"Sticks and stone may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

That was the saying that I always heard from my mother as I was growing up.  Nowadays, we are told that "words can hurt."

Uh, no.  Words have no power over you unless you let them.

For example, if some "enlightened" smug Prius-driving liberal calls me a global warming denier, I simply terminate any hopes of having a rational debate with him.  I'm through with the game of spending time defending my character.  It's easier to attack someone's character than their logic.  Hence the negativity of political ads.  The moment I stop to explain why I'm not a denier, the liberal has won:  He/she has moved the argument to their comfort zone-- They attack me, I defend myself.  Some think this is the way to "win' the argument.  It's not.  It's merely a way to stop it.  One of three things happens:

1. The smeared person switches to defense mode and the original discussion ceases.  Score 0-0, smear agent successfully covers up the holes in their argument with fresh coat of tar on the other's character.
2. The smeared person takes the high road and walks away.  Score 0-0
3. The smeared person gives the smear agent the knuckle sandwich he/she so richly deserves.  Score 0-0.

 So with this latest whining from Gays and Lesbians Against Accurate Depictions (GLAAD), I want to throw my support behind Vince Vaughn.  He's absolutely right when he says humor can bring us together.  GLAAD's over-reaction to a line in a movie is what pulls us apart and polarizes us.  Here's the line:

 Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars are gay.  Not homosexual gay.  But my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay.

As Al Capone (played by Robert DeNiro) said in The Untouchables:  "You know, we laugh not only because it's funny, but also because it's true."

And that's the ticket.  Electric cars are gay.  It takes a significant amount of manhood depression to drive something that reminds you that you need to pick up AA's from the store!  Masculinity, in it's purest form, is about men tapping into their primitive sides.  Men are on average physically stronger, larger, and more aggressive.  Don't blame me, blame biology.  Blame the testosterone flowing through me as I hammer out this screed.  Blame thousands of years of history.  The Amazons were the exception, not the rule.  Why is it any surprise that most men would shy away from being too civilized?  That's what an electric car represents:  That you care about your impact on the planet.

Screw that!  What men's names are familiar to us thousands of years after they lived and died? Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun.  Do we remember the men who sought to lessen their impact on the planet?  Will we remember Al Gore in a thousand years?  Or 500?  Or 250?  No, because the man is a hypocrite.  He wants his fellow men to act against their nature, to be more civilized, never mind that poor Al has gotten plenty of press for his own wasteful lifestyle.  If Caesar was apologetic for who he was, accounts of it have certainly not survived the test of time.  Had King Leonidas been more "civilized", he might have found a way to strike a deal with the Persian Empire and dramatically changed the face of civilization 2000 years later.

The promotion of the government-subsidized Chevy Volt demonstrates this affront to masculinity.  It's civilization telling us to stop hunting our food, to stop living how and where we want to live.  And when a movie line taps into our built-in response against being shackled by civilization, another group comes in and tries to shackle our speech and our minds.  GLAAD wants gays and lesbians to be accepted?  Fine, I accept them.  But stop your futile efforts to change the way I speak and think.  You'd have an easier time changing Earth's orbit around the Sun.

Bucking the trend

According to a couple of articles I came across, I do not fit the stereotype of a conservative.  At least not the stereotype that liberals envision when they think of conservatives.

The articles dealt with how choice of vehicle indicates political leanings.  Drive a small, fuel-efficient car, you're probably a tree-hugging liberal living in a cramped studio apartment in an urban center.  Drive an SUV, you obviously don't give a shit about the environment, you hateful urban-sprawl-promoting suburban redneck!

Well, wrong on both counts.

I have two cars.  One is a sports coupe.  The other is an entry-level SUV.

I've had the sports coupe for a few (12) years now.  It suited my purposes when I first got out of college.  I needed something to get me from point A to point B without burning a ton of fuel to get there.  I needed only to move my person back and forth to work.  Don't get me wrong.  I still wanted something a little fun.  Something with enough power and handling to extricate me from a potentially life-threatening situation.  Still, it gets 25/29 city/highway mpg.

A few years later, I decided to spin out on black ice in an intersection and put it into a snowbank.  I extricated it without too much difficulty, but I realized I wanted something a little better suited to traveling on icy roads.  Something will all-weather tires.  Something a little more grown up.

In the midst of high gas prices, I exploited the laws of supply and demand and purchased an SUV.  An entry-level SUV that didn't perform too badly on fuel economy: 21/25 mpg.  I didn't get an SUV because I enjoy burning fossil fuels.  Quite the opposite.  Burning that fuel quicker means I have to replenish it more frequently.  And that costs me money.  But when you can grab a load of lumber for a landscaping project, pick up a new office chair, and stop at the grocery store on the way home, it means you'll use less gas than a similar two or three trips in the sports coupe.

Fuel efficiency is important to me, but cargo capacity has become more important as I've aged.  And during a recent move, towing capacity showed its value as a potential time- and money-saver.  Exactly how heavy a trailer can a Prius tow anyway?

Oh, those clever Dems!

Voting is like driving:  Choose "R" to go backward, "D" to go forward.

Oh my, how clever!

Wait a minute.

I don't have a "D" on my gear shift.

Instead, I have the numbers 1-5 and an "R".  Hmm, guess the analogy falls apart for me.  No offense to automatic drivers, but I prefer to do something besides push the pedals and hang on.  It's the same with voting.  Making a choice and then disengaging from the experience for the rest of the journey seems kind of dumb to me.

Actually, since it's the progressives in the White House now, let's continue the driving analogy.  What does "P" stand for on an automatic shift lever?  Going nowhere fast.

Also, when driving, going forward constantly is impossible.  You have to turn from time to time.  Sometimes you turn left.  Sometimes you turn right.  Do too much of either, and you end right back where you started.

What about that cliff ahead?  Do you go forward, over the cliff?  Or do you turn?  Even better, do you reverse?

Why do liberals always screw up analogies?

Then again, maybe I've over-analyzing a bumper-sticker-sloganeering mentality.

Debate with these people is impossible...

All of the deniers- we refuse to grace them with their chosen name, "skeptics"- are dangerous for they create a false debate around the existence of climate change and divert attention from the real debate: "What are we going to do about climate change?".

-- excerpted from "Hall of shame | Rising Tide UK"

Remember what I've said before about the people who throw around this term "denier"?  They've indicated a cessation in their own critical thinking.  Anthropogenic climate change should not be and should never be something to be believed in.  Nor should it be something that is not believed in.  I will credit the so-called "Separation of Church and State" crowd with the notion that matters of faith and matters of science should not co-mingle.

If I deny ACC, does that mean you believe in it?

On the other hand, if, based upon the evidence I've seen so far, such as:

• The infamous "Hockey Stick" graph that was published in 1998 by Professor Mann, whom refused to share either the raw data or his model upon which he drew his conclusion for years, even though the study was funded with taxpayers dollars.  In 2005, he made available the source code to the model.  When it was released for scientists to peer review, their criticisms of the methodology were reinforced by a third-party panel assembled at the behest of members of Congress. 
• The e-mail scandal that wasn't a scandal, I guess, at the University of East Anglia, with excerpts describing a massaging of the collected data and collusion to suppress a view at odds with the grant recipients' money-maker.
• Thousands of surface temperature monitoring stations across the U.S. with data corrupted by their placement next to A/C exhaust fans, asphalt parking lots, etc.
• The uncomfortable truth that some of the same scientists who tell us with certainty that the globe is warming were telling us, with similar certainty, that the globe was entering into another ice age. Granted, scientists do draw the wrong conclusions from data sometimes, but I've not heard a compelling argument in which the scientist does the following:
• Acknowledge he/she was wrong.
• Do a little bit of introspection as to why he/she arrived at the first conclusion, now regarded as erroneous, and what assumptions were incorrect, and what outlier evidence incorrectly discarded.
• Show how, upon correcting these flaws, the new conclusion is supported

Those are just some examples, but you get my point.  But the ACC proponents have moved from "Here is the evidence to support our hypothesis" to "You must believe!" or "Just trust us, we know we're right!"

Sorry, I'm an engineer.  The just-trust-me explanation only works for that one area where I acknowledge science, logic, and reason are useless to me.

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Women.