The Perils of Laws and Perceptions

I wrote this in response to an article about new tobacco taxes and the reasons for them. A respondent stated there were no conspiracies behind most things done by government. It has often been said that money is the root of all evil—coupled with the desire for power and you have the answer to most of the world's problems.

You are right, there are no conspiracies. If we follow the money we always find the force behind many of the things you mentioned(drug and alcohol laws). Statistics are padded and ignored to bring about the results wanted. A statistician will tell you he or she can support any belief.  Even when we ourselves look at raw numbers we can't be sure of the truth. I have looked deeply into  DUI statistics. They will tell us how many people are killed each year in alcohol related accidents, or how many people are killed by drunk drivers.

What the statistics and proponents of laws don't tell us is that a DUI caused accident doesn't mean the drinker was the cause of the accident. They don't tell us that speeding or reckless driving was the cause. We aren't told the road was covered in ice and it was truly just an accident.  When a beer can is found on the roadside, or a weeks old empty in the floorboard, the accident becomes alcohol related. If the attending officer can smell what he/she believes to be alcohol, even if it's cough medicine, it becomes an alcohol related accident.

What happened to the 4th Amendment?

For the past few days as I watched events unfold in Boston, my mind was a jumble of thoughts. I watched as innocent people suffered at the hands of terrorists. I watched as Americans tried to rally against those terrorist who would make us afraid to leave our homes and to gather in mass to follow American traditions.

As time passed, I watched the news and tried to to pick real facts out of a maze of distortions cast by the media and the police, themselves. I cast no blame for that misinformation because I know some was done by accident and some for good intentions. I suspect it might be a long time before we have all the true facts of the story, and it's for that reason I tread lightly.

I spent my life trying to understand the how and why of all things. In this search I have seen a lot of rights and wrongs. I have come to the conclusion that the greatest question we can ask is, what is right? There are many perceptions of right and wrong, of moral and immoral. Sometimes the path to enlightenment lies in the questions themselves. So let's ask some questions.

Who is correct, the political left or right? I think both sides are correct, but it's in the solutions where the differences lie. Not long after the Occupy Wall Street event, I spent all night talking to both organizers and participants. I found them to be greatly divided on solutions, in part, because we all think differently. Part of the reason for their differences was that some of the organizers were out for power and money, while participants were average citizens wanting a voice.

The Perfect Candidate

Obama was the perfect Manchurian candidate. He was black, so anyone that offered opposition was immediately labeled racist. Obama was charismatic and was not the traditional black community organizer. There was an American electorate that was unhappy with two wars and a declining economy, which made the call for change a nice prospect. People were ready for someone to fundamentally change America. There was a complicit media that did nothing but cheer lead the first African-American candidate that could possibly win. Those of us that bothered to look into what lay past the facade were called racist.

What we saw, and now most Americans are seeing, is a man filled with hate for all things that make us Americans. He is an anti-colonialist, a term few of us were familiar with at the time of the election. They didn’t know that change was socialism and globalism. People were blinded by words and failed to see that Obama wanted to mold his presidency in the form of the man who was the most revered, albeit mistakenly, by American history, Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was only one way to be FDR and that was to create another Great Depression. I’m not sure if the timing of the sub-prime collapse was when he and the Democratic Party planned, but the timing was perfect. That catapulted him into the White House. We know now the collapse of the sub-prime market was foreseen, and possibly planned.

Government Protection or Loss of Liberty?

Our government has decided that they need to see our nude bodies or demand intrusive body searches. They do this all in the name of safety as we fly. There is all this extreme caution at airports, yet not one terrorist has ever been caught by a TSA agent.

The 9/11 hijackers and the so-called Christmas day bomber were not found by TSA agents despite the fact the government had been alerted to the danger prior to the attacks. We know that the average terrorists are Muslim with dark complexions, and are between the ages of 17 and 34. If we know this, why do we have government personnel searching white elderly people and children? They do it in the name of being politically correct. They will pass up the opportunity to search someone fitting the profile of a terrorist and intimately search a child. They are also doing this in their war on drugs that has failed miserably.