Choosing Happiness

             A friend of mine who dearly loved my mother just sent me an email saying our family reminded her of “Little House on the Prairie.”  That brought to mind a guy I used to teach with who called us the Flagstaff Waltons.  It causes me to reflect.  

             According to my mother’s count, we moved some 28 times into a series of 1 or 2 bedroom houses.  (Our Minot house had 4 bedrooms, but we rented out 3 of them to college students.)  \

     Once when reflecting on the “good old times,” a friend spoke of the pot under the bed.  Now we didn’t even have a pot under the bed.  If it was too cold to go out we used the slop bucket under the sink.  So when we say we didn’t have a pot to piss in, it was absolutely true. 

        Our life was not golden, but we were a very happy family, because we chose to be.  Listening to a lecture on Prageru.com got me thinking about this.  He says the pursuit of happiness is not a selfish pursuit, it’s an obligation.  We bathe and use deodorant so as not to offend others.  By the same token, we should take on a happy spirit so as not to infect others with our unhappiness. 

         Our move to Arizona illustrates how we somehow knew that.  My four older brothers and sisters had followed their dreams, and my  Dad had always wanted to pursue distant horizons as well, so we packed up our car with what was left of our earthly possessions in the trunk and a carrier on top of our car and the remaining six of us headed for Arizona.   As we headed down Black Canyon Highway toward Phoenix mid-August we were all exuded excitement. We'd stuck our arms out the window of the our un-air-conditioned car and exclaimed “Oh, feel that heat.  Isn’t it wonderful?  Look at that cactus.  Isn’t it beautiful” 

       Some years later, my sister Diane and I were sitting on the couch in our Page trailer house and I said, “I’ve got to tell you, when we drove down that last stretch of highway toward Phoenix, I was appalled.  I could not believe we had done such a dumb thing.  It was God awful hot and ugly.”  Both Mom and Diane said, “Really?  Me too.”  We laughed hysterically at our mutual deceit. 

          How did my parents teach us to choose happiness, to not infect others with misery and gloom?

“All happiness depends on courage and work.” ― Honoré de Balzac

              The Colorado River Tea Party hosted a successful, very informative Meet the Candidates Forum at the Martin Luther King center Thursday evening.  We are fortunate to have such a fine slate of candidates.

             My parents were of America’s “Greatest Generation.”  Their contributions to the nation were enormous.  I’m afraid my generation has been the generation that, through complacency, bought the nation to its knees.  I am heartened to see a new generation that has accepted civic responsibility, that realizes that we have a government of “we the people,” and that “we the people” have to step up to the plate.

              The candidates all made strong statements with regard to creating a council that is committed to working harmoniously with the mayor to promote a fiscally responsible government that is business friendly, transparent and committed to public safety.

            One query in the Q and A session piqued my interest, a question that diminished the respectability of a minimum wage job.  I have respect for my nephews who went to college and became doctors and engineers and nurses.  But I have even more respect for my nephews who were not above washing dishes and slinging pizza and eventually landing a minimum wage job at Lowes or Home Depot.

             They saved and invested their money and worked their way up the ladder of success to become store managers and district managers. Yuma has the highest unemployment rate in the country.  Let’s build an attitude of respect for work, respect for minimum wage jobs that are the ladder to success. 

     One season, my grandson successfully juggled three minimum wage jobs in order to make ends meet.  He made me so proud I burst the buttons in my shirt.  Well, in truth, that may have been as a result of massive weight gain, but I was proud as punch.

             We need to take Ashton Kutchner’s attitude to heart.  At the Teen Choice Award he said, “I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than….washing dishes, sweeping cereal flakes off the factory floor….  Every job was a stepping stone to the next job….  Sexy is being smart, thoughtful and generous.  Everything else is crap.”

Of course they are Socialists!

               Denial is a coping mechanism that prevents us from dealing with difficult problems.  I love my dog Cricket, partly because her lustrous black coat reminds me of the comfortable furry body of my late husband.   For months I denied her shedding problem, but I finally had to admit that she not only sheds, she molts, large tufts and scattering threads of hair, anathema to my house guests.

               John Beisner is in denial as well.  The Democrat agenda socialist?  “Hardly,” he says.  Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist Party candidate for president, said himself that we didn’t need a socialist party in America any more because the Democrats had so thoroughly adopted their platform. 

               According to Mr. Beisner,  I blame politicians of “the Democrat persuasion” for the shrinking of the middle class.  Actually, I respect Democrats for being forthright about their platform: raising taxes in order to increase the scope of government. The politicians for whom I have the least respect are Republicans who pretend to abhor large government waste but who, as one friend of mine says, “fall in love with the smell of marble” and abandon principle the moment get their first whiff.

               Beisner also fails to fully explain problems with with regard to income disparities.  It is probably true that incomes rose by 111 per cent between 1954 and 1982, but he fails to reckon with the fact that the cost of living rose by 300 per cent. The major reason the middle class has lost buying power is the grotesquely burgeoning cost of government regulations which have tripled in recent decades, strangling the middle class and suffocating entrepreneurship.

       President Obama scoffs at the notion that he supports socialist policies, but Newsweek magazine had it right.  “We are all socialists now.”  And history is undeniable.  Socialism is a kind of Dracula that feeds off the blood of its people, sapping them of strength and ingenuity. The ruling elite live lavishly in their seaside dachas, the rest of us stashed like worker bees in hive-like housing projects, carefully monitored, under constant surveillance, zoned out on alcohol or marijuana, or a daily ration of soma tablets.  

        Hello “Brave New World.”

Solar Power - Another burden on the back of the middle class.

                   The Yuma Sun article, (“Charges being added to APS electricity bills,” February 05, 2013) said that APS needed to raise their prices in order to cover fixed costs like infrastructure and power poles.

                 I think we need to look deeper into the real reason APS is raising its rates. There are other factors besides the fact that we aren’t buying enough power to maintain their infrastructure.

                 One factor is that the APS consumers are funding solar energy projects all over the state.  APS gives $2400 to $7000 rebates to every person who installs a solar energy unit.  They have to raise our rates in order to fund the generous rebates.  Does it make sense that those of us who are struggling to pay our power bills are expected to pick up the tab for generous rebates to people who are wealthy enough to afford solar panels?     

                  APS is also raising our rates in order to fund the huge megawatt renewable energy power plants they are building all over the state. That’s pretty expensive infrastructure and somebody has to pay for it.  Supposedly we’ll reap the benefits somewhere down the road, but I am not counting on it.

It’s another example of how government doesn’t solve problems; it creates problems.  In 2010 the Arizona Corporation Commission passed rules requiring utilities to cut their customers' annual energy use by at least 22 percent by 2020.  The federal government mandated green energy initiatives.

                    You will notice that the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation District power costs are about 60 per cent of what ours are.  They are not members of the corporation commission.  They’re run by a local board of directors, so they are not bound by the demand to build expensive renewable energy plants.  Their customers pay for the energy they use.

                   We have to pay for the energy we use and a little more for the cost of building plants like the 100 acre 15 megawatt solar plant located at Luke Air force Base. It will be a couple of generations before the plants begin to pay for themselves and by then they’ll be broken down eyesores just like the hay bale drying plant on the north side of Highway 8 that was obsolete before it dried one bale.  

The Rent Control Disrease

         Angie Lopez’ letter speaks to the heart (“Candidates need to support all of Yuma,” August 25, 2013).  We certainly want candidates to have the welfare of all in mind.  But rent control, like so many wonderful sounding socialist programs, has disastrous consequences for the very people they purport to protect, and the wealthy always find ways to make it work for them. 

         It’s impossible to find an apartment in a city that has rent controls.  Vacancy rates in cities run at about 1 to 2 per cent.  No investor wants to build apartments in those markets.  If they can’t make a profit, there is no incentive.  In cities like Phoenix that do not have rent control, vacancy rates run as high as 15 per cent and the free market rules.  Landlords compete for tenants at lower rates and with seductive packages. 

          William Tucker (“How Rent Control Drives out Affordable Housing”) says that there is absolutely no disagreement among economists that rent control will reduce the quality and quantity of  available housing and cause rents to skyrocket every time.  

           In New York and San Francisco and Berkley and in a dozen other American cities, those who benefit from rent control legislation are upper and upper middle class professionals.  The poor and the elderly are pushed out of the market altogether.

         Many cities are trying to repeal rent control legislation, but it seems the more detrimental government programs are, the more difficult it is to get rid of them

           Rent control is a disease in search of a host.

               A lesson in the art of persuasion for Mr. James Sefcak.  (“Radical conservatives want an oligarchy,” Yuma Sun, January 4, 2014)

Every generalization needs to be supported by appropriate evidence: facts, quotes, examples or anecdotes.  So when you accuse us “radical conservatives” of calling liberals “bad” people, or “stupid,” or “uneducated” or “traitors” you must give evidence.  There is none.  We don’t think you stupid or bad people or uneducated or traitors.  Quite to the contrary.  I think you’re very smart.  I simply disagree with your politics. 

               Your letter does, however, illustrate quite clearly the propensity of those of your ilk to resort to character assignation, ad hominem attacks, name calling.  According to your letter we are “crazy,” “screaming… loonies,”  “liars.”  Give me an example of a lie, James.

               Oh, I have one.  You accuse the GOP of making “changes to the voting laws that restrict the voting rights of the poor.”  The only ones who passed laws restricting voting rights of the poor were Democrats. Republicans battled racist Democrats for 100 years. Even JFK and LBJ voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  Johnson jumped ship in 1965 in order to garner the Black vote when he recognized the battle was lost, and even then he couldn’t talk many of his fellow Democrats to support his position. 

               Perhaps you didn’t lie, Mr. Sefcak. Perhaps you “misspoke” as Hillary Clinton did when she told the story about how she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire. Here is a better example of a lie:  “The Bosnia mayhem was a spontaneous reaction to a vilifying YouTube video.”  .

               And just to clarify: An oligarchy is a small group of people who together govern a nation or control an organization, often for their own purposes.  That’s what we have in Washington DC.  What we radical conservatives want is to restrict the power of the oligarchy. 

               I hope that helps.

"Just the facts, maam. Just the facts."

            Last week you ran another “news” story about the negative effecto f human activity on the earth’s climate.  What I didn’t see was a news story about Patrick Moore’s testimony before the Environmental and Public Works Committee on February 25. 

               Patrick Moore, Ph.D., an ecological scientist and one of the founders of Greenpeace stated before the committee that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years.”  Moore left Greenpeace when he saw that they had “abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.” 

               The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: '”It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming' since the mid-20th century.” Professor Moore disputes that notion. "'Extremely likely' is not a scientific term.”

               Moore told the subcommittee: "Perhaps the simplest way to expose the fallacy of ‘extreme certainty’ is to look at the historical record. When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished. Then an ice age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.” The fact that both an ice age and a warming period occurred at high levels of CO2 should give a scientist pause about the fundamental contradiction.

               Moore also pointed out that temperature increases from 1910 to 1940 are identical to increases between 1970 and 2000, but the IPCC ignores that scientific data in order to support the agenda of their “doom and gloom scenarios.”

               Oscar Wilde said, “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”  The “news” world apparently uses articles about the weather to distract readers from thinking about real news.  Who is responsible for the Benghazi lie?  Who urged the IRS to target conservative groups?  What is Charles Minn’s take on the Fast and Furious scandal? 

               How about doing an expose on the federal government’s ineptness as an investment banker? They flushed a trillion of our tax dollars down the toilet with investments in companies like Clinch River Breeder Reactor, Hydrogen Car, Synthetic Fuels Corporation, Fisker Motors, Ener 1, Spectra, Solyndra, Watt, Beacon Power, and A 123. For more local appeal, you could do a feature about Yumans whose lives have been disrupted by the havoc the Affordable Care Act.

               We can’t do much about the weather, but with your help we might be able to put the brakes on federal government spending and at least partially ameliorate the nightmare debt we’re bequeathing our grandchildren