Economy's woes hit the aging

See those storm clouds gather. They’re not just bringing April showers. Rather, go fetch the handbasket, for that’s what the U.S. economy is going to hell in.

Employment is down. Things are costing more. Gasoline prices are outrageous. The housing market is kaput. And, talk about basket cases, the stock market is on life support, and blood is oozing from the Wall Street Journal’s financial pages.

Yet, I still feel strong as a dollar. Oops! That’s a saying you seldom hear anymore. It takes over three of them to buy a gallon of gasoline or milk, five to buy a bushel of corn, and upwards of 110 recently to buy a barrel of oil.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Richard Gibbons, of the Motley Fool investment advisory firm:
“Right now, things look bad. Every day, the economic news looks worse. Unemployment has been creeping up. The service sector is shrinking for the first time in half a decade. Consumer confidence is declining...some stocks have been completely mauled..
“Things look so bad that you might think that there's nowhere to go but up. But I think this crisis has just begun."

And check this out: “[T]his financial crisis is the worst since the panic that led to the Great Depression.”--Mort Zuckerman, editor, U.S. News and World Report.

Chiming in, former Fed Chairman Greenspan claimed we could be in the most trouble since World War II.

But now, be my guest and throw some cold water on all that hot rhetoric: A few days after all that bad-mouthing, and New York Gov. Spitzer’s hasty red-light demise, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up over 400 points in a single day, then lost much of it the next.

In such a convulsive economic atmosphere how in the world can the GOP hope to retain control of the White House next fall? “Throw the rascals out” reflects the prevailing sentiment in these troublesome days.

APRIL FOOL! How I wish it were. Rather, for solace we may take comfort in the fact that Stafford, so singularly blessed by a gentle winter while other areas suffered, figures to escape some of the effects of the general downturn. Unemployment here typically runs half the rate of the national average. Government related businesses are still expanding, and federal employment, needless to say, remains recession-proof and will bulge if the Democrats sweep next fall..

By now, you are wondering when my smiley face will return, as usual, in this column.
OK. Here’s an effort. I turn 75 this week. What’s more, aside from a passing gloomy spell occasioned by all the above. I still feel pretty good. Praise the Lord.

I see other old guys, even in their 90s, who also appear to be enjoying life. I do wonder if debility for me can continue to be avoided. I’ve been pretty lucky so far. For sure, short-term memory loss is becoming more routine, but that’s to be expected, I suppose.

Also, I harbor no regrets, such as the one which Washington Post writer Abigail Trafford recently identified in an article as a “new challenge of identity: Who am I now that my role as the bull male is over.” Honestly, women seem to have only one thing on their minds, right?

In fact, in all the decade of attending monthly breakfasts with fellow ROMEO devotees here, our conversations have never turned to sexual inadequacy, although from seeing all those commercials on TV, you’d think we stay up late at night agonizing over it. If the rest of my fellow Retired Old Men Eating Out are like me, we fall asleep much earlier than that. True, prostate treatments are fair game for us seniors, since many of us are biologically fated to cope with them sooner or later.

Advanced old age also brings with it the question of financing it. At age 65, many of us probably planned, as I did, for my family’s retirement savings to last another 20 years. But as our time on earth continues to lengthen statistically, and as the costs of medical treatments to keep us alive continue to escalate, stretching the finances becomes a real chore. It could get much more difficult if current Democratic campaign proposals for hiking the taxes on investment earnings become law. With an all-Dem Congress and White House, you could bank on it.

So that’s one reason I like John McCain. He’s a younger Republican fellow who talks and looks much like we ROMEOS do. He makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately he seems, as we used to say, to be peeing against the wind.

It's been COLD elsewhere

Talk about a one-trick pony: There are no easy solutions to climate change, bemoans a Washington Post editorial, which concludes that we must nevertheless “confront the menace of global warming.”

Well, I’ve lately been confronting that menace right here in Stafford with a smug smile. If ever there was a milder winter hereabouts, I don’t remember it.

Fact is, we seem to have enjoyed a whole string of them. Granted, memory is tricky, but the last really bitter winter I can recall here was in Dec.1995-Feb. 1996.

So I think global warming is actually pretty cool. It’s surely better, I’ve heard, than global cooling, which demonstrably does a more effective job of killing off us humans.

I know. They say we’ll lose polar bears and see lots of giant pythons slinking around Aquia Creek before long if we don’t do something.

However, if we don’t do something or even if we do, global cooling may be upon us as we speak. Beyond our luckily warm Virginia county, the evidence over the past year for a cooling planet has exploded. China had its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad shivered, not to mention much of America north of here.

And now, hard scientific fact confirms: It‘s been cold. All four major global temperature tracking outlets have released updated data. All of them show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously, ranging from 0.65 degree centigrade to 0.75.
That’s enough, according to researcher Michael Asher (in Daily Tech blog) to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years--the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down, it‘s claimed.

As you may have also noticed, the climate so far in the 21st century hasn’t warmed a bit, either. That doesn’t deter the believers a bit. In a recent New York Times piece, devotee Michael E. Schlesinger at the University of Illinois said that any such evidence undermining the established theory that accumulating greenhouse gases are making the world warmer was, “a waste of time...a harmful distraction.”

Speaking of distractions, check this out: The National Research Council‘s Kenneth Tapping, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

Whatever. The Post’s beloved “menace of global warming” threatens to rob us all of hard-earned cash. And not just for those expensive new light bulbs. Here’s syndicated columnist Walter Williams: “Our buying into global warming hysteria will allow politicians to do just about anything, upon which they can muster a majority vote, in the name of fighting climate change as a means to raise taxes.”

What got the Post so worked up that it spewed out such editorial twaddle? From Princeton and the Nature Conservancy came a study warning that the increased use of biofuels like ethanol to replace gasoline would subject more forested lands to be plowed to grow more biofuels. Those farmed lands then will yield up much more nasty CO2 to our “endangered” atmosphere than is saved by the switch from fossil fuels .

Never mind that what the world really needs, thanks to increasing population, is more food from crops--not ethanol--to stave off starvation.

And guess what? Friend Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute has been preaching that gospel for years, long before global warming ever became a bogey man. Then in 2006 he wrote, “With both population and incomes rising, world demand [for food] will more than double in the next 40 years.

The world is already farming one-third of the Earth’s land area, including almost all of the land worth planting to crops. If we burn the corn in our cars, what will we and the livestock eat?” Yield-increasing high-tech farming can soften the coming population impact but only if it produces more food, not SUV fuel.

Meanwhile, here in Stafford, how soon will we have to turn in our trusty old incandescent light bulbs? Don’t laugh. It could come to that, given this insane drive to limit CO2 emissions. But just in case, I’m starting to stock up on the bargain bulbs before they’re banned.

A reader quoted in USA Today, concerning the switch to the costly and dangerous florescent bulbs, said, “This is an easy way to address global warming. We all have to participate. That’s all there is to it.”

No, there’s much, much more. Unfortunately, most of the coming controls will be for no sane reason.

And make no mistake about it, more controls are coming. All the presidential candidates mouth the same words, that we must control global warming. “We” means the government, backed by trendy science.

But what if the global warming scientists are wrong? Perish the thought. However, how interesting it is that the Grand Canyon is older by 11 million years than “scientists” had always claimed.

And by the way, as climatologist Richard Lindzen notes, the fancy computer models beloved by the global warming enthusiasts failed to anticipate the absence of warming over the past decade. I wonder why.

Service Clubs Good, for Others

Was it my fault? The stock market has tanked and so have house sales, while gas prices remain outrageous and the next president looks fated to be a black or a woman.

All I had done was something that had happened only once before, when I was quite young. Yes, I know that's hard to envision. But after I had attended Lone Star Boys State prior to my senior year in high school, I was obligated to give a speech at my dad's civic group, the Rotary Club.
At that time he was undoubtedly sure I would follow in his distinguished service club footsteps. He had logged a perfect-attendance record of over 30 years at Rotary's weekly meetings at home and elsewhere. He had then served a term as district governor of the many clubs in north Texas.

So I got through my speech to polite applause, no problem. Much later when I was growing my family, Dad would ask if I had joined Rotary here in Virginia. Nope. But I had thought of visiting local clubs of Lions and Kiwanis perhaps.

He snorted. About all they do at their dinner meetings, he asserted, is throw biscuits at each other, implying they weren't nearly as important or civic minded as the Rotarians.

Then this winter, as if to confirm his bias, here came President Bush to make a major speech in Stafford to members of, naturally, the Rotary Club.

About the same time, as luck would have it, a long-time friend and neighbor
invited me to a dinner meeting of the Aquia Harbour Host Lions Club. Curt Johnson wasn't recruiting new members, please understand, just hoping I'd devote a little space in my columns to the good things his Lions do.

Assuring Curt that my opinions couldn't be swayed by good food that was free, I nevertheless showed up at their first evening meeting in January, confident that New Year's hangovers and such would assure a sparse crowd. Besides, it was a cold 20 degrees outside and Va. Tech was to play that night in a Bowl game.

Surprise: Over 30 showed up, ate the good food provided by the Clubhouse Restaurant at the Country Club, and then proceeded to report on their charitable civic endeavors of late.
Not a biscuit was thrown, although available. Instead, members heard a report on how the Lions were helping save needy peoples' eyesight via several campaigns in poor countries.
Locally, team leaders then told of the results of their members' fundraising efforts over the holidays. Mike Shepherd said the annual White House Christmas ornament sales had netted some $10,000. The Christmas tree sales from the lot in Aquia Towne Center, it was reported, raised some $6,500. Also, Curt told how the annual Christmas party for attendees from Fredericksburg's Association of Retarded Citizens had again been gratifyingly successful.

How impressive. How industrious these men are in behalf of their service club. And how much I would like to participate? As a contributor, fine. As a member, well you know how busy we retirees stay in other worthy endeavors, etc.

Besides, I already help lead another men's club here, albeit one devoted not to service but only to comaradery--The ROMEO breakfast club. ROMEO stands for Retired Old Men Eating Out. That's all. No speeches, no appeals, no perfect attendance awards. No thrown biscuits, yet.
Further, I feel a continuing obligation to do what I can to help make the Stafford County Sun a better paper. After all, I have been writing stuff like this for going on 12 years here--ever since retirement from the government. Granted, my stuff isn't getting any better, but it's virtually cost-free, so who's to complain?

By the way, when I first started here, old Ben Bagwell was still the editor. I say “old” advisedly. He was and is my age. After leaving here for North Carolina some years ago, Ben's wife Jane died. Then this Christmas I got a card from Ben and his new wife Bev. They had known each other in school long ago and both had lost their mates. Now they are living blissfully in Pagosa Springs, CO.

Another former editor here, a young buck named Garrett Ebling, decided to return to his home stomping grounds of Minnesota. Poor Garrett was caught in that massive bridge collapse in Minneapolis last year. He survived and is recovering, following much surgery and such. Last time I heard, his fiance was still by his side, and a wedding is in the works as soon as he can swing it.

So it looks like my fate in life is--rather than to participate in service clubs and such, despite my father's wishes--to communicate interesting stuff to neighbors as well as I can: To tell rather than sell. Sorry, Lions.