EXPLOIT IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

EVERY day it seems one hears of people "exploiting" others. We have the Center for Missing and Exploited children. To exploit has come to mean to defile, to rape, to pillage. How dare anyone exploit!! This is what happens when we let people dick with the language for their own purposes (and ironically they are precisely exploiting the language when they do this).

If we did not mine coal and/or drill for oil and gas, we would all freeze in the dark. But these activities are demonized by calling them "exploitation of natural resources"; as if energy producers were rapists of pure virgin Mother Nature. The exploiter is evil, in the modern lexicon. And those who promote this usage do so using among other things the talents of poets and musicians.

But the poet and the musician are themselves exploiters. They exploit their own talents AND the desires of others to be entertained. In fact, everyone is an exploiter of one stripe or another. The workman exploits his employer's need for help quite as much as the employer exploits the worker's need for the wherewithal to have a living.

The leftist agenda to pervert the neutral meaning of the verb "to exploit" is clear. The oilman and the miner are no better than the molestor and rapist, to hear them talk. And those among us who use others are indeed exploiters of a very bad sort and are properly called cheats, con-men, molestors, robbers, swindlers, scoundrels, rogues and that sort. But there is nothing wrong with exploiting natural resources or human talent to a good end.

WHAT NEWS???

Earlier this month the financial muckety-mucks declared that we had been in a recession for some time. Thanks, idiots. We already knew it.
Always some blithering clump of idiots goes on the news to announce statistics about the last two or three months to explain what is happening NOW. "Sales were down in the quarter just ended". Well DUH. And everone gets all out-of-sorts, even though the only "Leading Economic Indicator" that counts - which is how things are right NOW - might show improvement. Listening to these idiot newspeople is like looking out the back window of the car and seeing a city and expecting traffic to get bad. Which it may if you are headed into another city; but just as likely you are going to be getting into open country where you can move. What has been, we already know. And what will be cannot be reliably gauged by what happened two months ago (or more) when, by the way, we knew it was happening in the first place.

Great conversation on Independent Sacramental Christian issues

Although Alexis Tancibok of Grace Catholic Church mentioned several times that his blog had moved, and had even prodded me into updating my link to his blog on this blog, I somehow neglected to update my RSS feed, and yesterday, I was puzzled to see several entries show up from the old blog address about how to be an entrepreneur. I emailed Alexis, and while waiting for Lyngine and Carol to arrive for Christmas Mass, got his reply that his blog had moved, and was delighted to find a very interesting conversation about OC/IC/ISM/EIEIO issues, to which Lyngine had contributed some quite insightful comments. When she arrived 15 minutes later, and I told her all of this, she was very amused.

Anywho, I encourage you to read this thread. I am mulling over the issues to make some comments of my own, either here or there.