Logical Conclusions: Essays on America: 1998-2013: Volume 1

By James Dustin

Chapters in this volume include: Chapter 1: American Government 101 Schools are supposed to teach this subject, but schools never teach what actually goes on at the local, state, and national levels. If they did, students would be mightily entertained Chapter 2: Our Weird, Weird World You would not believe how the behavior police want you to act while backpacking in the wilderness and other weirdness. Chapter 3: We Muse on the News So why don't rich people pay more in taxes, how to sell air, and other interesting stuff. Chapter 4: Sports There are only two sports that remain where one can drink while one is playing the sport and other observations. Chapter 5: Dog Tales I live in a town where dogs are so admired that we may give them the right to vote. Chapter 6: Space and Science The next gold rush will occur in outer space, where a single asteroid could be worth $100 trillion. Chapter 7: The Gopher Relays I can't help it. This happens every spring. You almost have to witness this activity to appreciate it. Chapter 8: Useful History What did they do about pirates back in the eighteenth century? Who actually won the Crusades? And honestly, a school forgot about Christmas? Chapter 9: Government Finances If this chapter doesn't frost your eyebrows, you probably don't pay taxes. Chapter 10: We Get Mail A big part of the fun of owning a newspaper is opening the mail. I mean, really. Chapter 11: Diving Us Crazy The days of Route 66 may be ending, and why I don't go abroad. Ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098047184

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Logical Conclusions

Essays on America: 1998-2013: Volume 1

James E. Dustin

Copyright © 2020 by James E. Dustin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Cover Art by Kathi Manville

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

American Government 101

Our Weird, Weird World

We Muse on the News

Sports

Dog Tales

Space and Science

The Gopher Relays

Useful History

Government Finances

We Get Mail

Driving Us Crazy

Introduction

I wrote this book and its companion volume as both an instruction and a warning to citizens of my favorite country, the USA. This volume includes columns that appeared in The Jackson County Star newspaper from 1998 to 2013. Topics of discussion include American Government 101, information on dozens of subjects that should frost your eyebrows; Our Weird World, like you should not leave your crap in the woods, but rather put it in a bag and carry it with you for several days; We Muse on the News you could have used, like proposals for constitutional amendments that were never meant to pass; Sports observations that ask such questions as why do struggling middle-class families help pay for stadiums and arenas where only the very rich play; Dog Tales, because these are our best friends; Space and Science, the truth is not only out there but also solutions to some of the planet’s biggest problems; The Gopher Relays, just for fun; Useful History, or if we only would teach our kids history, they’d be smarter voters, or if only we taught our elected officials history, they also would be smarter voters; Government Finances, or why did the US pay to build two $150 million ships that never sailed and other depressing facts about your government spending; and We Get Mail, with the hope that normal people don’t get this kind of mail; and our love affair with the automobile. Eleven chapters all broken down into 750-word essays, many of which won state and national Press Association awards, written by me, a career journalist. And if you are asking yourself why do events from 1998 to 2013 matter now, the answer is, little has changed.

Jim Dustin

Walden, Colorado

March 2019

Chapter 1

American Government 101

Schools used to teach kids American government. They might have called it civics, or social studies, but it was in these classes where students were supposed to learn how our government works. Judging from the numerous millennials to whom I’ve talked and having watched man-on-the-street interviews where young men and women proudly display their ignorance over and over again, I don’t think they teach that subject anymore. I mean, who believes we fought China in the Revolutionary War?

So they ought to be teaching how our government works, and then as we get older, we should pay attention to how our government does not work. That’s what’s in this chapter, and the sad fact is that it’s all true.

All of Our Eggheads in One Basket

December 2, 2010

I think that sometime in the next decade or so, a terrorist organization will get its hands on an atomic weapon. The weapon could come from several sources, but the most likely point of origin would be the countries run by nutbars who probably would be institutionalized by now if they had grown up in civilized nations. These nations of which I speak would be Iran and North Korea.

So if you were Upta Wazoo in charge of the Freedom Fighters for the Evisceration of all Heathens, what would you do with that atomic bomb? Well, given that the entire United States government meets in one small area in one city at very public times, wouldn’t Washington DC, be the obvious target?

Now, nobody would dare fire a missile at Washington because we can (a) shoot down missiles and (b) track missiles back to their point of origin. But our enemies could put such a bomb on a boat and sail right up the Potomac. We don’t inspect every cargo that comes to our shores, so getting a bomb to the US wouldn’t pose much of a problem.

My question is, in this day of instant communication, GoToMeeting.com, Facebook, tweets, e-mail, teleconferencing, and everything else, why do congresspeople need to spend so much time in Washington?

The answer, unfortunately, is they like it there. They like the cocktail circuit; they like the attention of the news organizations; they like their preferred parking spots and other perks Members of Congress get in the capital; they like to have their picture taken with groups of school kids on tour; they like to give away American flags that have flown over the Capitol.

Here’s a little-known fact. The Architect of the Capitol runs flags up and down the flagpole at a furious pace every day so congresspeople can have enough flags to hand out to their adoring constituents. More than a hundred thousand of these flags are handed out every year, somewhat more than the actual number of days in the year. The architect’s staff actually had to start using smaller flags so they could fly more of them because at one point, they ran out of flags. You can only get these flags through a congressperson. It’s another perk that gives incumbents such an advantage over challengers in elections. But I digress.

I would suggest that congresspeople not spend so much time in Washington. In fact, I would suggest that they spend very little time in Washington. They don’t have to be there to vote. That could be done electronically. They don’t have to be there to attend hearings. They don’t even have to be there to accept bribes. That can be done anywhere.

I only brought up the terrorist thing to give them a good reason to flee the capital, but my real concern is what happens to friendly, well-intentioned, honest, enthusiastic people when they get elected to Congress. They become aloof, condescending, arrogant know-it-alls who never come home except to campaign for re-election. I honestly believe that freshmen congresspeople are put into some sort of emasculation chamber in which newcomers are stripped of their free will.

I’ve known several congresspeople before and after elections, and all of them seemed to be different people—and not different for the better—after spending even just a little time in Washington.

Let’s look at the situation from a medical standpoint. If a human spends a lot of time in an area rife with disease, that human will catch the disease. But if a human spends just a little time in such an area, the human might well develop a resistance to the disease. That’s the theory behind inoculations. Giving the human body just a small amount of a deadly virus teaches the immune system to resist that virus in the future.

And looking at the situation from a cost standpoint, it’s far cheaper to maintain a congressperson in his or her home district than it is to maintain that person in Washington. They would not have to maintain two households; they would not have to employ chauffeurs; they would not be eating meals subsidized by the taxpayer; they would not be constantly flying back and forth.

But most important, maybe they would walk out of their office and not meet lobbyists but meet their constituents. Maybe they would walk around the block, run into actual citizens, shop at a small business, bounce through a pothole, stand in line, see a real cow. I don’t know; maybe this idea makes too much sense. Let’s just scare them out of town with the terrorist thing.

It’s a Matter of Decrees

March 1, 2012

President Barack Obama has gotten into trouble over several of his executive orders, the latest of which forced him and his advisors to go back and read and try to understand the US Constitution.

It got me wondering about some of the other executive orders Obama has issued. Executive orders are something like imperial decrees. Unfortunately, lots of presidents have issued a lot of them, and Obama is no exception. He issued 108 of them in his first three years in office.

Not having much of a social life, I spent about three hours one night reading them. A lot of them are pretty mundane, like setting salaries for federal workers or giving unionized companies advantages in getting government contracts.

But a whole bunch of them set up presidential commissions and presidential advisory groups or create new White House czar fiefdoms. The official name for a White House czar is senior presidential advisor, and they are typically paid $172,200 per year. Their appointments require no inconvenient advice and consent by the US Senate.

Thus we have the Presidential Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and a czar, Peter DuBois, special assistant to the President, with a salary of $100,000. As best I can determine, the council over two years produced a 162-page report that recommended (among other things) that people have increased access to income-enhancing benefits (i.e., government aid), that the definition of poverty be expanded, and that government aid programs be expanded.

The report also had chapters on preventing poverty in foreign countries and addressing climate change. Why? I don’t know.

These committees aren’t cheap. The members usually aren’t paid, but they do receive travel expenses, per diem, and staff. One committee met eleven times over two years in seven different cities from one side of the nation to the other.

Another executive order that caught my eye created the White House Council on Women and Girls, and, yes, this was created by Obama, not former President Bill Clinton.

This council also produced a report and thanked senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett—$172,200 salary—for her help. Jarrett is a woman who was active in politics in, of all places, Chicago, before following Obama to Washington.

This council’s report says, yes, women have made progress in the workplace but still haven’t achieved total, absolute, measurable equality. Another odd conclusion of the report was that women are almost 40 percent more likely than men to report difficulty walking. Really, I don’t make this stuff up.

Yet another creation of an executive order is the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. It caught my eye because that’s how I usually identify myself on census forms, not because I am a Pacific Islander but I’d like to be one.

It produced a report after years of work that filled an astounding twenty-two pages. One problem identified was language barriers to AA/PIs. This was apparent in a report that kept referring to the US Department of Education as ED. Apparently the AA/PI report authors were unaware of the male sexual proficiency problem usually referred to as ED. This led to potentially awkward sentences like state educational agencies select successful models that ED can highlight as potential models of instruction.

By a rough count, I figure Obama had created more than thirty of these councils and commissions with typically from twenty to thirty members each. So what impact on your life do these commissions and councils have, other than requiring your tax dollars for per diem and expenses and special assistant salaries?

Well, one of them was the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, more commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles commission. Its charge was to propose recommendations designed to balance the budget…by 2015 and to propose recommendations that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook, including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.

The commission completed its work on December 1, 2010, and presented its report to Congress and the president. As of today, none of those recommendations has been adopted or even seriously considered by anyone in Washington DC.

Learning from Their Mistakes

January 19, 2012

Hopefully, Colorado won’t make the same mistake that’s been made over and over again elsewhere and decide—as a Denver district judge has decided—that spending a great deal of money is a sure and certain way to provide a thorough and uniform education to all students in the state. Ain’t gonna happen.

When I say a great deal of money, I mean that witnesses in the case argued that schools in Colorado need $4 billion more in operating funds, and $17 billion more in construction funds. Well, say we spent those amounts. Would education across the state be uniform and thorough? No.

We’ve tried this before. The most famous case came from Kansas City, Missouri. There, in an effort to desegregate the school system, a federal judge ordered that more money be spent on the school system. How much? Basically, as much as the educators wanted.

The Kansas City schools budget went from $125 million in 1985 to $432 million in 1992. Where did this money come from? The federal judge ordered the property tax rate to be doubled (despite a state law that required voter approval of such increases) and imposed a new income tax on people who worked in Kansas City but didn’t live there.

The idea was to attract suburban white students to the city schools, which were about 75 percent black, by building the best school system in the country. And build they did—fifteen new schools, one with an Olympic-sized swimming pool that cost hundreds of thousands a year to heat, a zoo, a twenty-five-acre wildlife sanctuary, a robotics lab, fencing academy, and on and on. If the suburban kids couldn’t get to downtown, the school district would send a taxi. The transportation budget alone was $6.4 million per year. Teachers got 40 percent pay raises. The district swarmed with administrators, observers, court monitors, reporters, educators, and state and federal officials.

Did it work? No, it did not. Student performance at the end of court supervision in 1997 had not improved one whit. The desegregation didn’t work either. The target was for five to ten thousand students to come in from the suburbs. What they actually got was about eight hundred.

This is the most famous example of the uselessness of throwing money at education and expecting stunning results, but it is hardly the only one. The Washington DC, school district has the highest per-student spending in the nation and is among the worst in terms of academic results.

In Sausalito, a well-to-do suburb of San Francisco, the school district spends $12,300 per student. The buildings are in good repair, and class sizes are small. Yet the students’ test scores are the lowest in Marin County.

This kind of evidence was available to Colorado District Judge Sheila Rappaport, but she chose to dismiss it. So how did this case come to fall in her court anyway? Well, the parents of Tayler Lobato lived far, far away in the frontier town of Center, Colorado. The father one day decided to journey to the golden land of Denver where he observed that many of the schools there were better than the one his daughter attended in Center. So he did what any father would do, he filed a lawsuit against the entire state, and outraged parents from all over Colorado joined in.

Of course, this wouldn’t benefit poor, young Tayler. In a sad ending to this tale, Tayler’s secondary education was so lousy that the best college she was able to enter was Denver University—one of the most prestigious universities in the West.

After reading of Judge Rappaport’s decision, I had this mental picture of schools twenty years from now after the entire state budget was diverted to education, as it would have to be if her opinions turn into law. All the school buildings would look alike; all test scores would be average, as the law would require; all football games would end in ties; all teachers would get the same pay; and no student would be allowed to have more apps on his/her cell phone than any another student.

Life doesn’t work that way. The quality of public schools stems from community support, parental interest, safety of the educational environment, competence of school boards, and other dynamics that cannot be achieved simply through judicial decree. And I have to tell you, after the Rappaport Plan achieves uniform education throughout the state, you know what will happen? One school district will pass a special tax hike to make it just a little better.

If at First You Don’t Secede

December 6, 2012

As of November 30, nearly one million residents from all fifty states had filed petitions with the White House asking that their respective states be allowed to withdraw from the union.

The petitions are the objects of much derision from the Left. You can tell when the Left doesn’t like an idea—they call it stupid, their label for all thoughts with which they don’t agree. But the petitions more probably reflect a deeper fear, and that would be that the spirits of those who rejected tyranny in 1776 might well do it again in 2016.

No large nation ever has survived its own success; no large conglomeration of states in recorded history has remained intact after a period of expansion even after reaching the pinnacle of power in the world. The most recent example is that of the USSR, which fell apart as yet another history lesson that state socialism doesn’t work.

And really, that is a good example. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep people out of the USSR; it was built to keep people in. If there is a peaceful, legislative process to allow states to enter the USA, it follows that there would be a peaceful, legislative process to allow them to leave. Will Washington send in troops to fire on Texans and Alaskans or anybody else who wants to leave?

There is no reason that, say, a union of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana could not survive and prosper as an independent nation. The combined gross domestic product of these three states would be about $1.67 trillion, which would make it the tenth largest economy in the world. The population would be about 33.8 million people, or about thirty-seventh of all the countries in the world.

They could survive perfectly well as an independent country, as could other combinations that one could envision:

North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. They have little representation in Congress, and their president just stuck it to them by killing the Keystone Pipeline project, so why not go off on their own? They could be the Saudi Arabia of North America.

Alaska and Hawaii could make it on their own, and they know it.

But why would they want to split off from the US? One big reason is that at some point, the taxpayers in Texas, along with all of us, are going to be forced to bail out the spendthrift states of California, Illinois, New York, and others.

Residents of states like Colorado that more or less have balanced budgets are going to see their federal tax dollars going to bail out profligate spending states like California, which runs constant, huge deficits.

So what’s the fear from the Left regarding secession? That the nation will lose its biggest producer states, and the welfare states will be left to fend for themselves. Socialism can’t exist without producers to pay for the system.

But it is also a matter of personal freedom, adherence to the rule of law, individual rights, and a recognition that the Constitution is being ignored that fuels secession fever.

When President Obama put troops in harm’s way in Libya, he ignored the War Powers Act, which requires approval of Congress before such actions are taken. The US Fish & Game Service SWAT teams raided guitar factories (guitars!) in Nashville and Memphis, sent workers out on the street, and seized merchandise. No charges ever have been filed in that case. The FDA recently closed a peanut butter plant in New Mexico, the first exercise of a 2011 law that allows the government not only to punish a corporation for what it has done but for what the FDA believes it will do in the future, and all this without going to court. On top of that, you are being ordered to buy health insurance.

And it’s not just Obama. It’s Lyndon B. Johnson’s War of Poverty that didn’t reduce poverty in the US. It’s Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education that didn’t improve education in the US. It’s all these huge, expensive, undying federal initiatives for which we have to pay and pay and pay. If a program hasn’t worked in forty years, why do we still have to pay for it?

One petition says people who sign secession petitions should have to pay their share of the national debt before they leave. I say, let’s pay now! The price for leaving the US isn’t getting any cheaper.

Our federal government has put itself under the thumbs of foreign governments that are willing to lend us money because right now, the federal government either has to borrow money or print money to even operate.

No empires last forever. The US might have had the best chance at longevity because of its Constitution, but the nation is not really using it anymore. Lots of people know this. I’m not surprised that there are one million signatures on secession petitions; I’m surprised there aren’t more.

Living in Stupidia

January 6, 2011

The wisdom of printing money to pay debts is a questionable policy at best, but you would think once the feds decided to do that, they actually would have the ability to do that. Apparently not.

The US Department of the Treasury, which is under the direction of a man who under oath testified that he couldn’t figure out his own taxes, tried to print $100 bills. More specifically, the Treasury Department tried to print about $110 billion worth of $100 bills, only to find many of the bills cannot be used because of flaws in the printing process.

Some of the bills were creased during production, and those creases created blank spots on the bills. There were good bills created during the run, but if the feds wanted to separate those good bills out from the bad bills by hand, it would take twenty to thirty years. That should give you some idea of how much money $110 billion is.

Here’s my question: I can understand printing errors. It happens all the time in my business. But $110 billion in $100 bills is 1.1 billion bills. Don’t you think someone would have caught the problem after, let’s just say, a couple hundred thousand bills went by?

Ironically, this would have been the first $100 bill bearing Timothy Geithner’s signature. The Senate confirmed Geithner to the post of Treasury Secretary despite the fact that he underpaid his taxes through what he characterized as an honest mistake. He didn’t correct the mistake until President Obama nominated him for the Treasury post.

So why are we printing money? We print money because we can’t borrow enough or collect enough to pay for spending on such projects as improved border security, such as the dangerous border between Montana and Canada.

As part of Obama’s stimulus plan, $720 million was allocated for border security. About $15 million of that sum was approved for Whitetail, Montana, where about three travelers per day cross the border with Canada.

An additional $15 million was allocated for Westhope, North Dakota, which serves about seventy people a day. However, a checkpoint in Laredo, Texas, that serves about 55,000 travelers and 4,200 trucks per day was passed over in the first round of funding.

When the Associated Press asked for a master list of all allocations for border stations (remember this is an administration that campaigned on transparency), the Customs and Border Protection Agency denied the request. The feds said such a list would be subject to public misunderstanding. Now that could be true.

Still looking at printed money (as soon as the feds can do it right) being spent under the stimulus program, which group of trees would you say would be more subject to catastrophic wildfires—the national forests in the West, or park groves in Washington DC? Well, nearly $3 million included in an allocation that was supposed to be used for fighting forest fires in the West instead went to improving parks in the nation’s capital.

About $2.8 million in Wildland Fire Management funds went to improve public parks in Washington DC, and to also create green jobs. That amount of money equals the cost of fighting a real forest fire for three days.

The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, defended the allocation. Wildland fire management is not just for fighting fires, a spokesman said. By the way, there are no national forests in Washington DC.

And from yet another part of the stimulus program, 3,900 checks of $250 each were sent to prison inmates. The checks were supposed to be sent to Social Security recipients to make up for no cost-of-living-allowance payments in 2009.

Federal law prohibits prison inmates from receiving federal benefits in most cases, and this is one of them. Social Security administrators said they didn’t know the checks were being sent to prisons.

And finally, a gas-powered alarm clock won an Energy Star designation from a program run by the Energy Department and the EPA. The program is supposed to help consumers identify energy-efficient products. The gas-powered alarm clock design came from another government agency checking on the Energy Star process. The clock was just one of twenty bogus suggestions, several of which earned the Energy Star rating. But the program doesn’t attempt to verify claims from the product’s makers. Really.

Living in Stupidier

July 9, 2009

What drives me to the back room to haul out the bottle of Glenfiddich is the thought of the government undertaking new enterprises, such as universal health care. Such an enterprise is a noble effort, but the federal government does few things well. One could well conclude that as a composite entity, the federal government is an imbecile.

It may not be their fault. I have developed a theory that the inability to function efficiently accelerates faster than the number of decision makers involved. See, if two people are trying to make a decision, there is only one line of potential disagreement between them. If there are three people, there are three lines—A with B, A with C, and C with B. If there are four people, there are six lines. If there are five people there are ten lines—A with B, C, D and E; B with C, D, and E; and C with D and E, and D with E. The number of potential disagreements grows faster than the number of people involved. It’s called Dustin’s dogma (because I like dogs).

Plug this calculation (you’ll need a supercomputer) into an agency with 536 primary decision-makers (Congress and the president) and 1.8 million decision implementers—the number of civilian employees working for the federal government. So what do you get when the feds embark on a seemingly simple project? You get the Capitol Visitor Center. This project on Capitol Hill was started in 2000 as an entrance way into the Capitol. It had a budget of $265 million and a completion deadline of 2004. It was finished five years behind schedule and cost an estimated $652 million.

Struggling to defend this boondoggle, US Rep. John Mica, R.-Fla., told Time magazine that the project was a bargain compared with the private sector. Oh? One of the most expensive places in the world to build is New York City. An apartment tower being built there now will come in at about $100 per square foot, down because of the recession from about $125 per square foot. The Capitol Visitor Center came in at $1,124 per square foot. This is hardly the dumbest thing the feds have done in recent years. There is corn ethanol. This idiotic program was adopted to lower our dependence on foreign oil by replacing a certain amount of it with ethanol derived from American corn and to hand a re-election plank to farm-state politicians.

Ethanol returns about 1.25 units of energy for every unit of energy required to produce it. There are some problems. You can’t use too much of it—as in E-85 fuel—because engines right now are not designed for that mixture. Also, taking corn to use for fuel removes corn that used to be used for food. Also, it is heavily subsidized to the tune of 51 cents a gallon.

Is there a better way? Of course. If the congresspeople had directed one of their famous fact-finding junkets to Brazil, they’d have found a whole nation that has switched over to ethanol as its primary source of engine fuel. But they don’t use corn. They use sugar cane, which returns six units of energy for every unit of energy required to produce it. We can grow sugar cane here; we can grow sugar beets here, and it wouldn’t adversely affect our food supply. Have you ever heard of a cereal called Beet Flakes?

The final irony of this is Brazil went to ethanol because they couldn’t afford to import vast quantities of oil. Now, they’ve found a vast source of oil off their coast, and unlike the United State, they actually are going to drill for it. Imagine that—utilizing their own natural resources for the benefit of their country.

Now let us consider North Korea. We can’t stop North Korea from doing what it’s doing without bombing the place. But China can. Why can’t we prevail up on China to put pressure on North Korea? Because again, we’ve been stupid.

You look at all the products in your house that are made in China. It will astound you. Did you know the garlic sold at North Park Super’s comes from China? In my imaginary world with me as president, we would send a quiet mission to China and say, Look, either help us out or President Jim will mount the bully pulpit and advise Americans to stop buying Chinese products.

Our consumption of Chinese products is one cornerstone of their recent prosperity. But we can’t bring economic pressure because we depend on China to finance our government by buying our