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These Natives Say It Best & I Love Them For It

I want to make clear the thrust of my previous post: I’m not saying Ashli Babbit isn’t dead, nor am I saying that there aren’t a lot of crazy Trump supporters out there. There are. But there are every bit as many crazy progressive-liberal democrats out there — ANTIFA the craziest of them all — and there is absolutely no question in my mind that train-loads of ANTIFA and #BLM drones infiltrated the January 6th Washington DC protest.

What makes me so sure?

Apart from all the video and photographic evidence — and there’s tons of it — I’ve read the progressive-liberal manifesto called Rules for Radicals, written by an American communist named Saul Alinksy. It is, as you know, a book which the Obamas, like the Clintons, like Anita Dunn, Rahm Emanuel, Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, and all the others have, at one time or another, bragged about reading, and the “counter-intel” tactics are precisely what Alinksy taught. It’s like holy writ to the corrupt political machine he helped spawn, and that is not just speculation on my part. And yet there’s an even deeper reason for my certitude:

I’ve seen it with my own eyes — and on several different occasions.

In 2009, I peacefully protested — and I do mean out on the streets, in various cities — the trillion dollar “stimulus” package that Barack Obama and company rammed through legislation before anyone — ANYONE — had read this thousand-plus page “stimulus package” in full.

Let me interrupt myself briefly and ask you to take a moment and think about that. Think about the monstrous inanity of passing trillion dollar legislation before a single person had read it all.

Surely this is something upon which we can all agree. Surely this crosses all partisan lines: it is unequivocal lunacy.

No sane human-being could in good faith not see the sheer insanity of such governance — including, while I’m thinking about it, a young senator named Barack Obama (circa 2001), who gave an interview with radio-show host Randi Rhodes, and in that interview talked about how crazy he thought it was when politicians pass legislation before anyone has read that legislation in full. Mind you, senator Obama in that interview was talking about small-potatoes-type legislation when compared with his nightmarish disastrous trillion-dollar porkulus package, the ramifications of which are still being felt. I wrote about that “stimulus” package here, and gave a semi-detailed listing of what was in it. I’d love for you to please take a look. I can guarantee you that you’re in for a surprise. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That, reader, is why all governments are inherently dangerous and must unremittingly be kept in strict and rigorous check:

A story that just broke, this month (Jan, 2021): American taxpayer dollars funding Alqaeda. This is more than an outrage. It’s a criminal act. These are the people who flew jets into the twin towers of New York City.

So, yes: I protested many times and was even interviewed by a few radio and television stations and also a few newspapers — partly because I’d also written a book about laissez-faire and individual rights, and certain media outlets were interested in this. But here’s my main point:

I watched the counter-protestors infiltrate every significant protest I attended. And one of them — in Denver, when Nancy Pelosi came to town to give obscene amounts of taxpayer money to a failed enterprise — was so blatantly astro-turfed that it would have been comical were it not so disgusting. I watched it in front of me, right before my eyes, as I also watched Obama’s Organizing-For-America people become unhinged and dangerously deceptive: one clownish charlatan in particular, named Peter Fisk, who had a team of lackeys and who thought he could dupe me — and failed pathetically — who then became a serial harasser. I have a good deal of experience with the indoctrinated left, their love of violence and force and their tactics of harassment, and I can assure you that they need “deprogramming” every bit as much as the hardcore Trumpers. Their theme is hatred. I saw firsthand the Alinsky tactics of the American left, and I experienced their sloppy polemics.

And something else I saw after a little time had passed: I saw crazy people from the right and virtually all parts of the political spectrum come out of the woodwork — and that is precisely when and why I left.

When you have close to one million people gathered in Washington DC — after four years of Donald Trump, and after nearly one full year of being locked-down, after all the violence and the riots of this past year — I can assure you that among these hundreds of thousands of people, you’re going to get a multitude of different groups and types — like Jake Angeli, the infamous viking guy, picture below at a 2019 climate-change protest(!) [that is, protesting like a garden-variety lefty for government to do something about climate change] just one of the many bad eclectics:

The video clips I’ve reposted below don’t make sense. It’s all so bizarre. And yet it is as clear as gin that something deeper is going on. The National-Review-type conservatives and the “measured libertarians” — as well as any number of people on the left (not just the far left, I mean) — all of them, in short, who would have you believe that the January 6th violence was solely or even primarily the product MAGA extremists, they are wrong. In fact, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They exist in a bubble. A vast array of different groups were there — including ANTIFA, Proud Boys, #BLM groups and their many subsets — all of them were among those hundreds of thousands of people, and they would not have missed it for anything in the world. You can be certain of that. And you know who else was there? Plenty of peaceful protesters.

I’m not a conspiracy person and I never have been, and I don’t endorse this guy (the video-maker, I mean, in the vid directly below), but watch this — because the video footage doesn’t lie. Watch the gun (he slows the video and plays it back and forth beginning at about the 4:40 mark, and it sure as hell looks to me as though he swings it away):

Ask yourself: why is there no outcry over an unarmed woman being gunned-down by a mysterious gunman in black — about whom nobody in the press is talking — why the deafening silence surrounding the execution of an unarmed woman?

Why?

Now watch ANTIFA and CNN reporter afterward: “We did it!”

(Link)

The last ten months have seen the fastest worldwide aggregation and consolidation of state power, across a greater population span, than any other in human history. That is the power of propaganda when combined with a widespread unwillingness to think for oneself and instead conform to what one hears from the groups and people with whom one most closely associates.

The level of lies, manipulation, and propaganda, circulating across the world at breakneck speed, is absolutely horrifying.

The depth of the corruption is staggering.

This government will make dependents out of every single citizen if they can: people for whom self-reliance is unthinkable, since the big benevolent government provides everything and grants all permissions and privileges to exist. Or not.

Except for one problem: government is a literal parasite off the wealth that free-exchange (and free-exchange alone) creates. Government cannot spend a single penny unless it first either taxes, borrows, or prints. Government is an agency of force. Free people and voluntary exchange is the driver of all production and all innovation and all advances in standards-of-living and civilization. Voluntary exchange of goods and services are the locus and the foundation of all innovation, ingenuity, and wealth-creation. Government — any and all government — cannot exist without the wealth and production that freedom creates. Government without it will starve. That mindless leviathan called the state, who exists solely to gorge itself on things which others produce, and who grows hungrier and hungrier the more it eats, would starve without freedom and the corollary freedom to exchange. The state is helpless and completely feckless without individual initiative and ingenuity among individual human beings interacting and cooperating voluntarily and to their mutual benefit.

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else, I implore you: do not let them have control over your independent thought. Do not.

I beseech you: don’t just believe what you’re told.

Weigh the data yourself.

Think for yourself.

Your brain is so powerful — more than you maybe know.

Unleash it: unleash your beautiful brilliant brain.

And always check the endgame and the proposed solutions of any and every policy put forth by any administration in any era or place, because it is there, in the endgame and the means of getting there — the stance on private property — that the entire philosophy, forget all the feel-good, carefully named platitudes, which are designed that no one would want to say she’s against it, is disclosed.

Did we not need assistance two weeks ago, then?

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that it can’t happen here. It’s already happening. We’re talking about police-state governance in the land of the free, the home of the brave. But it can only happen if enough people allow it.

Disobey.

These politicians want to keep you in the dark. They want you to be assimilated, Borg-like. They’re politicians. They want to make dependent drones out of the population — because people who think for themselves are unruly and cannot be ruled. Politicians know that in order to have command-and-control over people, the first requirement is that they control the minds of the people they govern, so that people and press alike enthusiastically welcome the controls and commands that the government institutes.

Knowledge is power. Learning is light. Independent thought is a virtue. Educating yourself is healthy. It is good.


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“How Well-Intentioned White Families Can Perpetuate Racism”

That title is in quotation marks because it’s the title of an actual piece, which recently appeared in the Atlantic Magazine.

This piece is an interview with a sociologist named Margaret Hagerman, who sought to “recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race” — and this is for a book she’s written called White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America.

I want to quickly inject here that an actual privilege is a benefit bestowed by one in a position of authority — as in, thank you for the privilege, father, of not having to do my chores today. It is not success that comes through hard work or even inherited wealth, no matter at what place or position you start the race of life, and there are millions of affluent minorities (all races, all colors, all sexes) in America: women and men who through hard work and persistence have lifted themselves out of all manner of hardship and poverty to make better lives for themselves and their families — and in fact this is what America is largely about: coming up from the gutters, rags-to-riches, overcoming hardship, fleeing from authoritarian regimes, where freedom and the right to keep what you earn does not exist, and into place where you do have total freedom to make something of yourself, in a country which allows everyone, no matter their race, color, class, sex, gender, or creed, the freedom to do just that. And this interminable dividing and subdividing by race and other non-essential characteristics only, in the end, perpetuates racism and greater division among human beings — and also, not coincidentally, greater poverty in the end. Many, many minorities agree, and that’s why I think that the people who understand and appreciate freedom the most are those who come to America — usually with nothing — from other countries, where no such freedoms existed.

Also, just for the record, in terms of percentages, white Americans are some of the greatest recipients of food stamps and other welfare programs, and it is no coincidence either that some of the greatest inequalities and wealth disparities are found in places with the biggest government programs.

And yet isn’t it remarkable how certain people who claim they’ve done “exhaustive research” can only come up with the same-old-same-old rebranding of egalitarianism that’s become so fashionable today: “white privilege”?

How, then, according to Margaret Hagerman, do “well-intentioned white families” putatively perpetuate racism?

The answer may (or may not) surprise you: by wanting their children to do well in life.

Here’s what Margaret Hagerman says constitutes white privilege:

One of the things I talk about in the book is what I call this ‘conundrum of privilege,’ which is that these parents have a lot of resources economically as well as status as white people. [So do plenty of affluent minorities.] They can then use those resources to set up their own child’s life in ways that give them the best education, the best health care, all the best things. And we have this collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a ‘good parent’ means exactly that—providing the best opportunities you can for your own child.

But then some of these parents are also people who believe strongly in the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and who want to resist racial inequality. And these two things are sort of at odds with one another. These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids’ lives so that they’re better than other kids’ lives. So the dark side is that, ultimately, people are thinking about their own kids, and that can come at the expense of other people’s kids.

This notion that the good of your own children must perforce come at the expense of other people’s is, to put it mildly, preposterously and flatly false.

I believe the sole purpose of such ridiculous notions is the attempt to make people feel guilty about their station in life, their upbringing, their education — the ultimate goal of which is, as previously mentioned: egalitarianism.

It is an attempt to take down — via bromides like “leveling the playing field” and “creating a fairer and more equal starting line” — the freedom of all to pursue their own lives, no matter what their race or sex or sexual orientation or gender or skin color, no matter in what circumstances they grew up: all humans free to make better lives for themselves.

Egalitarianism, even if it were a good thing — and it is NOT, primarily because humans possess wildly varying degrees of ambition, motivation, desire, drive, persistence, and so on — remains, as it always has and always will, an impossibility, though, as pointed out before, you may look to Pol Pot’s Cambodia as one of the nearest successes.

People are not all born into identical circumstances, and it is not the role of government or anyone to attempt the impossible task of equalizing everyone, which would require continual and massive applications of force and expropriation, and which even then could never be fully achieved.

Quoting Margaret Hagerman again:

Some of the parents in my book, they rejected the idea that their child needed to be in all the AP classes. They valued other elements of their children’s personalities, such as their concerns about ethics or fairness or social justice. There were a handful of parents in my study who resisted having a separate track for AP students, for example, which can sometimes be a segregating force within schools.

There were also affluent parents who were very much opposed to having police officers in schools, and they were using their position of influence in the community to try to get the police officers out of there. Maybe others would be aware of their own presence at PTA meetings, making sure they’re not dominating them and making sure they’re not putting their own agenda ahead of their peers’ agendas. I’m not sure that I saw tons of behavior like that, but I certainly saw moments where some of the families were concerned more about the collective than their own kid.

Please give special heed to those last few words.

Please remember also that collectives don’t actually exist: only the individuals who compose them actually exist.

Let me here note as well (not quite parenthetically) that “justice” is an absolute: it needs no qualifier; it can take no qualifier. And more: any word used to qualify “justice” — social, latino, Asian, white, or anything else — is by definition an injustice.

Justice is the legal recognition of every individual’s inalienable right to her own life and property (money is property), and only her own life and property.

Egalitarianism, in any of its multifarious guises, necessarily requires massive violation and expropriation of property.

I’ll close by quoting at length Robert Tracinski’s review of Margaret Hagerman’s book:

So to be a good “progressive,” you should place “social justice” indoctrination over actual education, and maybe send your kid to a school with increased crime and violence. I could understand, if you grew up poor, if you got knocked around a lot, if you felt like an outsider, it might be natural to resent the upper-middle-class kids, to think they’re too privileged and need to be knocked down a peg. It’s not exactly a healthy way to go through life, but I could understand it. What I can’t understand is thinking that way as a parent about your own kids. But there, at the end of the quote, we find the real agenda: you must subordinate your own interests to “the collective.” Who, aside from unreconstructed Marxists, still uses the phrase “the collective”? Maybe Star Trek fans, because Hagerman seems to be offering advice on how to assimilate into the Borg.

This goes to the real heart of the issue, and it also indicates that this isn’t really about race. After all, which of these arguments has anything specifically to do with kids being white or black, versus being rich or poor? The difference between phrasing this as an issue of race versus an issue of economics is not logical or substantive. It’s merely a matter of intellectual fashion. It’s harder to get people to listen to you if you publish an old-fashioned lefty screed about “class,” but racial politics is all the rage right now and will get you a book deal and coverage in The Atlantic.

That’s why that phrase “the collective” is such a giveaway. This is just the old-fashioned Marxist class-warfare agenda repackaged in the language of racial politics….

Take, for example, the arguments that came up recently in the Sarah Jeong case about how non-white people cannot be racist—even when they are definitely, flagrantly racist—because racism is really about the “dominant power structure.” The “dominant power structure” ends up meaning pretty much the entire system [of freedom], including the fact that you are able to make money, own property, and buy things—such as buying a house in a good neighborhood in a town with a good school system, or sending your kids to private school.

These are the actual examples used in that interview about people perpetuating racism merely by providing as well as they can for their kids….

Collectivism was the next logical step, taken by the next generation of German intellectuals. You can see that if you have to eliminate any personal value, that would necessarily mean purging one of the most precious of personal values: your attachment to your own children.

In the collectivist theory, this purging of personal values is supposed to produce a corresponding increase in concern for “the collective.” New Soviet Man was going to care for state property as assiduously as economic man had cared for his own property. Caring less about your own kids is supposed to lead, Hagerman imagines, to caring more about other people’s kids.

To say that this runs counter to human nature is an understatement. It’s not just that people will psychologically resist caring more for other people’s children than their own, a resistance that might be overcome with indoctrination and willpower. The problem is that the whole idea is a logical impossibility. It asks us to care the least about those things that have the most intimate connection to us and are therefore most capable of earning our affection.

We can only feel love, compassion, or respect for others to the extent that we see our own humanity in them—to the extent that we imagine what it would be like if we were in their place. A man who cares nothing for his own life will actually find it harder to empathize with others. Self-loathing is not a basis for love of humanity.

Similarly, to reach the point where you do not wish the best for your own children, how much would you have to hollow out your personal values and capacity for affection? Hagerman asks us to “think in bigger ways about…what it means to actually have a society that cares about kids.” But how is “society” going to care about kids if you’re asking everyone not to care about their own? How can they be motivated by love after they have crushed their capacity for love at its most intimate source?

Reader, do you know what this is?

It’s anti-individualism and political correctness run amok.



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Rick Santelli: “Bring it On … If Not Now, When?”

Rick Santelli, who is largely credited with starting the tea part back in the old days before the tea party had lost its teeth, is something of a hero.

Here’s his unforgettable — and inarguable — salvo against Barack Obama’s explicit call to “fundamentally change America”:

Now he has this:

RICK SANTELLI: You don’t compromise on principles.

STEVE LIESMAN: So, Rick — you’re ready to see the United States —

Santelli: — Bring it on! Bring it on! Bring it on! Our fearless leader [GE CEO Jeff] Immelt, was on talking about what he perceived as an impediment to creating better jobs and he talked about regulation. Is he against Dodd-Frank?

Liesman: I’m talking about paying our bills, Rick.

Santelli: You know what, we should pay our bills. We should pay our bills. But the other amount, the 42-cents of every dollar we don’t have let Congress figure out they made the obligations.

Liesman: The trouble is, there is a time and a place for this conversation and debate.

Santelli: Now is the time!

Liesman: It’s not when the credit card bill is due.

Santelli: This is the place. We’re here. If not now, when?! If not now, when? If not now, when?!

Video here.



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Official Calls For Riverside, 12 Other Counties To Secede From California

Secession is interesting thing, more complicated than one might at first think. The following — which won’t go anywhere — is semi interesting.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire:

RIVERSIDE (CBS) — Is the state of California about to go “South”?

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone apparently thinks so, after proposing that the county lead a campaign for as many as 13 Southern California counties to secede from the state.

Stone said in a statement late Thursday that Riverside, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono counties should form the new state of South California.

The creation of the new state would allow officials to focus on securing borders, balancing budgets, improving schools and creating a vibrant economy, he said.

“Our taxes are too high, our schools don’t educate our children well enough, unions and other special interests have more clout in the Legislature than the general public,” Stone said in his statement.

He unveiled his proposal on the day Gov. Jerry Brown signed budget legislation that will divert about $14 million in 2011-12 vehicle license fee revenue from four new Riverside County cities.

Officials fear the cut will cripple the new cities of Eastvale, Jurupa Valley, Menifee and Wildomar.

Stone said he would present his proposal to the Board of Supervisors July 12.

The new state would have no term limits, only a part-time legislature and limits on property taxes.

(Link)


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Defending McDonald’s (Again)

Most in the mainstream are busy vilifying McDonald’s, but not me.

In fact, I’ve defended McDonald’s before, against the outrageous environmental hoops through which the religion of environmentalism has pressured McDonald’s to jump, and so I was particularly delighted to read Jeffry Tucker’s excellent essay also in defense of those golden arches.

Here’s an excerpt:

McDonald’s as the Paradigm of Progress

I feel vindicated by recent data on this company’s hiring in the midst of terrible economic times.

The national labor-participation rate has been falling for a decade and is now as low as it was during the 1982 recession. If people were leaving the workplace with wads of cash and every intention of living out their dream of a life of leisure, this might be good news.

Sadly, all evidence runs the other direction. People want remunerative work but can’t find it, and their situation is getting worse not better, thanks mainly to legal restrictions and artificial burdens borne by institutions that would otherwise be hiring.

McDonald’s appears to be responsible for more than half the new jobs being created right now: its April jobs fair added 30,000 people to its payrolls. It has bucked the trend — a bit like swimming against the tide.

But instead of congratulating this great company for doing the impossible, the judgment in the press is harsh. Burger flipping is the only work to be had out there? Surely this is evidence of how pathetic economic growth is.

The trouble with this line is that it doesn’t recognize how difficult it is for an institution to adapt itself and still grow in this climate. And how does McDonald’s do it? It is an old recipe: watch the markets, emulate the successful, adapt and change, and slavishly serve the consuming public.

The reinvention of McDonald’s began only two years ago, as its management noted the new vogue for healthy food and fancy coffees and fruit smoothies served up in a posh environment such as Starbucks offers. Can McDonald’s, the very embodiment of the lowbrow urge for a greasy burger and fries, actually horn in on this market?

It doesn’t seem likely, but the company gave it a try. There were new breakfast items like fruit parfaits. There was an apple-and-walnuts salad, along with many other premium salads, for lunch. There was a new premium burger made of Angus beef (which to me tastes as good as a restaurant-style burger). There were new fruit smoothies that taste as good (or better) than the ones that cost twice as much at the hip smoothie bars.

Not that McDonald’s merely chases public fads. The company responded to an earlier outcry for diet food by making the McLean sandwich in the mid 1990s. No one bought it. The company dropped it from the menu. The lesson is that public piety is not the same thing as actual spending habits. Future development would be rooted in reality, and it certainly is today.

Most of all there was the addition of new coffee drinks. Each is made from freshly ground beans, with the addition of fresh milk (whole or low fat), all made upon order. McDonald’s added its own spin. The most annoying aspect of Starbucks, as everyone knows, is the wait. Everything is done by hand, from the cleaning to the packing of grounds.

McDonald’s has a new machine that does everything. The beans fall through a large funnel. The milk is sucked out of gallons from the doors underneath. The nozzles and containers are cleaned after each drink by superhot steam blasts. The human hand only gets involved at the beginning to push buttons and at the end to give it all one last stir. The time it takes to make this fresh treat is reduced to half or even one-third of the Starbucks time.

Then there is the cost issue. A latte at McDonald’s costs 40 percent less than the same at Starbucks. And you don’t have to use strange words like venti or grande when you order. At McDonald’s, they seem to understand normal English words like small, medium, and large….

In a striking way, this approach is deeply embedded in the company’s history. The first restaurant opened in 1940 and closed for renovations in 1948, only to reopen as the first drive-through restaurant. Its first indoor-seating restaurant didn’t open until 1962. Since then, the company has taken glorious steps forward that have foreshadowed global change: it opened in Moscow in 1990, Warsaw in 1992, and on the Web in 1996.

Let’s be clear here. It’s not the case that the management of this company has an unusually high devotion to the well-being of humanity. The management is following the pricing signals and making entrepreneurial judgments all in the service of the consuming public. It is a great competitor, relentlessly reinventing itself in an effort to win the affections of the eating-out public.

The managers here might be the greatest humanitarians in history or they might be the greediest and most selfish people on earth. It really doesn’t matter. The market is the driving force and the profitability signals are the test of whether the company is or is not doing the right thing. This is the very heartbeat of the capitalistic process — the one spotted and dissected centuries ago by economists in France, Spain, Italy, and England.
Renovated McDonald’s Interior
“The result is not just a beautiful model for serving up food but a beautiful model for social service in general.”

These old liberals saw that the capitalistic process is the answer to the great social and moral problems raised by thinkers of all ages precisely because it pours every manner of human motivation into the grand project of satisfying the needs and wants of all society’s members. If economic science had one main point to contribute to the world of ideas, this was it.

A most impressive feature of capitalism that is highlighted in the McDonald’s case is how its institutions so beautifully adapt themselves to change. The drift is always upward: new and improved. And this drift is like a wind that never stops blowing unless it is stopped by the organized force of the state….

The addition or removal of the king-consumer from the process of reform amounts to a fundamental change in the whole raison d’être of an institution. It’s true that McDonald’s is not entirely sustained by the market alone, and even overly scrupulous libertarians have jumped on the attack. It’s true that it has been reported that some of its business loans were backed by TARP money after the crisis of 2008, and, of course, it benefits indirectly from subsidies on corn and the like.

By the same token, it is also wickedly punished by the state, paying 30 percent taxes on earnings and shoveling some $2 billion into the federal treasury every year — all money that might otherwise be used for capital upgrades, dividends, or expansions.

The crucial way to tell a predominantly market-based company from a state-based company is to investigate its primary institutional interest: does it serve the state or does it serve the consuming public? There can be no question where McDonald’s is on this spectrum, and the result is not just a beautiful model for serving up food but a beautiful model for social service in general.

McDonald’s is a prime example of how the market has overcome a fundamental human problem: getting enough to eat. This is a problem that vexed the whole of humanity from the beginning of time. Now it appears to be almost entirely solved, thanks to institutions such as McDonald’s, which people feel entitled to criticize and smear because they seem to be such a fixed element in the universe.

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The Unluckiest Man In The World

Reportedly, his girlfriend is “a tad miffed.”

From Hot Air:

If he had a couple of dollars, he’d be living the dream. Michael Kosko, a state worker who passed on the office pool that scored a $319 million Mega Millions jackpot, had the simplest reason for bowing out.

“I didn’t have two singles,” said Michael Kosko, a six-year employee of the Homes and Community Renewal agency in Albany.

“We had played over the past few months, we never hit anything. And I just decided that on that particular day, I wasn’t going to play.”…

“It wasn’t my day,” he said in the understatement of the millennium.




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The “Alleged” Is Probably Not Necessary When Describing This Indiana Paint Huffer

This is a recent and real mug shot of one Kelly Gibson, a long-time paint-huffer from Fort Wayne, Indiana:

From the Smoking Gun:

For the 48th time since 1992, the Indiana man has been arrested for inhaling paint fumes. Gibson’s latest huffing collar came when his wife summoned cops to the couple’s Fort Wayne home shortly after midnight on April 14.

As seen in the above mug shot, officers found an impaired Gibson covered in silver paint. He was booked into the Allen County jail for allegedly inhaling toxic vapors.

The image of Gibson will likely draw comparisons to the classic booking photo of Patrick “Goldface” Tribett, an Ohio man who has earned online infamy for his series of paint-dappled mug shots.

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick Wishes America Wasn’t A Free Country

Pretty hard to equivocate this one, no matter how liberal your viewpoint.

Here’s the Governor’s exact words:

“It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t, but . . . it’s a free country. You know, you got to, you got to respect that freedom.”

Deval Patrick said this on the “Jim & Margery Show” (WTKK-FM, Boston) September 1st, 2010.

Here, on video, is the audio:

As Doug Powers drolly notes:

Every now and then, a politician goofs and reveals more than he or she intended, providing a window into the true motives or beliefs. Michigan’s John Dingell claiming that Obamacare is a peachy way to “control the people,” and President Obama saying that America is a world super power “whether we like it or not” are recent examples.

Reader, do the world a favor and send this son-of-a-bitch Deval Patrick a message. Here is his contact form.

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Will Washington’s Failures Lead To Second American Revolution? — By Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins

You say you want a revolution?

Well, just recently the following article appeared in Investors Business Daily. I reproduce it here in full because America is currently under the thumb of people like this:



From Investors Business Daily:

The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, “Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?”

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There’s no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.

Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.

Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He’s diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.

He may soon bankrupt us and replace our big merit-based capitalist economy with a small government-directed one of his own design.

He is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most “consequential” president ever.

The Wall Street Journal’s steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is “an alien in the White House.”

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him “anti-business.” Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced “redistribution of income” in history.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America’s financial future is “unusually uncertain.”

A Wall Street “fear gauge” based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.

Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington’s wise farewell admonition: “cherish public credit … use it as sparingly as possible … avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt … bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not … inconvenient and unpleasant … .”

Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans — but that will not necessarily stop Obama.

A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.

In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.

Under ObamaCare, he can issue new rules and regulations so insidiously powerful in their effect that higher-priced, lower-quality and rationed health care will quickly become ingrained, leaving a permanent stain.

Under Dodd-Frank, he and his agents will control all credit and financial transactions, rewarding friends and punishing opponents, discriminating on the basis of race, gender and political affiliation. Credit and liquidity may be choked by bureaucracy and politics — and the economy will suffer.

He and the EPA may try to impose by “regulatory” fiats many parts of the cap-and-trade and other climate legislation that failed in the Congress.

And by executive orders and the in terrorem effect of an industrywide “boot on the neck” policy, he can continue to diminish energy production in the United States.

By the trick of letting current-law tax rates “expire,” he can impose a $3.5 trillion 10-year tax increase that damages job-creating capital investment in an economy struggling to recover. And by failing to enforce the law and leaving America’s borders open, he can continue to repopulate America with unfortunate illegals whose skill and education levels are low and whose political attitudes are often not congenial to American-style democracy.

A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.

The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.

• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.

• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.

Please remember: the revolution will not be televised, but it will be broadcast live right here. Stay tuned.

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Francis Bellamy And The United States Pledge Of Allegiance

The United States Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by an American socialist named Francis Julius Bellamy, who was also a Baptist minister, and whose cousin Edward Bellamy is the semi-famous author of two socialist utopian novels: Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).

Francis Bellamy was born in Rome, New York, May 18, 1855. He died August 28, 1931. His original Pledge of Allegiance was first published in a magazine called Youth’s Companion, a nationally circulated publication written for youngsters.

In 1888, Youth’s Companion began its campaign to sell American flags to public schools. For Francis Bellamy, this was more than a mere money-maker: it was an opportunity for him to spread his statist propaganda, and in the end Youth’s Companion became a supporter of the Schoolhouse Flag Project, which, under Bellamy’s watchful eye, aimed to place a flag above every public school in America.

His Pledge of Allegiance was first published in the September 8th (1892) issue of Youth’s Companion.

Along with the Pledge, the children were asked to perform the so-called Bellamy Salute (photo below).

Not four decades later, when the Nazi’s rose to power and began saluting in a similar manner, Franklin Roosevelt changed the salute to the hand-over-heart method we see today.

Francis Bellamy’s original Pledge of Allegiance, the recitation of which he intended to take no more than 15 seconds, went like so:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Here, in Bellamy’s own words, is why he chose the specific language that he chose for his Pledge:

It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution … with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people…

The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands’. …And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?

Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’. No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all…

The phrase under God was incorporated into the Pledge on June 14, 1954. The man to introduce it was a fellow named Louis A. Bowman (1872-1959).

Here are the transmutations that the Pledge has undergone since its inception in 1892:

1892
“I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

1892 to 1923
“I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

1923 to 1924
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

1924 to 1954
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

1954 to Present
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The Bellamy Salute

The problem, of course, with all this indivisibility talk is that the states were not necessarily intended to be indivisible. As Thomas Jefferson said:

If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation … to a continuance in union, I have no hesitation in saying, “let us separate” (Thomas Jefferson, 1816).

And John Quincy Adams — a devoted unionist — noted in a 1839 speech about secession:

[In] dissolving that which can no longer bind, we would have to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center.

If, then, you’ve ever wondered why it is when you hear the Pledge of Allegiance you feel as if you’re hearing the intonations of brainwashed drones, this is why:

The Pledge was a propaganda prayer written by a socialist who’s goal was to inculcate young minds with dogma.

And that’s the end of it.

Author’s Note: This article first appeared January 1st, 2010, on this website.

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The Jihadists’ Deadly Path To Citizenship

The following article, quoted only in part, was written by Michelle Malkin, with whom I do not, for the record, always agree. (I believe in open borders, with thorough and proper background checks.) But she does raise an exceptionally important point here:

In the aftermath of the botched Times Square terror attack over the weekend, Pakistani-born bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad’s U.S. citizenship status caused a bit of shock and awe. The Atlantic magazine writer Jeffrey Goldberg’s response was typical: “I am struck by the fact that he is a naturalized American citizen, not a recent or temporary visitor.” Well, wake up and smell the deadly deception.

Shahzad’s path to American citizenship — he reportedly married an American woman, Huma Mian, in 2008 after spending a decade in the country on foreign student and employment visas — is a tried-and-true terror formula. Jihadists have been gaming the sham marriage racket with impunity for years. And immigration benefit fraud has provided invaluable cover and aid for U.S.-based Islamic plotters, including many other operatives planning attacks on New York City. As I’ve reported previously:

– El Sayyid A. Nosair wed Karen Ann Mills Sweeney to avoid deportation for overstaying his visa. He acquired U.S. citizenship, allowing him to remain in the country, and was later convicted for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that claimed six lives.

– Ali Mohamed became an American citizen after marrying a woman he met on a plane trip from Egypt to New York. Recently divorced, Linda Lee Sanchez wed Mohamed in Reno, Nev., after a six-week “courtship.” Mohamed became a top aide to Osama bin Laden and was later convicted for his role in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Africa that killed 12 Americans and more than 200 others.

– Embassy bombing plotter Khalid Abu al Dahab obtained citizenship after marrying three different American women.

– Embassy bombing plotter Wadih el Hage, Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary, married April Ray in 1985 and became a naturalized citizen in 1989. Ray knew of her husband’s employment with bin Laden, but like many of these women in bogus marriages, she pleaded ignorance about the nature of her husband’s work. El Hage, she says, was a sweet man, and bin Laden “was a great boss.”

– Lebanon-born Chawki Youssef Hammoud, convicted in a Hezbollah cigarette-smuggling operation based out of Charlotte, N.C., married American citizen Jessica Fortune for a green card to remain in the country.

– Hammoud’s brother, Mohammed Hammoud, married three different American women. After arriving in the United States on a counterfeit visa, being ordered deported and filing an appeal, he wed Sabina Edwards to gain a green card. Federal immigration officials refused to award him legal status after this first marriage was deemed bogus in 1994. Undaunted, he married Jessica Wedel in May 1997 and, while still wed to her, paid Angela Tsioumas (already married to someone else, too) to marry him in Detroit. The Tsioumas union netted Mohammed Hammoud temporary legal residence to operate the terror cash scam. He was later convicted on 16 counts that included providing material support to Hezbollah.

– A total of eight Middle Eastern men who plotted to bomb New York landmarks in 1993 — Fadil Abdelgani, Amir Abdelgani, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, Tarig Elhassan, Abdo Mohammed Haggag, Fares Khallafalla, Mohammed Saleh, and Matarawy Mohammed Said Saleh — all obtained legal permanent residence by marrying American citizens.

A year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, homeland security officials cracked a massive illegal alien Middle Eastern marriage fraud ring in a sting dubbed “Operation Broken Vows.” Authorities were stunned by the scope of the operations, which stretched from Boston to South Carolina to California. But marriage fraud remains a treacherous path of least resistance. The waiting period for U.S. citizenship is cut by more than half for marriage visa beneficiaries. Sham marriage monitoring by backlogged homeland security investigators is practically nonexistent.

As former federal immigration official Michael Cutler warned years ago: “Immigration benefit fraud is certainly one of the major ‘dots’ that was not connected prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and remains a ‘dot’ that is not really being addressed the way it needs to be in order to secure our nation against criminals and terrorists who understand how important it is for them to ‘game’ the system as a part of the embedding process” (link).

And from a recent article written by indefatigable attorney Leo Donofrio, Esquire:

It looks like Natural-Born-Citizen-Gate is hitting top volume….

The report was closely followed by a historical discovery of Sharon Rondeau at the Post & Email which highlighted the legal opinion of lifelong Democrat Breckenridge Long – an attorney and graduate of Washington University Law School who later served as Secretary of State as well as U.S. ambassador to Italy under FDR – who, in an article written for the Chicago Legal News, argued that a “native born citizen” of the US who is also born to a British father is NOT a “natural born citizen” by stating – in 1916 – about Presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes:

“It is not disputed that Mr. Hughes is not a citizen of the United States, but if he had the right to elect, he must have had something to choose between. He was native born because he was born in this country, and he is now a native born citizen because he is now a citizen of this country; but, had he been a “natural born” citizen, he would not have had the right to choose between this country and England; he would have had nothing to choose between; he would have owed his sole allegiance to the government of the United States, and there would have been no possible question, whether he found himself in the United States or in any other country in the world, that he would be called upon to show allegiance to any Government but that of the United States.”

There you have a lifelong Democrat politician – who served at a high level of Government service – making the argument that President Obama would not be eligible to the office of President despite his place of birth. Is the former Democrat Secretary of State now to be retroactively attacked as a wingnut birther?

The historical dam is breaking as more and more evidence surfaces proving Obama is not eligible. A reader of this blog who has asked to remain anonymous recently provided further historical proof that Obama is not eligible to be president. The New Englander And Yale Law Review, Volume 3 (1845) states:

“The expression ‘citizen of the United States occurs in the clauses prescribing qualifications for Representatives, for Senators, and for President. In the latter, the term ‘natural born citizen’ is used and excludes all persons owing allegiance by birth to foreign states.”

That is serious on-point historical research. At the time of his birth, Obama owed allegiance to Great Britain. That is not disputed, it is admitted by the President himself. And this admission is the true problem Obama faces should this issue ever make its way to the Supreme Court. Obama owed allegiance to great Britain when he was born.

In a previous article, I highlighted the opinion of Alexander Porter Morse, taken from the Albany Law Review article entitled, “NATURAL-BORN CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES: ELIGIBILITY FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT”:

“If it was intended that anybody who was a citizen by birth should be eligible, it would only have been necessary to say, “no person, except a native-born citizen”; but the framers thought it wise, in view of the probable influx of European immigration, to provide that the president should at least be the child of citizens owing allegiance to the United States at the time of his birth. It may be observed in passing that the current phrase “native-born citizen” is well understood; but it is pleonasm and should be discarded; and the correct designation, “native citizen” should be substituted in all constitutional and statutory enactments, in judicial decisions and in legal discussions where accuracy and precise language are essential to intelligent discussion.”

It’s a rather clear testimony to the fact that simply being “native born” does not mean that one is “natural born” but “accuracy and intelligent discussion” are not the goals of propaganda. A fraudulent blogger who shall remain nameless attempted to justify Obama’s eligibility with the following lie:

“Some people have confused Alexander Morse’s paper on child born (abroad) to two US citizens being natural born citizens as a necessary requirement. Of course, anyone familiar with Alexander Morse realizes that he never held such a position…”

It appears the liar has selectively failed to read the quote above as well as Mr. Morse’s letter to the Albany Law Journal of December 18th, 1884, which states:

“It seems to the undersigned, aside from judicial sanction, that the children of aliens born in the United States are, to use the language of Judge Cooley in another connection, ” subject to the jurisdiction of the United States only in a much qualified sense; ” until they take some steps submitting themselves to the jurisdiction….”

This letter was written in 1884 – before Wong Kim Ark was decided. His article quoted above, was written in 1904 – after Wong Kim Ark. The historical evidence proves that Morse held the same point of view before and after Wong Kim Ark. The article and the letter both indicate clearly that Morse would not have agreed Obama was eligible.

(Link)

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Buffaloed

Chief Seattle was an extraordinarily intelligent and charismatic man, a 19th century leader of Puget Sound Indian tribes. In 1884 he purportedly said, among other things, the following:

The earth is our mother. What befalls the earth befalls all the sons and daughters of the earth…. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies left by the white man who shot them from a passing train… What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?

The above words have been cited by Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, in his mind-numbing autobiography; they have been broadcast over the airwaves of at least six foreign countries; and, according to a 1993 Reader’s Digest report, “Chief Seattle’s words” are read as “a matter of curriculum” in elementary public schools all across our great country.

Al Gore, of course, routinely trots out Chief Seattle’s words in his own speeches and articles, most famously in his other propaganda publication Earth in the Balance, which predates his more mendacious Inconvenient Truth by over a decade.

The problem, of course, as you’ve no doubt already guessed, is that Chief Seattle never made any such speech. He was too smart and too articulate for such hackneyed lines, and doubtless the good chief would be appalled to hear that these words are being put in his mouth like so much bad pemmican.

The “thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie,” for example (shot by white men from trains), should tip off all would-be quoters of Chief Seattle that this speech is ersatz: buffalo did not “roam” anywhere near where Chief Seattle lived, nor did trains run through there until years after his speech was supposedly delivered.

Also, the “ripe hills being blotted out by talking wires” doesn’t fit the timeline either.

But since when have actual facts really mattered to the religion of environmentalism?

It turns out that this speech was actually written by a university professor named Ted Perry.

Ted Perry.

He was hired to write a documentary about pollution.

The lie was deliberate, though not on Ted Perry’s part.

You may read all about this story in “What Chief Seattle Said,” by Paul S. Wilson, in “Environmental Law” (vol. 22, p. 1451-1468).

Or, alternatively, on the front page of The New York Times, April 1992.

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Trivia

The United States is not a democracy and was never intended to be. Democracy means majority rule. The rights of each individual, however, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, are inalienable in the literal sense (i.e. cannot be transferred, revoked, or be made alien) and are thus never subject to vote or the “whims of the majority.”

Which is why the word “democracy” does not appear one time in either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

The United States is, as Benjamin Franklin said, a Constitutional Republic.

Calvin Coolidge had a pet pygmy hippo, which he kept in the White House.

Whereas Teddy Roosevelt kept a pet hyena.

Ronald Reagan was once given an honorary doctorate in professional football.

The largest scientific study ever conducted on acid rain (National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, Integrated Assessment, External Review Draft) didn’t find any real evidence that acid rain destroys forests.

As a teaching method, the National Wildlife Federation routinely had students dump highly acidic water on plants to, quote, “simulate acid rain.” Thus, when the plants died, the kids naturally assumed that acid rain kills forests in this same manner.

In 1992, a man in Carson City, Nevada, ran in the Democratic primarily as, quote, “God Almighty!” And did not win.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) was invented to protect American troops in WWII from insect-borne disease.

Despite numerous studies, DDT has never once been shown to be harmful. On the contrary, it has saved more lives than any other chemical invention in the history of the world, with the possible exception of antibiotics.

One spraying of DDT lasts longer than all other pesticides combined. Which is one of the many reasons mosquitoes are less resistant to it.

Since DDT was banned, more pesticides are now required, because none are as effective as DDT.

Which is one of the biggest reasons malaria has come back with such a vengeance.

During the final rush to get the first shipment of DDT out the door to American Troops, a valve at the bottom of a large vessel of DDT accidentally came open. Chemist Joseph Jacobs, who was standing under the vessel when it opened, was covered with hot DDT. “When it dried,” he says, in his autobiography, The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur, “I had DDT an inch thick all over me. In my hair, in my ears, and in my mouth and nose. I took off my clothes, showered, and scrubbed, but probably ingested more DDT during that one incident than is today considered safe to absorb over many years.”

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, which singlehandedly succeeded in getting DDT banned, believed that one touch of DDT could kill you.

Chemist Joseph Jacobs lived another sixty years with no adverse health effects whatsoever.

Joseph Jacobs routinely lectured on the utter safety of DDT. In fact, he began each lecture by eating a spoonful of raw DDT at the podium.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his DDT work and was eighty-eight when he died, in 2004.

“In all the previous wars of history,” wrote chemical engineer O.T. Zimmerman, in 1946, “the louse [singular for lice] has killed more men than ever died from bullets, swords, or other weapons.”

The Audubon Society, though sympathetic to Rachel Carson’s claims, has stated publicly that no extinction or significant loss to bird populations came about through the use of DDT: “of the 40 birds Carson said might by now be extinct or nearly so, 19 have stable populations, 14 have increasing populations, and 7 are declining” (Easterbrook, 1995, p. 82). It should be noted furthermore that the 7 listed as “declining” declined only slightly, and not through any demonstrable link with DDT.

After President Bush senior banned broccoli from the White House in 1990, California broccoli growers delivered nine tons of it to Washington DC.

Science is in large part government-funded. Thus, scientists improve their access to research money if they can show politicians that they are “saving the planet.”

Statistically speaking, scientists who don’t propagate the fear-factor receive far less money than those who do, regardless of the actual truth.

Melvin Shapiro, for instance, head of research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Insight Magazine: “If there were no dollars attached to the game, you’d see it played on intellect and integrity. When you say the ozone threat is a scam, you’re not only attacking people’s scientific integrity, you’re going after their pocketbook as well.”

After that interview, Shapiro stopped taking phone calls. Word circulated that his supervisors censored him for fear of hurting their own funding.

Bureaucrats realize this as well: “When the Superfund Law was passed in 1980 … the EPA’s budget went up almost instantly by hundreds of millions of dollars, and ultimately billions…. The EPA administrator actively campaigned for the Superfund Law…. And, in fact, the law that emerged was largely written by members of the agency” (Facts Not Fear, p. 8).

The Superfund Law has achieved next to nothing — apart, that is, from spending billions in taxpayer dollars.

George Washington carried a sundial instead of a watch to tell time.

More timber grows each year than is cut.

“In the time it takes you to read this letter, nine hundred acres of rainforest will have been destroyed forever,” said Russell E. Train, of the World Wildlife Fund & The Conservation Foundation, back in 1992, a complete fiction, we now know.

The famous statement made by biologist Norman Myers, which sent environmentalists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes, that “2 percent of all tropical forest was being destroyed per year,” and that by “2000 we will have lost a third of the world’s tropical forest” (Myers cited in Goudie 1993:46.), has proved inanely inaccurate.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) puts tropical deforestation in the 1980s at 0.8 percent. In 2001, satellite imagery, which is precise, shows that tropical deforestation had declined to 0.46 percent.

Lack of property rights — i.e. private property — makes tropical deforestation worse.

The snows of Kilimanjaro, one of Al Gore’s pet props, have been receding for a very long time, a well-known fact among scientists, who, additionally, are also quick to note that the temperature on Kilimanjaro has not been going up. Why, then, the recession of Kilimanjaro’s snows? Ice requires cold and moisture. And it’s precisely the latter that’s lacking.

As climate scientist Robert Balling says: “Gore does not acknowledge the two major articles on the subject published in 2004 in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research showing that modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro was initiated by a reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century and not by local or global warming.”

I.e. the local climate shift on Kilimanjaro began a century ago.

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.

In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable.” Doctor Braithwaite’s unequivocal conclusion:

“There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

“By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite” (“It Would Be Nice to Know More about Ice,” Jay Lehr).

On the basis of that logical fallacy known as the fallacy of insufficient evidence, all glacier fears are stopped cold right there.

But in fact that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keith Echelmeyer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, says this:

“To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do… The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response.”

Mr. Echelmeyer goes on to tell us that in Alaska there are large glaciers advancing in the very same areas where others are retreating.

Quoting Doctor Martin Beniston of the Institute of Geography at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

Numerous climatological details of mountains are overlooked by the climate models, which thus makes it difficult to estimate the exact response of glaciers to global warming, because glacier dynamics are influenced by numerous factors other than climate, even though temperature and cloudiness may be the dominant controlling factors. According to the size, exposure and altitude of glaciers, different response times can be expected for the same climatic forcing.

According to the excellent glacier program at Rice University, those response times run something like this:

Ice sheet: 100,000 to 10,000 years

Large valley glacier: 10,000 to 1,000 years

Small valley glacier: 1,000 to 100 years

“Glaciers are influenced by a variety of local and regional natural phenomena that scientists do not fully comprehend. Besides temperature changes, glaciers also respond to changes in the amount and type of precipitation, changes in sea level and changes in ocean circulation patterns. As a result, glaciers do not necessarily advance during colder weather and retreat during warmer weather” (John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy).

Grist magazine: There’s a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What’s the right mix?

Al Gore: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience’s head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis. Over time that mix will change. As the country comes to more accept the reality of the crisis, there’s going to be much more receptivity to a full-blown discussion of the solutions. (Source of this astonishing exchange: Grist Magazine[boldface mine].)

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was a foreign diplomat at age 14.

Teddy Roosevelt once delivered a one-hour speech, despite the fact that he had just been shot by a would-be assassin.

Quondam senator Barry Goldwater recommended peanut butter for shaving cream.

The tenth President of the United States, John Tyler (1790-1862), was unable to get a job after leaving office and so worked at a village pound tending cows and horses.

All the trash produced by the United States for the next one thousand years could fit into a landfill forty-four miles square by 120 feet deep—one tenth of 1 percent of all this country’s entire land area. (“A Consumer’s Guide to Environmental Myths and Realities,” Policy Report #99, National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas, TX, September 1991, 3, quoting Clark Wiseman of Gonzaga University.)

“It is entirely possible that we may be the last generation of humans to know this wondrous earth as it was meant to be,” said the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, many years ago.

“Nearly every habitat is at risk,” said Time Magazine, almost two decades ago. “Swarms of people are running out of food and space …” Which is another statement that time and the facts have exposed as completely false. Thus:

Every man, woman, and child on the planet could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space no bigger than Jacksonville, Florida.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution says Congress has only these powers. To borrow money (not the same thing as taxation); regulate commerce with foreign nations; establish rules for naturalization; coin money and fix standards of weights and measures; punish counterfeiting; establish a post office; promote science with patents; establish the lower courts; punish pirates; declare war; raise and support armies, but only for a term of two years; provide a navy; regulate naval and land forces; call forth the militia; and administer capital.

“It would be impossible to construct a logical argument that these powers permit the massive welfare state and regulatory state that exists today in America,” said Doctor Thomas Dilorenzo, in 2006.

“The United States is not a Christian Nation,” said President John Adams, in the Treaty of Tripoli.

“Private property is the guardian of every other right” said James Madison, the father of the Constitution.

“I precisely advocate the abolition of private property,” said Karl Marx.

“Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned,” said Ludwig von Mises.

“The only alternative to private property is government ownership — that is, socialism,” says Doctor Dilorenzo.

Peter Cooper, inventor of a gelatinous dessert called Jell-O, once ran for the Presidency of the United States.

And lost.

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The Sudsbuster

He was one of the mellow, the soft-spoken, the tawny-haired — one who preferred to be alone.

His name was Mark, a dishwasher at age 45.

He was a drifter, a loner. He valued his freedom above all; dishwashing jobs he could always find.

Our paths crossed and re-crossed at the Café Claire, where I was tending bar. The Café Claire stood on the outskirts of an industrial town, near the railroad tracks, beside his temporary home. Sometimes he’d sit at the end of the bar, before his shift or after, and drink black coffee. Sometimes he’d speak to me, and sometimes he would not.

He was a tidy man, and orderly. He organized things in an oddly geometrical way. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not use drugs. He was clean-living and in good shape, neither depressed nor its opposite.

He was single, without children.

And he was free.

He read a lot — novels and non-fiction — to endure, perhaps, the knives of lust that so frequently strike. He had the quietude of one who has gone a long time without sex.

His home was an efficiency apartment — a “hutch,” he called it — with good plumbing. (This mattered to him.) He dealt only in cash and he was good with his money. He saved, he moved on. Sometimes he worked on farms, sometimes he loaded and unloaded freight, sometimes he carried hod. But when I first met him and asked him what he did, he said “I’m a sudsbuster.”

So in the way of things, he would come behind my bar at times, when I was busy, and, without asking me, he’d wash my dishes. I loved him for that. He was fast on his feet and knew how to work around people, so that nobody was in anybody’s way. Buried in bloody marys and martinis, I’d glance over and see him plunged to his elbows in suds, his gold-rim spectacles, which somehow endeared him to me, filled with the burning bar light, his neat goatee damp with perspiration and pied with skeins of gray. Working with somebody in this way creates a deep and ineradicable bond.

Two or three times, I saw him outside work while I was in my car. Each time, he was walking alone along the railroad tracks, at dusk like some solitary figure carved from the coming dark. This was a grizzled landscape, a prairie desert of Euclidian perfection, full of rings and radii, vast yet traversed by a single road: an isolate highway humming day or night with Mack truck tires. The wind ferried tumbleweeds across the lion’s pelt land. Deadwood everywhere stood silvery-gray, like the moon above, and invariably whenever I saw him, a feeling of melancholy came over me, a melancholy for him, I am not sure why.

This, though, is not about pity or pathos, and Mark was not a person to pitied.
This, rather, is about one man out of many millions making his way
in the land of the free,
the USA.