The Hills Are Alive

That old saying, Time Flies When You’re Having Fun, is just as true now as it ever was. At least for me. I checked in on the rant and realized that I hadn’t updated it since July 2014. Wow!

Since then we found a beautiful piece of property on top of a mountain and built a house there. We are near Horseshoe Bend, Idaho, about 25 miles north of Boise.  We moved in just almost exactly 11 months ago. We haven’t stopped moving since.

I look out of my office window and below is a small valley, you might call it a mini-dell. The other side slopes up very steeply to a ridge line that makes the sun go down an hour earlier than where it’s mostly flat. In the bottom of the little valley and due west is my Cousin Steve’s house. It’s a hundred feet below my elevation, I guess (have to measure it someday).  I swear, in my prime, I could hit a golf ball to his front yard with a stiff tail wind. 450 yards I suppose? (I am taking it for granted that I would hit it on the screws, the tail wind is 30mph and I’m getting every bit of 100’ of drop)

On the left, towards the south end of the little valley is my cousin’s brother-in-law Allen’s new house. It finished about the same time as ours. He has a spring fed pond in front of his place. Even though the house is 4000+ square feet, it is just a vacation home at this point. 

The three houses are all that is here, and ever will be. Between me, my cousin and Allen, we own all the land. Mine is just a little 6.5 acres piece.  And that’s just fine by me. I look down on both of them by golly! We joke that we are starting a compound, which in Idaho can have some significant meaning that you are all free to construe however you wish.

Below is a picture of our house, with Steve’s house to the right and Allen’s is straight away dead center. The picture was taken a bit over a year ago, just before we moved in. 

So yesterday, I was sitting at my desk working, on a conference call in fact, when I looked out of my window to see about 20 wild turkeys cross Steve’s yard and work their way down hill, to the right in the photo above. I’ve seen turkeys many times before here, but it is still cool. About an hour later I watched 6 deer come out of the woods behind Steve’s house and work their way across his yard and start up my hill. They usually split left or right around my house, though it is not unusual to see them in the yard (driveway, patio, looking in the bedroom window, and “Eating The Flowers Out Of The Pots). 

 On their way up the hill they stopped on the little bench below my office and all turned looking intently back across the valley. What, I wondered, are they looking at? I started looking around, and then caught a flash of movement low down on the ridge across the way. Coyote! He was a big fat fluffy one. The winter had been kind to him. (The deer too, which are looking more shiny and sleek than this time last year, much better than that rough coated flower thief shown above). I swear he is the same guy Cheryl and I watched catch a mouse in a snow storm just 20 yards or so from my office window a couple of months ago.  Here he is with the mouse two gulps before it was gone.

That’s the way it goes around here. I’ve seen elk wander through our valley. Antelope, too, believe it or not. Badgers, marmots, kestrels and hawks are all prevalent. A heron nests in one of the trees in the valley, and we are constantly buzzed by geese and ducks. The quail are forever skittering here and there and beyond.

Cattle wander in the dozens. I get a huge tax break on the 5.5 acres my house is not sitting on to let the free range cattle have access to my property. But I sometimes wonder if it is worth it. They are extremely destructive. They will eat anything that is green, including the wife’s pansies and violets (which I guess are more colors than green), poop on everything else, and make a mire out of any soft ground. There is one big bull that likes to dig giant holes next to the roads, flipping the dirt onto the road and creating quite an obstacle. Piles of dirt! Steve calls him a knucklehead. I think he’s a pain in the ass! 

But for all this game, there is no game hunting. Steve, the majority landowner and developer—who as such got to the write the CC&Rs for the HOA—will not allow hunting. It causes resentment with many of the locals, who think Steve is keeping all the prime hunting to himself. It is not true. Steve is a hunter himself, occasionally bagging a bull elk of local terrain.  It's just that the animals on his property are like furry relatives and he doesn't want them molested. He would not let Allen kill the marmot that dug a hole under his new house and set up a cozy marmot condo in the basement. No, rather than shoot the little pest, we had to catch him and transport him 10 miles across the ridge to another mountain for release. I figure it took the critter less than a day to get back.

We sold the motorcycles when we moved in. We have a mile of winding, steep in places, dirt and gravel road once we leave some questionable paved road to get to our house. That combination of road and 700 hundred pounds of big cruiser do not play well together. Someone was going to go down, and it was going to hurt. Cheryl said “sell ‘em, I want a tractor!” And so we did. Here is here new baby.

This is going on a bit, and there is still much to tell. But, for now, it is enough to say we are heading toward retirement.  Just a few years left. Getting the ducks lined up, the house in order, the finances fleshed out and the plans laid.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Condom?

Funny how two years ago women all over this country were able to get birth control without government requiring employers to pay for it. Now, without that requirement, we are to believe that women somehow no longer have access to that which lets them have all the unrestrained sex they want. But, that’s precisely the message in the over the top frantic screaming that many on the left are indulging in now in reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Hobby Lobby.

Here’s what happened. Obamacare was passed into law and the HHS was charged with issuing regulations to manage it. Nowhere in the law does it say that medical insurance has to cover birth control. What it does say is that the insurance must cover, among other things, medical stuff that maintains good health and prevents bad. HHS then created a list of the things that the insurance should cover, including checkups, mammograms, vaccinations and lots of other medical stuff, and some not so medical. HHS then went a step further and defined birth control as health maintenance and bad health prevention. Really.  You know, lots of women throw up when they are pregnant. Some of them even die from pregnancy complications.  If government doesn’t jump in and require someone to pay for their birth control some women will get pregnant, get sick and die.

It’s a highly arguable point, this health maintenance ploy, but HHS did it anyway. Thank you, Sandra Fluke. Remember her, the law student from a well off family who said government should pay for her birth control in a speech at the 2011 Democratic convention? That woman is a future pig at the public trough if I ever saw one.

Hobby Lobby is a corporation owned by a single family. They have provided health insurance for all of their 13,000 or so employees for many years. The coverage even included birth control. What it did not include, and which they purposely did not want to provide, was coverage for abortions, including abortifacients, which are drugs or devices that cause a fertilized egg to no longer be viable (which is a euphemism for killed). The morning after pill is an abortafacient, and so are IUDs. The owners of Hobby Lobby maintained that their religious convictions required that they not support abortions. Forcing them to pay for abortifacients was the same as forcing them to take an active role in abortions. They considered this a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Guess what, the Supreme Court agreed. 

Enter the all too predictable rage and hyperbole from the left. Here is just some of the hysteria spewing from their mouths, pens, and word processors:

• Conservatives hate women and want to keep them chained and pregnant.
• Women all over the country are going to die because they won’t be able to get birth control.
• The Supreme Court likes corporations more than it does people, especially women
• With this ruling dozens, hundreds, thousands of corporations will be able to claim religious objections to vaccinations, blood transfusions and cancer treatment
• This decision is like imposing Sharia Law

Ack! I could go on and on.

In truth, the Supreme Court’s decision had nothing so much to do with any of these things. Actually, what the Supremes said was that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a law that was created with bipartisan support 20 years ago, applies to the sole owners of companies just as it does any other citizen. The law requires that the government not force any person to violate his or her religious beliefs unless there is no other way to achieve a compelling lawful purpose for the greater public good. Essentially, just because you are a sole owner of a business and that business happens to be incorporated, like tens if not hundreds of thousands of businesses today, you do not give up your fundamental constitutional rights. Clearly, many on the left really think that business owners should not have rights, as do apparently four liberal justices, but that’s another topic for another time.

Before you say the government should just pay it, don’t. That is such a slippery slope that once headed down it, we won’t get back up. Hobby Lobby’s owners pay taxes, and so do a lot of other folks who don’t approve of birth control, especially achieved through abortion, on religious grounds. Simply using government funds may remove those folks from directly contributing to the cost, but they would still be contributing. The government would still be violating their religious rights as set forth in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

So what is to be done?

Do we really need government mandated insurance to pay for $30 a month prescriptions for The Pill? Heck, why the pill at all? Why not just cover condoms? In fact that’s the far healthier way to go, considering STDs are not prevented by birth control pills or IUDs. I saw a box of 50 count condoms, lubricated and ribbed for her pleasure, for sale at Costco for $19.

The real issue is that there was no need to require that health insurance cover birth control. Women who wanted it were paying for it just fine before the law. And before you say some couldn't afford it, just consider. Using prescription birth control is an elective and personal thing. If you can't afford birth control, and you are afraid of getting pregnant, then just don't. Or consider some alternative. You may demand the right to have all the sex you want, but you cannot make that demand without also accepting the responsibility and accountability for doing so. Saying that the government has to pay for your birth control so you don't have to be responsible and accountable is just plain wrong. Nobody got you pregnant but you. That responsibility does not belong to anyone else but you. Do you hear me Sandra Fluke? Enough said. 

The condom argument above was not just sarcasm. Any woman who can't afford even the $19 for 50 condoms, which ought to last her at least a month even with the most virile or numerous of partners, can get them for free from any number of sources, including  Planned Parenthood. The cost issue is not an issue; it's a smoke screen. There is no more sense in requiring birth control coverage than there would be in requiring coverage for breast implants, which are just as helpful in allowing women to have sex as birth control if from a slightly different perspective, and that's the point of both, right? To be able to have sex?

Everyone’s premium is getting jacked up a bit for the cost of the pill, not to mention the cost of the doctor visit to get the prescription to get the pill.

Which brings me to the point we should all be seriously considering. Why does a woman even need a prescription for the pill? A prescription is not required for the so called Plan B morning after pill. Teenage girls all over America are buying them out of vending machines every day. No prescription for The Pill is required in most countries in the world, so why are US women so stupid or incapable that they need one? Most women are quite capable of knowing when their hormones are being jacked improperly, which is the chief risk in the pill. They don't need a doctor to tell them so. Besides which, the pill is no more harmful that a multitude of other over the counter medications. We are just fooling ourselves if we restrict access for the pill and not some of the other equally and even more dangerous products available without a prescription. In my opinion the only reason for such a restriction is that doctors make a lot of money off those ridiculous office visits required to get the prescription, drug companies can continue to charge more than open competition would allow, and the AMA is still a huge lobby concerned with preserving their business and restricting competitors.

Remove the prescription requirement and we come close to completely solving this particular problem. Prices for the drugs would go down as competition went up. The bigger cost of the doctor’s visit would be eliminated. Availability would be assured. Insurance premiums should go down a bit. Conservatives should like it because no one is being forced to violate their religious principles. Liberals should like it because they would achieve all the benefits they exhort in their demand for easily obtained birth control. Women everywhere could have all the sex they want without the fear of unwanted pregnancies. The unwanted pregnancy rate should go down, because, as I have read, many women who have such pregnancies stopped taking their birth control pills because they didn’t go back to the doctor after the prescription ran out. Lesbians and gay men should like it because they would not be forced to pay to enable women and men to have sex with each other. Ick!

What do you think the chances are this is going to happen?

I say about slim and none. Mostly because doing this would take away a “crisis” opportunity for the liberals and Democrats. Why do you think they are screaming so dramatically if illogically? Why didn't Obama and HHS issue an exemption to the birth control coverage for those who asserted a recognizable religious objection? They certainly gave exemptions to unions and other interests on more expensive and important issues. I don't believe for a moment that competent government lawyers actually thought they had a real chance of winning this case. So why push it to the Court in the first place?

Because they don't really care about the birth control coverage. That was never a true concern for Obama or HHS.

Seriously. They saw an outside chance to win big if they won the case. More to the point, there was no down side to losing and a big upside. If they lost, they had another issue to distract the stupid on the left. It will charge up the base. It will help keep the donations coming in. It lets them keep making the argument of how heartless and mean conservatives and Republicans are. They create a false issue to divert America from real issues in an election year that is not looking so good for them right now. The truth is the Supreme Court just did the libs and Dems a huge favor. The Left is not about to throw away all this for something that actually makes sense and is the right thing to do. It almost makes you wonder if they put the birth control coverage mandate in place knowing it would come to this. That seems overly devious, but heck Devious is Obama's other middle name.

In short, the Obama administration, its many constituent supporters and the liberal media enablers  position before the fact and their hyperbolic hysteria after is just more of the same phony  hypocritical practices in the pursuit of their religion, Progressivism.

However, let's take one last look at this to find the silver lining. 

I think a woman should be able to make the choice of having an abortion. I don't think it is a good choice. In my heart I think there is a point before which it is acceptable and after which it does become murder. Don't ask me to explain it any better than that. I think we have nuanced the abortion thing to death, no pun intended. Generally I don't like it and I don't like the things it does to people. I don't like its implications on morality and ethics and our social interactions. But, I can see that sometimes for the poor woman there is no other viable choice. So I am a reluctant pro-choice, and depending on the circumstance am pro-life.

But the one thing that I think is entirely wrong is that the Supreme Court decades ago decided they knew better than the rest of the country about what was morally right or wrong. The Roe v. Wade decision is a travesty of American justice. They created a right where none existed before and stopped in its tracks any opportunity for the democratic system to work. That's the travesty. We the people should be able to reason with each other, scream invective at the top of our voice at those we don't agree with, campaign on platforms and issues and in the end come to a decision about what we want through the election of law makers and the enactment of laws, state by state and nationally. The Supreme Court took all that away with Roe v. Wade. To their shame.

So, the silver lining. For the first time that I can remember, a Supreme Court has acknowledged that citizens may have a legitimate objection to abortion and were within their rights to resist compulsion in the matter. They did that with the Hobby Lobby decision. And don't forget, they also recently ruled that states could not impose artificial barriers to the exercise of free speech, specifically the "buffer zones" around abortion clinics.

I like that this court is focused on the actual Bill of Rights and what it means, and tends to frame their decisions in terms of the original intent. They have done that with several 1st and 2nd Amendment decisions over the last several years. Can it be that we may actually get to have that debate about abortion, so that the majority of citizens of a state can elect to allow it or not based on their own judgment?

There is that observation about the East Coast and the Left Coast and Flyover Country. What do the two Coasts care about what the Flyover Country does? It's not like they plan to live there or even try to understand the people who do. So here's hoping that some courageous state writes an abortion law in such a way that allows the Supreme Court to frame it against the actual Bill of Rights and end 50 years of bad precedent.