Posted by
Resa on Monday, March 05, 2007 11:13:33 AM
1. Child Abuse - Last week, I wrote that we are headed toward a
force-based society in which people will live in fear that their
neighbors will turn them in for eating the wrong foods, failing to sort
their garbage properly, or smoking near their children. I am sure
most people who read the article thought the prediction was ridiculous,
but later that same week, as I was driving toward downtown Louisville,
I saw a large billboard that said: “Second Hand Smoke – Child
Abuse”. (I wonder if my taxes were used to pay for that!) If
smoking around children is considered to be child abuse, and even
police chiefs are threatening to arrest parents who smoke in cars, then
it will not be much longer before there will be no-knock raids to try
to catch parents smoking in their own homes, and then children will be
removed from their homes to prevent them from being exposed to this
“child abuse”.
This is what happens when we allow junk science to go unchallenged in
the media and fail to respect parents. The talking heads on
television majored in journalism or acting and don’t have a clue about
science, but that doesn’t stop them from telling us that huge numbers
of people die each year from second-hand smoke. These
unscientific reports are repeated often enough that they become
political reality, so soon many good families will have to fear
no-knock raids and will be insecure in their own homes – talk about a
bad environment for children! And, once smoking in the home is
considered to be child abuse, then the real, serious types of child
abuse will be ignored or given less attention. So who will suffer
in the end? Children, of course.
2. Global Hot Air – The hottest
item on the junk science hit parade is global warming. This time,
the junk science folks want us to believe that burning fossil fuels
(coal, oil, and natural gas) is causing the earth to heat up, which
will result in tidal waves destroying New York City. While there
does seem to be agreement among a majority of knowledgeable scientists
that the earth is in one of its warming phases, there is not agreement
that any substantial part of that warming is caused by human activity,
and certainly no proof that humans could do anything to reduce the
warming regardless of what actions they take. (And the folks who
have been digging out of huge snowfalls this winter might question
whether reducing the warming would necessarily be a good thing!)
But that does not stop Al Gore and his friends from wanting to totally
cripple the economy and regulate us all back to the stone age. We
know that really would cause death and destruction as millions of
people would starve, and millions of others would die from lack of
sanitary facilities, lack of medical treatments, lack of safe
transportation, and lack of so many of the things we now take for
granted. It also doesn’t stop Al and his friends from using
twenty times as much energy in their homes as normal folks or from
flying around in gas guzzling private jets or driving gas guzzling
cars. No, they want all those crippling regulations to be for the
“little folks” like us – not for themselves.
3. Respect for Parents – Most
parents try very hard to do a good job raising their children, and yet
our society increasingly presumes that parents are bad or incompetent
and must be controlled. In addition to treating many common
activities as if they were child abuse (i.e. smoking, spanking, or
feeding children ice cream), society presumes that parents cannot be
trusted to educate their own children, so they must be forced by law to
send their children to schools and forced by law to support government
schools rather than the schools of their own choice. The
teachers’ unions want us to think that parents cannot be trusted to
spend vouchers or education scholarships wisely, but their real concern
is not the children. Their real concern is a fear of competition
and a desire to protect the paychecks of teachers who are doing a lousy
job. If parents had a choice, then the paychecks of incompetent
teachers would be at risk. So who really is looking out for the
children?
4. Health Care – Star Parker has an
excellent article this week explaining that the latest controversy
about forcing young girls to get shots to protect against cervical
cancer is a perfect example of what is wrong with our health care
system. It ignores the costs and puts control in the wrong
hands. She is right. I also just read that these shots will
only be effective for 4-5 years. Wonder why that wasn’t in
Merck’s press releases.
For more articles, go to http://www.JeffersonReview.com