Kaitlin Bennett went undercover.

From the comments:

If Trump supporters were all in camps, who would feed the freeloaders?

Indeed.

9:08 student body president saying “do it, but lie about it so we don’t get in trouble!”

Yeah, and the meaning of the word bigot is: “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.” Just pointing that out there.

I live in California and I think she nailed the look

I live in California too, but I used to live in Seattle…she bulls-eyed both, except her clothes are all brand new and her hygienic habits are satisfactory. She looks alive and pleasing to the eye, whereas a true leftist is like a hunk of some zombie spirit world materialized onto the plane of the living by mistake.

Ironically I was just talking about this to someone last night. I said that although conservatives might dislike liberal ideologies, most would never want to see a liberal harmed or harassed, whereas I know for a fact many liberals/leftists would be thrilled to throw conservatives into camps or see harm come to them. It comes down to more than just policy ideals, it’s a very warped and toxic mindset!

Not hard to prove that true. I saw this question posted on Quora a few days ago: “Is it unfair for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be unable to go to restaurants because he gets yelled at by people who oppose what he does/says?” And the very first answer is “I don’t just think it’s fair. I think it’s overdue. And this also goes for members of the Trump administration being denied seating at restaurants, etc.” The attitude is everywhere, and you can see it if you just take the time to look.

Going the other way, I can’t prove it but I think I speak for a lot who lean my way when I say: No “camps” for lefties. The camp I have in mind is reality itself. It’s called getting your hands dirty, doing some honest work, engaging in a difficult effort in which failure is a real possibility, and the final word on whether or not you succeeded goes to someone else who cares about end-results, and isn’t a tenured professor.

Work hard to make a positive difference, and earn a bit of profit honestly and well. Then watch some goo-gooder come along and take that away, to be redistributed among others who didn’t try as hard…lather rinse & repeat a few times. A lefty who doesn’t catch on after awhile, is too far gone anyway, but I think most of ’em would catch on in pretty short order. So no camps. Not because I’m some kind of nice guy, but because they’re not needed.

Bernie, Bernie, Bernie…

Q: What is the Bernie Sanders theory of the case, for why Venezuela is the way it is? What went wrong there, in what is an avowedly socialist project?

A: Ah well, that’s a long story that I don’t think we have time to get into. But this is what I will say: …(blah, blah, blah)

Journalist just lets him off the hook. Because our media sucks.

From the comments:

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried. Hey Bread line Bernie, I explained it in 8 words.

How could it not fail? The fuel line of our economy is the connection between your actions today & your prospects tomorrow. Socialism severs that fuel line.

It isn’t complicated.

Yes, to all of it.

There’s a lot of talk these days about people being “anti-science.” The problem is, a lot of people making those claims either are a bit unclear on the idea of what science is or know full well what it is but are hoping you don’t. Just because someone calls something science doesn’t mean that it actually is.

First off, science is not a collection of “facts”. It’s not a set of conclusions. And it most certainly is not ultimate Truth, forever and ever, amen.

Science is a method. And the core of that method can be summed up in one simple question:

“How would we know if we were wrong?”

The late Richard Feynman described it this way:

First, we guess what we think our new law will be. Then we calculate what must happen if that law is right. Then we compare the result of that calculation with experiment.

And here’s the most important part. If the calculation from our guess does not match experiment, it’s wrong. Period. Yes, there can be experimental error. Yes, if the data is variable sometimes just from chance you’ll get a result that is atypical. But once you account for those, once you’ve gotten your measurements nailed down precisely enough to differentiate from your calculated result, once you’ve got enough measured data for the statistics to say whether it matches calculated results or not, then if they do not match, they’re wrong.

Ran across these emanations from the dark cesspit of despair late at night. I’d like to put together a rebuttal of sorts, because it reminds me of this clip from She’s Having a Baby, and I know our society dies a little bit when more and more people think this way. But a rebuttal wouldn’t do anything other than insult the intelligence of the author — he’s clearly already read such things and figured out for himself how little they mean. I think the encounter would be fruitless, or it would come down to a contest of writing ability, and then he’d win and I’d lose. Give credit where it’s due, he did a great job of summarizing the situation.

I know, because I’ve been there myself. Three times, this side of that stupid Y2K computer bug. This century’s brought challenges the last century didn’t bring, even though in the olden days I can see now I really didn’t know much of anything. “Something else won’t come along,” as brilliant of a good-writing gem it may be, as much potential as it may have to really get the point across…is a tested falsehood. I can’t die three times, and the test of whether something is over or not, is whether there’s more coming afterward. Well, knock on wood, I’m still working.

Kevin Bacon’s character, at 1:40: “I secretly believed that he was terrified I might make something of myself outside the field. If I did, he’d be reminded in living color of his own failure.”

You see, there’s some good writing in that too — and some truth. Once we’re in the hole, we pull others in with ourselves. Maybe without even realizing it. “If I climb out of this hole, I’ll remind that guy down there that he’s not really trying.” We-ell…you know, sometimes that could be a good thing.

There certainly is an age thing going on, I discovered. I don’t think about it much because there isn’t a lot I can do about it. So the other lessons have made more of an impression on me. Every little complication that makes it tougher for a reader of my resume to figure out what it is I really do, is a liability. In my youth, I went where I was needed, and I noticed the people who were more highly valued didn’t do that. I wondered at the time if they knew something I didn’t know, and in the aftermath I got my answer. One manager got me on the phone, and inquired from behind a thin veil of exasperation from having tried to figure it out for himself, what was I. It was a weird conversation because he was all but admitting he didn’t know what to do until he had me properly pigeonholed. It was also exasperating, because from a technical point of view I knew it was true I was worth more, having had real practical experience in more areas. But it was also true I wasn’t willing to be pigeonholed, because at that point I would have done either one, programming or project management, to earn a steady paycheck. This conversation didn’t go anywhere and I never heard from the guy again. I guess after he hung up I was supposed to go “Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should’ve told him I’m a coder, coder, coder!” But, I look at it more like I dodged a bullet.

Nevertheless, there’s some Logan’s Run youth-worship going on there, and some unhealthy pigeonholing. People placing people, and the placers are creating problems because they themselves aren’t going to be in the business in another five years, aren’t truly committed to making the organization better, and don’t have any interest in making it healthy over the long term. They just want to make a decision today, and be able to defend it for a few weeks or months, tops, then go on to something else. We should all worry about this whether we’re impacted or not, because it simply doesn’t work. My “Are you a programmer or a project manager?” type interviewer got back exactly the answer he didn’t want…either one…both…he was sniffing me out to see if I really needed a job, which I did, and that was a turn-off. The most attractive candidate is already working. Why was I out looking for a job after age 35? There must be something wrong. Well the math doesn’t work on that, does it? Medical miracles have made it commonplace for people to live past a hundred years, and with that we’re going to have to get used to the idea of people maybe not retiring at 47. Someone didn’t get the memo. And so a situation is developing.

The sense of despair, travels. The sense of victory, not so much. We can’t outlaw age discrimination, or people-pigeonholing. We can only adjust our attitudes. Something will come along, if your skills match the job someone needs to have done. The trick is to keep them relevant.

Happy President’s Day. Hamilton wrote in Federalist #70:

Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.

There can be no need, however, to multiply arguments or examples on this head. A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.

Of course, Rome eventually fell. It goes without saying there is an intended balance here, and there are those who insist President Trump is throwing it out of whack with this “Emergency Declaration” business to set aside funds for the construction of his big, beautiful wall.

Well, about that.

The WH did not make one executive action today. In reality they made three, only one of which involved an emergency declaration.

First the WH announced they would be funding $601 million in wall construction from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, relying on 31 U.S.C. § 9705. This does not require an emergency declaration.

Second, the WH announced they would be funding $2.5 billion in wall construction under 10 U.S.C. § 284 (this is MilCon $ for combating drug trafficking). This does not require an emergency declaration.

Finally, the WH announced they would be funding $3.6 billion under 10 U.S.C. § 2808. This money does require an emergency declaration.

According to the WH this money will be spent sequentially so the § 9705 money will be spent first then the § 284 money then the § 2808 money.

So depending on how fast they can begin construction, they will have to spend over $5 billion (including the $1.3 billion in fencing appropriations) before any of the emergency money is ever tapped…

But, isn’t this whole thing rather phony? If it’s an emergency, why declare it and then go golfing? Seems like a good question, at first, but then you go to inspect it…to do that, you have to construct a coherent narrative in which there’s something wrong with Trump making a move after Congress told him no. According to this narrative, Congress must have acted in good faith, not attempting in any way to usurp the control of the cockpit, determining which way the ship is going to go; but simply reporting to the Captain of the vessel, as the responsible stewards of the fuel supply, that there’s no more fuel.

The Captain has the sole responsibility to steer the vessel clear of any dangers. The guardians of the resources say the resources are not available to do this.

Looks like an emergency to me. What else to call it?

But many have lined up to point out the dangers of precedent. If Trump does this, so goes the litany, a future democrat President can declare a national emergency that…I eat meat. Or that I own guns. A constitutional crisis will follow, and supposedly we’ll have Trump to thank for it.

I find this unconvincing. It pretends we have yet to head into the cul de sac, when in fact we’ve been in it for quite some time, and in fact have converted it into a busy thoroughfare. Seems such a long-winded way to say “We should never elect democrats President again”; or, “I don’t know very much about these national emergencies.”

Good constitutional arguments can be made for and against President Trump’s evocation of emergency powers to address the crisis at our southern border. But the notion that such a declaration would encourage a future Democratic president to do something similar borders on the comic. Democrats don’t need encouragement.

Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the faithful cheered every violation. In early 2014, New Yorker editor and Obama groupie David Remnick wrote about his experience accompanying Obama on a west-coast fundraising tour.
:
By 2014, Obama had successfully nullified any number of laws with negligible media objection. In February 2011, for instance, Obama and “wing man” Attorney General Eric Holder came willy-nilly to the conclusion that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was not “constitutional.” President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law in 1996 with overwhelming support from Democrats in Congress and nearly unanimous support from Republicans.

No matter. Going forward, Obama decided that the Justice Department would no longer enforce DOMA. That simple.
:
On the subject of illegal immigration, Obama did not bother deeming existing laws unconstitutional. He chose not to enforce them because they did not poll well among Hispanic voters. It would get no deeper than that.

Getting back to the presidency itself, there’s an oath you’re supposed to take as you’re inaugurated into that high office. It reads:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Seems to me a more easily defensible idea, that Trump has fulfilled the letter and the spirit of this oath and Obama has failed it, than the other way around.

Because of some family obligations, I’m communicating with some people for the first time in many years. It’s not by choice, and even now this is being done through intermediaries. But I can pick up the vibe of some old resentments against my less enjoyable qualities, and being a flawed Son of Adam who ate of the fruit, I must concede there is some legitimacy to these resentments.

Even the people who tolerate me graciously repeat some of the litany: I don’t admit it when I’m wrong. There is some truth in this, although it doesn’t survive strict scrutiny. All it takes is one time for me to admit to a mistake, and that proves I’m at least capable. After reflecting on this, on & off for many years, I’ve come to the realization that the complaint is insufficiently precise. It has to do with how, and when, I admit to being wrong about something.

The complainers evidently have a script already written in their heads: I’m to be shown something, and then comment audibly something like, Heavens to Murgatroyd I must mend my ways. What actually follows is an explanation of why this new nugget of information doesn’t matter, or best-case scenario, a methodical re-examination of the true state of things followed by a rational, autonomous, non-instruction-driven declaration of my new revised opinion which might not fit the supplied stencil. So the real beef is not that I’m unwilling to alter a flawed opinion, but that I’m maintaining my own control over how I come up with these alterations. This is something all real grown-ups are supposed to be doing all the time, so with this understanding I suppose I’m magnifying my original sin. My interest level in possibly reforming, also, is slipping from its apex. From there, things deteriorate all-around.

So yes. I don’t get along well with mental midgets. It’s best we not have contact with each other.

But some labor under the onus of maintaining contact with me across vast expanses of time whether they want to or not. And for them there is an additional complication: As time goes on, these happy occasions on which I admit I was wrong about something and revise my opinion, become less and less frequent. Well…yes. That’s actually a feature and not a bug. If you apply your own critical thinking skills, make up your own mind about the true meaning of things as grown-ups are supposed to be doing, and you are capable of learning from mistakes but you apply those lessons in a way that makes the best sense to you — throughout a larger expanse of time, with nothing dramatically changing, you should reach correct conclusions about things more often and you should find it necessary to admit defeat less often. That’s actually the only meaningful definition of learning. So I conclude we’re dealing here with a mindset that demands from others a “healthy” admission of mistakes made, but is unready to deal with the natural consequences.

We just finished the latest available episode of The Ranch, and it’s been entertaining and everything because the jokes are genuinely funny and the writing is above par, but I have to say I’m somewhat relieved. Watching them back to back, you can see the slow but sure drift toward soap-opera dreck, and I’m tiring of the leitmotif of aggrieved, aggravated females getting fed up and leaving because of [blank]. It comes across like a creativity deficit in the writing pool, perhaps an outreach effort toward harridans who watch too much teevee and, in a related development, can’t manage to make their own marriages work. Or, if I’m conspiracy-minded, a blue-stater’s desire to infect the red state with the blue-state plague of broken families. And honestly, I find it rather offensive toward red-state women, who in my personal experience are not that delicate. I sympathize somewhat with Abby’s predicament with Colt’s deceptions, but I’ve never been entirely clear on what these various women find wrong with Beau. Something to do with waiting for something to change, and the thing not changing. Sorry, that’s just stupid. If you’ve got a ranch and women on the ranch act this way, eventually the whole damn country goes hungry. When is it time to leave? Abuse, physical or mental — and, no fair stretching the perimeter of “mental abuse” to cover “He doesn’t make me feel good ALL of the time.” Adultery. Lying, I suppose, if they’re really big lies and not just “No that dress doesn’t make you look fat.”

Short of that — sit down and STFU you dumb bitch. That’s what we tell your husband when he gets bored with family life, and desires a spectrum of options he no longer has.

I believe we’re just emerging from a sad chapter in our cultural history, in which we haven’t been able to get along with each other because it’s become fashionable to expect/demand so-and-so does such-and-such. Now this character that they’ve used Sam Elliott‘s acting talents to construct, to me, couldn’t possibly be easier to understand. He’s not a complicated individual at all, what you see is what you get. Perhaps I identify with him too much, because for me, he’s the central character and the soap opera angle of “The Ranch” is about this crusty old fart trying to bring beef to market in the middle of a bunch of estrogen-charged ditziness…which I suppose is not the intended thrust of the show. It seems everyone else is picking up on something that’s eluding me. The monologue from this or that woman lamenting how long she’s waited for something to change, and it never does, has always bored me. And I suppose my reaction isn’t the intended one either: “Well then GTFO, you silly twit.”

But these are scriptwriters who have managed to create an immensely popular show in a short amount of time. Their fingers must be on the pulse of somebody, if not on mine. This sad chapter is not yet closed. There has to be closure to this, because society cannot endure this way. We cannot keep a healthy culture going, when everyone with an opinion to offer about anything, is expecting everyone else with an opinion to offer about anything, to change for insufficient reason. Those who fancy themselves learned in all the interpersonal skills required in order to function, are going to have to get jiggy with the plain fact that people are people, and they don’t change their minds about things just because they’ve received an instruction that they should do so. There has to be a reason. And even if one emerges, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that that reason will be reconciled against their own life-experience, and not someone else’s.

There’s no such thing as being right all the time. But there is such a thing as thinking for yourself, as an adult…and the problem is, this works. If you’re truly capable of learning from mistakes, after awhile you make fewer of them, so if your aim is to regularly admit to mistakes so you can make other people happy, this is not for you. Making mistakes is just like anything else: If you want to do it often, meet some kind of quota, you have to put some effort into making mistakes.

Washington Times:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says he doesn’t “deserve” his fortune and thinks taxes on the rich should be much more “progressive” than they are in the United States.

“I have paid more than $10 billion in taxes, but I should have paid more,” Mr. Gates, who is worth roughly $96.5 billion, told the UK.’s Daily Mail in an interview published Tuesday. “I more than followed the law but I think things should be more progressive.

“I don’t deserve my fortune,” he said. “Nobody does. It has come through timing, luck, and through people I worked with. I certainly worked hard and I think software has been a beneficial thing, but I benefited from a structure too.”

Yeah…but no. Not following. You benefited from a structure, for which you paid more than your share of taxes. Individuals and companies benefit from lots of things, for which they/we pay…once we’re done paying for those things, we’re done paying for them. That’s the whole point of paying for them, to satisfy the attached claim.

The big lie here is that “benefit from” is somehow synonymous with “Will never satisfy the attached claim, ever, ever, never, not ever.” Silly stuff. You don’t think of the candy bar you bought from a vending machine that way, why think about anything else that way? Soldiers give up their blood and their limbs for us, we can think about them that way. How about that? But government contracted with private businesses to build our roads and so forth?

There persists another deception about the nature of money, what it represents. It’s not privilege. The government didn’t allow Bill Gates to have money. Bill Gates earned it by building things, then running things, then investing in things. Yes it can grow exponentially without work. That’s a feature and not a bug. You risk large amounts of money, if it works you make large amounts of more money. That’s what makes our economy go.

Money is control. Saying “I don’t deserve to have this much control” is saying “I don’t know what I’m doing,” which means Gates either doesn’t know what he’s doing, or he’s being deceptive. He knows what he’s doing.

The real problem is that we have persons walking around among us, listening to stuff like this and reading about it, who are receptive. Mr. Gates is playing to them, earning their approval. Why does stuff like this net their approval, that’s the real problem.

“I don’t think giving the money to my children would be good for them or good for society,” he said. “So after whatever consumption I have, and after some left aside for the kids and for taxes, the rest of the money goes to the foundation.”

“Melinda and I work hard all the time to make sure that money goes to help those most in need,” he added.

I can’t disapprove of that, it’s his choice and he has every right in the world to make it that way. If I’ve got some three-comma assets under my control when my time comes, I’ll probably do something similar.

But this one-guy-has-too-much stuff has been creeping in, a little bit at a time, and while we were all snoozing away it seems to have become mainstream. It’s not a question that becomes relevant only when & if you reach billionaire status; it cuts to the quick of the point of existence, for all of us. Too many Americans don’t have savings, aren’t ready for retirement, and that’s directly linked to this mindset that the most positive effect you can have on posterity is to do-nothing, emit-nothing, be green & clean. Lack of financial goals. Vacation? That’s why we have tax “refunds.” If you haven’t got enough coming back or you end up with the IRS sending you a bill, well, then you play the lottery.

Unprepared people have hurt me. They’ve redirected my resources and thwarted my goals, jeopardizing or diminishing my dreams. They have, at the very least — excepting the occasions I rejected their conjured-up high-drama crises entirely — delayed what I was trying to do, which often had something to do with helping other people. In short: They have been agents of chaos.

People who have “too much” money haven’t done any of this to me.

This is not consistent with favored plot-lines and literature or movie drama. But it has been my experience and, from what I have learned about the experiences of others, it’s not unique.

Enough of this. It’s pablum for people who lack the attention span to review, or consider themselves above reviewing, results. It doesn’t bring good results. It wrecks things and causes misery.

It’s a good thing you’re running a charity that’s supposed to help people, Bill. Perhaps it can make up for some of the damage you’re doing here.

So we finally watched Solo, and I wasn’t that excited about it so I just glanced at it every now & then, sort of seeing it with half an eyeball. But I do have to say what I saw surprised me and it looked pretty good overall. All this fuss about the social justice robot seemed overblown, to me.

Disney’s new direction, I’ve come to realize, has stirred a sort of weariness in me. It’s not annoyance and it’s not actual fatigue. I’m weary of going through the motions pretending something is deep and complex, when at the end of it the narrative turns out to be threadbare and shallow. Back in my childhood, the franchise excited us as a meeting-place between technology and spiritualism, as good confronted evil. That’s gone, and what a shame that is. What we had before wasn’t just a mix of tech and holy ghosts, all dumped into a big bag & shaken together. There was planning, there was elegance.

There was real mystery. Yeah we were disappointed when we realized Lucas was making it all up day-by-day as he went along…there’s no explanation for Darth Vader standing right in front of his own daughter and being unable to sense her. Sorry, but every explanation you’ve heard about that is bunk. The unavoidable fact is that Leia was not his daughter in 1977, and by 1983, she was. But at least each character had a solid anchoring within a much larger story, including Leia…who, since then, has become a plainer, simpler, less interesting character.

It’s not just Leia. Some of the old elegance, that depth of good story-telling, has been bleached out by this effervescent drive toward “Girls Are Awesome!!” Okay, yeah, boys got a lot of inspiration out of Star Wars and there’s a desire to share this among girls who couldn’t get into it. This issue with girls who couldn’t get into it, puzzles me too. I recall the girls being just as inspired as we were, and having just as much fun. These days it seems we have a lot of people who see yet another inequality in need of correction. But the people most agitated about that, don’t warm up too cozily to the concept of religion. As a consequence, Star Wars has lost depth. I tire of obligatorily pretending the depth is still there when it isn’t.

It’s come to be just another thing social justice warriors are wrecking. And we’re not supposed to notice.

This issue of the droids being potentially sentient and therefore deserving of rights, though, does rightfully claim an anchoring in the old trilogy, specifically at the moment when Luke tries to enter the Mos Eisley Cantina with his droids and is curtly informed by the bartender “We don’t serve their kind.” Therein lies a loose thread, that can be pulled to offer us the story of how oppressive things are in this galaxy at that time. I remember wondering about this, maybe for just a split second, clear back in ’77 as I was trying to take in the story. I guess this is just a weak point in the story-telling, because with good story-telling things should have a point, a reason to be. What was the reason for this exchange?

Luke comments to 3PO that they should acquiesce, which they do, since they “don’t want any trouble.” Is this to clue us in on the situation that, with the Empire looking for the droids and the entourage now wading into a much more densely populated area, they’re in danger? Seems redundant. Is this setting up a theme that “there are alternatives to fighting,” which is picked up a little while later as the Millennium Falcon is sucked into the Death Star? Or a situation in which the droids are out in the alleyways looking for proper hiding spaces, instead of meeting Han Solo and the Wookie?

Maybe, when it came time for Obi-Wan to save Luke by slashing that guy’s arm off and killing the insect-creature, a couple of zany mechanical sidekicks would have hurt the suspense factor? I never did get a good answer to this. George Lucas has always been a stickler for the good-storytelling rule that, if there isn’t a definable reason for a thing being there, the thing should be ejected along with even the most marginal risk of possibly boring the audience. Seems to me the Mos Eisley Cantina could’ve gone right on ahead “serving their kind,” the droids could’ve waddled around, and everything with the story would have been fine. So what gives?

I’m very sure there’s nothing deep or challenging in the state, or degree, of droid sentience that I’m missing. As characters in the story, the droids service the whims of children who haven’t yet put any serious thought into the difference between gadgets and living things. The droids do things robots simply don’t do, like express pleasure while taking a hot oil bath, swear at each other and tell each other to “switch off,” etc. To adults who fancy themselves sufficiently sophisticated to ponder weighty moral issues, they’re toasters, with just some fictional/metaphorical embellishments added, like speech to a cartoon animal, to entertain the less mature.

Toasters don’t need liberating. Oh yes, I know slaveholders referred to their slaves exactly this way in the antebellum era…they’re things and not people. This doesn’t cause me much discomfort with regard to my toaster. As far as I’m concerned it can stay where it is.

Independent Sentinel:

Radical leftist Cory Booker has been a vegetarian roughly since 1992, and it began as an experiment. He is committed to it now and wants us to all be vegetarians to save Planet Earth.

The planet can’t sustain all the meat eaters, he told vegnews.com.

“You see the planet earth moving towards what is the Standard American Diet. We’ve seen this massive increase in consumption of meat produced by the industrial animal agriculture industry. The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” he said.

There just isn’t enough land, he said. There is too much rainforest destruction and too many greenhouse producing gases, he added.

Hmmm…I like eating meat, but let’s leave that alone for now. After all, the continuing survival of the planet is at steak, er, stake.

The problem here is that I do lots of other things, besides eating meat, that we can’t afford to have everyone doing. The lot size of my house, for example, multiplied by 3.77 billion (world’s population divided by my household’s population) would come to how much land mass? I have a job, and drive a car to get there. I use up services, I consume goods. Not just meat, I also go through a lot of coffee, to say nothing of beer and wine.

You know what I think would make a big, negative environmental impact? If everybody stopped eating meat. How come no one’s exploring that? Could you just imagine? These discussions surface about eating-meat, and people automatically think about cows. Every now and then I’ll come to learn about the actual throughput of chickens, though, and it’s hard to fathom. Hundreds and hundreds, per day, in one tiny little restaurant…what if we were all to quit, uh, cold-turkey. All those chickens that would’ve been butchered every day instead just strutting around making more chickens.

I would imagine one of the first things to happen would be an acute corn crisis. Corn requires a massive investment in land use, and all of the time. You use an acre to grow corn, you can’t use that acre for anything else. I could take this further, but I think I’ve already passed the point that’s been given any serious thought by the Senator or those in agreement. Liberals like to talk about simple things, like individual liberty, being “complex” and “tricky” so they can disguise what they want to do. But then they come to whether the planet can survive the way we do things, and all of a sudden things aren’t tricky anymore, they’re nice and simple, like a fast car barreling toward a brick wall, or a cliff. But that’s exactly when things really are tricky, and not that simple.