Below you can read what I think about a few different subjects.  Some simple, rudimentary thoughts by a complicated (although maybe simple minded) man. They are my observations and opinions, nothing more and nothing less. They are meant to be kept or discarded as you please.

I’ve never been the sort of person who can fool himself. I can’t tell myself that I like things that I don’t. In other words if a doctor tells me to do something I don’t like, I might do it, but I am incapable, in any fashion, of convincing myself that “it’s okay”, I really do enjoy doing that. I mean, it’s me were talking about, I know what I like and what I don’t. I am incapable of lying to myself.

The world is full of people who can, by lying to themselves, convince themselves to do something they would otherwise not do. Most self-lies are rationalizations. Most people will eventually fail at that, but some people do succeed.

Joe Shmoe has grown weary of his vegan friends always telling him he should learn to eat this seed or that weed, so he decides that to make things easier he will give up his pizzas and Wendy’s cheeseburgers, just so he doesn’t have to listen to them anymore.

Two weeks later he says to his cheeseburger and pizza friends, I love what I am eating now, really, I do! Every day he lies to himself and says he really doesn’t like pizzas and cheeseburgers anyway.  They really don’t taste that well.

The years pass and Joe sticks to his diet. Eventually the pizzas and cheeseburgers aren’t even thought of anymore. He does have favorites in his current diet. Let’s say seaweed with flaxseed oil and Spiderwort petals. Mmmm!!! Now days Joe gets hungry for that particular favorite and he no longer even remembers what pizza and cheeseburgers taste like.

In the end there is value to any talent including the ability to lie oneself into doing what you don’t really want to do. The question is whether or not it’s worth it. Joe may now live to be 80 instead of 78. For some that’s more than worth it, for others it’s just two more years of seaweed, flaxseed oil and Spiderwort petals.

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Freedom should never be taken for granted and is “always” something that has to be fought for. First to be gained, and then to be kept. That battle has to be won not once, but perpetually. It never ends. We are never more than one generation away from losing our freedom. That last sentence is a paraphrase of a Ronald Reagan quote. History is replete with examples of taking freedom for granted, and the disastrous results. 20th Century Germany is just one example of that.

American universities were once the bastions of free speech. It was taken for granted. Now, the only speech that is free, is that which liberal professors approve of. In other words, free speech is dead in what was once called our schools of higher learning.

America has to get over this idea that we fight for what we believe in (freedom etc.), and if we win, then we can relax and just cruise. The battle goes on each and every day. Every day!  Democracy (representative republic), and the freedom of independent thought, is not a goal to be won and forever enjoyed. It is a standard of life that needs to be given a rebirth, much like the spring brings new blossoms.

Never take those blossoms for granted.

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Science and politics have become one in the same. I used to think that I could exclude health sciences from that truth, but I learned way back in the late 1990s that is often not the case.

In or around 1998 a Swedish health publication commissioned a group of scientists who were in the business of doing research and sometimes experiments, as an investigatory procedure to find out the truth about health related subjects. The publication was “supposedly” dedicate to revealing the truths as they are found by such groups.

Stop!! This needs to be said before I go on. As a former smoker, nobody is more sure than I, that a life without cigarettes, is not only longer, but more fruitful, than one with cigarettes. You will also have more money if you do not smoke. You will smell better, look better, and be happier with a life that is free of cigarettes and all addictions.

If you work or live around smokers, there is undoubtedly an inherent risk to you if you repeatedly breath that smoke. Most specifically, if you breath deeply or accidentally inhale a lot of second hand smoke. Common sense is well, common sense.

Just how much you do have to breath, and how deep you must inhale it to contact a disease, was not known in 1998 ( or even today), but it was heavily debated. The sentiment of the politically correct crowd led many of them to proclaim that second hand smoke was the world’s leading killer of innocent people. This was ascertained, without unbiased truth seeking data.

A couple of years were spent accumulating data and conducting experiments.

They came to an answer, and then reran many experiments and re-examined all of the data. The answer was the same. While second hand smoke clearly posed threats to the health of non-smokers, what we were being told about in resepct to what the results on people’s health was today, especially by the news media, was grossly exaggerated. Most people spend less time close enough to second hand smoke to be the hazard they thought. Most people, including cocktail waitresses and bartenders, do not take in nearly as much second hand smoke as any of us would think. They take in little to none into their lungs.

No!! The scientists were not bought and paid for by big tobacco. In fact, their recommendation was to avoid second hand smoke whenever possible. The point was that we needed to look in a variety of directions for the culprit in many cancers and other infirmities. We did not know, and still do not, just how serious second hand smoke is.

The scientists, divulged their findings to the sponsors of the tests. The publication first removed anything that did not suggest that second hand smoke was a major killer, but then they were left with almost no article to write. They killed the entire story.

Within a year those scientists who were involved, but were searching for the truth rather than just attempting to shore up what the politically correct crowd wanted the story to say, came out with the truth. The truth in what they found was not reported in most publications and by most news media, but it leaked out anyway.

Many, maybe most people in today’s world would say….so what! Smoking is bad for you so anything that reinforces that is good….right?

That sort of thinking, that fear of the truth, is dangerous.

If you can’t believe science on that issue, what makes you think you can believe anything? We were once told that SUVs were destroying the planet. How much time, money and effort should be spent, dispensing lies on behalf of political correctness, and ignoring real issues? May I ask when is it, that we can believe anything they say, if they pick and choose which truths to report and which to hide?

The big brother mentality, that it’s okay if they lie to us just as long is it is for the good of man (their definition of course) is the signature of a mindless society that wishes to be led around by the nose. What’s next, a bedtime mandated by the self-proclaimed do-gooders? After all, we ned our sleep.

Most of those who would micromanage my live or yours, are either in the government or connected to those who are.

We need people who run the government, not a government that runs the people.

America and much of the world is at a crossroads. A crossroads that shows freedom and self determination to one side, or a nanny state being led by people who are among the most untrustworthy among us on the other.

It’s up to us as to what road we travel.

That’s what I think,                                                                                                                                     Wayne