NASA needs to be grounded, forever.

Mission control- come in mission control. To all of you boys and girls at NASA, slowly push back away from your million dollar toys, the professionals are here to do the job right. That's right, trying to re-launch the shuttle program now is a bit behind the times. Burt Rutan, the White Knight and Space Ship One are the wave of the future. While you were sitting on your thumbs trying to figure out how to keep your jobs, Spaceship One was successfully launched into space TWICE within two weeks and returned to Earth safely. Game over, give it up. NASA had a Cold War fueling the fervor of the 60s and 70s, but the good ol' US of A is back to worshiping the almighty dollar and corporate America is about to hand you your pink slips. There is money to be made in space and the idealistic relic known as NASA is sitting squarely in the way of real innovation. If you want a case of compassionate euthanasia in Florida; PLEASE put NASA out of its misery!
On a different note Farm Aid is back for a concert in Chicago. I wonder if John and the other dozen Mellancamps will be there with their hands out? At least they're asking for cash this time and not preaching about how overtaxing the G-8 nations will make the world a better place.
SOMEBODY TAKE MY GOVERNMENT AWAY!!

Keep your eye on the ball!

American politics can be summed up with the following two words: shell game. The politicians try as hard as they can to get the voters to focus all of their attention on something other than the true objective of the game. Sometimes they give you sex scandals to distract you and other times they simply play with words to get you to think that what they are doing is going to be good for you. The whole idea of campaign finance reform is a great point for the latter. The politicians have more power than they should have, power to make or break people, companies and even countries. That power is a commodity that forms a market where it is bought and sold. The politicians play their little game with you though and sell you campaign finance reform which they tell you will take the money out of politics. They know that they are the problem but have sold you on the idea that money is the problem. Campaign finance reform is now law but it hasn’t taken a dime out of politics. Why? Because the power is still there and there is still a market for that power. The only way to stop the money is to take away the market which means taking away the power that the politicians have marketed for so long. The politicians have also sold you on the idea that making drugs illegal will make them go away. Has it? No, drugs are still available because there is still a demand for them and a very enthusiastic supply base. The only thing the "War on Drugs" has done is make drugs that are dangerous to their users dangerous to everyone around them. Last night I heard that prescription drug abuse has doubled in the last decade. Now abuse of Oxycontin and Ritalin is higher than abuse of cocaine and heroin combined. Which is the way they want it. They don't want you to not take drugs they just want you to take their drugs. For society in general, alcohol is more dangerous than any illegal drug. It causes more domestic violence, more car accidents and more health problems than any other drug out there. The politicians already tried to outlaw it once with disastrous consequences. The same problems this nation had with alcohol prohibition are the same problems we see today with drug prohibition. The politicians have sold us something much more dangerous than drugs, they have sold us the idea that the government can do something about them.

Do fireworks=freedom?

Here we are, another Fourth of July behind us. Every year that I have been alive our government has gained power and individual citizens have lost freedoms. This year as in several years past fireworks were illegal to use in the state of Colorado. Our benevolent dictators once again felt the need to protect the ignorant citizens from themselves. So there I sat last night, all of my patriotic fervor packed into a state sponsored fireworks display. I will be the first to admit that the big fireworks are fun to watch. I would have been all for a few of the guys at the fire department setting up a fireworks fund for the community so everyone here could enjoy the big fireworks as they were set off by trained firefighters. Unfortunately, sitting there watching the fireworks I could not get my mind off of the idea that the dollars spent for those fireworks were forcefully taken by the government. The same government that recently outlawed almost all other fireworks. The government really hates competition when they're stealing from you. The phrase they used for what you could use was "Safe and Sane" fireworks. WHAT?? Fireworks by their very nature are neither. You don't use fireworks in day-to-day life because they are dangerous. People who make blowing things up their jobs don't use fireworks because gunpowder is too unreliable and doesn’t pack enough punch. Fireworks are only a manifestation of our celebratory spirit meant to be miniature recreations of the "rockets red glare...bombs bursting in air". They are dangerous and with every liberty there necessarily comes a responsibility. Too many parents don’t take their responsibility seriously and kids get seriously hurt. It only takes so many pictures of poor little Billy standing their with three fingers left and no eyebrows to open the door for the nannyists to walk in spouting about protecting ourselves from ourselves. And voila!! I'm sitting there on a Fourth of July "enjoying" my local state sponsored fireworks show wondering how much freedom I have left for them to take.

Alan Greenspan: Rock Star!?!

Here it is at last the Live 8 concerts, proudly brought to you by the same people you saw sleeping in the back of your economics class. They don’t want you to give charitable donations this time; they want you to ask your government to tax you out of your money after the government forgives debts to Africa. On that single basis along the debt relief is a bad idea; I for one don’t need more taxes. To make things worse, it WON”T HELP!!! The problem with Africa is not that the people are poor, the problem is that the way the governments work in Africa no one will ever have property or money. The dictator du jour found in most African governments creates instability. The laws in the African countries do not recognize individual property rights. They do not allow for banking systems like they do in the First World nations. Africa is made up of Third World nations not because they lack resources or they compassion of the G8 nations. It is because their governments will not institute laws that allow them to modernize their economies and become First World nations.
Let me attempt a little lesson in logic here. What all of these singers and movie stars are doing is called (in the Latin) argumentum ad verecundiam. Otherwise called argument or appeal to authority. They are singers! When Bono wins a Nobel Prize in economics he can lecture all of us about how debt relief will save Africans from their own governments. Until then as far as I am concerned the only thing Bono knows about economics is that when U2 puts out a new album his bank account grows. I wouldn’t necessarily want Alan Greenspan to put out a new rock album and I definitely don’t want Bono standing in as an economics professor.