The Travel Blog 2

This article, and the previous, related one, here, looks at deception, which comes in forms we often don’t identify, or it wouldn’t be deception.

Take the product I plug on the Media page, Jurisdictionary. We wouldn’t even need a product like that if the legal system weren’t geared for deception. In any sensible legal system, each side would present its case, and the guilty would be punished and wrongs made right. There’d be no reason for reams of paperwork, formalities, lawyers and intense study. Law would and should be the simplest of disciplines.

So, after that article, it was fun to see the 60 Minutes news report crop up, almost in response. There is a big hubbub in Rome over cleaning the big wreck, the Colosseum. They’re suddenly “concerned” about it, begging for money. They’re cleaning it, stupidly and painstakingly, using volunteers, only with “purified water” and toothbrushes, also suitably purified, presumably.

Shameless. There are almost 50 million on food stamps in the US, but no one is equally concerned about them. Never mind all the unemployment and poverty in Italy. There’s a lot said about “lazy welfare bums,” but the few who genuinely are lazy are not a real problem. Most people want to work and contribute — it’s part of human nature. Unemployment shows and proves that the system is inefficient — bad, really — and can’t properly allocate resources. It’s that there is little authentic concern for people, but ample concern for a decrepit horse barn… At least when there is a buck involved.

Getting real here, they seem to forget that they already ding you for big bucks to even get inside the old husk. It’s a sort of an à la carte deal where you have to pay extra to see other bits and pieces. But in their pitch, they imply that there’s no source of support for any improvements or maintenance. Better to tear down the Colosseum. What we see nowadays doesn’t genuinely represent the original building. It is a manipulation to suddenly go off on a tear of frantic concern for something that was abused and left to decay. It doesn’t make us “better people” in the here-and-now to cry crocodile tears when a whole revamp of perception is required. From the Colosseum example, we see that the volunteer concept can be workable, so why not move up from the baby steps? Have volunteers rebuild the whole thing so it is presentable.

This reminds me of a tropical area with a “nature preserve” on the east side of the country. The implication was that this land had been patiently preserved since “time immemorial,” by the cloistered guardians of “Mother Gaia.” What a put-on.

If you do a little inquiry, you will soon find out the whole area had been denuded and stomped, not so long ago looking about as inviting as a “Pitch and Putt” on the lunar surface. That razing was done by the very relatives of the young guides that now speak with bated breath in reverent, hushed tones of awe and respect about “the nature,” and “the animals.” It was simply a strip-logged area that was allowed to go fallow and regrow. But it’s promoted as some sort of “natural wonder” and hallowed ground to be worshiped, at least until there is more profit to do something else with it. They might even believe their own line of BS, though.

It’s a cheap and easy “fix,” to get jollies, but unfortunately, those who thrill to their self-righteousness are enablers for con men. There’s something new every few years. Now it is the “Eco-” this and that, or “Green-” or “Fair Trade” — meaningless nonsense.

As long as there is tolerance, though, for ineffectual, “feel-good,” so-called remedies, we’ll suffer with absurd fads. “Recycling” is a good example. A lot of places put out the blue bins. Sort your plastic in here, your organic waste in there, paper over there. Everyone gets on board, obediently shuffling and sorting. Some even waste time and gasoline to drop off their “recyclables” at the local “recycling center.” Only for it all to be all thrown, together, into some big landfill somewhere.

Now, they had a good thing going, for a while. Back in the Sixties, all the pop bottles and beer bottles were returned to the factories from whence they came, for cleaning and reuse! In a situation I find bizarre, no one ever mentions that fact.

The reuse was “a good thing,” but instead, people “got tired” of hauling “heavy” glass around, and store-keepers and delivery drivers didn’t like to have to bother with it, so we switched to unhealthy, environment-burdening plastics, instead of broadening the practice, so as to reuse things like our Tide detergent containers, et al.

You just can’t escape the nonsense. I innocently scanned the TV the other day, only to be subjected to some more of the goofy, where Obama was with some “mountain man” type, and they were hiking some desolate northern tundra. Then the guide points to a spill of snow a little ways up from where they were standing and starts to spout off about how, “That glacier was down here just a year ago, and now it’s up there!” Obama looked suitably morose, and a “discussion” ensued about the horrors of global warming catastrophe.

At this rate, one might bring Obama to his backyard, and hold his hand up. “And the snow was up here, up to my chin, just last year, and now, nothing!” Luckily, no one has done so, for this would undoubtedly set the great leader to a frenzy of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This points to a hopeless situation, of people falling for a continuous, but ever-changing line that excuses more taxes, more infringements on rights, privacy, and the use of our time, while ignoring or poo pooing proven things that might require a little inconvenience. It’s silly, but effective.