A year or so ago I did a column on how much we could all save if we did away with plastic grocery bags — the annual consumption, I calculated, in the United States equals Utah’s entire oil production, and Utah is 10th in the nation in oil production.

Which is to say, we don’t produce a whole lot, but in these days when we’re sending billions to Saudi Arabia to buy oil from people who hate us and call us infidels and hold television telethons to raise money for suicide bombers in Israel, should we really be taking any of our oil, at all, and using it for disposable bags? Probably not.

Not to mention, the silly things cost 5 cents each. That’s a lot of money, especially when you consider the dimwit who usually bags my groceries only puts three items in each bag.

Anyway, Florida is discussing a proposal (click here) to do away with plastic bags, phasing them out and then charging people 25 cents each if they do use them. When Ireland instituted a similar fee for plastic bags a few years ago they disappeared overnight. It’s being attacked as a horrible huge tax on the poor, but it seems to be the poor are as able to buy a reusable bag as anyone else, especially since they only cost a buck each, can hold what three plastic bags can hold (6 if you get the kid who bags mine) and will pay for themselves many times over.

I’d like to see this go much wider, much faster. It’s a slight bother to have to remember your canvas bag, but that’s better than sending money to people who hate me. I would think Americans are tough enough to handle that much sacrifice.

And then Utah’s oil could go to powering Utah’s car, not clogging its landfills.

In a post right below  here, Doug Gibson looks at recent polling data and wonders why more Americans call themselves conservative, but the Republican Party is losing ground.

I posted a response to him there, but thought I’d expand on it here.

I’ve been telling Doug for some time now that the terms “Republican” and “Conservative” don’t mean anything any more. Same thing goes for “liberal” and “democrat.”

You can be conservative (the adjective) without being A CONSERVATIVE (the noun) if you catch my drift — the title is totally disassociated from the action, and the Republican Party even more so. In Nixon’s Checkers speech he said his wife Pat had “a good Republican cloth coat,” and he chose that phrase very carefully because the Republican party fancies itself as the party of the common man, and the common man watches his pennies.

I’m conservative because that is how I lead my life — simply, cheaply, with an affinity for small consumption, little govenrment intrusion and a demand that government pay for what it buys, just like me.

The group of people who call themselves the core of the Republican party, and claim to be conservatives (noun) are not conservative (adjective) at all — they believe in massive government spending and debt, huge expansion of government powers and intruding government oversight into the doctor’s office — they live in massive expensive houses, drive massive expensive cars and lead massive expensive lives.

I believe in paying for what you buy — yes, even if that includes raising taxes. The so-called “conservatives” of the so-called “Republican” party threw two wars and actually cut government revenue, through tax cuts.

That’s fiscally irresponsible and politically insane. It tells the people that they can have something for nothing and put the whole thing on the nation’s Visa card. That’s a policy that’s good for short-term gains in popularity, but in the long run is unsustainable, as the current national deficit shows. It hit a trillion under Obama, but the path was set under 8 years of  Bush, who added trillions of dollars to the national debt while continually promising that his budget would balance someday, always in the future.

I believe in smaller and less intrusive government. That includes staying the hell out of life-or-death medical decisions such as that brain dead chick that our Rep. Biship was ready to fly across the Atlantic, at massive public expensive, to vote to intrude the federal government into. Government has no business at all making rules about who can get married, who can get an abortion, or who can be tought how to keep from getting pregnant. The expansion of government snooping powers under the so-called “Patriot” act is frightening in the extreme.

I believe in effeciency and eliminating waste. That means, among many other things, making health care available for all to cut medical bankruptcies and avoid forcing people to wait until they’re so sick they qualify for emergency room treatment, as President Bush so blithly advice people to do.

So, yeah, I’m conservative. Sadly, the Republican party, which is composed of a lot of people who call themselves conservatives, is the antithesis of all I stand for.

And, please note, I am very aware that the Republican party SAYS it is for much of what I believe in. Sadly for them, I look at actions, not words. When the Republican party starts acting like real conservatives, I’ll be happy to give it another look.

There is a fixed deposit of $24.5m usd in my bank branch (Hang Seng Bank,Hong
Kong) where i am a director and i am ready to share 50/50 with you if you
choose to stand as my deceased client’s next of kin. if interested mail me at
the address below: (email removed.  sorry. this is my game.)
Yours Truly,
Ming Yang.

One has to wonder where the anti-Christ will appear. There is speculation in some circles that he will reveal himself (herself?) in a more disassociated way then as a mere human being-type person.

Consider the cell phone.

An article in the NYTimes (here) describes the remaining 15 percent of the population that hasn’t been enfolded in the warm embrace of the cell phone yet. In 20 years this new technology has grown, Borg like (Blob-like, for us older types) and it looks as if it is going to take a lot more than phaser or fire extinguishers to make it all stop.

It is interesting that an entire technology has grown to encompass 85 percent of the population in a mere 20 years or so. Billions of dollars of the economy depend on it now. Sure would be cool if they made those things in this country.

But I digress.

Really, is there any more intrusive technology around? It turns normally prudent drivers into maniacs, makes us all tell our most intimate secrets to strangers in line to buy groceries, and leads to panic attacks when we forget where we put the damn thing, leading us to frantically call it and race around the house hoping to hear it ring, or twitter, or sing, or whatever idiotic ring tone it has, before the battery dies and it disappears into a nether world of lost socks, pens, lens caps and pennies.

I remember resisting. My family was among the last on our block. Only the insistance of my employer that I had to have one as a condition of employment, made me consent.  

Plus my wife was starting her schooling in Logan. Driving all those winter canyon roads, “what if something happens?” she said. Nothing did, but she felt better.

So now I can be called by anyone, anywhere. I remember, during one period of family crisis, getting a phone call while wandering Deseret Industries and finally pleading that sitting on an old sofa surrounded by used books and dead toasters wasn’t working as a place to discuss that sort of stuff.

The days when I forget to take it with me are bliss. Anyone can forget, right? And then nobody can find me, or call me, or ask me questions.

Amazingly, the world still spins.

I see where the White House is lashing out at former Veep Dick Cheney (WaPost story here) because the former Veep is saying President Obama is taking too long — “Dithering” — on his decision over Afghanistan troop levels.

Why can’t someone get this jerk to shut up? No, seriously.

This is beyond irresponsible. Sending troops to war is not a thing to be done hastily because making a mistake in that decision will get people killed.

One really has to wonder what the real agenda of Cheney, and perhaps the military who are leaking their reports about the war, is in this matter. Why are they in such a hurry? Why the rush to get soldiers killed?

This war was messed up on their watch when they didn’t just dither; they delayed, procrastinated, sat on their hands and them moved their efforts somewhere else. NOW, when the decision is not theirs, they want to act quickly?

Afghanistan is a place only fools rush in to, and we did, eight years ago. We’re paying the price for that foolishness now in treasure and funerals.

More treasure and funerals will not solve the problem, and might make it worse. As Nicholas Kristof, NYTimes columnist, argued at Weber State last week, and does again in his column today (Click!)  more American troops in a country where we are seen as propping up a disastrously corrupt government will look more and more like occupiers to the people who live there. That means they’ll hate us and join anyone who promises to make us go away.

Since the more troops we put in also means that more innocent civilians will, inevitably, be killed in accidents or on purpose, that also means we’ll have more and more sworn enemies. Americans forgive and forget quickly — Germany and Japan –  but Afghanistan is a country where people measure their grudges in centuries.

Cheney’s criticism is double hypocritical because he claims that Obama is delaying even though the Bush administration prepared a study of the whole situation telling him what to do. He accuses Obama of ignoring all this sage advice — an odd charge coming from someone whose efforts to rebuild Iraq after invading that country were hamstrung by the Bush Administration’s insistance that anyone, no matter what level of expertise in nation building, be excluded from the rebuilding effort if they had any connection whatsoever with the Clinton Administration.

Bush and Cheny put the job of rebuilding Iraq in the hands of party hacks and political favor seekers, with the results we saw in the headlines for five years. The book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran documents the resulting disaster in very painful detail.

Don’t tell me the book is no good because it was obviously written by a liberal. Show me the book by a so-called “conservative” that documents how well the rebuilding effort went.

Not to mention, I believe it is President Bush who, in the months preceeding 9-11, ignored a CIA report titled something along the lines of “Osama Bin Laden plans to attack the U.S.” It was given to him by a CIA courier who Bush told, I believe, “OK, You’ve got your butt covered,” and then went back to chopping brush.

So  Cheney should just shut up. He adds nothing, is playing political games and obviously cares nothing for the security of the country unless that includes more business for Halliburton.

If Obama is taking his time on a decision, let him — the war’s not going away and for once I would like to see a decision in this country made intelligently.

After 8 years of Bush and Cheney’s methods, it will be a nice change, whatever Obama decides.

heres a lot of discussion about a talk that LDS authority Dallin Oaks made a bit ago. Our editorial is HERE (CLICK) A political cartoon by Bagley at the SLTribune (go find it yourself, but it’s worth the hunt) is going viral.

In addition to wondering why members of a church that suffered incredibly unfair discrimination at the hands of Bible thumpers would turn around and sanction, in any way shape or form, discrimination against anyone else is beyond me. I was particuly puzzled, also, by Oaks statements about atheism, saying it is hostile to religion.

I’m not sure why atheism is a threat to religion for the same reason that gays marriage is supposed to be a threat to marriage. In neither case is anyone stopped from believing, or marrying, who they choose.

I’m not an atheist, but I have no problem with anyone being one. Fair is as fair does. The fear tossed around in the argument is that athiests somehow lack the moral compass that religion imparts to its believers, and so atheists might feel freer to commit sin, or crime, or whatever, because they’re godless.

The number of Catholic priests and LDS Bishops who’ve had problems with sexual improprieties over the years puts the lie to this assumption. Morality comes from within, not from a Bible. If you need the fear of God to keep you from sinning you have much deeper problems than going to church can solve.  

I’ve always Jesus’ advice applied in these cases: Do to others as you want them to do to you. You want me to respect your beliefs, you respect mine, and that includes not trying to legislate me into following yours. That goes for gay marriage, atheism, or anything else.

I made a sad observation at the Golden Hours Center the other day while listening to a POW from the Vietnam War speak.

While waiting for the speaker to start, I talked with several of the people there, all older people of course. As usual, a lot of them liked the column and had to come say so.

One woman surprised me when she said “I would like to shake your hand but they tell us we can’t touch anyone or hug anyone,” and that was about the time I noted the large economy sized bottle of hand sanitizer on every table in the place.

I know everyone is worried about H1N1 flue virus, and it can be serious, although the rates of people dying still haven’t risen to anywhere near the numbers of people who die every year from the regular flu (35,000) or traffic accidents (40,000 or so).

On the other hand, anything that keeps old people from hugging someone is just tragic. That’s what they do, and it is a sad thing to lose.

It makes me wonder if there isn’t more than a bit of media-driven hysteria going around.  People always get sick from something, and the things we’re being warned about now with this H1N1 are really things we should have been doing all along with regular flu, or the common cold: Washing our hands regularly, staying home when we’re sick, learning not to cough on anyone.

Of course, some times all efforts to keep safe are for nought: An editor here whose wife works at a grocery store said a woman came through with a coughing child in the grocery cart. The woman said the kid had to stay home from school because he had H1N1 (how did she know? I think a lot of people assume) but then why was she trundling the kid all around a grocery store?

My friend’s wife had to be polite, but very discreetly told the bagboy to go sanitize that cart before letting anyone else push it around.

Ok, maybe not the real end, such as the Mayan Calender running out so we’re all going to go “pfft!” some day, but interesting national stories that do show that, essentially, we as individuals have little real power to protect ourselves against the corporate masters increasingly turning themselves into feudal lords.

Consider this story in the NYTimes (click!) about a woman who had a “angus select” hamburger and was paralyzed by the resulting e-coli which, the story makes clear, even following FDA food preparations guidelines might not have prevented because the stuff is so dangerous.

I was struck by several things in the story — the comparisons to practices in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” are inevitable and reasonably accurate. The statements by the head of the FDA that he can’t require better testing because it might make things hard for the industry, and he can’t do that, of course. Which raises the question, who’s on our side if our own govenrment doesn’t put our safety first?

One thing the story doesn’t say out loud, but should, is the fraudulent use of the word “angus” to describe that meat — Angus cattle allegedly taste better, and you see it hyped all over, with “angus burgers” costing more than regular ones, although I can’t tell any difference. As we see in this story, so-called “angus” cattle are never mentioned in the supply line, and who can tell the breed of all those scaps and leavings they mix together, dose with amonia and then package up all pretty?

Makes one swear off hamburger – or at least only buy hamburger from a butcher who makes it himself.

Another story is this one also in the NYTimes, about the Simmons Mattress company  and its fate, facing bankruptcy, after being the subject of 20 years of financial manipulation by the captains of the financial world.

Essentially, the company was bought and sold by a series of investment firms who piled the company with the debt they’d used to buy it, then turned around and sold it to someone else who also piled on more debt to buy it — a mirror of the housing market, using the same idiotic assumption that value would always go up so it was Ok to keep milking the process.

The victims in all this were the employees who actually made the product, of course. All these managers managed to make the company look good on paper, for a while, and they lined their own pockets. It was all a Ponzi scheme, however, that broke down the minute the housing bubble burst and all the paper profits inflating everything disappeared.

What does this mean for us? Newspapers around the country were bought and sold in a similar process that has now left them so loaded with debt that they can’t react to lean times the way a company could if it were properly managed with an eye to protecting not only the stockholders but the employees. Housing market? We all know how that went, and is going.

The entire nation went on a borrow-and-spend bender, and these are all just symptoms. Getting back to responsible financial practices is going to take time and dicipline. Meanwhile, as this story makes clear, the captains of industry are already trying to find other ways to mile Simmons of more money. And, heck, why not? The process worked for them. It’s only workers who lose jobs, and who cares about them?

This just in: Chicago didn’t get the 2016 Olympic games.

Lucky them. No, seriously.

The story at the Chicago Tribune is here (click) and I am being perfectly serious. I speak from experience.

Utah had an Olympic games once. We bribed people to get them — my favorite bribe was the hundreds of dollars worth of door knobs someone on the IOC got — and lobbied like heck, and spent a gazillion dollars and got out of it, as near as I can see, nothing.

OK, we got world wide fame. We got some nifty pictures on our highway overpasses. We all have drawers full of cute little pins.

Whoopie-dee-do.

We spent billions of federal welfare building up I-15 in Salt Lake County (which work was done with so much quality and foresight that chunks of it are already being torn out and re-done), sports venues for the rich to play on and who knows what else. Thousands of Utahns got short-term work at minimum wage, thousands more volunteered to work for free in exchange for the experience.

But that was it.

Ogden got bupkis out of it. All the international exposure may have made money for Earl Holding and Snow Basin, but it didn’t do anything for me, or my neighbors.

OK, it joined with the housing boom to boost the values of homes in Ogden Valley and Ogden’s bench, raising everyone’s property taxes. Some say that’s good, but the widows in Huntsville who are losing their homes because they can’t pay their taxes now may disagree.

Ogden claims to be using the afterglow of the games to boost its own effort to be a winter sports mecca. That may be true, but if  it is it was a darned expensive PR campaign, billions of dollars just so some guy in an office can tell Mayor Godfrey, “Hey, I saw you guys on TV.”

Really, we could have spent a lot less money boosting Utah and gotten the same thing. Oh, wait, no, that would mean we would have to spend our own money. The Olympics let us spend federal money to spread the word of how self-sufficient, worker-friendly and anti-big government Utah is.

Sorry, I know I sound cynical, but what’s not to be cynical about the Olympic games? They meant something once, back when Jim Thorpe was losing his medals for having the gall to play pro-football one summer to make food money, but now they’re just a ticket to well-paid fame for a bunch of coddled and very rich athletes who work for advertising companies. They are a massive corporate party that moves around the planet, extorting millions, if not billions, from communities in exchange for the right to have the Olympic brilliance settle down for a couple of weeks. The towns make a little money selling pins, get some publicity, and get to clean up the mess.

The games do not create lasting economic activity. They contract with national and international corporations to do the big stuff — Mitt Romney was not a Utahn before he was hired and is not a Utahn now — sending all the big salaries right back out of town again. Any jobs created for the locals are 1-time construction or minimum wage hot dog slinging.

If the Olympic games were really about competition and fairness and all that they’d pick one spot and hold them there every four years. There’s no money in that idea, just good athletics, so it will never happen.

OK, Jerry Pobanz called me up this morning about today’s column on bicycle/car safety and in the process of talking we came up with a way to solve Utah’s budget crisis.

Two words: Photo radar.

Here’s the deal. My column today is on how people in cars are trying to kill each other, and the rest of us. Seriously, they are. Don’t think so, you obviously don’t drive, or bicycle, or bike, or even walk. Heck, people sleeping in their bedrooms have been assaulted by cars several times this year alone. Nobody is safe.

Jerry wondered if people, who are polite about bumping into other folks in hallways, suddenly undergo a brainectomy when they turn their key on. My own theory is that people in cars think they’re safe, and as long as they’re safe all is right with the world.

One solution would be to have everyone drive around in cars made of papier mache’, sort of like those Trabants the East Germans used to make. When you drove one of those you were very, very safe because hitting a bird at speed could smash in the front of the car which, no kidding, was made of paper.

But paper cars won’t sell in America, tend to be a fire hazard, and they won’t solve our budget problems. Here’s what we do:

Set up photo radar, which photographs the license plate of every car breaking the speed limit, in a construction zone where the speed limit is 55 m.p.h. Turn it on, and send a traffic ticket with an $80 fine to everyone going by who exceedes the speed limit by more than 5 m.p.h.

Which, as you know, is everyone.

Seriously, there are 40,000 cars per hour using some sections of I-15 at peak hours. If you want to really piss off every single one of  them set your cruise control at 55 m.p.h., or whatever the posted limit is, settle down in the right hand lane and watch the middle fingers wag. That’s assuming they’re going slow enough for you to see. Usually they’re not.

In one hour under those conditions, photo radar would generate $3.2 million.

As a business model, I think this is pretty sound. There is the possibility that word could get out and people might actually slow down, but I doubt it.  

Utahns will pay, and they won’t slow down. Utahns didn’t slow down when gasoline hit $4 a gallon, making the price of a trip to Salt Lake and back something like $12 a day for the gasoline alone.

They bought a few fewer large gas guzzlers, but not a lot fewer. Utahns consider it their right to drive fast in big vehicles, and they’re not going to let anything stop them, not as long as they can boost their credit card limit.

If we only set up photo radar once a week at any given spot, the cost to people driving there would be about the same as gasoline, and there’s always the chance that the photo radar won’t see their license plate because the car behind them is tailgating. Drivers will get a pass on enough weeks to make it a sporting proposition.

So I think the Highway Patrol should get on this. Photo radar has been criticized for hitting the owner of the vehicle, not the driver, but that strikes me as a small point.  Other countries seem to do fine with zinging the licensed owner and letting him/her deal with whoever was actually driving.

If this doesn’t fly, I have other ideas, mostly centered around this apparent booming industry in Morgan growing marijuana. The revenue from taxes on that stuff would be enormous …..