Harrisburg’s descent marked by stupid stuff
Harrisburg City now charges cars at over-time meters $30.00, and $50.00 if you don’t respond within four days.
It’s an egregious amount of money to pay for a stupid meter violation.
Four days is hardly enough time in this day and age to do anything. If you’ve got a job, kids, and volunteer work, the ticket either lays on your car seat for two days or sits on your kitchen desk for a week before you get to it. That’s normal. Now, Harrisburg City is engaging in predatory behavior.
Remind me to avoid meetings downtown, and to invite people to meetings away from the city, where parking is not a predatory scheme to rip off citizens so rip-off artists can stay out of jail.
That’s what this is about: Making money to cover costs that were incurred through the incinerator scandal.
Good luck with rebuilding our beloved city by chasing away the people you need.
You call this global warming?
Not only is the northern hemisphere in a deep freeze, a bunch of “climate change scientists” looking for evidence to support their religion … Oops … I mean their theory, got frozen in the Antarctic ice. Their ship is immobilized because so much ice is not only not melting, but actually increasing. Rescue ships also got frozen.
Members of the crew said it was the most ice they’d seen in years.
Guess what? Planet Earth is a dynamic place, with dynamic weather patterns and a multitude of factors simultaneously influencing climate.
Trying to ascribe cause-and-effect to these factors, or even worse, claiming to know what’s really happening with all these factors, is not science.
It’s politics, for sure. We know how clean that is.
Its adherents behave as though they’re in a cult, or at least in some charismatic religion.
Too many environmental groups use crisis to whip up support for their causes and to fund raise. Climate change appears to be one more scare tactic. The evidence just isn’t there to support the claims. Today’s zero temperature is classic.
But if you want to talk about overfishing the oceans, loss of farmland, loss of critical wildlife habitat, good wildlife management, why then reasonable people are interested.
In the mean time, I’m shoveling loads of carbon…oops, sorry, I mean firewood, into our wood stove as we trade yesterday’s carbon for today’s heat. Seems like a good and sustainable trade to me.
Curious things afoot in our American republic
Some time ago, actually not too long by the measure of human history, Communists, Capitalists, and Fascists fought each other in the streets of Weimar Germany.
Each fought for what they believed in. What the Fascists and the Communists believed in was equal amounts of totalitarian evil, served up slightly differently. Only the capitalists had a track record, and it was a successful one that had led Germany to a place of such prominence and financial success that human nature and poor judgment had then sought to use those riches for imperial gain and human subjugation.
Weimar Germany was bad for every German. What naturally followed on its heels – Nazi Germany’s National Socialism – was bad for the entire world.
Capitalism creates such great wealth, across such a large number of people, that like bees to honey, the evil inclination of human nature is drawn to it with bad intentions.
Politicians of all stripes cannot keep their hands off of the private money created through capitalism. Whether it’s high taxes to fund government grants to preferred political allies, or outright confiscation/ theft and wealth redistribution, politicians always seek to appropriate capitalist success for their own careers and their own ends.
Yesterday I had the unfortunate experience of watching New York City’s new mayor, Bill deBlasio, get sworn in. De Blasio is a kook, a radical whose communist views are well known. No one can predict for certain what will befall the Big Apple after one term of his management, but it probably won’t be pleasant to watch from Pennsylvania (he is first-off aiming to end the handsome cab business, where tourists get pulled around in horse-drawn carriages in Central Park). And my New York friends will probably suffer significant losses to their home values, businesses, and other investments they have made in the area. Wealth would naturally flee de Blasio’s presence.
One cannot help but be intrigued by the similarity between Weimar Germany’s otherwise unremarkable circumstances, and those America is sliding into today: High unemployment, sliding currency value, inflation, and increasingly hot friction wherever mutually exclusive political interests collide.
Human history repeats itself so often that it’s both kind of silly to even suggest that America will become another Weimar Germany, and it is also silly to blow it off and pretend it isn’t happening.
De Blasio has his sights set on other people’s private wealth, and he is likely to lose a great number of wealthy people from NYC as a result. What is more worrisome is the friction that will arise and ripple out as he presses forward and is met with the natural resistance reasonable people expect to greet thievery.
“Income inequality” is his byword, and it’s just another way of saying he’s going to steal from the makers and give to lazy takers, using the coercive power of government force and threat of loss of liberty for dissenters. Other politicians are watching de Blasio, and they have already signaled their inclinations to follow his lead in their local venues.
It is difficult to imagine a more explosive arrangement or set of circumstances. Once again, one is reminded of either the 19-teens and 1920s, or even the 1850s in America. Such incompatible political philosophies are afoot, banging into one another, and one must win, and one must lose.
I hope de Blasio loses. I hope. To think otherwise is to be against the very American republic that first created the wealth he is now after.
Happy New Year!
Friends, here is to a happy next year, a new year, The New Year, 2014, for you, for all of us.
And thank you for being part of my past year, which was good in so many ways, thank God.
Make it count.
Josh
Merry Christmas to one and all!
However it evolved into a fake insult, saying Merry Christmas is still the nicest thing one American can say to another.
Christmas is our national holiday. Religious Christians fret over its secularization, and certainly the commercilization and materialism surrounding Christmas stand in contrast to its roots.
But thanks in great part to 19th century British writer Charles Dickens, Christmas is, for all people, a time of cheer, good will towards one another, an abandonment of grudges, an embracing of love as the preferred force in human relations.
So, secularized as this all may be at this point, the message and culture now surrounding Christmas is good stuff.
So, whether you are Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Muslim, Baha’i, Zoroastrian, or pagan, I wish you a very Merry Christmas. You’re an American, you’ve earned it.
ObamaCare…are unilateral changes to law legal?
Congress makes laws, the executive branch executes and implements them.
So how is it that Obama makes unilateral changes to his health care law? Isn’t congress needed to amend the law?
One of Obama’s chief flaws is his tendency to rule as a dictator. He shakes hands with and bows deeply to dictators. His willful disregard for American law is dictatorial.
When do congressional leaders corral this wayward president? Will he be impeached?
From here on out, it’s all downhill
Yesterday was the Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. In a winter-dreary location like Central Pennsylvania, it also marks the beginning of longer days, leading to sunnier days. From here on out until June 21st, it’ll be easier sailing.
Sure, we’ve burned half our firewood and we expect the balance to be gone by February’s end, but just knowing that our friendly neighborhood sunlight will be filtering in more often is a reason for hope. And no, annual trips to islands and warm beaches just do not seem to break winter’s grey grip.
Lesbian activist Camille Paglia speakin’ the gospel
http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/19/paglia-duck-dynasty-uproar-utterly-fascist-utterly-stalinist/?onswipe_redirect=no
Lesbian activist Camille Paglia calls gay activists “juvenile, fascist, Stalinist, intolerant…” And she’s right.
People like me, who strongly support a person’s right to be who they are born to be, straight or gay, without harassment, intimidation, penalty, are now personally penalized for holding Biblical views.
Is this free speech? Is this protected religion? Duck Dynasty guy got railroaded because he believes in the Bible. Wow. Folks, are you paying attention? Your religious views are no longer protected. But everything else is protected, even if it has nothing to do with the founding of America. We are in a fight, people. It’s a good fight. Better win it.
Is pro-gay political community anti-Bible bigotry?
Duck Commander guy says what he thinks about gay sex. A bit too graphic for me, but he’s entitled to his opinion. His views are basically based on explicit Biblical values. Next thing ya know, he’s being attacked as a “bigot.”
OK. I understand that a gay person doesn’t want to hear those views. I’m also sure that people who follow the Bible don’t want to hear the views of pro-gay sex advocates. If there’s parity in life, then there’s equality here, too.
Right?
Doesn’t this Duck Commander guy deserve the same First Amendment rights as other Americans? And if his views are “wrong,” then are his opponents anti-Bible bigots?
I’m trying to figure this issue out. It seems filled with double standards and bullying by political advocates who just cannot accept that other Americans disagree with them. And that disagreement results in severe career punishment.
If it’s wrong to punish someone’s career because they are perceived as gay (how does one ascertain that a person is, in fact gay? What’s the level of proof?), then why is it OK to punish someone’s career because they hold traditional Biblical views?
It is one thing entirely to support a person’s right to be who they are. It’s another thing entirely to say everyone is equal, except for you. It’s equality for everyone, or for none. Tolerance for one, tolerance for all, right?
The Duck Commander guy has zero equality, apparently. So much for First Amendment rights or protecting Biblical views.