Hunting

I read an article yesterday either in TIME or WORLD that discussed some people's obsession with watching the death of animals they are about to eat. As someone who has done a lot of hunting and trapping, I thought now might not be a bad time to explain to those of who do not hunt or trap why we do what we do and what our mindset is. I cannot speak for everyone, and I recognize that every hunter is different.

Hunters can be broadly divided into four groups; The adrenaline junkies you see on TV who shoot an animal with big antlers from a few miles away, the hunters you rarely see who are simply trying to put meat on the table, those who are doing pest control on wildly over populated areas, and those who hunt to stay in touch with nature.

Many of the hunters on television are nothing like the majority of hunters, but there seem to be more of them every year. Such hunters are after notoriety and adrenaline highs. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a great hunter or relishing the flood of adrenaline from a hunt, I and many others are disgusted by the hunters who leave it at that. There little to be proud of in shooting a deer from thee hundred yards away while it was eating on what is for all intents and purposes a bait patch, and then taking the antlers only, leaving everything else to rot and be eaten by buzzards. People with this mindset occasionally move beyond the bounds of law and become poachers, using floodlights, silenced rifles, and night vision to kill trophy bucks on other people's land and then sell the antlers for hard cash.

Many hunter on the other hand are simply trying to put meat on their table. Deer meat is far more healthy than beef, and one deer can provide several meals for an average family. During the great depression deer became a valuable source of food in rural areas, where men would kill thirty or forty deer to feed their families.

Most people today do not 'need' to kill wild animals to put food in their table, yet hunting remains a popular activity. Fathers taking their sons deer hunting is a common practice in Texas, and its not because we have a wild fascination with killing things, but because we want to be responsible stewards of our world. I hunt in order to help keep the deer population at the point the land can reasonably support it, to provide food for my family, and because the hunt is one of the greatest experiences a man can participate in.

It is widely propagated that hunting damages the populations of deer especially. This is quite simply a myth. Last year I spent a few days on my grandfather's ranch in Texas and killed four deer in three days. I was shooting a scoped high power rifle from a four wheeled vehicle at deer that we saw while we drove back and forth doing chores for his cattle. The area is over run with deer, due in part to the vast ranches surrounding the area that do not allow hunting. Already the deer population is beginning to reach over population and running out of food, and the current drought is not going to help at all. The result will be a large number of deer dying from starvation and disease because the population has not been kept in check by responsible hunting. When I was with my grandfather, he asked that I always aim for the oldest doe, thus removing two or three fawns from next years population with each shot. That is responsible hunting, what many hunters engage in from year to year, trying to properly manage the land they have been given stewardship of.

A Proposal For The Resolution Of The Debt Problem And The Increase Of Efficiency In The American Government

The following is a proposal written up by one of my smaller friends who occasionally does time as an obstruction for me to bounce ideas off of.

As election season approaches and the debt crisis escalates I would like to propose a solution to our economic problems and to our government’s inefficiency. In a word: Monarchy.

Every two years billions of dollars are dumped into the election industry, an industry which produces a million annoying ads, vast amounts of paper signage, a few hundred politicians, and not much else. A pure monarchy would do away with this mess and help the nation in three ways. First, it will free up those billions of dollars to do something useful and build the economy, which can then be taxed more to increase government revenues. Second, Monarchy will free up hundreds of educated men and women now serving in public offices for the work force, which will further grow the economy, which will further increase revenues. Thirdly, it will remove the annoying campaign adds, which will result in calmer people in the work place, which will be conducive to better business decisions which will help grow the economy, which will increase revenues still more to the point that we can pay off the debt, pay people to do nothing, and still have a space program so we don’t have to ride to our space station at the Russian’s convenience. A further note on Space, Monarchies like big things, which would give the monarch the added incentive of encouraging NASA to make bigger and better Shuttles instead of telling them to work on some multicultural time killing investigation. Such a move would reemploy a number of people, which would further grow the economy, further increasing revenue.

The running of the nation by a monarchy would also cut down on the amount of money given away by people seeking reelection, which would increase the amount of money in the treasury, possibly raising it as high as not-completely-in-debt.

A Monarchy would also solve many of our foreign policy problems. With a monarch for life, there will be no more switching back and forth every four years in our policies. Also, with military power concentrated in one person military problems will be dealt with quickly and efficiently, a few bombs, a group of Marines, and problems like the one in Libya could be changed from a small nation bloodbath to a small nation mess-which-may-also-be-a-bloodbath-but-will-receive-less-press-because-there-are-fewer-big-caliber-explosions-mess.

Also, because a Monarch will rule for life, he will be more likely to be careful with his nation’s treasure since he has to make it last a lifetime, not just four to six years.

To conclude, let me put my argument into a logical syllogism for the effect of greater clarity.

We need a more efficient government than a Democratic Republic

Monarchy is a more efficient government than a Democratic Republic.

Therefore we need Monarchy.

Logic makes it so simple!

-Mark Auralius Tudorius

Novelty Cannot Replace Quality

In my continuing quest to create a story that a few people might enjoy, I have spent not a little time reading books on how to write a book. Many of them have provided me with helpful insights, a few in particular have harped incessantly on the necessity of ‘surprising the reader’ and ‘being new’. So far this is all well and good, I enjoy being surprised by a clever plot twist, or a new type of character, but when the aforementioned books assert that without such, the book will not be read, I fear I must respectfully disagree.

A good work of art attracts attention either by its novelty or its quality. Novelty is easier to create than quality and has thus become, for many, the Holy Grail of art. So artists, writers, directors, etc. spend their time trying to outdo each other in novelty, usually by being ore and more grotesque, until grotesqueness ceases itself to be either novel or grotesque. Art today is a business, if you book, movie, or paintings don’t bring in money, then few people are interested in it, and when something becomes a business product, people try to find the way to produce something for as little as possible to sell it for as much as possible. An artist’s currency is time; novelty is quick and fast when compared to quality. Thus, quality has suffered. Novelty is just that, something new, and so when something ceases to be novel (when you’ve seen or read it), the essence of what made you enjoy the work of art is gone, then it has no pull on you. Novelty may create best sellers, but it cannot create classics by itself.

Well told stories, well made characters, however, do not grow old at nearly the same rate (Reading your favorite story, and nothing else for weeks on end will make you sick of it no matter how charming or fulfilling). Quality stories, quality characters are able to entertain for years on end, they have staying power. Part of what brought this to my mind was the number of movies that are remakes of stories and characters we already know: Iron Man (film adaptation of a comic series), Thor (film adaptation of a comic series) , Green Lantern (film adaptation of a comic series), The Green Hornet (film adaptation of a comic series), The A Team (Film adaptation of a TV Series), True Grit (Remake of a film adaptation of a book), The Eagle (Film adaptation of a book), I Am Number Four (Film adaption of a book). These films have done very well, and you cannot really argue that they succeeded because they pushed the envelope or were in some way vastly different from anything we had ever seen. In fact we already knew what most of them were going to be about.

A pursuit of novelty has contributed largely to the waste paper lining the Fantasy, Horror, and Sci-Fi sections at Barnes and Noble; it creates works that are fun to read once or twice but have no lasting value. Quality can overcome a lack of novelty and create a work that is fun to read and does not rely strictly on your desire to find out what happens next. A great work of course, includes both novelty and quality, but novelty must be servant, it makes a poor master.

A quick thought...

If tax revenue was such an issue, shouldn't the person in charge of our treasury be someone who actually paid his taxes? I mean, Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion, Timothy Geithner was made Secretary of the United States Treasury. No wonder law school can be confusing.

Tax Cuts Part II

In the below post there are a few things I want to clarify. First, I was not trying to be biased in my comment about taking from the rich to give to the poor. There are few people (Scrooge excepted) who think that people with more have no responsibility to help those who have less, the argument that arises is whether the government should have a hand in the sharing; liberals say it should, conservatives say it shouldn't (as a rule). I recognize that's not where all taxes go, its just where a lot of them go. Conservatives also believe that taxes go to a lot of things they probably shouldn't (like Planned Parenthood).

Also, low taxes will not expand the economy no matter what else happens. Low taxes tend to help grow the economy. Let me reiterate, tend to help. The economy can still struggle when the taxes are lower than they were the year before, and it can still grow when the reverse is true. Taxes are only one of many factors that effect the size of the economy, lowering taxes will not cause the economy to boom by itself, though it will tend to have a helpful effect. Raising taxes will not tank an economy by itself, but when a number of other factors (such as uncertainty, heavy regulation, and too many government mandated programs) are putting pressure on the economy, raising taxes will only put more weight on an already overloaded economy.

My comparison of Texas and New York was a comparison of the best and the worst, but it cannot be explained simply by natural resources. Yes, having massive amounts of oil sitting under your state might help you with the trucking industry (which California ran off), but it doesn't necessarily help you lure in the tech industry. New York has been increasing taxes and programs at a staggering rate, and businesses have been leaving the state equally fast. New York taxed productivity to pay for people who were not being productive. It shouldn't be surprising then that productivity in the state plummeted, and their programs are going bankrupt.

There is no silver bullet to reviving the economy, and the government's job is not to micromanage it. The answer is not no government regulation, but neither is it heavy regulation beyond reason. The answer is a balanced solution that utilizes all the assets we have available.

Tax cuts

I've had several conversations with people about tax cuts recently, and most of them seem to have no idea how tax cuts work. It is my attempt to explain the rational behind tax cuts as I understand it.

Most tax revenues come from money moving through the economy (income tax, sales tax, trade tariffs, etc.). Making this look more simple than it is, the equation might look something like this: T x I= R, where T=tax rates, I=money changing hands in the economy, and R= government revenue. Now, if we want to raise R higher, then we can raise T or I. Everyone agrees we need more tax revenue if we are going to stave off economic collapse

The argument for higher tax rates goes something like this: The best way to raise revenue is to increase tax rates. The money is there, we just need richer people to give more of it to the government so we can continue taking care of the poorer populace. In the short term they are right, raising tax rates will indeed bring in more tax revenue.

The counter argument is more complex because, I think, it takes the real world into consideration. The counter argument states that the way to raise revenues over the long term is to lower tax rates, which will increase the amount of money changing hands in the economy, (lowering T to raise I in the equation above). When you tax something, people will pay the tax until it gets annoying. At that point they will either try to do it somewhere you can't tax it (outsourcing) or as little as possible. The more money we leave in the economy, conservatives argue, the bigger the economy will get. The increase in the size of the economy will off set the reduction in taxes enough to raise the amount of money that is raised through taxes. In the long run, they are right, though tax cuts will not do a whole lot in the short term to help the economy.

With tax increases, people will pay more money to the government. Pulling money out of the economy, through the government, and then putting it back into the economy is terribly inefficient and doesn't do a whole lot.

A lot of companies are taking moving out of the states because it is cheaper to do business abroad than here. Part of that is, I admit, because you can't pay Americans a dollar a day, but neither do they have to pay the Chinese government 35% of their earning in taxes. If tax rates where decreased, a lot of business would return to the U.S. I admit that I am not an economic major or a math genius, but it doesn't take a genius to see the difference between how New York and Texas are weathering the economic crisis. New York has some of the highest tax rates in the nation and they are going bankrupt. Texas has far lower tax rates and we're growing.

To the Young (Like me)

This is primarily for young people, specifically young men. I've done a lot of thinking over the last few months with all the debate about what laws should and should not be passed etc, and I have come up with the solution to most of the ethical issues facing the nation. Young Men.

If young men would take a stand and live for God instead of for self, a pretty large portion of the evil in America would simply vanish. To illustrate my point, consider the following:

Abortion: If young men are only having sex with their wife in marriage, there will be precious few young scared girls getting abortions because they can't take care of themselves and a young child.

Porn and the explicit entertainment industry: It's simple, companies produce what people buy: if it ain't being bought, it will not be made.

Gun Violence: If young men get their focus off themselves they would be less likely to shoot up people they don't think respect them and more likely to minister to those who are in pain.

Bottom line: The Social Evils that everyone is spending so much time and money fighting will not be ended by a law. You cannot pass enough laws to make people good. The solution is hard and slow, something people today don't like. It is not easy to popular to tell people that abortion will not be ended by a Supreme Court decision in ten years but will take at least several decades of people interacting and changing hearts one at a time.

Young men and women are the leaders of tomorrow, as people at college are so fond of saying. If we make the decision that we will make a stand for God, for the right, whatever the cost, whatever the result, God can use us to have an impact far greater than we could ever wish.