07 Apr 2005
Saving Daylight

Indiana is once again immersed in the Hoosier Great Debate: should we adopt Daylight Savings Time or not.

Our new Governor is quite a bug on the subject - he contends that by moving the hands of our clocks around we'll encourage economic development and all sorts of good things will just drop from the sky for us. I think he's full of this: but what I really object to is the entire notion that we're "saving" anything. It's just specious - a completely fallacious argument.

Daylight savings time is like cutting six inches off the end of your bedsheet and sewing it to the head, and then claiming the sheet is longer! You're not saving squat: you're moving an artificial "time window" around the day. My livestock don't schedule their days according to a clock: they go by sunrise and sundown, getting more active in the summer and less in the winter. It's a natural cycle. Humans have a natural rhythm too, and when we go monkeying around with natural cycles, all sorts of unintended consequences can result.

I was quite amused to find this site: it points out many of the fallacies proposed by DST proponents as to power consumption, accident reduction, etc., etc. Listening to some of the moonbats testifying for it's adoption in legislative hearings this year you'd think that merely adopting daylight savings time would cure all of the the worlds ills. One lady even said she was all for it because it would shorten the three hour drive from Indianapolis to Evansville to two hours! Personally, I think this shows we need to spend some more money on education!

I'm quite proud of Indiana for refusing to go along with this nutty scheme to "save" light, and I can only hope that the Legislature, in it's infinite wisdom, remains set against it.

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Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo

So it was real after all ... I wonder how many of the conservative bloggers will print a retraction on this, something that many implied was owed them by the "MSM" after this memo was "proven" to be fake?

Update: Of course not. After all, only Democrats, the "main stream media" and other cursed liberals lie, cheat and steal... and write fake memos. If this doesn't show up the moral bankruptcy of the current Republican Congress, then I don't know what will.

washingtonpost.com - The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

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Not Just Indiana

I have followed with a sense of incredulous amusement the absolute fixation of the new Indiana government on daylight savings time - some of these guys are more obsessed with passing it than this old curmudgeon is obsessed with stopping it. It's gotten to the point that these people are ceasing work on infrastructure improvements, taxation, public works and nearly everything else in an attempt to ram DST down the throats of a Hoosier public that either doesn't want it or couldn't care less one way or another. And I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Few local links here (as the Indianapolis Star archives go offline after a few days) but the short story is that the bill to institute this nutty scheme was first passed, then died getting out of the House when the Democrats "pulled a Texas" and left the building, not allowing the chamber to gain a quorum. The bill was resurrected (over much more substantial and to my mind, important, legislation) and rammed through the House again - only to be amended in a fashion that it's supporters find impossible to accept - it would allow individual counties to opt out! So that's now in a conference committee, and faces a threatened court challenge!

But time stupidity is not just the province of the Indiana Legislature - apparently it's infected Congress as well.

Congress also is debating daylight-saving time. Wednesday, a U.S. House committee adopted an amendment by Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., that would extend daylight-saving time by two months...

"Extending daylight-saving time makes sense, especially with skyrocketing energy costs," Upton said. "The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use. It is that simple."

In that case, Rep. Upton, why don't we just move our clocks ahead by 12 hours and eliminate darkness entirely? Think of the energy savings!

The latest twist in the daylight-saving time saga calls for the House to vote today on the bill and let the Senate -- if the measure makes it that far -- deal with a provision that is illegal.

(link) [Indianapolis Star]

Update: Apparently I'm not the only paleo-conservative out there who thinks DST is a stupid ritual, with "the malodorous whiff of industrial policy". Lot's of good history in this article, too.

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