Daylight Savings Time, Threat or Menace?

Today is the worst day of the year: The day you give up an hour of sleep. The long-delayed hangover from the Time Party you had last fall.

I think Fox just said 13 states were debating getting rid of it, though people aren't agreed on whether they should switch over permanently to standard time, or to savings time.

This blog is all about getting rid of this.

I object to this, for several reasons. You have probably heard it's simply wrong that it saves energy. You probably also know that, far from reducing car accidents, it causes more of then, as people are shaken too early from bed and get into collisions, still half-groggy.

But consider this on a sort of paranoid, social-control order:

What right does any group of people have to tell us to change our clocks?

Why? Because they theorize that we'll have "more hours of play" with a later-setting sun? That we'll spend more time and money at departmentment stores with a later-setting sun?

1, those things aren't true, 2, those things aren't necessarily good, and 3, what right do you have to enlist me in this weird social-conditioning experiment to maximize my available hours as a consumer?

I could also point out that religious scholars and philosophers have long prized the darkness as being inherently more contemplative and suitable for thinking about God and existence.

Who's to say that early risers mind a bit of contemplative darkness before they set out about their daily rounds?*

It's fucking weird that a coterie of people (no doubt smitten with the ideas of "Scientific Fascism and Socialism" so in vogue in Europe) just decided that they were going to send out the signal in the hive that, twice a year, the worker bees were to change their customary hour of rising by an hour.

It's weird that people went along with this, especially way back when, when people were more cantankerous about the goblin-fingers of socialist control sticking themselves into every private space of our lives.

By now, we've become accustomed to this. But back then?

Anyway, it's time to correct a great historical and ideological error. If individual businesses would like to change the hours they're open in the summer, fine, let them do so.

But leave the rest of us the fuck alone. We can decide what time it is and when we should be awake and alert, thank you very much.

* Obviously, I have no idea what early risers would prefer.

Update to Last Post: I don't want this to get lost, as I added this as a late update to the last post, and I doubt anyone has seen it.

But Carl Cameron says that Cruz is "taking a different tack" from Rubio and Kasich, noting that the BLM and OWS protesters coming to Trump rallies are coming there looking for a fight, seeking (and then finding) violent confrontation.

Commenters have also pointed out that he repeatedly defends Trump's right to hold a rally free of intimidation and riots.

So a bit of additional information to factor in.

Good Quote: Tyler Mason wrote this. It sounds like it's someone else's quote (and I mean that in a good way), but Google says this is the first time it's been said:

Have you ever taken an afternoon nap and awoke to twilight? Not knowing if dusk or dawn? This is daylight savings in a nutshell, only later, or earlier!

posted by Ace at 06:20 PM

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