The world is falling apart and everyone is blaming the other guy, nobody wants to look in the mirror and point at themselves. Bumper stickers abound talking trash about everything, and the pundits on the airwaves have it all figured out. The conservatives blame the liberals and visa-versa. I don't have all the answers, I will leave some of that to the people who are way smarter than me, but I know some things, and I feel that I need to say something. Here is what I see:
In my local city, (Rochester) they are getting government money to install red-light cameras at particularly troublesome intersections. These cameras are designed to snap pictures of the license plates and drivers of vehicles passing through intersections that have red lights. Duh! "The great Orwellian society is taking over." "It is the age of big brother." This is the cry of the public now. Um... Guess what? There are cameras everywhere you go these days waiting to catch you doing something wrong. In the parking lots, in the malls and the stores. In the gas stations, and in the restaurants. Anywhere that people congregate there are cameras watching. The biggest difference is that, MORE PEOPLE BREAK TRAFFIC LAW THAN ANY OTHER LAW. Sad sack sumbitches think that now they will get caught doing something that they shouldn't. Mostly because they have been doing it for so long that they figure that they will forget the cameras are there and get nailed. I'm sure they will. I don't like it, but people have proven for generations that they can't be trusted. When I was a child someone once said to me, " A lock will only keep an honest man honest." I think that is probably one of the truest things I have ever heard in my life. There is something in a human being that makes them wish to "get away" with something. Whether it is extra dessert when nobody else gets it, or finding an open door or slipping through a red light when no one is coming. Even the most Honest person in the world will eventually slip up and let nature goad them into something. Maybe they peek in a window and see a naked lady, or snitch the last donut. IT happens. It's human nature, like fighting and arguing. Sadly traffic cameras are more about generating income for a city than they are about traffic enforcement. It's a newer and sneakier tax. There is another things that the police are using now to catch scofflaws too called a traffic scanner. It's a highspeed camera attached to a computer that scans plates and stickers for validity and warrants. Lazy cops! Whatever happend to knowing your people? Get out and walk around the neighborhoods! Get off the bbicycles and out of the patrol cars and walk. Get to know the people again.
Guns are in the news and in a big way. People dieing and people killing. Whole families wiped out because of the despair factor. Insanity and instability making people go out with a bang. (pun intended) But there is another thing that I know the Pro-gun and the anti-gun crowd haven't considered as a contributing factor here. It was dramatically pointed out in the Pittsburgh Police officers deaths. The Pro-gun people have been harping constantly on how President Obama is going to take away our guns. The truth is that he has so much more to concentrate on, that it is highly unlikely that it is up at the top of his to-do list. Yet as long as the NRA and others keep pushing the buttons it will spur idiots to do stupid things, and this only adds fuel to the Anti-gun fires. Everytime a child dies or a family is torn apart or a maniac goes on a killing spree, the drums beat louder to take away our 2nd amendment rights. This will literally take a LOT of doing and no one president or congress will be able to do it. It will take most of a generation to get that kind of change enacted and it just isn't gonna happen yet. Sadly, the despair brought on by the economic situation in this country makes it more likely that people who were borderline stable to begin with will go off the deep end and do something to hurt themselves and those that they "love". Selfish bastards! Still, look at the overall statistics and you will see that more people die on Americas highways than at the end of a gun. And now here in Rochester we have a new problem...
Last Saturday morning (3 am) a man shot and killed a 17 year old kid who was breaking into cars. The basics of the story are this; A man heard noise and looked outside to see people moving from driveway to driveway. Being a leaglly licensed gun owner he grabbed his gun and told his girlfriend to call 911 and get the police coming. He went outside and yelled to the people to stop what they were doing, he warned them that he had a gun and he was calling the police. He found that it was three young men, and two of them took off running. The third one charged him despite his continued warnings. He fired two shots stopping the young man. He immediately ran back into his house and relayed to the police via the 911 operator that he had fired his gun and was afraid that he had killed the young man. He laid down his gun and put his permit with it as instructed by the police. He was arrested and put in jail and indicted by a grand jury. The young man's family has spoken out that their little angle could not have possibly been doing anything wrong. If he wasn't doing anything wrong, why was he out at 3 am? Why was he breaking into unlocked cars? Why did his cousins run and not look back? They are as culpable in his death as the man who pulled the trigger, and they should be charged as well. If they had stood still and kept their cousin from charging a man with a gun, they would all be alive and most likely on probation. Now a good man is going to stand trial and probably lose his job and half of what he has worked his whole life for, because he tried to do the right thing. To much to discuss here, but it's another example of neither side willing to see the middle ground where real life happens.
Scientists wish to put reflective particles into the atmosphere to cool the earth. Idiots!! I can't even believe that they are truly considering this act! The planet will fix itself if we give it the chance to come back into balance. Stuff in the atmosphere is the reason for our problems. I have watched enough of the History channel and Discovery to know that they are talking about Carbon Black. It's a very fine powder that when released in the atmosphere will cause cooling over large areas because it will block the suns rays and reflect them back into space. Uh huh. In small scale, earthbound, laboratory expriments it has proven to work, yet I truly fear putting this dust into the air. In 1980 when Mount St. Helens exploded, there was a decided cooling in the atmosphere and the summer was particularly mild. This was a natural phenomenon, and we had no control over it. The dust eventually settled and the atmosphere warmed back up the following year. Carbon black is FINE stuff and it could actually stay airborn in the atmosphere indefinitely. How long do we really want it up there and what would be the effect if it stayed there for a few years? How much crop loss would there be? How much crop loss could the world stand? We are near the edges of production capability on many things and even one year of significant crop loss could be plenty hurtful to many economies, but 2 or 3 years? That would be utter devastation and probably the beginning of the apocolypse. Screwing with the atmosphere in a deliberate way is worse than all the damgae that we have already done. We could easily bring the planet back into balance in a generation with some minor fixes. Messing with the atmosphere is too dangerous. It is the atmosphere that keeps us alive. We must have it to live. Without it we are done for. No question about it. The magnetosphere keeps out the excess solar ratiation and the atmosphere gives us life. Carbon is what got us into this mess and Carbon is NOT going to get us out, unless it is used as a way to gather solar energy and convert it into electricity. Solar power and wind power are the two things we need to develope in order to stave off the disaster that is looming in the future of humanity if we don't change our ways.
There I got that off of my chest! I feel BETTER, but still not very powerful!
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