to do more than we thought we could. That’s heroic.

We need heroes. When we honor mere Presidents, all we get is another sale.

Sea Kittens Are Us

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PETA has gone off the deep end.

The terrorist group determined to end humankind’s position at the top of the food chain has learned to be soft and fuzzy. Probably from Al Gore, the Nobel laureate who has mastered the art of advertising to move most of a population away from real science.

PETA wants to rename fish.

Renaming fish is their 2009 contribution to political correctness.

Kindergarten educators (I can’t call them teachers because teachers know better) want to prevent kindergarten bullies from offending the less fortunate. The Political Correctness Police (ever wonder why that equates to PCP?) compel us to avoid upsetting the non-white, the homosexual, any female, the crippled, the ugly, the fat, or the stupid. One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies is “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The man in the lice-ridden poncho would lose a lot of punch if he starred in “The Good, The Goodness-Challenged, and The Unfortunately Handsomeness-Challenged.”

Political correctness comes in all flavors and all of them irk me.

I wonder whether Brazilians are annoyed by the name we have given (mostly) Bolivian almendra nut. The annual harvest of Brazil nuts is about 20,000 tons; Bolivia sends about half of those to market.

The American Fisheries Society moved Floridians to call the jewfish the “goliath grouper.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first usage of “jewfish” in this 1697 quote: “The Jew-Fish is a very good fish and, I judge, so called by the English because it hath scales and fins, therefore a clean fish, according to Levitical law.”

Seconds before his ouster in 1999, public advocate David Howard, was quoted thusly, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund…” The political firestorm came as others called this 700 year-old synonym for miserly, a “racist” epithet.

Muslims have castigated Prince Harry for calling a fellow cadet a “raghead.” (As an aside, I find it interesting that it is politically CORRECT for Muslims pledge to kill all American infidels and to shout *death to Israel*.)

The term “politically correct” traces back to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and was adopted in the 1960s by the radical left. RightSpeak (or in this case, LeftSpeak), ought to give us pause no matter what the origin. After all, the entropy of the universe never dwindles and once your peers decide they can trash your mental treasury, the penalties they impose grow larger with every alleged infraction.

The death of language comes when words lose their meaning in favor of their consequences.

Got to dial it back:

I do not use racial or ethnic slurs.

I do know that people who call me a redneck WASP show only their own brilliance.

I do know kids need to build immunity to germs both bacterial and conversational.

I do not tolerate RightSpeak or RightThink.

And now PETA wants us to call all fish, “sea kittens.”

“Nobody would hurt a sea kitten!” the group says on its website.

They hope to start their campaign to end “fishing” by retiring the name for good.

OK, OK, I understand that no one takes PETA seriously and the sea kitten campaign is at best laughable. I’m not laughing. PETA’s agenda is quite simply to destroy our meat and fish industries which, when you look at the expected results, means PETA’s agenda is to destroy humankind.

After all, it is already so illegal to catch or eat a kosher goliath grouper in Florida waters that the penalty for simply having one aboard may be forfeiture of one’s fishing boat.

Time to trot out my recipes for cat.

Guest Post: Geno on Changing Political Party Affiliation

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Regular correspondent Geno sent this along:

Yesterday I went to my financial planner with a check for $30,000 and purchased a fixed-index annuity. I had withdrawn the money from a passbook savings account that paid me .75% interest, and when I purchased the annuity I got an immediate 15% bonus ($4500).

So, my $30M in the savings account would earn me about $300 a year after compounding, but the 15% bonus on the annuity earned me $4500. That equals $34,450 or an increase of $4500. The downside is that I can only draw out %15 of it per year for income if I need it. I don’t need it.

I have a half dozen of those, and a couple are well above $100M–and each of them will let me draw out 10% per year for income if I need it. I don’t need it–because…

…Mrs Geno and I sat down last night and figured it out. Since President-elect Obama’s tax plan will ensure that no one earning less than $50 will have to pay income tax, she and I will join the Democrat party in 2010. She plans to retire in 2010–after which we will both be pensioners, earning prolly around $27,000 and only withdrawing enough from our annuities to stay below the $50M cut-off line.

Of course, once we are democrats we will vote to make sure that the arrogant people earning above $50M get no tax relief. Screw them, the selfish f***ers.

Hoperfully Universal Health Care will have become a reality by then or shortly thereafter. It sure would be nice to sit back with $50M and not have to pay anything out for taxes or victimization expenses like health care and such. Mebbe we can get a tax rebate for driving old cars–even though we will not have paid any taxes. I love liberalism.

I have always wanted to be a democrat because I love Katie Couric … and that Dan Rather was a hoot.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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In Charlotte, Vermont, a school got hammered to take down its candy cane decorations because a grinch there says they have an overt Christmas message. CANDY CANES! The Menorah probably stayed up, though.


Merry Christmas, Everyone

Every radio station has defaulted to Christmas music. I’m surprised we haven’t lost that, too. I don’t particularly like Christmas music but my radio has an off switch. I don’t have to listen to it if I don’t want to.

I was raised in a family that was Quaker on one side, Presbyterian on the other. I may not be as organized now as I was when I reached the age of accountability and joined the Presbyterian church but I am still a Christian. And, of course, a WASP.

You don’t have to be either.

Today is the day Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the meaning of Christianity. It was a pretty big day before the stock exchange took it over.

It doesn’t mean Do unto all the other religions, then cut out.

Here’s the thing. If you offer food to the monks on Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday, I will honor your commitment to the poor. If you celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, I will honor with you the victory of Lord Ram over the demon-king Ravana. If you fast during Ramadan when the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammad, I will honor your patience and humility. If you celebrate the most solemn and important of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I will honor your atonement and repentance. If you light the candles of Kwanzaa, I will help you honor your heritage. And if you are a lib’rul atheist, I will not proselytize.

That maybe the most important message.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, Islamic, a Jew, a Kwanzaan celebrant, or an atheist; I have no expectation that you should. It is time, on this Christian holy day, to let Christians be Christians.

My right to impose my own beliefs stops at my property line (or the end of my nose when I’m out in public). The Charlotte, Vermont, grinch’s right to his own idiocy stops at pretty much the same place. It is time to stop accepting that “politically correct” credo and start honoring the true message of Christmas.

Scythian philosopher Anacharsis wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.”

Peace.