Common Sense Filter

Warning: This post is just a vain attempt of venting on my part. I personally am sick and tired of this “pussy” culture I find myself living in. I may just call the string of these writings “The Pussy Chronicles” because there are just so many examples of how “pussified” our society has become that I could be adding to this series many times daily. My qualification for using the term “pussy” is my military background. That means that if I say you are a pussy you indeed are a pussy. Now, on with my rant…

A.D.H.D. (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is not a medical condition.

It is an environmental condition.

Your child isn’t suffering from A.D.H.D. you just feed them too much sugar. Now they are bouncing off of the walls and you don’t quite know why? You want to blame this on a non-existent disease designed and conceived to prevent Pediatric professionals from being sued because you are an extremely bad parent. A.D.H.D. is also a big business now. People make money from telling you that your child has it. You or your insurance company pay the doctor who diagnoses it and the pharmaceutical companies make money from the medication that the doctor you just saw will prescribe to treat the symptoms of it.

A.D.H.D. can’t be “cured” because it’s not a real disease. The medication they prescribe for this is a legal version of what the sixties crowd used to call “downers.”

People who medicate their children because they believe they have A.D.H.D. need to take a good hard look at themselves. Those folks created the problem and should probably sterilize themselves immediately.

I remember thinking as a kid that those folks who beat their kids or at least gave them a smack on the ass every now and then were bad parents. They were not. Before it was called A.D.H.D. it was called a “failure to pay attention.” A smack on the ass, a ruler across the fingers, or perhaps a strong comment designed to embarrass you in front of your classmates was enough to “cure” this affliction.

It is about controlling your child’s environment. When I was a kid we played outside. We played outside everyday and for as long as we could get away with (which was typically about dinner time). We ate candy throughout the day as well. That was the extent of it. Yes, we took in a fair amount of sugar but we were also burning it off by running around and playing outside. Being sent to your room was considered serious punishment and something that we as kids seriously tried to avoid.

Today, kids sit in front of their computers for fun. Being sent to their room is welcomed. Why? All of their stuff is there. Television, computer and internet, game consoles, and cell phones (in a lot of cases smartphones) are also a part of the modern child’s environs. They watch enormous amounts of television and they eat very badly because parents just don’t seem to give a shit about that sort of thing anymore. They are driven to the bus stop or even back and forth to school. Those kids aren’t even being given the opportunity to get exercise by moving themselves around. Of course, the parents will say that it’s a safety issue, they are worried about predators, or they just can’t stand the thought of their child standing out in the rain waiting for the bus. Instead of teaching kids about what they should do in a worse case scenario, modern parents think it’s much easier to just shuttle their children around. This is a short term solution for the parents that causes long term damages to the kid.

I remember my father telling me to stop doing something. He only ever gave me one chance to actually stop. It was usually a better situation if I stopped rather than having him do it for me. It also usually ended painfully for me when he made me stop. What I see these days in the grocery store is some out of control kid with a parent standing there trying to “reason” with them. “Oh, Jeffrey please stop doing that. Now, I’m going to count to ten…” The worst thing the kid has to put up with is listening to his parent drone on and on.

Parents these days want to be their children’s friend. You can’t. Sure, when you kids have grown into adulthood you can be “friends” with them. Just imagine what kind of Army we’d have if all of the drill instructors wanted make nice and be friends with the recruits. The same goes for child rearing. Growing up in a home with “rules” is a boot camp of sorts for life. The tougher the boot camp the more likely it will be that your child will succeed. Incidentally, this also includes a regiment of exercise. Our children are fat and overweight because we’re making them that way.

See? It’s not really a disease unless you consider the parents to be the disease.

I do.

This Lifehacker Article that claims that idling your car is bad.

For those readers in chillier climates it’s a common to see people trudging out to their cars to warm them up early in the morning. It turns out all that idling isn’t just ineffective but a waste of money too.

The common belief is that you have to start a car ahead of time in cold weather or else the engine won’t be warm enough and you could damage it. It turns out that engines only require around a half minute of idle time to warm up; excessive idling decreases the life of your engine and unnecessarily kludges things up.

If you really want a good laugh at the expense of the author read the comments below the article. For example…

It’s not just your engine that needs a warm up. You want the fluids circulating freely through the automatic transmission and through the power steering system before driving off. They don’t need to be at operating temperature, but a couple of minutes to let the fluids flow and move about can save wear and tear.

The article is easily defeated by simple common sense.

Yes. The article was written with an obvious “green” bias.