Government regulations are often stupid. I’m used to that. Government regulations which fly in the face of the laws of nature, simply amaze me.

Case in point, a 70 year old woman in Oren, Utah, (just south of Salt Lake City) was supposedly man handled by police over not watering her lawn. Read the BBC account (the most rational of them) here.

Not only is this a prime example of a stupid law, in this case demanding that you water your lawn in a desert - but it is a prime example of a simple concept of the law that most people seem to forget. All laws are enforced by the barrel of a gun.

Betty Perry claims that the officer hit her in the face with a pair of handcuffs, whereas the officer in question claims that she slipped and fell. I’m sure there are more than a few people out there who have personal experience with the “slipped and fell” clause that cops dish out. It’s amazing how many people slip and fall while under police “protection”.

I have no reason not to believe a 70 year old woman’s story about the incident, but mounds of reason to distrust the police’s version. There have been so many cases of police corruption, abuse and general misbehavior these days to give the cops a free ride, just because they are cops.

She was treated in a local hospital for the cut to her nose and for other bruises before being taken to jail. But she was let go when police realised there were “other ways” of finding out her identity without jailing her, a police spokesman said.

There are ways of finding out who people are without arresting them? No way! How does that work? Does it require a license? Do I need to file such a request through the Department of Redundancy Department, or the Commission for Duplicative Commissions?

Back to the case at hand…

“The officer had judged that Ms Perry’s “sadly neglected and dying landscape” breached an Orem city guideline and was attempting to issue a formal caution when the 70-year-old was injured.”

Let me express again, Utah is a desert. I know this, because I currently live here in Utah, just north of Salt Lake City. Orem is no different from where I am. To make matters worse, we’re in a drought. Every morning on the way down the mountain for my commute to work, I marvel at Antelope Peninsula (used to be an island) sitting out in the Great Salt Marsh (used to be a lake.) Yet, the powers that be have made laws and continue to enforce laws, which are designed to waste water trying to keep Kentucky Bluegrass alive in a bloody desert!

Is it just me, or are there some damn stupid people making up these rules?

Here are some more to titillate readers outside of this Mormon mess:

• Birds have the right of way on all highways.
• It is against the law to fish from horseback.
• A husband is responsible for every criminal act committed by his wife while she is in his presence.
• It is illegal not to drink milk.
• It is considered an offense to hunt whales.
• Alcohol may not be sold during an emergency.
• It is a felony to persistently tread on the cracks between paving stones on the sidewalk of a state highway.
• It’s legal for restaurants to serve wine with meals, but only if you ask for the wine list.
• In Monroe county, daylight must be visible between partners on a dance floor.
• In Provo, throwing snowballs carries a $50 fine.
• Finally, in Salt Lake County, no one may walk down the street carrying a paper bag containing a violin.

To be fair, other states have stupid laws as well, but very few have laws so stupid as to demand growing a lawn in the desert. Maybe they should try making smog illegal next, so that the news can stop reporting that we’re having a “hazy” day.

This leads me to one more comment on “official responses” and people’s addiction to them. We have several wildfires raging in Utah right now, which have engulfed dozens of square miles of forest and field. Even the I-15 freeway has been shutdown several times and the smoke from some of these fires is hovering over the Wasatch Front (where Salt Lake City and related communities lie.) My wife caught a blurb about the smoke on the evening news (I still haven’t determined what disease causes her to watch that drivel) which included a call-in from a viewer. The viewer’s response to the fires and smoke, “They need to do something about the air quality over the city.”

???

Hey, moron - hundreds of fire fighters are risking their lives, trying really hard to put out the fires. What do you want here, air filters over the city?

I stumbled onto this site accidentally while doing a manual Web link crawl. They have some amazing photos of Great Whites in action.

Chris Fallows has a real passion for oceanic photography and his skills are self evident. Have a look!

I had the misfortune of catching a brief glimpse of Fox News the other morning, that my wife was watching out of some deep sense of masochism that I don’t understand. I don’t know if the anchors had escaped from the local Utah morgue, that it was part of a nationally broadcast autopsy, transmissions from another galaxy, or just a sick satirical twist on the Muppet’s - but they were vapid. Lifeless heads, on dandruff free shoulders, smiling like deranged department store mannequin’s.

Normally, this would be enough to make me cringe, but the “story” being told was a hit below the belt. I don’t remember the exact wording, as I’ve been trying hard to repress it since Thursday, but it was something to the extent of a mock sense of excitement over Drew Barrymore and some guy from the cast of a medical sitcom, caught “making out” (I know they used the term “making out”, because they repeated that phrase about eight times) at a restaurant somewhere.

This is news? If Drew Barrymore had been caught flashing senior citizens on the New York subway (excluding David Letterman) that might have been news, of a sort. Perhaps. If you stretch the definition of “news” quite a bit.

This just in, Justine Timberlake, star of TV’s major hit, “Dude, Where’s My Jockstrap?”, was spotted at a local nightclub giving a sloppy hickey to Ernest Borgnine’s superfluous third nipple! Film at eleven!

I thought to myself that this was just a fluke, some “entertainment” exclusive, privy only to the woeful beings who glue their eyes to the muted radiation of the boob-tube during the daytime broadcast fiasco. Then I had the misfortune of catching Fox News again that evening, when they were airing a “new story” about the current events on “American Idol”.

Jesus Tap-dancing Christ on a Pogo stick!

I ask again; this is news? I really need to find out if my wife is ill, or just watching this out of morbid curiosity, like a train wreck that you can’t pull your eyes away from.

I’ve never been impressed with American news broadcasts. Even when I was a kid, back in the dark ages of the Nixon era, the calm and dispassionate announcements from the BBC (aired on PBS), was such a breath of fresh air compared to the pulp on the local stations, that it was the only news I would watch, when I would actually take the time to watch the news. I was a kid, after all, there were better things to do, unless I was sick.

Since I don’t watch television, other than the occasional episode of “The Simpsons”, I can’t say if the current trend is an overall phenomena or just a Fox thing. I’ve certainly read several rants over the disinformation which passes as news on Fox. Frankly, I don’t care if they have a right wing bias, as they are accused of having, because it’s doing the right wing no favor to be holding Fox News up as a symbol of their intelligence. If I were to guess the IQ’s of those watching Fox News and believing what they present as being real news, I’d be spouting figures in the low teens. As for bias, there certainly are enough left wing news programs to make up for anything of the Fox sway. “Fair and balanced” is meaningless to any of the networks.

Maybe I’m reading more into this that I should, but with news looking more like entertainment than news, is it any wonder that the typical American is as ignorant of world events as they are?

Al Gore’s son caught motoring at 100 MPH in a hybrid car with illegal drugs, isn’t the only egg on Gore Sr.’s face this week.

While Gore is busy with his work on the amazing Technicolor Live Earth propaganda concert, all with the auspice of world calamity caused by anthropogenic global warming - a new scientific study of core data from 1.2 miles under a glacier in Greenland, has shown that 450,000 to 800,000 years ago, when the temperature was 9 F (5 C) warmer than now, that the glaciers of Greenland did not completely melt away. (Note that the IPCC is calling for perhaps a 2 C change in the next century.)

Link to the article here.

Addendum: It appears that they found the DNA of insects (butterflies, moths, flies, beetles), pine yew and alder trees. They could not rule out the possibility that there was contamination from the last interglacial, 116,000 to 130,000 years ago. More on the story here.

Interestingly enough, this find comes as a side effect of the study of the oldest plant DNA ever found.

Another key finding in their work, “They found the temperature varied widely, by as much as 15 C (27 F) over the 800,000 years.” (Note again, that the ice the pulled up didn’t melt during all this.)

Must have been all those mammoths driving SUV’s or something.

Climate changes on its own, continues to do so and will always do so. You just have to love the egotistical circus of the human response to it all.

The myths of anthropogenic global warming are being shown for what they are and as time goes on, it will fall into the dustbin of history as yet another failed leftist political scheme, killed by it’s own hubris and the plain and simple facts.

The more shrill the fear mongering from the Church of Global Warming becomes, the more like evangelical doom-crying morons they appear. Don’t be shocked by it, the message will become increasingly shrill - it has to. As the scientific facts roll in, showing their theories to be nothing more than the tripe it is; as time rolls on in the 21st century and the doom-saying never comes to pass; the message will have to get more and more ominous in order to hold anyone’s attention. The goal is not to save the world, but to enslave it. Fear has always been the greatest tool to achieve that goal.

“Freeze or fry, the solution is always the same: destroy the free market and impose socialism.”

Carbon taxes have only opened up a new market to cheat on. Political pressures for changing CO² emissions have only the goal of stifling free trade and industry, to make room for new, controlled industry. It’s all about control and money. Left wing greed is no less ugly than right wing greed, it’s just rolled out in a more intelligent looking wrapper.

Peal away that wrapper and it’s still a shit sandwich that they want you to eat.

The celebration used to be called Independence Day. Now it’s just “the Fourth of July”. How many even realize the significance of the day? Does the modern American understand the point?

When the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776, they put into motion a course of action that would change the face of political structure in the world. When the President of the Congress, John Hancock went to sign the document (along with Charles Thomas) on that day, he signed his own death warrant; as the following 55 signers did on August 2nd (with a few stragglers after) when the final document was finished. They were standing up against the King of England, the most powerful empire in the word, and in doing so had sealed the fate of their lives if history turned against their attempts to secede. As Benjamin Franklin so aptly stated, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

The fireworks that came to celebrate the day were symbolic, not of mere celebration, but of the workings of war - rockets, cannon fire, muskets… It is a solemn event, to be honest and one that celebrates the spirit of revolution against oppression. It is not meant to celebrate our current government itself (patriotism is not measured by blind loyalty to a government body), to celebrate the workings of war, or a false sense of pride in a flag. A flag, after all, is just the symbol used to rally troops on the battlefield. It is a time to celebrate a few courageous rabble-rousers, who managed to convince a fragile colony to attempt to govern themselves and in the process, put their lives on the line for that fight.

How times change. Today, this date is but a time to allow a barbecue and a light show. We drink our beer, eat our burgers and slap ourselves on the back for being “the best country in the world.” Resting on one’s laurels is silly enough, but suffering delusions of grandeur is no longer becoming for a nation which has lost sight of everything it once stood for.

We have a President in office today who is behaving like a King. (How ironic that we threw off the yoke of King George III, only to be entrapped by King George once again.) We have a Congress which is so corrupted by bribes and industry entanglement that they can’t see the forest for the trees and make decisions based only on the money they earn. We have a justice system so painfully broken, that it is nearly impossible to be tried fairly by our peers; while we boast the largest prison population of any industrialized nation in the world - where one can be locked up indefinitely by being label a terrorist, never seeing a trial at all. We have a population which grumbles, but does nothing of consequence, against a taxation rate that would make a mediaeval peasant cringe. Our rights are being actively stripped away and everything that was fought for is slipping through our fingers.

What is the response of the modern American when faced with this vast yoke of government oppression?

“We need to make a law!”

This is the folly, the utter insanity of the modern America. The call from all sides, from everyone but the tiny portion of libertarians in our society; is to fix the problem by passing more laws, enlarging the government’s size, boosting the government’s power. It doesn’t matter what the problem is: the universal call from the Republican and Democratic duality of our nature, is a call for increasing the roll, the structure, and the raw violent power of the very organism which is causing the problem in the first place.

It is time to stop solving the problem by making it worse. What we need are less laws, not more. We need less government, not more. We need less oversight, not more.

Governments always grow to oppression, always grow to infringe upon the people it is supposed to serve. Government always attracts despots and tyrants. There has never been a nation in history which has not followed this cycle and ours is no exception. We need to wake up and realize that having an “official” response to the situation, simply no longer works.

Until we muster the same strength and courage as the 56 men who stood up for their liberty that summer in 1776, we shall remain subjects of the new crown and our fates will be dealt out at the whims of our oppressors.