June 5th 2008
About Me
L
et’s see if I can remember all my Navy Brat postings: Oakland, Washington DC, Turkey, Washington DC, Key West, Pacific Grove, Tokyo, South Bend (while Dad was on a spy ship and we couldn’t tag along), Yokosuka. I figured it out once — 20 schools between kindergarten and high school graduation. A wonderful experience that left me thinking a military career was not for me. Too bad.
I graduated with a degree in journalism from Indiana University and was a reporter for about a year before the cynicism of the profession drove me out, leading to the discovery that freelancing is a very good diet. Too good. Thanks to a couple great guys, I found my career in PR in 1976 and couldn’t be happier. For more on that, see the PR tab or visit my firm’s Web site.
The true definition of my life is this: Christian, husband of Incredible Wife, father of Incredible Daughters 1, 2 and 3.
The political definition is this: Despite being raised in a military family, I was raised in a liberal family, and gladly wore the mantle through my hippie and anti-war years when, yes, I drank the Kool Aid. I was also an environmentalist, actually the president of an environmental group in the mid-70s that fought (successfully, unfortunately) to stop a nuclear plant.
I held stubbornly to my liberal beliefs through Carter, despite the economic and foreign policy chaos he caused, but my liberalism was no match for the power of Reagan, so I’ve been happily conservative for more than 20 years. I’m still a conservationist, but having seen the environmental movement become a socialist litigation machine, I dropped that moniker in the 80s.
Two things got me into blogging: My long-time friend Hugh Hewitt, and seeing on Little Green Footballs Dan Rather’s copy of the supposed IBM Selectric-typed, pre-kerning Bush National Guard deferment letter morph without so much as a jiggle into a freshly typed, kerned Word version of the same.
You can always reach me at email2laer[@]yahoo[dot]com.
8 Comments »
Comments
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:54 pm
The new site looks FANTASTIC Laer! Really, it’s fun to read. Nice work.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:37 am
This is a great website. Thanks for sharing your views and fascinating insights! God bless, Colleen Sahlas
October 9th, 2008 at 9:46 am
I bookmarked your blog a few weeks ago from another blog link.I read about 30 blogs a day, and I want to compliment you on your blog, both for the content and the look.Excellent content, Great look.Michael Carr
October 17th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
I’m really taken aback at the anger you hurl around this blog site. How is being an environmental advocate a bad thing? Environmentalism = public health. Clean water and an ecologically functional planet is much better than mucking around in toxic sludge.Hopefully you will learn to truely open your heart, eyes, and mind, and rid yourself of this hate - it is blinding you!
October 17th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
JT, I doubt if you’ll be back, but you’re not reading me very well, and you’re not viewing the environmental movement very well. We moved beyond your simplistic view of the movement years ago. Clean water and clean air have been taken care of, endangered species protections are intact and functional, and systems are in place to protect the grand achievements we’ve accomplished. Now the movement has turned anti-capitalistic and is profoundly opposed to all growth. It whips up unrealistic fear and uses litigation to raise money. It is stubborn and inflexible, and it costs people billions upon billions of dollars - for example, here in California, its refusal to look at other solutions on the Delta smelt has reduced water deliveries to So Cal by 30%, which will result in billions of dollars in higher costs for water, while there were other solutions worthy of pursuit.
I am not opposed to the old environmental movement; heck, I was president of one of those groups. It’s what it’s grown into that bothers me.
October 21st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Actually - I am back to see if you responded! Thanks for a non-rantful, reasoned statement. I do agree that I appear to have misread you. Of course I disagree with your statements about environmentalists though.I am a geologist and water scientist by training, and spend my time restoring landscapes that have been destroyed by human impacts. I can tell you with absolute certainty that we do not have clean water OR clean air. How can we be DONE with the clean water movement when 25% of our freshwater fishes face extinction? When more than 100,000 US citizens a year die of illnesses perpetrated by poor air quality? When we have altered our climate processes to the degree that we are now faced with increased incidences of coastal flooding, catastrophic storms, desertification, and mass extinctions (yes - global climate change is real - read the science, not the media sensationalism….)I agree that environmental regulation can be cumbersome, bureaucratic, and, as you say “anti-capitalistic”. But we know that markets will not self-regulate in terms of environmental protections (or, for that matter, anything else - as we see in the current economic crisis).Environmentalists are trying like hell to create a world in which the overall human quality of life is maximized.Unfortunately we are in the situation where so much of our infrastructure and economy in California was planned and constructed prior to human knowledge or concern about how ecological systems would be impacted. Now we are paying the piper.Our use of water in this state is already unsustainable. And if you live in the South - you live in a desert. The Delta smelt is simply the message bearer…
October 21st, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Well, JT, I honor your experience in the field, but you certainly make some claims that are unsubstantiated or stretched. “100,000 US citizens a year die of illnesses perpetrated by poor air quality” is such a canard. As I understand the stat, it is a tally of various respiratory causes of death with a model applied. Most of those who die are elderly with systems failing from multiple causes, yet because chronic respiratory failure or something like it is written as the cause of death, they become one of the 100,000. Show me one 16 year old who keels over and dies because of something he breathed.
And you’re just off on climate change; more and more scientists aren’t buying the “it’s all our fault!” line. See my post yesterday. To my knowledge, no one has ever been able to credibly tie increased storm activity to climate change; the record of hurricanes is quite complete and quite long and it disproves the claim.
My primary point is that the needed systems are in place. Air quality is getting better, not worse. Ditto for water quality. More wetlands are being preserved and restored than destroyed. And on and on. Credible regulation is good. Hysteria for the sake of fund-raising and over-regulation is not. And if the environmental groups focused their attention on less regulated markets than here, they would be doing more good.
Southern California is becoming quite adept at water conservation, BTW, with extensive use of reclaimed water systems and growing behavior change. California as a whole has a sustainable water supply. New York City is unsustainable agriculturally - should people move out from there?
November 4th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Last month I came across a very well written article that dispels the global warming/climate change melodrama using facts. It can be found at: http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2008_09/contoski-warming.htmlThis article is not a blog post. It is a rather well-researched piece that shows how much facts are ignored in favor emotionally biased outcome-based research. On an economic level, if entrepreneurial capitalism can be stunted or thwarted then social-welfare statists will hold more sway over public opinion. I don’t think that most people involved in various causes extrapolate their involvement to this end but many so-called movement leaders and their followers do serve as useful fodder for the hopes of those who would like to cement in place a permanent, global political class as well as a permanent and dependent constituency.For those who may be able to articulate a necessary but unasked question of any public figure, please visit my own site and participate in the survey I’ve created. The results should be a lot of fun to review.