Good Neighbor Blog

THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

2010-09-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

"Green" vs. "Red, White & Blue"
By Marita Noon
"Our civilization is not indestructible: it needs to be actively defended"--so said a recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting the "Huntingtonian model" as laid out in the classic work of late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington: Clash of Civilizations. In short, the idea is that "a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization." The three main civilizations are Western, Muslim, and the Confucian-with the West declining in power.
The West includes America.
The article's author proposes a political incorrect idea: survival depends on groups with a shared civilization uniting to defend it against challenges.
Looking at the three-civilization model, The West is declining because we've become dependent on the other two. The Middle-eastern countries-Muslim civilization-for our oil. Asian countries-Confucian civilizations-for most everything else. We, in the Western civilization, manufacture very little. Our computers and cell phones, our furniture and clothes, our dog food and medicines are mostly manufactured in China. It is hard to find consumables without the "Made in China" label.
The Muslim or Confucian civilizations have not become super-powers. They cannot boast about housing any of the world's great institutions of learning. The major inventions do not come from these civilizations. No. Instead, much of the West's demise can be traced back to the emergence of a fourth civilization-a post- Huntingtonian civilization.
"Green."
Though thought to be the salvation of America-and, in fact, the world, the Green movement has morphed into a civilization clashing with the Western world.
The environmental movement had not yet fully geared up at the time of the release of The Clash of Civilizations. They were viewed as a radical fringe in their beginning back in the sixties and moved into a worthwhile cause in the polluted seventies. However, as Patrick Moore, co-founder of GreenPeace (one of the first environmental groups) explained "the 80's ushered in the age of environmental extremism." The basic issues for which he and Greenpeace fought had largely been accomplished and the general public was in agreement with the primary message. In order for the environmentalists to stay counter-culture, they had to adopt ever more extreme positions. "What happened is environmental extremism. They've abandoned science and logic altogether."
Now, the Green civilization is largely responsible for America's dependence on foreign oil-which has become a security issue as well as an energy problem. We have vast supplies of oil and gas right here in America, but we are not allowed to access it. New legislation and regulation is constantly introduced, on both state and national levels, that either shuts off access to energy supplies or makes them more expensive or difficult to extract-making us ever more dependent of unfriendly governments for our energy resources. As a result, we send billions to Muslim civilizations and they are "exploding."
Likewise, the economic assent of the Confucian civilization can be traced, at least in part, to the Green civilization. The "extremism" with which they have pursued their agenda has moved beyond the pollutants of the seventies to the modern-day attempt to eliminate all carbon emissions. They've pushed policy that has determined that the CO2 that humans breathe out and that plants breathe in-a part of the natural cycle of life-is a "pollutant" that must be vanquished. As a part of this effort, energy has become more expensive and industry is viewed as "dirty." Therefore, manufacturing has moved to off-shore locations-specifically China. Then we import it-and think we are "clean." All this has done is shift the C02 emissions to China where they do not have the pollution controls that we have in America. Instead of America producing CO2 emissions, China is spewing so-called greenhouse gases and true pollutants into the air with such rapidity that the cloud of pollution can be seen creeping to America's shores via satellite photo.
If typical, the response to this "opinion piece" will spotlight the clash of civilizations. The "Green" will attack me with vigor. The "Red, White & Blue" will cheer. As an e-mail I received following a recent radio interview said, "Finally someone speaking out against the WACOS!!"
Huntington was right. There is a clash of civilizations. The question is, will we allow the destruction of the "Red, White & Blue" or will we actively defend it?

50 SIGNS YOU ARE A BAD NEIGHBOR

2010-08-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

We would love to share with you an article that we just posted on our own blog! “50 Signs You are a Bad Neighbor” would be an interesting story for your readers to check out and discuss on your blog, so we hope you will consider sharing it!
Thanks so much for your time, and have a wonderful day!
Sheryl Owen
_____________________________________________

50 Signs You are a Bad Neighbor
We all have neighbors that we could really do without, right? You know the people that I am talking about… It might however surprise you that to someone else YOU are one of those people that they just can’t stand to have as a neighbor. So, you might be wondering how you know if you are one such person. Funny you should ask as I find myself in the same predicament. So, after a bit of soul searching and digging in my memory I came up with the following 50 signs that you are a bad neighbor:
Pets – Nobody has an issue with you having a cat or dog, usually if something comes up it is more how you are taking care of the pet or not that becomes an issue like:
You let your dog out of the house late at night or early in the morning and they bark a lot (and loudly).
You let your dog out and don’t quickly let them back in so they scratch and scratch at your door (while barking loudly).
You let your dog go to the bathroom in your yard and don’t clean up (so your yard is a mine field).
You walk your pet but don’t keep them on a leash.
You let your dog or cat roam the neighborhood (because “everyone loves them”).
Your dog has a problem with biting yet you tie them up outside your home for extended time periods.
You let your dog dig holes in your yard making it less than attractive which reflects on the neighborhood.
Your dog is outside so much the grass is worn down from their chain dragging back and forth as they run and bark at people passing by.
You don’t clean up after your dog when they go to the bathroom in your neighbor’s yard.
You let your cat or dog fight with other pets in the neighborhood.
Kids – Who doesn’t love the sound of kids playing and having a good time in the neighborhood? Well you might be surprised… In general it’s not a problem but watch out if you allow one of the following:
You let your kids TP or “egg” other houses in the neighborhood (yes, even if it is one of their “friends”).
You let your kids run wild outside with no apparent adult supervision.
You buy your kids three wheelers, go carts, mini bikes, and other loud and annoying toys and then let them go wherever they please as long as they stay close to home.
You let your kids buy fireworks and allow every Saturday night to be the 4th of July.
You let your kids have lots of parties (even if it’s not on a school night).
If you buy your child all the best toys and then they run around the neighborhood bragging to other kids (usually resulting in those kids pestering their parents for the same type of gifts).
If you are constantly going to the neighbors asking them to support one of your child’s causes (brownies, cub scouts, school, band, sports teams, etc.). Your neighbors don’t need so many magazines and candybars, give them a break!
If your yard is the neighborhood football or baseball field…
If you let your kids play basketball in the driveway late at night or early in the morning (especially on the weekends).
If your kids leave toys in the neighbors yard all the time… eventually it gets old.
Yard – Everyone understands that working in the yard is not a lot of fun, but it is important to the overall look of the neighborhood. You could find yourself in trouble with the neighbors if you do one of the following:
You are always late mowing your yard so the grass is always long and always results in you needing to rake.
You always mow your lawn late at night or early in the morning (in case you don’t get it… that also goes for trimming).
In the Fall if you never rake your leaves because they will naturally decompose.
If you don’t take care of dead grass or yellowing grass in your yard.
If you let your bushes and trees die and never remove or replace them.
If you park 10 cars in your backyard and run a private car dealership or junkyard (whichever you prefer to call it).
If you let your yard get over-run by weeds (yes dandelions included they aren’t pretty yellow flowers).
If you always water your yard (even after weeks of rain).
If you feel that every inch of your yard must contain a pink flamingo or other “lawn ornament.”
If you build the largest monstrosity of a swingset/clubhouse in your yard.
House – Just like with your yard there are basic expectations that need to be met with your home as well to keep you in good standing with the neighbors. You could have issues if you…
NEVER, ever wash your windows and it’s clear that they are covered in dirt and other grime.
If you don’t keep your house paint looking decent (if it is chipping, repaint).
If you paint your house the brightest of colors to be “different” you probably will be… forever “different.”
If you never wash your house or if you don’t know what power washing your house is… you might have a problem.
If you leave your Christmas lights on your house all year long, people will NOT admire your holiday spirit.
If you in general always decorate for every single holiday and go “all out.”
If you start a lot of home improvement projects, but never finish them.
If you like to talk to neighbors about how much bigger/better your house is than their house (give us a break, we know you are awesome).
If you always have a sign in your yard from a contractor working in your home (okay maybe it’s their trucks and the workers always being around).
If your home alarm system goes off ALL THE TIME, you will eventually annoy your neighbors and they won’t come check on you.
Random – There are some other things that can make you a less-than-desirable neighbor that you may or may not appreciate knowing like:
If you park an RV, boat, and five cars in a driveway that is meant for a max of 3 cars.
If you ALWAYS park in the street right behind your neighbor’s driveway.
If you have tons of parties at your house and all your friends park in the street blocking the neighborhood.
If you have LOUD, I mean LOUD parties (even if they are rare).
If you argue a lot with your spouse or yell at your children a lot it tends to make you less popular with the neighbors.
If you like to pull pranks or practical jokes a lot on neighbors it could get old (flaming dog poo, etc.).
If you feel the need to have campaign posters/yard signs up all year long, you will probably get negative feedback.
If you burn leaves and or other things in your yard (who does that still, seriously…)
If you have a yard sale or garage sale every week (that’s considered a retail shop at that point)
If you sit outside and talk to EVERYONE that passes by, people may not find you as charming as you think they do.
HONORABLE MENTION – PEEPING IN NEIGHBOR’S WINDOWS IS NOT A PART OF YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH DUTIES!

THE WOLVES ARE AT THE DOOR!

2010-08-07T13:22:00.001-07:00

By Henry Lamb
America is not a democracy. It was never intended to be a democracy. The founders worked hard to see that the new government they created was not a democracy, but a growing segment of the population seems hell-bent on transforming this great nation into a democracy in which the rights of the minority are systematically ignored.
The United States of America was quite deliberately designed to be a federal republic. The founders recognized the highest governing authority on earth to be the individual. They realized that they, as individuals, had the authority and the intelligence to create a new system of government, empowered by the consent of the governed to do only those specific chores that the people stipulated in a written Constitution.
They recognized that in such a government, there would need to be direct accountability to the electorate for every official empowered to make laws that restricted the freedom of individuals. This new federal republic had to recognize and honor the state governments that were already constructed, and the local governments within these states, if the new federal republic were to have any chance of succeeding.
The Constitution these men formulated contained two provisions to ensure that the new government would forever remain a federal republic: a Senate chosen by state governments; and a President chosen indirectly by what came to be known as the Electoral College. The 17th Amendment destroyed a major safeguard of the federal republic by allowing Senators to be chosen by the public, rather than by the states.
The 17th Amendment was a significant part of the wave of progressivism ushered in by the Wilson administration in 1913. Imposition of the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, began the attack by progressives on the federal republic the founders had so carefully constructed.
The Electoral College is the last and only element of the Constitution that keeps the United States of America from being formally transformed into a direct democracy. Now, the progressives have taken aim, and are attacking this last bastion of the federal republic.
Direct election of Senators came as the result of a Constitutional Amendment, which can be reversed as was the prohibition amendment - another progressive-era mistake. The war on the Electoral College is taking a different path: states are enacting legislation that authorizes all the state’s electors to be awarded to the national winner of the popular vote, regardless of the how the people voted in the state.
Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and now Massachusetts have all enacted legislation that pledges to assign their state’s electors to the winner of the national popular vote in the presidential election, regardless of how the voters in the state voted.
Prior to this new war on the Electoral College, in all states except Nebraska and Maine, all the state’s electors were assigned to the candidate who received the most votes in the state. This is the winner-take-all system. This system assures that small states have a say in the selection of the President.
Progressives argue that the winner-take-all system is not democratic. So be it. It was not designed to be democratic; it was designed to help balance the power between and among the states and the various branches of government. It was designed to make government function as a federal republic rather than a democracy.
Few people understand the importance of the Electoral College because schools have all but erased the subject from the curriculum. The Electoral College is cumbersome, it is confusing, it is frustrating for the supporters of Al Gore who saw the Electoral College bestow the presidency on George W. Bush who received fewer popular votes than did Al Gore.
Consider the effect of eliminating the Electoral College: direct democracy.
The president would be chosen by urban population centers. There would be no need to campaign in rural states. There would be no need to be concerned about the needs and cares of rural people. There would be no interest in the minority.
The genius of the American system of governance is the carefully developed balance of power between the states and the federal government, the various branches of government, and between conflicting philosophies of governance. When the minority is driven from the debate, or ignored, tyranny reins.
The first 18 months of the Democratic regime in Washington has demonstrated how the majority can ignore the minority and the Constitution. In the cycle of governance, democracy is the last phase before anarchy. The founders wanted no part of a democracy; they created a federal republic.
A democracy is often described as two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. The wolves are at the door of our federal republic.

OBAMA COMPLIES WITH AGENDA 21...

2010-08-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

Obama complies with Agenda 21 and expands federal power
By Henry Lamb
President Obama’s Executive Order 13547 issued July 19, further extends federal power, embraces global governance, diminishes the rights and privileges of individuals, and brings the United States into compliance with Agenda 21, Chapter 17.6, which says:
“Each coastal State should consider establishing, or where necessary strengthening, appropriate coordinating mechanisms (such as a high-level policy planning body) for integrated management and sustainable development of coastal and marine areas….”
The National Ocean Council created by the Executive Order creates this mechanism - and much more.
The genius of the American system of governance created by the U.S. Constitution is the delicate balance of power between the federal government, state and local governments, and the people. The founders recognized the people as the source of power; the people came first. It was the people who organized states. The states created a federal government and through the Constitution, limited the power of the new government to those specific powers set forth in Article 1, Section 8. All unspecified powers were explicitly retained by the states or the people.
In the first 200 years, the United States of America produced greater wealth and prosperity than the rest of the world had produced in 2000 years. Why? Because individuals were free to pursue their own individual happiness.
Throughout its entire history, however, there have been those who believe that government is, or should be, the source of power; that the people are, or should be, subjects of the state. Since the 1970s, these people have used “environmental protection” as an excuse to expand the power of government. They argued that free people, in their pursuit of personal happiness, were polluting the environment. Therefore, government had to restrain free people in order to save the earth.
Their arguments prevailed in Congress, in the schools, and throughout society. The result has been ever- expanding government power that continually diminishes individual freedom, which results in less investment in the pursuit of individual happiness and a gradual slowdown in the growth of prosperity for everyone.
Once, Americans could do whatever they could conceive, restrained only by the possible consequences of infringing their neighbors’ right to do the same. Now, Americans must get permission from multiple layers of government to do anything that produces income, pay multiple taxes on whatever income is generated, and comply with expensive regulations that govern every activity that might be pursued. Consequently, the individual entrepreneurial spirit is steadily being replaced by the ever-expanding reach of government’s ambition to manage society.
President Obama’s most recent Executive Order is another example of government’s ever-expanding reach. First, Obama created an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force in June of 2009. This group worked a year to produce a report that recommends how government can better protect the environment relating to the oceans and the Great Lakes. The Executive Order essentially adopts the recommendations in the report as national policy, and creates a new bureaucracy called the National Ocean Council to implement all the recommendations in the report.
The two most egregious recommendations are: controlling activities on land that affects the ocean, and ratification of the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Before America became a nanny- state subject to the tyrannical decrees of the federal government, people were subject to laws that forced polluters to make whole anyone who was harmed. People who used their own property in the pursuit of their own individual happiness who inadvertently, through negligence, or deliberately polluted water that harmed a neighbor could be brought to court and forced to pay damages.
Now, the federal government ignores private property rights by requiring government approval of any proposed use of private property, payment of fees for the privilege, and payment of penalties for any infraction of a myriad of rules that govern the activities that government may allow.
The trampling of private property rights is not as bad, however, as the subjugation that would result from the ratification of the Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty was rejected by Ronald Reagan in 1982. Despite the so-called improvements to the treaty boasted by the Clinton administration, the U.S. Senate rejected it in 2000. President Bush tried to have it ratified, but the Senate rejected it again in 2004. Now Obama is trying again to force this horrible treaty down America’s throat.
This treaty would give the U.N. power to regulate activity within our territorial seas (Article 2, (3)); it would give the U.N. the power to levy taxes in the form of application fees ($250,000) and royalties; it provides no benefits that the United States does not already enjoy. Yet, the Obama administration has set up this new National Ocean Council to convince the Senate to ratify the treaty.
This treaty is another expansion of global governance, which is defined by the U.N. to be that “framework of rules, institutions, and practices that limits the behavior of individuals, organizations, and companies” (U.N. Development Report, 1999, p. 34).
Obama’s expansion of government is taking the nation in the wrong direction. The federal government should be reduced in size, scope, and function. The federal government should be pushed back inside the bottle of those limited powers defined in Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. States and individuals should reclaim the power given to them by the Constitution and guaranteed by the 10th Amendment. No elected official – including President Obama – is immune to the power of the ballot box. Those in power who support Obama’s brand of foolishness should be forced to find a new career path next November.

REFLECTIONS ON THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE

2010-08-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

By Michael Connelly

Almost one year ago I started by blog on Constitutional law by posting an article I had written on HR 3200 that was the original version of the health care bill pending in Congress. I pointed out that the bill was unconstitutional on its face because it involved the granting of powers to the Executive branch of government that Congress didn’t have to begin with. Specifically, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution does not give Congress the right to regulate health care and certainly does not give it the power to allow the President of the United States to regulate health care. I also pointed out that since the states have always regulated health care on their own; such action by Congress violated the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.
Along with other opponents of the legislation I pointed out that the pending legislation would force the rationing of health care, particularly for senior citizens, would provide for taxpayer funding of abortions, provide health care to illegal immigrants, and would allow Federal bureaucrats to chose the doctors who would treat American citizens and determine what type of care people could receive.
I came under immediate attack by those on the left, including such groups as Media Matters; a George Soros funded group, as well as liberal newspapers for being a liar and a fear monger. They said that none of this would happen under the legislation. I continued to read and monitor the new versions of the bill that were proposed in the House and Senate including the one that was finally adopted. I talked in my blog about the massive tax increases that would take place under the legislation and how people could be subject to finds for refusing to buy federally mandated health care insurance.
In the meantime, the President of the United States and the leaders of Congress continued to repeatedly assure the citizens of the United States that there would be not health care rationing, no taxpayer funded abortions, and they could certainly keep being treated by the doctors of their choice.
Now it is time for a reality check. As the health care bill is being implemented the states of Pennsylvania and Maryland have been provided with assurances of Federal funds, i.e. taxpayer dollars for the funding of abortions. Insurance companies acting under government mandates are offering plans that allow the government to decide who will be treated by particular doctors. In other words, Americans will not be allowed to choose their own physicians. There is also nothing in the legislation that provides for documentation of who participates in the mandated health insurance programs. Therefore, it is wide open for illegal aliens to get Federally subsidized coverage.
As for the tax increases, they are numerous in the health care bill including provisions that allow the IRS to track and impose taxes on Americans who buy gold to protect themselves against an economic collapse. However, the most onerous tax is that on the use of artificial limbs that will directly impact the thousands of American military personnel who have lost arms or legs in combat while defending our freedom. They will now be forced to pay a tax in order to use the artificial limbs that should be provided to them by a grateful America.
And finally, we have the recess appointment by Obama of Dr. Donald Berwick to oversee the Medicare and Medicaid systems in the country. He is an admirer of the failing British system of universal health care and has stated that rationing of health care in the United States will occur. He and his group of Federal bureaucrats will decide who will get care and what kind of care. They will be making the life or death decisions for millions of American citizens. Death panels will be real.
The bottom line is that the American people were lied to by the President and the leaders of Congress. We are being stripped of our Constitutional rights by the Obama administration and this is just the beginning. Other legislation pending in Congress goes even further in attempts to abolish the Constitution. Americans need to wake up now and fight back or our Republic will soon be just a memory.
Michael Connelly
http://michaelconnelly.viviti.com/
mrobertc@hotmail.com

ATTACKING OUR RIGHT TO VOTE

2010-08-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

By Michael Connelly

The right to vote is perhaps the most cherished and important of the rights guaranteed to Americans by the Constitution. Without the right to vote we literally have no way to control the Federal government and keep it from taking away our other rights. Yet, it is precisely because of that fact that the so-called progressives in this country are now trying to severely limit the right to vote, and unfortunately the efforts are coming at us from all three branches of government. We can also expect them to intensify as the November elections grow closer.
First, we have the attack by the Congress on the 1st Amendment right of all businesses and groups to participate in the election process. This came in the form of the Disclose Act, which thanks to the efforts of my you and many other Americans has at least temporarily stalled in the Senate after passing the House of Representatives.
Then, we have the blatant actions of Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice (DOJ) in making a decision to drop the civil suits against members of the Black Panther Party who were videoed during the 2008 election intimidating white voters in Philadelphia. According to J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ attorney, he and his colleagues were informed that the office would not prosecute any minorities for voter intimidation, but would only prosecute whites who intimidated minority voters.
Apparently, that was only the beginning. Historically, members of the military and their families have voted overwhelmingly for conservative political candidates who support the values that the troops are fighting for. This has always been an irritant to the left so there have been increasing efforts by the progressives in some states to derive ways to keep absentee votes from the military from being counted. These tactics have primarily involved waiting so late to send out the ballots to the troops that it would be virtually impossible for them to return them by the election deadline.
In October of 2009 President Obama signed into law a bill introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R. TX) that required the Secretaries of State in each state to mail out absentee ballots to military personnel no later than 45 days prior to the election. This could only be avoided by the Secretary of State getting a waiver because of something unforeseen happening that would prevent the ballots from going out on time.
It sounds great doesn’t it? A left wing controlled Congress passing such legislation and Obama actually signing it. Yet, now it has been learned by the few members of the media who will report on this that at a recent meeting between DOJ officials and the Secretaries of State of various state governments, the DOJ told them not to worry about getting waivers or complying with the law. They were told that the Department of Justice had no intention of enforcing it. In other words, the whole thing was a ruse. The Executive Branch of government has no interest in protecting the right to vote of the men and women fighting for and dying for us overseas.
So, as you can see there is two pronged attack on the right to vote coming from Congress and the White House. First, Congress will do everything it can to limit the free speech efforts by people who disagree with this administration from influencing the election. Secondly, the DOJ has virtually declared an open season during the 2010 election for groups supporting the left to do what is necessary to intimidate voters who might oppose the progressive agenda. At the same time, the DOJ will do its part to help eliminate from consideration votes coming from our heroes overseas in the war.
As unbelievable as all of this is, it gets worse when you look at what has being done by the third branch of government, the Judicial Branch. Certain far left Federal Judges who have their own political agendas have decided to adopt the approach that if you don’t vote for the things I support, you vote won’t count. This has clearly been the case in the recent rulings on the Arizona Immigration Law and the California Marriage Law.
In both of these cases we have the voters of a sovereign state passing legislation that applies only to their states. Yet, because the progressives don’t like these laws they are essentially telling the citizens of these states that you no longer have the right to vote. Do not let yourself be fooled by the decisions that these two pieces of legislation were unconstitutional. Nothing in the Constitution of the United States prohibits the State of Arizona from passing a law allowing its police officers to enforce an already existing Federal law.
In addition, there is nothing at all in the Constitution dealing with marriage whether heterosexual or otherwise. Therefore the states have this power under the specific provisions of the Tenth Amendment that says:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
That is very clear. Whether you agree or disagree with the prohibition of gay marriage by the people of the State of California the fact is that the decision is up to them and when a Federal judge takes that power away from the people, they are being denied their right to vote. That, by the way, is a right clearly granted to the people by the Constitution and can’t be legally taken away by any branch of the Federal Government.
Michael Connelly
http://michaelconnelly.viviti.com/
mrobertc@hotmail.com

$8 GAS - If You Can Find It

2010-07-19T09:21:00.001-07:00

By Henry Lamb
Following Rahm Emanuel’s advice, the Obama administration is certainly not letting the Gulf oil crisis go to waste. The BP catastrophe is just what Obama needed to justify pushing his irresponsible energy policy on a weary nation. Obama wants to stop using fossil fuel in favor of more exotic alternative energy sources. He doesn’t seem to know, or care, that there is no alternative energy technology that can meet the current energy demand.His actions suggest that if enough tax-generated government subsidies are applied, the technology will emerge.
His recent visit to Smith Electric Vehicles in Kansas City proved to be a dog and pony show to try to convince the nation that his $32 million grant to the firm to produce 500 trucks was well spent. This is a direct subsidy from taxpayers of $64,000 per truck, which, when offered in the marketplace will still cost twice as much as a comparable non-electric vehicle. This comes on the heels of a $2 billion grant to subsidize two solar plants.
So strong is his desire to wean Americans off fossil fuel that he immediately issued a six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The order was issued as a safety precaution even though the 50,000 well holes drilled in the Gulf since 1947 have leaked far less oil than has been released through natural seepage. As tragic and expensive as the BP spill may be, its impact on the economy can’t be compared to the loss of oil production from the Gulf.
Obama was only 12 when OPEC decided to turn off the oil faucet to the United States in 1973. At the time, OPEC supplied only about seven percent of our oil. Nevertheless, gasoline prices more than doubled, and supplies were sporadic, at best. Long lines formed at every gas station; cars with license plates that ended with odd numbers were allowed to purchase gas on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Cars with plates ending in even numbers could buy only on the other days of the week.
Oil from the Gulf supplies nearly ten percent of our petroleum requirement. By turning off this faucet, the price of gasoline will skyrocket, perhaps doubling, as it did in the 1970s.
Despite two court rulings against Obama’s moratorium, he continues to insist that no drilling will be allowed. By refusing to issue permits, the Obama administration has effectively stopped Gulf oil production regardless of the courts’ rejection of his moratoria.
The first wave of economic impact is already spreading across the 35,000 families that are directly employed by the Gulf oil industry. Each oil rig worker provides employment for three additional people who work in supporting industries. These jobs, too, are evaporating. The deepwater rigs cannot simply sit and wait in hopes that Obama might change his mind. The daily cost for a rig to sit and wait is about $600,000. Diamond Offshore has already announced that its Endeavor rig is moving to Egyptian waters. More will surely follow. Once these rigs are out of the Gulf, they will not soon return.
The second wave of economic impact will begin when prices at the pump begin to rise. Remember the spike in gas prices when hurricane Katrina shut down a few rigs for a few weeks. Now, imagine what the effect will be when there are no rigs in the Gulf, for the foreseeable future.
Currently, more than 60 percent of our oil is imported. With no oil from the Gulf, nearly 75 percent of our oil will have to come from abroad. Canada and Mexico now supply only about 15 percent of our oil. This means that most of our oil will have to come from countries that really want to do us harm. It makes no sense at all to deliberately become dependent upon our enemies for our energy needs.
A responsible administration and Congressional leadership would do whatever is required to fix the BP problem in the Gulf without shutting down domestic oil supplies. Next, they would open domestic reserves, on land and in the oceans, to environmentally safe development. A president who is more interested in his citizens’ well being than in advancing his own agenda, would not try to force his citizens to use exotic alternative energy that costs much more than petroleum. It is apparent, of course, that Obama’s first concern is his own agenda, regardless of what the people or the courts may say.
If America is to survive as the land of the free, it is imperative that the current leadership in Washington be removed and replaced with people who believe in the principles of limited government, free markets, private property, and individual freedom. Two years of leadership by the Obama-Reid-Pelosi trinity demonstrates contempt for these principles. The only reward worthy of their service is early and absolute retirement.
____
Henry Lamb is the author of “The Rise of Global Governance,” Chairman of Sovereignty International , and founder of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO) and Freedom21, Inc..

NEA'S FOCUS ON POLITICAL - NOT ACADEMIC CONCERNS

2010-05-31T20:12:00.000-07:00

by Beverly K. Eakman
Wednesday, 26 May 2010 07:12

Several states have begun exercising their prerogatives lately in a decision to face up, finally, to K-12 education failures. For example, according to a report by Deborah Simmons in the May 24th issue of the Washington Times, DC school Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is working to do away with seniority-based lay-off methods and has begun tying both teacher retention and tenure to pupil performance. So are a number of other states — among them, New York, Colorado, Connecticut and Arizona.
“Part of the impetus for this change,” writes Simmons, “is the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, which promises billions in federal funds to school systems that institute a wide range of reforms, including improved classroom instruction and tougher teacher evaluations.” In some cases, schools are making use of “longitudinal studies,” in which teachers’ names can be linked to pupils over the entire course of a student’s K-12 class records.
Longitudinal measures of that sort come with a significant downside — tidbits of psychological information divulged by clueless children, who are subsequently incorporated into standardized “tests” and surveys. These morsels range from the seemingly benign to the blatantly political, including personal family data — all of which becomes the domain of behavioral analysts (individuals with dual advanced degrees in behavioral science and statistics). These “experts” come to conclusions about the pupil, some of which are way off base, yet never completely disappear from the computer system.
On the plus side, the various attempts to link teachers to student performance (dare we call it “merit”?), and to base teacher tenure and layoff policies on something besides being their students’ best buddies represent a welcome rejection of policies all-but-codified by the two teacher unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Their seniority-based rationale, originally, was that it was wrong to throw out experienced educators with advanced degrees for cheaper new, college grads — a justifiable position.
The problem is, merely linking meritorious teaching to student knowledge levels doesn’t mean improved standards overall, especially given the number of decades student knowledge has been allowed to fall.
There are only nine reasons why a child doesn’t learn: visual and auditory memory, visual identification, spatial and abstract reasoning, mental stamina (i.e., concentration), perceptual speed, hand-eye coordination, and thought-expression synchronization. But how many education majors specialize in any of these?
None — except for graduate-level educators, who are siphoned off for high-priced learning centers and elite private schools, which gratefully make use of legitimate scientific research, recognizing that before their staffs can remediate anything, they have to diagnose the child’s real weaknesses — not just buy into a bunch of psychobabble. That’s how these centers and schools stay in business.
What is interesting is that nearly all of us are weak in at least one of the nine areas listed above. Yet, all nine are correctible — without drugs. The earlier, the better, of course.
For example: If a child thinks ¼ is bigger than ½ based on the logic that 4 is bigger than 2, then he probably has an abstract reasoning and/or a spatial reasoning weakness. The pupil will try to memorize his or her way through math. By fifth grade, the student will crash. As an adult, the same graduate will struggle with tax and budget issues and never even look into the complexities of global warming theory. This is because memory, no matter how spectacular, can take a person only so far.
Another example combines reading and spelling. Suppose a child has a significant deficiency in auditory memory? The pupils can’t seem to recall sound combinations and transfer these to unfamiliar words. Systematic, intensive phonics is the correct remedy for such a child, as only 15 percent of English words are truly non-phonetic.
So what is the average public (and even most private) school’s response? First, they are busy trying to diagnose non-germane, psychological phenomena instead of any of the above; secondly they are applying an eclectic mix of phonics and “whole language” (a.k.a. “look-say”) to the task of reading, technically called “psycholinguistics,” which only the brightest children can surmount. The idea behind psycholinguistics is that context clues are the keys to a full-functioning reading capability, but that is not true for young children who don’t yet comprehend many double meanings — for example, the difference between “deer,” the animal and “dear,” the fond greeting.
So, the young pupil guesses at words — and is encouraged by teachers to do so. Here’s what comes of such foolishness:
Instead of (taken from an actual textbook):
As the Spirit of St. Louis touched down on the turf, the crowds surged toward it.
The student will read the sentence like this:
As the Sprite of St. Louis turned down the surf, the cowards splurged toward it.
Couple this to the fact that youngsters are no longer taught proper enunciation, out of some misguided notion that doing so somehow demeans certain cultural populations —such as southerners (i.e., the Texas “drawl”); blacks (“ebonics” or “black English”); or northeastern accents (the famous Brooklyn, Jewish and Yankee cadences). All of this is nonsense, as proved by the New York Conservatory for the Dramatic Arts, whose students and graduates are prominently shown in televised performances ranging from the Macy Thanksgiving Day Parade to Broadway. None of the kids, black, white or polka-dot has accents unless they are supposed to in a particular role.
Maybe a student’s problem is that eye movements are slow, left-to-right, thereby impairing the visual speed needed to read easily and fluently. Some students may even skip to another line right in the middle of a sentence, through no fault their own, owing to what is called a “lazy-eye syndrome,” which is easily corrected either using prisms in a set of eyeglasses and/or a thin colored plastic sheaf over the page that causes the background color to appear in something other than the usual black-on-white. A machine then can literally train the eye to move increasingly faster in small increments so that the student eventually performs the task smoothly.
Another possibility, currently being researched, involves the early overuse of computerized lessons. Colette Silvestri, a former early-childhood computer enthusiast, earned great respect for her groundbreaking efforts with gifted children via her self-styled WIREWorks program in Enola and Hershey, Pennsylvania. In an interview she indicated that such immersion into the automated, programmed world may be “closing a window” on brain functions that cannot be recaptured after the primary-school years. This affects things like creativity and the kind of meticulous, hand-eye coordination necessary for penmanship and playing exacting musical instruments, such as a violin. Some of her European counterparts seem to have come to a similar conclusion — that an elementary-school brain on computer-generated overdrive, is actually developing differently than it would have otherwise, and not all for the better.
Whatever the final assessment of the computer’s usefulness in elementary education, the key to educational success remains to locate every first-grader’s “weakest link.” By the end of the second week of the first year, every child should be matched with a teacher (maybe two) whose methodology incorporates one of the nine elements on the list of possible weaknesses. Between mere months and two years, a child matched in this calculated setting will rarely demonstrate the weakness(es) in question. As a bonus, neither the student nor his classmates will know why Johnny or Susie spent a year with a particular instructor, unless some idiot counselor tells him. Thus, no stigma.
Moreover, the way to reform education and improve standards lies in large part with the colleges and universities that train prospective educators. As it is, most university-level education courses revolve around psychology: “child psychology,” “educational psychology,” “adolescent psychology,” etc. No wonder, then, that “history” has been replaced with “social studies,” spelling with “psycholinguistics,” and “health” with sex education. These, and other, courses are fueled by psychology, not scholarship or academics, much less excellence. In fact, “excellence” as an educational ideal was traded for “functional literacy” in a 1981 paper published by the National Institute of Education (then an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Education).
This move proved highly “dysfunctional” as a federal education policy. But it satisfied the teachers unions, especially the NEA, whose annual Legislative Agenda over the past 20 years has focused mainly on political, not academic, concerns.
“Competition” (except in sports) was deemed damaging to a student’s self-esteem, as was any sort of criticism. Yet, “gotcha” offenses, like “sexual harassment” for a 6-year-old caught pecking a little girl on the cheek, or “terrorist” levied at a little boy aiming a half-eaten chicken wing at a classmate in jest across a cafeteria table, sent mixed messages that were very damaging to self-esteem. The ridiculous fabrications became replacements for what today’s grandparent generation remembers as discipline, such as dress codes and polite language. Misbehavior now is confined to the fickle dictates of political correctness — which, again, are rooted in psychology: “psychopolitics,” in this instance — turning the schools into the epitomes of a “hostile environment.”
That many school systems, and even state policies, are at long last rebuffing both the teachers unions and federal carrots for ill-conceived education policies is a positive sign, if late in the game. But it is clear that even earnest reformers have no handle on how to strengthen their schools or improve performance. They should ask: Performance at what, exactly? Then they would be on the right track.
Beverly K. Eakman is a former educator and retired federal employee who served as speechwriter for the heads of three government agencies as well as editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper (Johnson Space Center). Today, she is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer and columnist, the author of five books, and a frequent keynote speaker on the lecture circuit. Her most recent book is Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks (Midnight Whistler Publishers).

MICHAEL CONNELLY books!

2010-04-13T01:17:00.001-07:00

Michael Connelly
Personal website and Blog http://michaelconnelly.viviti.com/
Author of "The Mortarmen" a book about my father's unit in WWII; "Riders in the Sky: The Ghosts and Legends of Philmont Scout Ranch" ; and my just released novel "Amayehli: A Story of America".
I also teach law courses via the Internet through colleges and universities worldwide. To find a college or university near you, go to Education To Go's website at www.ed2go.com.
New: Check out my radio talk show every week called "Our Constitution" at this link: http://www.radiosandysprings.com/showpages/OurConstitution.php

INTERSECTION OF HEALTHCARE AND CAP AND TRADE

2010-02-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

Following is the newest opinion editorial from Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy.
On February 16 of this year, three corporate giants suddenly pulled out of a leading alliance of businesses and environmental groups known as the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. Their participation was heralded by some as proof of their belief in manmade global warming-when it could have merely been acquiescence to the inevitable and a chance to participate in the potential profits. This past Tuesday's announcement by ConocoPhillips, BP America and Caterpillar that that the bills now in Congress are unfair to American industry shows that the motive was more profit than protection. They knew all along that cap and trade was a scheme not a solution, but the way the rules are set, they'd come out ahead by playing along.
Using an existing government program--Medicaid--as a parallel, Marita's newest opinion editorial shows how given the direction government was heading, cap and trade was their better option. We can hope, now, that other companies will follow suit by speaking up regarding the damage these polices will do to the American economy.
We hope you distribute/publish this material as soon as possible!
Eric McInteer -Research Fellow, CARE (Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy)
-------------------------------------------------------
February 24, 2010
The Intersection of Healthcare and Cap and Trade
By Marita Noon

"I can't wait until we get government healthcare. I hate working with these insurance companies," said a healthcare worker tasked with getting his hospital reimbursed for the services they provide to Medicaid patients.
What he didn't realize is that the United Behavioral Health subsidiary with whom he is dealing is "government healthcare."
Privatizing the delivery of services to Medicaid recipients has been a trend long before healthcare "overhaul" became a priority. Companies such as United Behavioral Health-the specific company being vilified in the aforementioned conversation-simply respond when the government puts out a Request for Proposal (RFP). Basically the lowest bidder gets the contract. The ability to offer such services for the price quoted is not taken into consideration, just how cheaply can the obligations be met. The contractor does what the government outlines for them. And, ideally, they make money from the services they provide-allowing them to stay in business and offer job security.
Those responsible for getting the hospitals paid for the services acknowledge that getting money from the private insurance companies is much easier than from the companies getting funded through government.
How does this connect to cap and trade?
First, understand that cap and trade is a government plan to deal with so-called man-made global warming. While the entire climate change issue is challenged due to the acknowledged data forgeries, and plummeting public concern over climate, governments are still moving forward with cap and trade plans. President Obama's appointee as Administrator of EPA, Lisa Jackson, is ready to regulate CO2 as a pollutant in case Congress does the right thing and doesn't pass cap and trade legislation. Here, in New Mexico, Governor Richardson is pushing for a statewide cap and trade program using an Environmental Improvement Board stacked with conflicts of interest.
Cap and trade supporters have touted the fact that many energy companies signed on to a cap and trade plan as proof that climate change is a real issue. Here is where healthcare and cap and trade intersect.
I am in the camp that believes that climate change is not a crisis, and if it is, there is nothing humans can do to change what has been going on for millions of years-long before human emissions were an issue. From this mindset, I have been speaking out against cap and trade. However, if we are going to have some type of climate change legislation, a carbon tax is a much more honest approach.
Like the privatization of Medicaid services, the unwary consumer will not realize that the energy price increases are as a result of a government program. Like an insurance company being blamed for the difficulty, the energy company will bear the brunt of the consumers' wrath. Like an insurance company's bid to get the government contract hoping to make a profit, the energy companies have signed on to what they (prior to climategate and the collapse of the theory) once viewed as inevitable. They expected to profit from cap and trade, while, the citizens are burdened with the higher energy costs.
Instead of cap and trade, a climate tax is more transparent. Citizens know that a "tax" is a government action. We know that the government collects the tax. It, too, will up our energy costs, but like the taxes on our phone bills, it will have a line on the bill stating exactly how many dollars of the bill are due to the carbon tax. Instead of being mad at the energy provider, the anger gets directed toward the government-and the energy companies have no chance to profit from the action.
When you hear conversations about cap and trade-especially those who support it as a way to stop so-called manmade global warming, suggest transparency; support the idea of a carbon tax. It is more honest. And, no one wants more taxes.
Better yet, now that the forged data has been exposed and more revelations are taking place on an almost daily basis, encourage your elected officials to block any climate change legislation. Support companies like ConocoPhillips, BP American and Caterpillar who have jumped ship before it sinks America. With public outcry, maybe more companies will see the light and pull out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.
CARE (Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy) is the nonprofit, member-based organization advocating for citizens' right to energy that is affordable, abundant and available. Based in Albuquerque, CARE addresses energy issues statewide, region-wide and nationwide. For more information visit www.responsiblenergy.org.

PERSONAL ESSAY

2010-02-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

by Korry D. Lewis

Abraham Lincoln once said, “I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.” That is a quote I live by. My mom always told me that in everything I do, to give it all I have and to not hold back. That way, if it is a success I can be honestly proud of my accomplishment, but if it fails I will still walk away knowing I gave it my best effort. Performing at the best of my abilities has helped me achieve high honors and accomplishments in academics and athletics throughout high school and college. It has also helped me to be a leader in numerous organizations and within my community. Most importantly, it gives me the confidence to move forward in my life and career, and continually pushes me to be a better person. Hence, I am pursuing a legal education to fulfill my ambitions of being an agricultural law and water rights attorney. I am confident that I will achieve this aspiration and will perform well in law school because I am extremely dedicated, self-motivated, and I have strong work ethic and leadership skills.
Growing up on my family’s working cattle ranch in southeastern Colorado, I learned the value and meaning of hard work at a young age. The life lessons I have learned and the wisdom I have gained from my rural background has instilled in me the cowgirl virtues of independence, endurance and grit. My work ethic combined with these virtues has been the cornerstone of my success personally, athletically, and academically in my collegiate career and will continue to benefit me in law school and throughout life. Nine years ago my dad passed away from leukemia and left a huge void in our family. My mom continued to get up every day and work hard in order to make debt payments so that she would not lose the ranch, and I admire her for that. Being that I am the youngest of six children and knowing that mom would not be able to help me pay for college, I stayed very dedicated to my education, sports, and community service so that I could receive scholarships. In order to cover the rest of my college expenses, I have kept many jobs; all the while actively volunteering in numerous organizations. I have gained many leadership skills from being the captain of my volleyball and basketball teams and running meetings, to representing my college at the state capitol. Amidst my busy schedule, I was determined to maintain a 4.0 GPA while in college and have achieved that thus far.
My work ethic, dedication, and leadership skills will prove to be valuable in the future, and I look forward to law school as an opportunity to develop and maintain these characteristics among many others. In my legal career, I wish to represent and defend the rights and interests of the American rural landowner and private property rights organizations. Increasingly, water rights and private property rights are becoming more important and sacred. I want to help the American rancher and farmer in their fight to keep land that has been in their families for many generations, as well as the grazing and water rights to these properties. They are the true stewards of the land, and their success is due to their proven ability to care for and sustain the land they live off of. Rural America is where my heart is and I have a true passion for the land. I feel it is my duty to give back to my community and fellow rural Americans as they have given so much to me. I hope to be able to use my legal education to help ranchers and farmers keep such a blessed way of life.
I wish to acquire my legal education at the U________of ______ because of your natural resource law curriculum and since I recognize the value of small classes. At______ I will feel at home and what better place to champion the rights of agriculturists than with a degree from a rural university. I am ready to take on the challenges that I will face during law school, and I am confident in the qualities that I bring to the table. Notably, I will bring my drive, my passion for agriculture, and my determination to be the best I can be.
Editors note: GNL shares Korry's personal essay so you, the reader, can see what a Good Neighbor looks like.

PITTY THE FOOLS WHO BELIEVE IN MAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING!

2009-12-01T18:56:00.000-08:00

By Ron Ewart
President - National Association of Rural Landowners
© Copyright November 24, 2009 - All Rights Reserved

What a snow job some corrupt scientists, the arrogant elite, radical environmentalists, the United Nations and their co-conspirators in the United States, have perpetrated on the people of this planet in order to convince a gullible public into believing in the Alice-in-Wonderland fairy tale of man-caused global warming! In the process they have sullied true science and corrupted the scientific method, maybe beyond repair. Their specious arguments stretch credulity and are what we call MAI science, or Made-As-Instructed. In other words, you manipulate the data to arrive at the desired outcome. What has transpired in this debate is nothing less than the trashing of all of the science greats since Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.
But to see anything clearly, you must have a sufficiently broad perspective, accompanied by hard data, repeatable long-term observations and verifiable facts. If you are standing and looking at the ground, your perspective and your field of view are quite limited. If however, you are standing on the top of a mountain, your perspective broadens exponentially. And thus it is with the subject of global warming. Without a broader view, it is almost impossible to know whom or what to believe. So, a short history of the Earth is in order. The history we present here is reasonably accurate, based on the collected scientific data over the last 500 years, with not much argument within the honorable scientific community.
Human civilization is but a bare 5,000 years old. If you took the entire life of Planet Earth, some 4.5 billion years and divided that life span into a 24-hour clock, our puny 5,000 years represents the last tenth of a second, of the last second of the 86,400 seconds that occur in one 24-hour period. If you took the age of enlightenment, commonly known as the Renaissance (14th to the 17th Centuries) when true science was born, it represents less than the last 100th of a second of the last second in our 24-hour clock. During the last 5,000 years the Earth has been relatively quiet, with a few burps in climate variables, but it hasn't always been that way.
The Earth has endured the effect of massive sunspots, reversing poles, shifting magnetic fields, drifting continents, asteroid and comet collisions and ice ages, in its 4.5 billion-year history. It has experienced the wondrous 165 million-year dinosaur experiment. Approximately six hundred million years ago, the "Cambrian explosion" occurred, when life almost magically erupted, emerged and evolved at a pace never before seen. Some scientists have contributed this explosion of life to a sudden increase in atmospheric oxygen.
Over its lifetime the Earth spun, tilted, heaved, shifted its orbit, drastically changed, expelled poison gases, ash and molten lava, grew hot and then cold. Continents, floating on an underground sea of molten magma, drifted first toward each other (Pangea) and then away. Polar ice caps and glaciers melted and sea levels rose and then lowered. New evidence has come to light that the entire Earth was one big ball of ice at one time in its long and violent history.
A little more recently, about 12,000 years ago, one-third of the Earth's surface was covered in a layer of ice more than one mile thick. During that ice age, which lasted longer than civilized man has lived on Earth, there were no animals, plants or insects that could survive in this harsh, frozen environment. But life on Earth still survived in other places less-hostile. The ultimate thaw and the rushing torrent carved deep gouges and massive channels in the Earth's surface. It created riverbeds and dry falls and lakes and inland seas and other features in the Earth's crust, not there before. Now that was global warming on a grand scale and humans hadn't even come out of their caves yet.
Whole forests grew and then died out. Mountains rose out of the bowels of the Earth, pushed up by continents in collision and then flattened back into the crust. Rivers changed direction. Monster lakes were formed. Giant meteors struck the Earth at galactic speeds, carving massive holes in the crust and sending continent-size clouds of sunlight-dimming dust into the atmosphere. The atmosphere became opaque and cut off the life-giving sunlight, rendering lifeless enormous parts of the planet. Millions of species of plants and animals evolved, survived, reproduced and then died out, to be replaced by entirely different species of plants and animals. Had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, it has been posited that mammals would have never evolved in their current form, including humans.
However, major changes seldom occurred in cataclysmic events. They almost always took place agonizingly slowly, over eons of time, through the tedious, grinding, random, chaotic, disorganized process of natural evolution and natural selection. The variables were almost infinite and still are.
And today, those same agonizingly slow processes are at work. We (humans) are an integral part of those processes but we will have little or no effect on any final outcome. Those who tell you so are lying. We will but only tickle the grander elements such as the sun, the moon and the Earth itself, none of which is predictable, much less measurable to the degree necessary for accurate predictions over long periods of time. Our only avenue for survival is to get out of the way, if we can. The whole idea that man-generated CO2 is causing run-away global warming, when atomospheric CO2 represents a small fraction of so-called greenhouse gases and man's contribution to atmospheric CO2 is a miniscule fraction of naturally occuring CO2, would be laughable, if it wasn't that evil men were exploiting it for evil purposes.
A few spewing volcanoes or an episode of sunspots can totally invalidate any computer models. Just look at weather predictions. Any prediction is good for about two hours and that is why the environmentalists' models were predicting an ice age 20 years ago and now they are predicting global warming. Any credible scientist will tell you that the greater the number of variables in a non-linear dynamic system (such as the weather) render long-range predictions virtually meaningless the moment they are spit out of the computer. What has been done in the name of man-caused global warming, is an insult to true science. It is fueled by dirty, agenda-driven money, a corrupt ideology and the lust for global power.
The universe, our solar system and even our Earth are violent, dangerous places to humans and other life forms and always have been. Just ask the dinosaurs. So far, we have just been lucky. A close-by (in galactic terms) supernova in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, in which our solar system resides, could flood the sun and planets with massive amounts of deadly radiation and render Earth lifeless and barren in a virtual geologic instant. If the sun changed its energy output by a significant fraction, all life on Earth as we know it, could cease. An errant asteroid or comet could cross the Earth's orbit and the resulting collision could dramatically change the pattern of life, or terminate it altogether.
Environmentalists cry "wolf" on very little data and way-too-short time periods to come up with so-called accurate predictions, as they have with man-caused global warming. Unfortunately, environmentalism has become a cult of mindless followers with a distorted vision of how humans and the Earth should relate to each other. Earth gets the highest priorities — over people — in spite of true science. In reality, humans are but a part of the evolutionary and natural processes of Earth and those processes, not environmentalists or governments, will determine whether we, as an intelligent species, will survive or die out. This is why their man-caused, global-warming theory is an unmitigated farce and this is why that any very expensive attempts to control man-generated CO2is an unprecedented fraud, with dire consequences for the global economy.
We must always be vigilant against the never-ending threat of governments and special-interest groups peddling crises with propaganda, hype, distortions and lies, because behind each crisis is a hidden agenda and in the end their hidden agenda has more to do with control of the masses and the transfer of wealth. They only use pseudo science as a means to an evil end. Shall it ever be thus.
Who next will set out to conquer the world? Who will follow in the footsteps of the great conquerors of all time? How long will it take to herd the entire human race into the corral of world-wide enslavement? What name will we call this new-world country created thereby? What weapons will this new conqueror use to subjugate and unify by force or other means, the peoples of the world under the brutal hand of an all-powerful, dominant King ..... or is it a bunch of bankers? What!!!!!!!!? Not man-caused global warming! It couldn't be. The people of the world aren't that dumb ..... or are they? Who was it that said: "If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the perception of truth in the general population".
Now with the heavy hand of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) hanging over a potential conqueror's head, military might, in and of itself, cannot conquer the peoples of the world, so the weapons of mass destruction can be ruled out of the equation, unless purposely executed by terrorists to start a world war.
Perhaps there is a weapon that has nothing to do with military might or weapons of mass destruction. Way back in the middle 18 hundreds, one of the early Rothschild's (a banker)said this: "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." The Rothschild's, Rockefeller's, the Morgan's and other money elites and power brokers, led us into the U. S. Federal Reserve that isn't Federal and isn't a reserve and established the IRS with the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913. They already control our Nation's money supply and the taxes to "feed" it. Could our laws be meaningless as an early Rothschild quipped?
But if money was the weapon to conquer the world, the people would be suspicious, as they are today and that is why over 300 U. S. Congressmen and women have called for an audit of the Federal Reserve. So money by itself can't be the weapon to conquer the world, unless it was combined with something else ..... something intangible, something ethereal, something that would "touch" the emotional hearts and minds of an ignorant populace, or "trigger" their collective guilty conscience. It would have to be something that "tugs" at the very core of irrational compassion, like saving the planet, or maybe even protecting the cute little polar bears ..... those white, furry creatures that would rip your heart out with one paw and eat it in front of you, that just happened to be the largest land carnivore on Planet Earth. One might ask, why do they need saving in the first place?
Still, why would polar bears need protecting? Aren't we told that their total population is increasing? (That doesn't matter to the lead spokesman for global warming, Al Gore.) But let's say we could gin up a crisis, you know, like man-caused global warming that is melting the ice upon which the cute little polar bear requires to survive. And let's just say we could alter the data to make it appear that CO2 (a so-called greenhouse gas, but a compound upon which all life on Earth depends) is growing rapidly in the atmosphere and man is the direct cause of the increase and the increase is causing the unprecedented crisis of global warming. Oh my God, we're doomed if we don't act now!
Now, let's add to the mix a way to save the planet (and the polar bear) from the scourge of man-generated CO2, by limiting the amount of CO2 the human population can emit by a complex scheme of caps and trades and the government gets to set the emission standards for all of the emitters ..... cows and horses excluded of course. The government also gets to be the broker for caps and trades. Just think of the money that government will rake in under Cap and Trade (or is it "cap and tax"?).
The plan almost worked, didn't it? Those all-wise scientific and political folks in the UN (IPCC) and Europe almost had us convinced they were right and the debate was over. To take the heat off, they even changed the name from global warming to climate change. Countries of the world were (and probably still are) headed for a world treaty on CO2 emission limits in Copenhagen, Denmark this December.
Even with all the hype, many skeptics tried to open the debate but it was quickly shut by the corrupt perpetrators who had an elaborate plan to conquer the world using the heart-wrenching theme of "saving the planet from man" and a diabolical scheme to transfer the wealth (money) from the wealthy nations of the world and re-distribute it to the poorer nations .... or is it into the bank accounts of the money changers and the power brokers who had set out to conquer the peoples of the Earth using money and man-caused global warming as their weapons of choice, making high-paid pawns of scientists who were willing to exchange their honor and integrity for a few pieces of silver?
All was going well until the proverbial cat was let out of the bag by the clandestine release of a whole bunch of documents and e-mails from one of the "academic leaders" in so-called scientifically-proved, man-caused global warming, that finally exposed the scheme for what it was. Now the whole world knows that the science was totally contrived, bogus and "cooked" for a fair-the-well.
The "enlightened one", the Obama, the great orator, is planning to attend Copenhagen in spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence refuting man-caused global warming and in spite of the new evidence that was just released, exposing the perpetrators of a massive global conspiracy.
But in the end, only one country stands in the way of world domination by the money changers and the power brokers who are using "money" and "man-caused global warming" to subjugate the entire human species and transfer the West's wealth in and to a one-world government. It is the free peoples in a free and sovereign America who will trample the "money" and "global warming" weapons of a shadowy elite, out to conquer the world ..... without a shot being fired. It is wise Americans who have seen through the global warming smoke screen of propaganda, hype, distortions and lies, emitted by a corrupt government and an even more corrupt fourth estate. It is the people of America, once again, that will lead the world towards freedom, instead of the bottomless pit of abject socialism and the mind-numbing slavery that socialism brings, under a looming one world government.

BLINDSIDED

2009-11-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

By Michael R. Shannon

Last week marked the debut of two movies featuring overweight black teenagers as the central character. Movie reviewers (a chronic incubator of "progressive" thinking) found one movie "important," "inspiring," "compelling," "transformative" and "a triumph." It won the Grand Jury & Audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival and received a 15-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.
The other movie was described as "unremarkable," "undemanding," "superficial," "obvious" and "unsatisfying" with an overall failing grade of 57 percent at the Rotten Tomatoes web site.
From the following descriptions, can you guess which movie was the darling of the intellectual set and which movie resonates with Wal-Mart shoppers? (Warning mild to detailed plot spoilers to come.)
In Precious, a functionally illiterate, morbidly obese, black teenage girl is raped repeatedly by her father. One incestuous coupling produces an infant with Down syndrome. Precious lives at home with a cruel and physically abusive mother in a ghetto neighborhood. She is withdrawn, hates her appearance, uses fantasy as a coping mechanism and has no social skills.
A second pregnancy results in her being sent to an alternative school where a lesbian teacher and social worker combine to try and reach the girl hidden inside her shell. The movie ends with Precious, who is still the size of the Hindenburg, landing in a new government program and being informed that during one of his rapes her "father" has infected her with AIDS.
In 1987, the time period of the movie, this is a death sentence.
The Blind Side starts with Michael Oher functionally illiterate, living on the streets in a ghetto neighborhood, with a crack 'ho for a mother, eating discarded concession stand food, possessing only a single change of clothes, hidden in a shell, with no social skills.
So far what's not to like about The Blind Side? Sounds like the movie is well on the way to wild applause on the film festival circuit.
But then differences rear their ugly heads.
In The Blind Side an evangelical Christian white woman takes Michael into her home and into her family. He is given a scholarship to a prestigious Christian school and a private tutor - hired by his new family - brings his grades up. Michael starts to play football and earns a scholarship to a major university. He grows to love his adopted family and becomes a new person.
At the university, Michael achieves All-American football status, his grades put him on the Dean's List, he is drafted in the NFL's first round by the Baltimore Ravens and, judging from the pictures over the credits, he has slimmed down without resorting to fad diets.
In "elite opinion" circles a black person is allowed to indulge in many varieties of degraded behavior and exhibit any number of dangerous pathologies without causing so much as a raised eyebrow, but nothing keeps elite festival-attendee behinds in the seats like the hero relying on white people, the private sector or a Christian to change his life.
As the reviewer for the Village Voice hissed, "the (Blind Side) peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them."
"Progressives" are much more comfortable with white people dragging black teenagers behind pickup trucks. It confuses them when Christians act like Christians.
Precious a feel-good movie for liberals because what miniscule progress the girl makes is facilitated by a lesbian teacher, a social worker and a halfway house. It's a trifecta for modern "progressives!"
"Progressives" watch Precious and pretend to empathize while still feeling superior. Because Precious does not ask the uncomfortable question of why aren't YOU doing more to help, because, as the New York Times says, "An unstated but self-evident moral of Precious, . is that government can provide not only a safety net, but also, in small and consequential ways, a lifeline."
So the viewer is personally off the hook, just keep voting for Gerry Connolly and stand by for Nirvana.
Christians see The Blind Side and feel inadequate because the movie asks Christians in the audience are you doing enough? And the answer is no, we are not doing enough. We need to do more. We need to do it now.
Christians and conservatives (not always one and the same) complain that Hollywood doesn't make good movies. But if Christians want Hollywood to make good movies, then Christians have to buy tickets to see the good movie Hollywood makes.
The Blind Side is that good movie. Unless you are a "progressive intellectual" you will enjoy it, but you will also wonder what can you do to make a difference?
You don't have to start a foundation, pass legislation or ride your unicycle across America to raise money. Just take the advice of Thomas a Kempis: "Do the duty nearest you."
Michael R. Shannon is a public relations and advertising consultant with corporate, government and political experience around the globe. He is a dynamic and entertaining keynote speaker. He can be reached at michael-shannon@comcast.net.

WHO WANTS A JOB?

2009-11-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

By James Nathan Post

Like to play around with numbers? Let's say you are single, and have no dependents. You get a minimum wage job. If the MW is about $6 (to keep the arithmetic easy), and you work 40 hours, your gross earnings are $240. Your SS and IRS deductions will each be about $10. If you drive about 25 miles going to work and back, you'll spend about $20 a week on gasoline. Liability (only) on a cheap old car will run you about $80 a month, or $20 of that weekly check. Lunch is probably a burger combo on the run, at $5 a day, or $25 the week. After those deductions and daily expenses, your weekly take-home is about $150.

Not included in those figures is a payment on the car you need to have the job ($120/month?), uniforms or other special clothes, using a coin-op laundry for cleaning ($10/week?), makeup and grooming ($5?), and parking costs ($5?). If these are included, your net discretionary income is $100 a week.

That is to say, you must spend 60% of a minimum wage income for taxes, transportation, and lunch just to service the job. Counting the two hours you must commit to rise, dress, and drive, the lunch hour you aren't paid for, and eight hours of sacktime, you have five hours a day left in which to live the life you are working for, and $20 each working day to spend. If you are very careful, and save $5 of that each day, you will be able to buy a pizza and a 12-pack of beer for the weekend.

Not included in these figures are your rent, utilities, other food, and whatever you do besides eat, sleep, and work…. and oh, yes, your health care.

Get a better job, you say? How about a good job, breaking that $10 per hour barrier? OK, start with $400 a week gross, and deduct IRS and SS at about $30. You'll be able to afford a newer car, raising your payment to $50 a week, and adding comprehensive ups your insurance to $40. You'll be able to eat at a restaurant for lunch at $10. You will likely need to improve your wardrobe, and add dry cleaning costs, as well as professional grooming. Even only doubling those from the very frugal costs above, that will consume $40. This goes way up if you are a woman. You drive to work in a nicer car, wear a nicer outfit, and you get to sit down to eat. Now you are left with $190 you can call your own (before your rent and living costs... and your health care), which is $38 per working day. If you are very careful, and save that extra $8, you will be able to take your sweetie to a movie on Saturday, and buy a bag of popcorn to go with that pizza and the 12-pack.

It surprises me to hear people whine they just don't understand why our youth, when told they need education to get a job, decide they don't want one, and drop out of school to hang out with their friends selling weed to the working man to buy the beer.
James Nathan Post Albuquerque NM www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm VYDYOFYL James Nathan Post
Have friends who would appreciate reading something warm-hearted and fun for the Holidays? The three stories in this trilogy of novelettes capture the character of old 1850's New Mexico, and also the mystery and enchantment of today. From the drunken chile farmer Cabrito who wins The Devil's Own Horse, and declares God has made him the town of Lastima's new priest, to little Chulita who prays for a miracle for the town's celebration of La Posada, to Buck Tyler, the archaeology prof who gets trapped in an ancient ceremonial cave, with a psychic Indian girl and the spirit of the old Medicine Chief "El Cacique"...

THREE TALES IN LASTIMA

bon appetit, and best wishes,
James

DOGS ARE JUST LIKE PEOPLE

2009-11-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

By Jim Beers

Fifteen years ago I was washing my golden retriever (Bud, short for Budweiser King of Beers) with soap and water and rinsing him with tomato juice in my Virginia yard. My lawyer neighbor saw the dog all wet and looking truly "sheepish" and wanted to know what I was doing. I told him the dog had just bungled into his first skunk and that despite my commands (at this point I nudged the dog with my elbow), mister he-knows-best walked right into a full spray from a pretty large skunk. When my lawyer neighbor then said that it probably taught the dog a lesson (he was neither woodsy nor a dog guy), I told him it only taught the dog one of two things based on my experience. Either he will kill every skunk he sees from now on or he will avoid every skunk he blunders into from now on. The truth of this was never born out because Bud (to the best of my knowledge) never met up with another skunk.
This truth was taught me at an early age. We raised Dobermans when I was young and once they were let out of their pens to run in the yard and one of the male "dobes" got sprayed by a skunk, evidently before the skunk snuck back out under a low spot in the fence. About two weeks later that male Doberman (Red) came back to the house smelling of skunk. I went out to see where the skunk had gotten in the yard and what I found was shredded skunk in several locations. To my knowledge no skunks ever came back in our yard.
A few years later I was quail hunting in Arkansas with some relatives of some brothers I hunted ducks with back in Illinois. The bird dog was an Irish Setter. As she wandered into the edge of some woods bordering a field we were working she suddenly came running back out toward her owner. When I looked into where she had came from (hogs were a common problem) I yelled out that there was a skunk in there where the dog had just run from. His owner just looked disgusted and said she had been sprayed by a skunk a couple of years earlier and ever since she ran from them like a little kid running from a bully.
I thought about old Bud and Red the other day as President Obama cautioned us all to not rush to judgment about the Army "Major" that killed and wounded all those innocent military personnel at Fort Hood. As he prattled on about law enforcement requirements and trials and how the poor "Major" just snapped I was outraged. My thoughts went back to President Bush telling us all right after 9/11 that those that perpetrated this would pay for it. President Bush kept us attack-free for 7 ½ years and now we see both incidents and increasing terror incidents since the new President took office.
President Bush reminds me of my Doberman Red. When Red killed that skunk and left a lot of carnage, the skunks stayed away from our yard for years and years.
President Obama reminds me of that Irish Setter in Arkansas (whose name I don't even remember) that ran from every skunk it encountered for the rest of its life. Skunks never paid her any attention and probably not only nested under her porch but likely ate from her food dish at night.
If you want to keep the skunks away, get a Doberman: if you want skunks under the porch, get an Irish Setter. If you want a safe and free America, elect a conservative. If you want a smelly home that isn't fit to live in, elect liberal radicals that will infest the Congress and the White House with poisonous fumes that will soon cause you to have to abandon your own home.
See, dogs are just like people.
Jim Beers Veterans Day, 11 November 2009

TRAGEDY AT FT HOOD

2009-11-21T18:05:00.000-08:00

By Lieutenant Colonel Allen B West (US Army, Ret)

This past Thursday 13 American Soldiers were killed and another 30 wounded at a horrific mass shooting at US Army installation, Ft Hood Texas . As I watched in horror and then anger I recalled my two years of final service in the Army as a Battalion Commander at Ft Hood, 2002-2004.
My wife and two daughters were stunned at the incident having lived on the post in family housing.
A military installation, whether it is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, or Coast Guard, is supposed to be a safe sanctuary for our Warriors and their families. It is intended to provide a home whereby our “Band of Brothers and Sisters” can find solace and bond beyond just the foxhole but as family units.
A military installation is supposed to be a place where our Warriors train for war, to serve and protect our Nation.
On Thursday, 5 November 2009 Ft Hood became a part of the battlefield in the war against Islamic totalitarianism and state sponsored terrorism.
There may be those who feel threatened by my words and would even recommend they not be uttered. To those individuals I say step aside because now is not the time for cowardice. Our Country has become so paralyzed by political correctness that we have allowed a vile and determined enemy to breach what should be the safest place in America , an Army post.
We have become so politically correct that our media is more concerned about the stress of the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The misplaced benevolence intending to portray him as a victim is despicable. The fact that there are some who have now created an entire new classification called; “pre-virtual vicarious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” is unconscionable.
This is not a “man caused disaster”. It is what it is, an Islamic jihadist attack.
We have seen this before in 2003 when a SGT Hasan of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) threw hand grenades and opened fire into his Commanding Officer’s tent in Kuwait . We have seen the foiled attempt of Albanian Muslims who sought to attack Ft Dix, NJ. Recently we saw a young convert to Islam named Carlos Bledsoe travel to Yemen, receive terrorist training, and return to gun down two US Soldiers at a Little Rock, Arkansas Army recruiting station. We thwarted another Islamic terrorist plot in North Carolina which had US Marine Corps Base, Quantico as a target.
What have we done with all these prevalent trends? Nothing.
What we see are recalcitrant leaders who are refusing to confront the issue, Islamic terrorist infiltration into America , and possibly further into our Armed Services. Instead we have a multiculturalism and diversity syndrome on steroids.
Major Hasan should have never been transferred to Ft Hood, matter of fact he should have been Chaptered from the Army. His previous statements, poor evaluation reports, and the fact that the FBI had him under investigation for jihadist website posting should have been proof positive.
However, what we have is a typical liberal approach to find a victim, not the 13 and 30 Soldiers and Civilian, but rather the poor shooter. A shooter who we are told was a great American, who loved the Army and serving his Nation and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) stating that his actions had nothing to do with religious belief.
We know that Major Hasan deliberately planned this episode; he did give away his possessions. He stood atop a table in the confined space of the Soldier Readiness Center shouting “Allahu Akhbar”, same chant as the 9-11 terrorists and those we fight against overseas in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation.
No one in leadership seems willing to sound the alarm for the American people; they are therefore complicit in any future attacks. Our Congress should suspend the insidious action to vote on a preposterous and unconstitutional healthcare bill and resolve the issue of “protecting the American people”.
The recent incidents in Dearborn Michigan , Boston Massachusetts , Dallas Texas , and Chicago Illinois should bear witness to the fact that we have an Islamic terrorism issue in America . And don’t have CAIR call me and try to issue a vanilla press statement; they are an illegitimate terrorist associated organization which should be disbanded.
We have Saudi Arabia funding close to 80% of the mosques in the United States , one right here in South Florida, Pompano Beach . Are we building churches and synagogues in Saudi Arabia ? Are “Kaffirs” and “Infidels” allowed travel to Mecca ?
So much for peaceful coexistence.
Saudi Arabia is sponsoring radical Imams who enter into our prisons and convert young men into a virulent Wahabbist ideology….one resulting in four individuals wanting to destroy synagogues in New York with plastic explosives. Thank God the explosives were dummy. They are sponsoring textbooks which present Islamic centric revisionist history in our schools.
We must recognize that there is an urgent need to separate the theo-political radical Islamic ideology out of our American society. We must begin to demand surveillance of suspected Imams and mosques that are spreading hate and preaching the overthrow of our Constitutional Republic……that speech is not protected under First Amendment, it is sedition and if done by an American treason.
There should not be some 30 Islamic terrorist training camps in America that has nothing to do with First Amendment, Freedom of Religion. The Saudis are not our friends and any American political figure who believes such is delusional.
When tolerance becomes a one way street it certainly leads to cultural suicide. We are on that street. Liberals cannot be trusted to defend our Republic, because their sympathies obviously lie with their perceived victim, Major Nidal Malik Hasan.
I make no apologies for these words, and anyone angered by them, please, go to Ft Hood and look into the eyes of the real victims. The tragedy at Ft Hood Texas did not have to happen. Consider now the feelings of those there and on every military installation in the world. Consider the feelings of the Warriors deployed into combat zones who now are concerned that their loved ones at home are in a combat zone.
Ft Hood suffered an Islamic jihadist attack, stop the denial, and realize a simple point.
The reality of your enemy must become your own.
Steadfast and Loyal,
Lieutenant Colonel Allen B West (US Army, Ret)

A LESSON IN THE CARNAGE

2009-11-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

By Jim Beers

This is being written the morning after the shooting rampage by a Moslem US Army Major at Fort Hood Texas. Watching the continual news coverage and the questions asked and statements given by both the media and the US Army, there appears to be an aspect of this that is both misunderstood and that we should all consider.
As a former Naval Officer that lived on a ship and on a Naval Base as well as someone that has been on numerous Navy and Army bases over a long government career as both a law enforcement officer and biologist, I am surprised by the naiveté of reporters and the general public regarding the presence of guns on military bases. The diminishing number of citizens that have "served" in the military probably has lots to do with this ignorance. This common misperception reinforces such dangerous fantasies as gun control, gun-free zones, and the elimination of the Constitutional "right" in the 2nd Amendment "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
While modern day citizens often think this "right" only applies to hunting or target practice, modern dictatorships like Russia and its former satellites also allow "favored" citizens to hunt and target practice but their guns are held by the police or Army and only checked out when government grants such specific use to "cooperative subjects" for a specific time period. Please watch the news for the current gun violence and unsolved political assassinations that go on every day in "gun-free" Russia. "Gun-free" nations and nations without a 2nd Amendment "Right" not subject to the power of governments to deny are not safer, nor are they places to be emulated by freedom-loving Americans concerned about themselves, their families, and their neighbors.
American Military Bases in the United States are "gun-free" zones. None, to my knowledge recognize the concealed carry rights of licensed gun owners in the state in which the base is located, that means no civilian or military personnel can possess or carry any handgun anywhere on the base. Searching automobiles and trucks going onto the base is a totally impossible task. Those that live on the base must "register" all the guns they own, the guns must be kept unloaded, cased, and in the home. Transport and use of any rifle or shotgun (special hunts on the base or target practice) is only by permit from the Provost (Military Police or Shore Patrol). [Special Note: One "politically ambitious" Base Commander hoping to attract the attention of the newly elected anti-gun politicians in Washington even tried recently to make military personnel living OFF- Base report all guns they owned OFF-Base. "YOO HOO, over here Attorney General Holder, look at me: wouldn't I make a great 2, 3, or 4 Star General?]
The Bottom line is that all military arms and ammunition on the base are carefully kept locked up in the arsenal and only issued for shooting practice or for law enforcement. Only MP's or SP's carry weapons on duty and evidently even a dwindling number of them are armed on duty as law enforcement officers. Enforcement, like everything else, is being "contracted out" to "female-owned" companies or "minority-owned" enterprises or in this case the "Local Police". So you see, the Base is a "gun-free zone" just like:
- Columbine High School shot up by disgruntled students.
- The New York Government office shot up by a disgruntled immigrant welfare recipient.
- Chicago and Washington DC streets shot up by gangs, drug dealers, and robbers.
- Virginia Tech where a loner killed fellow students at will.
- National Parks, Government Buildings, Post Offices, and growing numbers of National Wildlife Refuges where crime rates grow both in reality and in the lurid justifications of bureaucrats seeking more money, more employees, and more supreme authoritarian authority for a social environment they create for themselves.
There are many other such examples but my time and your patience are limited.
In the twisted mind of some anti-infidel Moslem; in the fantasies of some children soaked in fantasy worlds; in the minds of fatherless, violent, school dropout, gang members; in the mind of some displaced person depressed about the loss of his culture and uncaring neighbors; as well as in the mind of robbers, rapists, and just plain vicious persons - one thing is sure. When they plan to "get even" or "show them" or " get some loot" or "rape and kill" or "make a statement" they gravitate to places where they are reasonably sure that they can maximize or just achieve their evil intent. The more sure they are sure of a "gun-free zone" (be it an apartment in New York City, or a "gun-free" mall parking lot at night, or a school, or a church, or a Boston alley, or even a US Military Base but not near the arsenal or the shooting range evidently), the more likely they are to perpetrate their atrocities. One need look no further than the comment yesterday by a relative of the Moslem US Major about how he "hated" going to the shooting range. Why do you suppose he chose to shoot up the helpless and unarmed occupants of the Administrative Area instead of the "hated" shooting range and its ARMED occupants? Duh.
All of this is conjecture and reflects our deeply held beliefs. The anti-gun person says, "this would never happen if there were no guns". The pro-gun person says, "this would never get started, or if it did it would be quickly stopped, if more citizens were armed in all such places". Proving either of these is just like "proving" if "the Stimulus worked" or if Socialism "worked". One side says it only failed because "we didn't do enough": while the other says it failed because "we did it". Suffice it to say that if I or you were in Columbine or that NY Government office or at Virginia Tech or on a dark Chicago street or at Fort Hood yesterday you would quickly realize that only if you were armed was there any chance to save our own life and/or the lives of those around us. When I was a law enforcement officer and bar room discussions got around to what caliber or model of gun was best (another never-ending discussion) I would always say the if, God forbid, I ever HAD to use my gun I would hope I had a bazooka (I am old, today I would hope for a Metalstorm, electronic ignition, multiple barrel, 9mm, automatic firing 16K rounds/second).
There are reasons of military discipline and décor (you can't have soldiers, sailors, etc. going around with "one-sided tummy rolls" in uniform. There are often military behavior problems on and near bases but anyone that is a danger carrying a gun doesn't belong in the military (see yesterday's "Major"). Be that as it may, each reader should consider the exceedingly high rate of incidents and violence where guns are prohibited but most importantly think about how a gun in your possession or in the possession of a neighbor or coworker may be the ONLY thing between you and your maker.
Permitted concealed-carry gun owners assume great responsibility and liability when they go armed. They not only deter crime and criminals in the act of attempting violence, they create an atmosphere of uncertainty in the minds of violence-prone individuals that, like so many other things is immeasurable but real. Public perception of areas where guns are forbidden attract and encourage the worst among us to take advantage of others for nefarious purposes.
May God take those that died yesterday to His bosom and may those hurt yesterday be healed both in body and in spirit. Amen.
Jim Beers 6 November 2009

SHAME, SHAME!

2009-11-21T17:53:00.000-08:00

The following is a Letter to the Editor of my St. Paul Pioneer Press concerning an article published as a feature Op-ed on the 4 November, 8B editorial page. It was titled "Wind power has threats of its own" by Michael Fry, and was written for the Los Angeles Times. JB
By Jim Beers
Shame on Michael Fry (director of conservation advocacy for the American Bird Conservancy) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service and all their duplicitous cohorts for the hidden agenda sold so smoothly in the recent Op-ed piece, "Wind power has threats of its own". The crocodile tears they shed for "sage grouse" and "prairie chickens" unable "to engage in cacophonous courtship" "each spring" due to wind turbines are disgusting.
So, "bird collisions (with swirling turbine blades) are mounting" while "Environmentalists and the wind industry have been discussing for several years how to protect birds" (like "Eagles, hawks, and falcons")? So "pressure from conservation groups" and the US Fish and Wildlife Service "Wind Advisory Committee" have agreed to "early consultations" with wind developers? So all these worthies hope to develop "recommendations" "to be released next year" and that may be "voluntary"?
The dirty little secret here is that ever since modern wind turbines began cropping up all over (Russia in 1931; UK in 1954; and the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, DC in 1974) they have killed billions of birds. They are "scientifically and exactly" located where wind (and coincidentally bird movement and migration routes) is most prevalent. Local predators and scavengers soon learn to clean up the evidence during the periodic abundance of dead birds apparently "falling from the sky".
Dismissing the assertion that such devices can ever replace oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power - where was the US Fish and Wildlife Service and all these "concerned environmentalists" and their lobby groups for the past four decades? If those "turbines" were oil pumps or derricks or radio towers killing birds, they would have been quickly forbidden in a flurry of righteous indignation and donations by incensed activists to their lobbyists complete with "payments" by the "bird-killing" oil folks or others to beg public forgiveness. The same goes for similar myriad federal private property "takings" without compensation under auspices such as the Endangered Species based on similarly specious claims of harm to birds as near Austin, Texas and elsewhere. If these groups were truly "concerned" they would develop management practices to keep bird abundance as we advance American society, instead they use these inevitable clashes of man and an ever-adapting environment as excuses to dismantle American society.
What this 11th hour conversion by federal bureaucrats and their environmental partners-in-crime is all about is a thinly veiled but audacious attempt to get what they have been trying to otherwise get for decades with unproven "science" and bureaucratic maneuverings on federal lands. That is, stealing State jurisdiction over sage grouse and prairie chickens. State bureaucrats are AWOL here because they have come to rely on federal grants like drug users on their pusher. These radical federal bureaucrats and lobby groups intend to manipulate such federal authority (ostensibly cloaked as "saving" these widely occurring birds) to depress and eliminate rural community improvements, grazing, energy development, hunting, road building, ranch operations, animal control, rural land values, etc. all over the Upper Plains and Northern Rocky Mountain states.
Shame, shame on them; and shame on you for publishing this two-faced propaganda. Why shame on you Pioneer Press? Shame on you for publishing this energy development and energy production killing tripe right after your front page trumpets how the "cap-and-trade" political chicanery by these same perpetrators and their political enablers was responsible for the recent death of the Big Stone II, a large energy production facility vital to future Minnesota and Upper Midwest power needs.
We used to pray to be saved from communism or the Russians or the Chinese: today we should pray to be saved from ourselves.
Jim Beers 4 November 2009

WHO YA' GONNA CALL?

2009-11-21T17:48:00.000-08:00

By Jim Beers

A retired Minnesota law enforcement officer just "lost his face and ear" to a bulldog. The latest report is that he is slipping in and out of a coma. His girlfriend reported that the attack came quietly and without warning as she was upstairs. The dog was purchased from a "rescue" source in Houston, Texas and according to reports the rescue outfit actually traveled to Minnesota to inspect the retired officer and his living arrangements before permitting him to adopt the dog.
In Nova Scotia, Canada a 19-year-old girl hiking in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park (located on a large island compromising the NE one-fourth of the Province of Nova Scotia) was recently killed by a "pair of coyotes". While Provincial and animal rights "biologists" warble about how "rare" such incidents are, and about how the coyotes probably came "across the (several decades-old) causeway connecting the island to the mainland" another explanation is emerging. Several lifelong Nova Scotia residents report how the Provincial Wildlife Authorities "introduced" the coyotes in the 1980's "to control rabbits that were destroying large tree plantations and plantings." One resident that has lived for decades near one such tree farm reports how the coyote population exploded upon introduction in the 1980's and how "packs of coyotes" up to as many as seven were common and increasingly aggressive, dangerous and hostile to humans in the areas. He was "not surprised" by the fatal attack. As with the historic (from colonial times) coyotes in the Eastern US and the recently returning (since the 1970's) coyotes in the NE US, these coyotes are reportedly very large as well as aggressive (like one on cape Cod that tried to kill and drag a toddler out of his backyard in broad daylight.)
Minnesota urbanites are all atwitter as I write this about recent reports of "a" (or several?) mountain lion in the river bottoms that skirt the southern Twin Cities area. The State DNR is pretty sure (as opposed their decades of denials about numerous reports from N Minnesota) that there is a cougar in the bottoms. Their advice is to keep your pets on a leash and to "remember" that cougars are protected in Minnesota and may not be harassed or harmed. Gun carrying of concealed weapons, open holstered guns, or gun bans in parks and certain urban areas have not been modified as party-goers speculate about how exciting it would be to glimpse a cougar.
Minnesota has many wolves. A recent multi-page article in the Minnesota paper about the steady decrease in moose numbers cited "experts" prattling on endlessly about how "global warming" is the culprit. Curiously, there was no mention of wolf predation as the decrease in moose numbers follows the increase in wolf numbers and distribution in Minnesota since their protection by federal authorities. Like the expanding cougar population in California following their protection by an animal rights ballot initiative, Minnesota wolves kill adult male moose in the winter but a steady wolf harvest of cows and calves (just like the California cougars learned how to do with California Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep or Nevada coyotes learned how to do with Pronghorn Antelope) will steadily decrease the prey numbers while eventually making them "Endangered" and even "extinct in ." unless the predators are regularly killed and their numbers and distribution are kept lower.
Iowa has had several mountain lions reported in recent years. Iowa state biologists likewise deny their presence while warning everyone that they are protected and a "valuable" part of "the ecosystem". When South Dakota state biologists parroted that animal rights/environmental line several years ago while increasing mountain lion populations were killing South Dakota livestock and pets and threatening people, it took a massive effort by ranchers and rural residents to have the legislature finally force the state "nature worshippers" to allow for a healthy harvest of cougars every year to keep their numbers and effects tolerable.
When wolves killed a young man hiking in Saskatchewan, the Provincial Wildlife Authorities at first denied it was wolves and then fought any stories about the danger of living near wolves or about the difficulty of being able to defend yourself against wolves (or coyotes, or mountain lions, or grizzly bears, or black bears, or wild dogs). No Provincial or National Wildlife Authorities, just as in the USA State or Federal Wildlife Authorities, took any responsibility for failing to protect citizens, commerce, and human activities from numerous, protected and uncontrolled predators. Handguns in Canada are still prohibited from Cape Breton National Park to Saskatchewan and British Columbia. The point being that while Canadians, just like Americans are free to run their nation as they will, the young lady in the Park or the young man in Saskatchewan would have had at least a chance to live if they could have and did avail themselves of carrying a pistol as they hiked in a Park or in winter brushlands near a mining town where deadly abound - of this there can be no doubt.
Deaths and attacks by grizzly bears on humans in British Columbia, Canada are reported similarly to deadly and damaging attacks by California and Colorado cougars are reported as "unusual" and "rare" and often "the fault of the (hiker, biker, camper, hunter, etc.)" that "failed to 'puff up'" or that "ran instead of (what??)". The numbers and distributions of wolves, coyotes, bears, cougars, and wild dogs are invariably and almost always under-reported by government authorities concerned about being tagged as "inefficient" or as "uncaring". When such incidents or complaints occur they are never reported with any accuracy just as when wild claims are more and more cooperatively confirmed by "experts" when made by animal rights/environmental groups as they are either on a rampage or threatening to sue.
The situation is disgraceful. Rescue organizations and state wildlife authorities have evolved from admirable enterprises into threats to society, American freedoms, human lives and families.
Persons concerned about mistreated animals are to be admired for their concern. That they take in animals that others abandon or willingly surrender is a credit to their activity. It does not give them any traction in our free Republic to use their concerns as a reason to pass laws, seize private property, gain law enforcement authority and discourage animal breeding, animal use, and animal control by private owners and government. Not only have many "rescue" outfits done all these things, they have discouraged people from buying puppies from reputable breeders by untrue myths about mistreated adult dogs like the above bulldog being suitable for families and even a retired law enforcement officer. IF you want to "adopt" such a dog, good for you but to tell families that such dogs (as opposed a pup from a reputable dealer that is taken into a family at a young age to become accustomed to the family) are suitable is akin to selling pythons to said families. Dog Breeders are disappearing as new laws, draconian law enforcement, propaganda in the media and schools, and myths about "adopting" are spread by animal rights and rescue advocates.
Counterparts to these "rescue" extremists (not all rescuers are extremists) are more and more majorities in state and federal Wildlife Agencies and Universities. - Spreading and protecting deadly predators that we are told to "live with".
- Spreading myths about how to avoid attacks and denying attacks whenever possible.
- Dismissing the economic and human behavior losses caused by redators.
- Denying disease dangers and game animal losses to predators.
- Covering up necessary animal control by the all-but unknown APHIS in USDA.
- Manufacturing population data on a dime as over-abundant predators are denied and "disappearing" predators are claimed as environmental/animal rights lobbyist desire.
- Calling predator losses things like dog attacks or global warming as environmental/animal rights groups want and government growth advocates encourage.
- Working actively to undermine the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution they used to be sworn to uphold.
- Holding up an evil and imaginary goal (Native Ecosystems) to divert public attention from their legitimate primary purpose for existing. - Protecting the lives, livelihoods, families, and welfare of the CITIZENS THAT EMPLOY THEM.
Here is all you need to know about "rescue":
- Puppies are always your best bet for a family pet or a dog to be trained to perform some function.
- Adopting is admirable but must be carefully considered.
- Rescue groups can require all they want but you can refuse to encourage neutering or not having more than one dog, etc. by refusing to adopt.
- Accept that some unwanted or abused animals must be euthanized and disregard all the hoopla about "so many" animals in various shelters or rescue homes. Once people understand that unwanted animals are euthanized, fewer will be purchased frivolously.
- Fight attempts to expand "animal warden" or "animal welfare" "officers". Seizing private property or searching without warrants is wrong for merely suspected citizens and is grotesque for thin horses or breeding dogs that are privately owned. As respect for the rights of animal owners are eroded on the whims of others, so too can and will all rights be eroded and eventually disappear.
- Except for health or noise nuisances or where elderly persons become overrun with animals, animal owners and animal users should be respected as any other citizen. Such nuisances "need" "special officers" about as much as littering needs specialists to detect and deter littering.
Predator numbers and distribution are LOCAL, NOT FEDERAL, matters. Since Constitutional powers "not delegated to the United States" "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" per the 10th Amendment, State government and (here's a novel assertion) their employees are responsible to LOCAL communities where "the people" live. State government employees that disregard "the people" are targets for "the people" of that state to expand, contract, and set goals for them to accomplish. Uncooperative politicians should be ripe targets for replacement. So here is what you need to know about Predators:
- Predators are not necessary for anything. Doubt that? Travel to New Zealand where contented people, healthy economic ventures, and animal diversity including (Gasp!) introduced Non-Native plants and animals thrive together in an "ecosystem" LACKING ANY large predators.
- Any group or government employee that is responsible for protecting or introducing a deadly predator that kills or maims a citizen should be held as responsible as the owner of a dog that gets loose and kills someone in the neighborhood.
- Local rural communities should be supreme within a state concerning whether they will be expected to tolerate any or some or no predators IN THEIR COMMUNITY. Far off urban areas in the state, no more than far off cities and government offices IN OTHER STATES should have little or no role in saddling rural communities with unwanted predators.
- Only Federal land under EXCLUSIVE JURISDICTION (land NEVER placed under State authority - the District of Columbia and Yellowstone are about the only examples) should be subject to federal overriding of state predator determinations.
- Gun rights, especially handgun availability and carry rights, ought to be particularly easy where large predators exist or are to be tolerated.
- Citizen rights to protect life and property ought to be no less concerning an encounter with a deadly predator than when encountering a dangerous and threatening human assailant.
- Deadly predators no more "belong" on Cape Cod or in Iowa than they belong in Central Park or San Francisco's Chinatown.
- Killing predators should primarily be the responsibility of landowners and hunters licensed under agreed-to state management plans for maintaining, increasing, or eliminating predator numbers and distributions. Government control should only be an expensive last resort for all but federal properties or in cases like geese or other federal Treaty-protected birds around airports or in populated areas where Local governments cannot do it for various reasons.
- States like Florida, New Jersey, and Louisiana should reduce their black bear populations and distributions not only because of the cost and damage being caused by excessive bear numbers but because ---
As bears and cougars and coyotes and wolves search for food, learn to kill other animals for fun (like cats with birds or mice whenever available) and as they live near people without any fear (from shooting, trapping, poisoning, harassment, etc.) they get more familiar with people and therefore more dangerous. Kids, old people, and hikers, and anyone else become merely something to eat or "bluff" or simply attack JUST LIKE THAT "RESCUED" BULLDOG.
Whether it is an "isolated" incident or whether or not you are the one being "damaged" by livestock or pet attacks or your kid is threatened at bus stops; whether it is one death a year or whether you never hope to hunt for moose in Minnesota: you can no more rely on government "biologists" than that retired officer could rely on those "concerned" (primarily with him evidently) rescuers.
Watching this bizarre drama for years and listening to all the propaganda reminds me of a silly movie based on a fantasy theme. Remember that tune? "Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghostbusters". We have been playing bit parts in these animal rights/government comedies for long enough. Getting rescue and wildlife management back under American Constitutional control needs to start with repositioning the animal rescue efforts and the wildlife management and control "professionals" that have strayed far from public purposes to harmful agendas that I leave to you to judge as to whether they spring from ignorance, self-interest, or evil intent.
Jim Beers 2 November 2009

THE TWO "F" WORDS

2009-11-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

By Jim Beers

A recent lecture on the relation between the prolific writings of GK Chesterton (in the late 19th and early 20th century England) and modern environmentalism was well worth the evening commute and time I spent at a nearby University. The speaker, Mr. Ahlquist the President of the American Chesterton Society, made many thought-provoking observations from Chesterton but one in particular was, to me, very relevant to the US in the past 40 years and especially to all of us today.
In early 20th century England, just like in the USA today, there was a political "Right" and a political "Left". Their characteristics have been practically identical over the past century.
The "Right" is synonymous with Republican, "Conservative", business, "the rich", and "tradition" (this latter being synonymous in popular mythology with the "rich keeping their riches"). The "Right" is the champion of "Individual Rights" as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and as treated in the strict interpretation of the Constitution. In short, the "Right" sees the RIGHTS of an INDIVIDUAL as "Unalienable" and the root for everything else from private property rights to gun rights.
The "Left" is similarly synonymous with Democrat, "Liberal", workers, "the non-rich", and "change" (this latter being synonymous in popular mythology with "everyone eventually being as rich as 'the rich'"). The "Left" is the champion of "Community" broadly defined (as opposed the "individual"). Their model is a changeable government system subject to the values they attribute to being for the good of the community based on what they say it to be. In practice, that means the desires of those that elect the leaders, no matter the words of the Constitution or any previous "precedents". In essence, the "Left" sees the WILL of the COMMUNITY as being superior to Individual Rights and either the Constitution or the ideals stated in The Declaration of Independence.
As nations like England, Canada, and the United States swing back and forth over time between these two "sides" certain things become evident. I believe it is proper to generalize about the periods of "Left" and "Right" governments in these countries over the past century.
When "Left" governments rule they tend to disregard and even replace local governments (State, County, City, etc.) that are not of their own party and/or not cooperative. They tend to create more powerful and more all-inclusive (of human rights and activities) authorities in the name of "controlling business" and "redistributing wealth" (from the "rich", naturally). They tend to disregard tradition and precedent as they struggle to form a new model that will create a "Brave New World" as described in Aldous Huxley's depressing 1931 book (written during a World Depression when Liberals were taking control for a decade simultaneous with German and Japanese world-war planning.) Symptoms such as Consider the periods of 1914-1918 under Wilson, the 1930's under FDR, the late 1960's under Johnson, the late 1970's under Carter, and the current debacle under Obama as examples of Liberal rule. Actually, the periods of Clinton, both Bushes, Teddy Roosevelt and Nixon were Liberal or "Left"-"Lite", truth be known. Look at spending, government growth (in size and jurisdiction), the unchecked meddling in the affairs of all, the diminishment of state and local authorities, and the embrace of world government from the League of Nations to the present UN.
When "Right" governments rule they tend to resist "change" even the "change" wrought by a previous "Left" Administration. They are not openly usurping state and local governments except when financial supporters lobby for it. They embrace the status quo while giving lip service to the wording of the Constitution. They tend to be supportive of deterring crime through punishment and they are more assertive and unforgiving to international threats and terrorism. They are more aligned with traditional and cultural defenders although their more affluent supporters often resist being identified with or supportive of the cultural, sex, marriage, or Life issues. Although they run on "cutting" government and spending, they have evolved to being a party that only represents a slower slide into a massive central government that controls everyone and everything. Relations with the One-world government types tends to be one of resisting things like Kyoto and Climate Change Treaties while signing on to Endangered Species, UN Natural Area designations, and Whaling Agreements that are all not only counter-productive but more importantly grow domestic federal government authority over all manner of associated things in massive spurts that ultimately destroy state and local Constitutional authority. The periods of Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and Reagan would be typical "Right" periods, while the period of JFK and Harry Truman might be definable as "Right"-"Lite".
To sum it up, the "Right" touts Individual Rights while the "Left" touts Community Rights. Neither really protects state and local government (who, other than "local" government guarantees "local community" rights?). There is not the slightest doubt, and I will argue anyone on this point, that the current lock on power by the Left (White House and massive majorities in the US House and Senate) is characterized by a true "Blitzkrieg" by the federal government on business, private property, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, and COMMUNITY GOVERNMENT. The combination of political majorities, extremely radical appointees, an unfamiliarity with the truth, unparalleled massive spending, and a ruthless disregard for precedent and tradition that has accounted for a 9-month swing to the Left unmatched in American history.
The Founding Fathers drew up and signed a Constitution that essentially did three things.
- First, it clearly stated an explicit list of INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS guaranteed to all citizens.
- Second, it clearly limited the necessary (but yet to be always feared) central government to specific and limited responsibilities and powers, mainly national defense and interstate commerce "regulation" meaning preserving fairness and trade between states not the massive and all-encompassing power claimed over the past century.
- Third, all other powers and responsibilities were left with the "States respectively, or to the people" per the 10th Amendment. That means the "people" can control their State (and not vice versa) and thereby have "control" of THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES.
While each of these three purposes has been stood on its head over the past century, can anyone disagree that they are being spun like a baton in a parade by the current "Left" government?
So what did Chesterton have to say about his back in the beginning of the 20th century? He said that neither Individual Rights nor Community Controls are an answer unto themselves. He postulates that the environment created by explicit INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS and COMMUNITY CONTROLS that are truly controlled by the local community EACH creates a balanced environment where Liberty thrives; and where Liberty thrives FREEDOM nurtures the true cornerstone and foundation of all human societies, THE FAMILY.
As this is written the family is under attack by every imaginable force. Children, parents, religious values, and religious institutions are all being attacked by political (mainly Left) actions encouraging same-sex sex, abortion, euthanasia, fatherless children, population control, birth control, divorce, and cohabitation, while discouraging marriage and timeless moral values by the shameless use of propaganda by teachers on the public payroll. This attack has paralleled both in speed and intensity the loss of INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS and COMMUNITY CONTROLS in western nations over the past century. As we have watched and fought about our individual loss of Individual Rights and Community Controls, the environment that supports Freedom and the Family has deteriorated proportionately.
In the US this argument between Left and Right has become an "either/or" confrontation with no answer. Like the, "you're either for or against Wilderness" or hunting or animal ownership or animal use or "clean" air/water/environment, or "science", etc., etc. argument, there is no answer. Only when we recognize Individual Rights as applying to each of us regardless of how someone else "feels" must be respected by all will we break the power politicians hold and expand when they promise to take away the rights of others for their own personal gain. Only when we realize that we must accept LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTROLS and not clamor to use federal powers or the political power of large cities that "control" state governments on rural residents or dog owners or parents, etc., etc., that we disagree with will we restore the environment necessary for Liberty and Freedom to fluorish.
THE FAMILY is the cornerstone of any society and it needs FREEDOM to flourish. As we wonder about how to preserve Liberty for our descendants, perhaps we should first and foremost consider the Family and Freedom. As those two "F" words go, so go we all.
Jim Beers 31 October 2009

DESPERATE CLIMATE-TORS!

2009-11-11T09:17:00.001-08:00

By Paul Driessen

You can hear, feel and almost taste the desperation within the dyed-in-the-wool climate alarmist camp.
The planet is no longer cooperating with their cataclysmic warnings. It is in fact not warming “furiously” and “dangerously” – not any longer, or ever in recent millennia. Their favorite whipping boys – carbon dioxide, fossil fuels, Western living standards and civilization – may not be guilty of planetary murder, after all.
So now, to protect and advance their Copenhagen agenda, it is critical that they rewrite history, delete the inconvenient episodes, pooh-pooh ignorant geologists who bring up Earth’s history of never-ending climate change, and create some idyllic past when Planet Earth was forever bathed in constant temperatures, summer lingered ‘til September, winter exited March the second on the dot, and by order of the Crown the climate was perfect all year. Thus we hear from Reinhold Leinfelder and Tagesspiegel in the November 10 CCNet that:
“… the CO2 emitted by us is now gathering in the atmosphere, unlike other greenhouse gases over thousands of years, where it now exceeds all historical values for at least a million years. Therefore, the CO2 increase is the main driver of the processes warming.
“Our civilization, based on agriculture … relies on a stable climate. So far, we have been lucky: In the last 5000 years, the climate at a global (not regional) level has only varied by a few tenths of a degree per 100 years. Only the 20th Century, with its warming of 0.8 degrees, is an exception.
“Planet Earth did not care three million years ago that the climate was about three degrees warmer and sea level was 25 to 35 feet higher. For our civilization today, a rise by just one meter would have negative consequences.” Et cetera.
So the proof is in, Leibfelder claims. CO2 levels are rising, due mainly to human activities. QED. This is, ipso facto, proof that carbon dioxide is “the main driver” in global warming. The natural forces have simply ceased to exist, one must assume, or at least no longer play a noticeable role in climate change.
But now that planetary temperatures have stabilized and even dropped a bit, is CO2 also the main driver in global cooling? That would be rather complicated, and inconvenient. As would these other inconvenient truths:
Sea levels have risen 400 feet since the last Ice Age ended, and all those mile-thick glaciers melted. Granted, 11,000 years ago is a bit more than 5,000 years. But it is quite a bit less than the “three million” years ago that those troublesome geologists were talking about in Berlin – before they discussed the Pleistocene and even more recent Earth history. Did mammoth flatulence and cave man fires perhaps cause those repeated glacial and interglacial epochs?
In northern Africa, green river valleys used to be home to contented hippopotami and happy human villagers. Then, rather suddenly, 4,000 years ago, the region somehow metamorphosed into the Sahara Desert. That’s certainly within Leinfelder’s highly selective time frame. Do you suppose Egyptian slaves did it, cooking over their open fires, while also breathing very heavily as they built pyramids for pharaohs?
What about the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age? Fires from sacked cities, perhaps? Admittedly, the Northern Hemisphere isn’t exactly planetary. But it’s a lot of territory. (And maybe the Southern Hemisphere doesn’t count now, since this much more watery expanse doesn’t behave quite the same way as its Northern cousin.) But in any event, how did our ancestors, even more dependent on agriculture than we are – and even less technologically advanced – manage to cope? Historians tell us they ADAPTED! One would suppose we could adapt, as well, since thinking humans don’t usually just sit there and get pummeled by callous natural forces, and we have learned a lot over the past centuries.
What about the Dust Bowl? It blew away soil, destroyed agriculture and displaced thousands of American families. It was a climate disaster, by any definition. It was the same kind of regional disaster that Climate Armageddonites routinely seize on to “prove” global warming. Did the Model T, Wright Brothers or World War I cause that extended drought? Did the Dust Bowl destroy the planet? What made it go away? More carbon dioxide, which presumably cooled the planet until 1975, when we had the global cooling scare? And is CO2 now causing planetary temperatures to stabilize and even cool off again, after a 20-year interlude of warming?
All this alarmist caterwauling and revisionist history really is getting a bit tedious, though it is also very amusing – and great fodder for cartoonists.
Does Herr Leinfelder really think the 1975-1998 temperature was ideal? Or perhaps the much cooler average global temperature between 1940 and 1975 were more ideal? Or during the twenties and thirties? Or maybe during the Roman or Medieval times, or Greenland’s during the Viking Colonization period? Or maybe it was the Little Ice Age global average, of just a few centuries ago? (Or maybe, as Michael Mann suggests, the LIA never happened.)
Does Leinfelder really think we humans can set the Earth’s thermostat? And who exactly does he suppose should have the power to decide what is the “ideal” temperature, humidity, rainfall and storm setting for Planet Earth and all its various regions?
One more inconvenient question. How exactly does he know global climate varied by only “a few tenths of a degree per 100 years” during the last 5000 years. That’s quite a precise estimate. Did he perhaps find a stash of Celtic, Inca, Mesopotamian, ancient Chinese and late Neolithic thermometer data that had been overlooked by historians? Perhaps it was filed among the “missing” CRU data? Or with Dr. James Hansen’s airport, blacktop and air conditioning-modified ground temperature measurements?
As I said, you can almost taste the desperation. Bring on Copenhagen. It will be a very entertaining circus.
Paul Driessen
Senior policy advisor
Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality

WE'RE ALL IN CHINA NOW

2009-11-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

New Initiative Launches Police State Under Guise of Mental Health
© 2009 Beverly Eakman

It's zero hour in America. Do you know where your country went?
Now that America's education system and parenting "experts" have brainwashed a generation of now-grown schoolchildren-cum-parents into believing that what we once called personality quirks, character flaws and moral issues are, in essence, mental disorders, politicians have taken the ball and run with it. Law enforcement agencies and the judicial system are in the process of adopting Stalinist and Mao-inspired methods of controlling dissidents at home.
Only a few, short years ago, what was held up as independent thinking, speaking one's mind, and robust dialogue is now decried as a prelude to terrorism. Our nation's leaders are pulling off communist-style thought-control by implying that any words uttered in print or out loud that run contrary to "accepted wisdom" (and that can change in a "New York Minute") is the result of mental illness.
Don't believe it? Well, "google" this:
A recent report out of Missouri labeled "not-for-public-distribution" (circulated anonymously by a shocked and patriotic police officer) specifically describes supporters of the three presidential candidates as potential "militia"-influenced terrorists and instructs police to be on the lookout for bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with, of all things, the Constitution-such as "Campaign for Liberty." Even a few Members of Congress were implied to be security risks themselves (potential domestic terrorists). The document, entitled "The Modern Militia Movement" (February 20, 2009), emanated from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), one of several so-called "Fusion Centers" established by the federal government around the country.
Most people are probably not familiar with the term "Fusion Center." These were originally intended to allow local and state law-enforcement agents to work alongside federal officers after 9/11so that terrorist-related activities could be identified, then pounced upon by all three entities at once. "Fusion Center" offices, therefore, incorporate local, state and federal law-enforcement personnel, a strategy which, prior to the launching of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was deliberately avoided to maintain independence and preserve impartiality. Predictably, these Centers got out of hand and fell into what is referred to as "mission creep."

Mission creep is defined by Wikipedia as:

"the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes.. [I]t is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts, only stopping when a final, often catastrophic, failure occurs. The term was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to [other] fields, mainly the growth of bureaucracies."
Ongoing improvements in tracking and monitoring of opinions via magazine subscriptions, charitable gifts, school and household surveys, and other computerized data collection has made political prediction on hot-button topics that much easier to secure. "Predictive computer technology" (already a staple of school assessment testing) entails analysis by behavioral psychiatrists with concurrent degrees in statistics. This same capability has greatly accelerated mission creep among the nation's Fusion Centers.
The PBS News Hour (not known for its conservatism or, for that matter, for being "alarmist") recently reported on how political dissidents in China are forced into to psychiatric hospitals Video: Chinese Dissidents Committed to Mental Hospitals. In the segment, aired September 13, 2009, the manner in which complainants (called petitioners), whistleblowers and outright protesters are "managed" bears an eerie resemblance to a policy shift right here in America. States' rights (or the 10th Amendment) are among the first casualties of a top-down, federal effort to minimize, and eventually suppress, dissent.
Take, for example, an individual or group complaining about government "land seizures" without proper compensation-a property-rights issue that is becoming very familiar to people in the Southwest and Northwest, such as Oregon, Arizona. Ron Ewart, president of National Association of Rural Landowners and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues can document dozens of cases where farms, livestock and people have had water and other infrastructure cut off, forcing them from their homes and their properties to depreciate on spurious environmental grounds. But such "land grabs" are moving even into liberal-left states like Connecticut, and for no other reason than "the common good." The Kelo v. New London decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2005 essentially allows the State to condemn or take over private residences and small businesses that happen to be in the way of "better" taxation prospects.
Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center in the Washington, DC Metro area explains it this way:
"Say a councilman and a developer decide they could make money using 'eminent domain' to take an entire neighborhood of small-tract houses - tearing them down to build a hi-rise condo. That new building would fit the Kelo decision's definition of 'common good' because it would create new and higher taxes than the existing small-tract houses. Building the condo would mean creating jobs; it would help realtors and furniture stores, and so on, by giving them new products to sell. The only losers would be the old property owners who lose their homes - oh, well.."
Regardless of the strength of a plaintiff's grievance, it typically costs more to fight than it does to just pack one's bags.
The point? That people are suddenly afraid to balk at government overreach, especially if such overreach is tinged with politically correct dogma, as in the case of the "common good."
And why is that? Psychopolitics.
Psychopolitics is as the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and "the masses," via various techniques ranging from "group dynamics," "cognitive dissonance," "de-sensitization," "super-imposing alternate value structures," "artificial disruption of thought," the Delphi Method, the Tavistock Technique, to negative or positive "reinforcement." If you don't recognize any of these, don't feel too badly, because they are not part of any school curriculum. The people who created them are, for the most part, unknown in our own country, except among those groomed by extremist political organizations to become "change agents," professional agitators or "provocateurs." The pioneers of psychopolitics, including attitude prediction, include individuals such as Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Lewin, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm (Germany); A. S. Neill, A. J. Oraje and John Rawlings Rees (Great Britain); Antonio Gramsci (Italy); Anatoly Lunacharsky and Georg Lukacs (Russia); G. Brock Chishom and Ewen Cameron (Canada); and the U.S.'s own Ralph Tyler and Ronald Havelock.
Although psychopolitics originated under Vladimir Lenin as "political literacy" and "polytechnical education" in the old Soviet Union, and was carried to the free world via Peter Sedgwick (1934-1983) a translator for Victor Serge, author of PsychoPolitics and a revolutionary socialist activist as well as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the term psychopolitics found its way into the American lexicon via Isaac Asimov, a master of the sci-fi genre. But psychopolitics is no science fiction adventure, and never was.
By the 1970s, a slew of enablers were establishing a system of numerical codes for so-called mental disorders that would accommodate computerization. This lent legitimacy to what would otherwise have been considered "questionable illnesses." The goal was to ensure that medical professionals, the media and government accepted these terms as they might "diabetes," thereby ensuring that the mental illnesses so codified would remain indelible, beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable.
The long-term game plan of psychopolitics is the conquest, usually by proxy, of enemy nations through "mental healing," better known as "re-education." This entails what we know as "encounter groups," extensive self-disclosure surveys and peer pressure to conform. If all that doesn't work, if certain individuals are still not amenable, then the first step is marginalization as "mentally unbalanced."
Example: A study by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $1.2 million, announced on 1 August, 2003, that adherents to conventional moral principles and limited government are mentally disturbed. NIMH-NSF scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford attribute notions about morality and individualism to "dogmatism" and "uncertainty avoidance." Social conservatives, in particular, were said to suffer from "mental rigidity," a condition which, researchers assert, is probably hard-wired, condemning traditionalists to a lifelong, cognitive hell, with all the associated indicators for mental illness: "decreased cognitive function, lowered self-esteem, fear, anger, pessimism, disgust, and contempt" (Jost, J. T., J. Glaser, et al. (2003). "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition." Psychological Bulletin 129(3): 339-375 online at http://www.apa.org/journals/bul/503ab.html). [Note: this study has been moved to Apa.org]
This is the sort of ultimately unprovable, but nevertheless libelous, condescension that is heaped upon anyone from talk show hosts, to authors to patriots who dare to contradict "common wisdom" (a.k.a. "political correctness"). If that doesn't work, contempt may be followed up with "mandatory [psychiatric] counseling" (already a feature of the American judicial system), or even forcible psychiatric drugging (well on its way to legitimacy in this nation's schools). Finally there is incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, which gratefully is not yet a fixture in American democracy for potential dissenters, but the handwriting is on the wall, as the expression goes.
Totalitarian states like Communist China and Russia may be more blatant in their affronts to human rights and personal property - inasmuch as they don't need a "reason" - but the differences are narrowing precipitously.
As emphasized during interviews on the PBS segment, the Chinese system is set up in such a way as to pre-empt complaints. The Chinese government doesn't wait around for somebody to sound off; it pre-emptively seeks out individuals likely to become troublesome, by assigning a mental-health diagnosis to anyone at the first sign of a provocative or inflammatory remark.
This lies at the heart of what is going on here in America, and we absolutely must put a stop to it, if it isn't already too late. Data-mining (which actually pre-dates 9/11), along with longitudinal tracking (that's tracking over long time periods) and, therefore, ongoing monitoring of individual perceptions, worldviews and beliefs is gaining momentum with every moment that computer technology evolves - which means constantly. Combine this with the practice of assigning mental-illness labels to private opinions, based on snippets of various information - with anything that might be favorable to the individual conveniently left out!
This "diagnosis," like the American school child's, follows the person for life, often compromising his or her college and career prospects. An why not, after all? Computerization makes it impossible for anyone to prove that an erroneous or falsified accusation has been purged from the system with no backup copy.
Today's Chinese authorities, like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) before them, in order to avoid drawing attention to policies that may be morally or ethically distasteful abroad (e.g., the one-child policy and forced abortion) or invite protests that coincide with an event at which international media attention is expected (such as the Olympics), they employ spies, block careers and intimidate family members.
It may be shocking to hear from your college-age children that we going down the same road. Several universities, like the University of Delaware, in which a lawsuit was filed, have planted paid opinion-monitors in university dormitories (called "resident assistants," or RAs).
Adam Kissel, Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, provides this shocking, real-life example in a January 2008 speech at the Constitutional Coalition (St. Louis, Missouri), which resulted in a lawsuit:
The freshman arrived for her mandatory one-on-one session in her dormitory at 8 pm. Classes had been in session for about a week. Her resident assistant handed her a questionnaire. He told her it was "a little questionnaire to help [you] and all the other residents relate to the curriculum." She "looked a little uncomfortable."
"When did you discover your sexual identity?" the questionnaire asked.
She wrote in response: "That is none of your damn business."
Another question: "When was a time you felt oppressed?"
Her response: "I am oppressed every day [because of my] feelings for the opera. Regularly [people].jeer me with cruel names.. But I will overcome! Hear me, you rock-loving majority?"
The resident assistant felt appalled.. He wrote up an incident report and reported her to his superiors.
This one-on-one session was not a punishment.for a recalcitrant student who had committed an infraction. It was mandatory sensitivity training, indeed, but it was part of a program that was mandatory for all 7,000 students in the University of Delaware dorms. It was a thorough thought-reform curriculum that was designed by the school's Residence Life staff in order to treat and correct the allegedly incorrect thoughts, attitudes, values, and beliefs of the students..
Many other features - the mandatory one-on-one and group sessions throughout the year; the "confrontation" training to help RAs challenge students who were not complying [with political correctness]; the posters with [politicized] messages spread throughout the dorms; the zero-tolerance policy against anything deemed "oppressive"; the individual files on students and their beliefs, in some cases called "portfolios," which were to be archived after graduation; the RA reports on their "best" and "worst" one-on-one sessions; the scientific analysis of the questionnaires in order to measure improvement toward the "educational objective"; the "strong male RAs" who were hired to break the "resistance to educational efforts" among [especially] the young male students - all of this, according to the university's own materials, was part of a cutting-edge educational model that had won awards from a professional association for university administrators, the American College Personnel Association.
As if this weren't enough to prove that psychopolitics is alive and well in America, with the pervasive undercurrent of "mental illness" as justification, schools below the college level have thoroughly succeeded in exchanging academic testing for mental-health "assessment"; left out, rewritten, and altered history texts until virtually nothing is left of the Framers ideals of a constitutional republic; redefined and watered down morality into something called "situation ethics"; removed the physiology from health classes and replaced it with graphic sex education, beginning in kindergarten.
Already, we see the results:
Do you vocally promote the right to self-defense? Do you voice support for the intact family; national sovereignty and strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Do you criticize easy immigration (i.e., without an citizen-sponsor); unrestricted free trade; free condoms hanging on some college freshmen's dormitory doors; formalization of same-sex unions; abortion on-demand; mandatory mental-health screening of all pregnant women and schoolchildren? Do you have a problem with the policies of the Federal Reserve; with "traffic" cameras and other surreptitious surveillance devices; industry-wide bailouts; no-fault divorce and illegitimacy? Then, my friend, you are not merely holding to a "divergent viewpoint," to use the 1950s term; you are mentally ill and a potential terrorist. You are a person who is ripe for radicalization and therefore suspect. Did you volunteer for certain political candidates in the 2008 election? Do you, by your choices of magazine literature and religious preference, show that you have "bought in to" theological tenets such as the Creation?
If any of these apply to you, good luck in ever securing a government grant or contract, or getting your child into a top university, when there are others who carry none of this psychological "baggage."
Americans are supposed to view any opposition to all this as "paranoia." Of course, the term paranoia carries a chilling effect, because it screams "mentally unbalanced" to the world.
Once it becomes possible, via technology, to track and legislate private opinions - and even to classify those that don't conform as "mentally ill" - then we have left the realm of politics and moved into coercion. We have facilitated the stigmatization of political dissent and vocal objection using labels like "acute stress disorder" or "paranoid schizophrenia," just as they do a right now, today, in China, according the aforementioned PBS segment.
As a former employee of the U.S. Justice Department, I personally saw several precursors to the MIAC document - "watch-out" reports (for lack of a better term), on a smaller scale, under Janet Reno's tenure there. These were distributed to employees following the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Obviously, such alerts have been greatly expanded, what with the network of government "Fusion Centers" in state after state.
With pharmaceutical company moguls and politicians sitting on each other's boards (E. I. Lilly's chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, sat on the Homeland Security Council under George W. Bush's administration); with nationwide mental health assessments like the New Freedom Initiative (funded by the House in 2002) sizing up the political "health" of schoolchildren (and curriculum being altered accordingly); and with "behavioral detection officers" ("BDOs") looking for any signs of irritation among model citizens in airport security lines, while U.S. borders are left open for drug-runners, who then get to sue Border Patrol agents for shooting at them-all this points to an America in big trouble.
"Political dissent" is now in the eye of the bureaucratic beholder - or the surveillance camera, erected under the guise of traffic safety to pursue revenue and to intimidate through meaningless "gotchas."
We're all in China now.

About Beverly Eakman:
Beverly K. Eakman is a former educator and retired federal employee who served as speechwriter for the heads of three government agencies and as editor-in-chief of NASA's newspaper at the Johnson Space Center. Today, she is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer, the author of five books, and a frequent keynote speaker on the lecture circuit. Her most recent work is Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks (Midnight Whistler Publishers).

HAZY IMAGES NO MORE

2009-10-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

The US Attorney General has just announced that Federal laws regarding marijuana will no longer be enforced where States allow marijuana use. Like the administrative decisions by other Presidential appointees to not enforce Federal Immigration laws or even to not enforce The Federal Right and Constitutional wording regarding "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" in cities like Washington, DC or New York City or Chicago or states like Illinois, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Massachusetts: one can only be dumbfounded by the impunity and callous disregard for Constitutional jurisprudence exhibited by "elected officials" and their minions. All of this makes a shambles of Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution that states, "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States."
Yet, when it comes to signing a UN Gun Treaty or a "Climate Change" Treaty, or when it comes to enforcing a prohibition against ANY abortion restrictions (parental notification, permission, school encouragement, etc.): these same "elected politicians" and their minions suddenly become Constitutional "extremists". In the case of Gun Rights and in the case of all the "Climate Change" implications in the proposed Treaties we will all be reminded about how a Treaty "shall become the Supreme Law of the Land" per Article VI of the Constitution as they develop a book of regulations that remake the USA into a copy of 1935 Germany or present day Venezuela. In the case of unlimited abortion, mere words constructed out of thin air (a "right to privacy") when uttered by a Supreme Court Justice are treated as etchings on stone tablets being carried about by Moses.
So what is going on? If a law is unenforceable or if a President and his minions choose not to enforce it (on what legal basis?) it should be repealed. As the current Administration decrees what laws will not be enforced it simultaneously is colluding with the Congress to politicize and control American society in ways that are Constitutionally illegal. For instance:
· Controlling the bonuses and pay levels of selected and growing segments of the economy.
· Threatening banks through government regulatory agencies like the FDIC to provide loans to unqualified minority applicants or to contribute significant amounts to minority organizations that helped elect the President in spite of collecting government funds that specifically prohibited any partisan political activity by such groups.
· Awarding Billions of dollars to select banks, investment firms and insurance conglomerates based on secret (political?) criteria with no public accounting on the disposition, use, and results of such public monies.
· Establishing precedents that destroy the Constitutional mandate of Article I, Section 9 that "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time" by additionally proposing to make said favored firms pay back certain funds and then for the Administration to merely reuse such funds ad infinitum.
· Buying auto companies and then operating them in partnership with workers' organizations.
· Eliminating certain businesses like car dealerships that either supported opposition candidates for office or did not contribute to the recently elected politicians.
· Proposing to take control of all health care, doctors, health workers, and hospitals to not only extend its unconstitutional extension of power over the economy and people but to reinforce its anti-life and anti-religious programs of abortion, family numbers control, withholding of care to the elderly and disabled as well as more Draconian policies such as have been in evidence in recent dictatorships and more Socialist western nations regarding euthanasia for the elderly, the sick, and the disabled.
· Proposing a "Cap & Trade" Treaty that will give the central government unprecedented control over every sector of the economy, all human activities, and unlimited taxing power to both collect massive revenues and favor political supporters like same-sex couples and childless couples that leave lower "carbon footprints".
· Targeting private citizens, media outlets, business entities, and academics for marginalizing and destruction because they oppose Administration policies. For instance, re-instituting the "Fairness Doctrine" to destroy Talk Radio and White House encouragement for supportive media to ignore media reports from opponents considered unfavorable to the Administration.
All of these unconstitutional expansions of Federal powers are identical to the actions taken by Communist dictatorships, Nazi tyrants, and current dictatorships like Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba, and Morales in Bolivia as they assumed all powers over everyone and everything and simultaneously assured their own unopposed lifetime position as ruler.
Politicians and supporters favored by the ruler will be quietly relieved of the burdens placed on the ruled. For instance:
· Does anyone think that rich regime supporters like Ted Kennedy would have been placed on a six-month "waiting list" or have been told he was too old or too sick to receive end-of-life medical care under the proposed Government Health Care takeover?
· Does anyone believe that powerful politicians would have to give up their New York City Gun Permits while they work to disarm the rest of us like Senator Schumer?
· Would any common man; be he middle class, white, or property owner; be un-prosecuted for carrying a loaded gun in no-gun cities like Washington, Chicago, and Boston like many minorities are or as US Senator Webb was when he carried a loaded gun across Washington, DC and into US Senate offices?
· Consider the "poor" Chancellor at the University of Illinois that recently "Resigned Under Pressure" for favoring "politically-connected" applicants over better qualified common-folk applicants. Why aren't he and other such "perps" prosecuted? Aren't the "politically-connected" in Illinois and Chicago the fruit of this system that the President and all his old chums from Ayres and Wright to Daley and Blagoyevich inherited and milked and are now introducing into national politics? Like Claude Rains in the 1942 movie Casablanca being "Shocked" by the gambling at "Ricks", we can all assume that these Illinois politicians are similarly taken aback by such nefarious activities at The State University.
Last night Lannie Davis, a mouthpiece for the Administration, was arguing for the worthiness of many of the travesties mentioned above. As others dismantled his arguments he was forced into a corner wherein he said "well elections have consequences". The clear implication was that an elected President can do whatever he wants, however he wants to do it. That is exactly what Communist dictators, Nazi Tyrants, and despots like Chavez and Mugabe maintain.
Communist dictators like Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Min obtained their "positions" at the point of a gun. Hitler, Mugabe, and Chavez obtained their "positions" in elections during times of economic crisis with the "assistance" of thugs and intimidation.
The current Administration was similarly elected in a time of "crises" as the President's Chief of Staff noted as "opportunities too valuable to waste". The Administration employed thugs and crooks ("ACORN" and associated "community organizers") that were specifically forbidden from such activity by virtue of the public funding paying for their activities yet were never prosecuted.
What is going on is very dangerous. Based strictly on historic and recent precedents, we are clearly heading into dictatorship and single party rulers not only like 1930's Germany and present-day Venezuela but also like Boston, New Jersey, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. All the foregoing are hard examples of where this Administration and Congress intend to take us.
The ONLY purpose of government is to protect society. Individuals and families can best control government when it is kept at the lowest possible level (a principle called Subsidiarity). Federal responsibilities ought to be limited to national defense and interstate commerce, while State governments and particularly local governments should be concerned with day-to-day things necessary to the common and local good.
Government will inevitably control individuals and families when power is allowed to migrate to the highest possible level. Power concentration will always attract amoral individuals that will scheme and connive to possess that power in perpetuity for their own benefit. Government growth and the concentration of power at the highest level must always be resisted and avoided for the result is always tyranny and dictatorship because by definition there are then no longer any enforceable limits on government.
Jim Beers 21 October 2009

KUDOS & BRICKBATS

2009-10-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Kudos & Brickbats was written in response to Jim Beers following column "Reflections of a Nazi Tyranny".

By Jim Beers

My recent piece (Reflections of a Nazi Tyranny) has generated both kudos and some serious brickbats. As I answered one of the kudos and pondered what I might say to those that are so disturbed by what I wrote, the following combined response has come to mind.
To those that enjoyed the article, a reader on the West Coast asked, "I would appreciate any help or insight you may offer towards productive action we might pursue." Here was my response:
1. Form alliances to protect your rights and freedoms. Look to everyone from trappers, gun owners, and pet owners to ranchers being harmed by wolves and irrigators. Always remember that you are protecting the rights of you and your neighbors (in the national sense) and not making ideological judgments about whether or not people outside your community should be able to do this or that based on your personal preferences. As their rights go, so go yours.
2. Speak up in the family, at work, in professional groups and social settings about your concerns in ways that don't antagonize but explain your legitimate concerns in ways that all will consider.
3. Target those responsible for harming you (both declared enemies and those that Lenin referred to as "useful idiots") in ways intended to make them reconsider their actions. These arguments should be made public as much as possible to make as many folks as possible understand your issues and what needs to be done.
4. Regain control of faculties and curriculums in public schools and in State Universities.
5. Strongly, openly, and forthrightly oppose politicians that harm you. Make your reasons simple, public, and understandable.
6. Clean-up corrupt voting processes and corrupt voting administrators at all levels.
7. Explain rural living and private property issues and concerns at every opportunity and in every available media.
8. Treat State and Federal bureaucrats as self-serving individuals concerned with their own (NOT YOUR)) interests. Minimizing their numbers and power, like making politicians and judges always respect the Constitution, should be a never-ending task for each of us.
9. Always support and consider subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization that can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity that can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom.
Subsidiarity conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State. A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate it with the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism.
When the principle of subsidiarity is ignored, governments often overstep their bounds in managing matters best handled on a more local or individual level. Typically this decreases economy, efficiency, liberty and the personal character of the social order.
I hope this helps. It would be good to sit and talk about this somewhere and sometime but for now, this would seem to be all I can jot down.
Good Luck, Jim Beers
Now to you reluctant readers that condemn what I wrote, particularly my references to the US government exhibiting traits in common with dictators like Stalin and Hitler, the following quotes by two of the better-known tyrannical killers of the last century are offered in response. I submit that these quotes are as relevant to US policies and leaders today as they were to the dictatorships, executions, gulags and shared misery that these two bums were imposing on Mother Russia in their day.
From Joseph Stalin:
"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."
"Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemy have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"
"Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army* can reach."
(*Note: Think domestically and substitute Geithner's IRS and Napolitano's Homeland Security and the President's promised Domestic Army made up of "organizers" like ACORN and their ilk for Stalin's "army".)
From Vladimir Lenin:
"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
[bour-geois (boor zhwä) Fr. n.1. a member of the middle class. 2. any person owning property.]
Lenin described those Western reporters and travelers who would endorse the Soviet Union and its policies in the West as "useful idiots of the West". In the United States today, the term is used to imply an ignorant person that is easily swayed (made 'useful') toward causes that are against their own interest, or what they would consider to be the greater good, were they better-educated.
And some people think those guys never had anything worthwhile to say! Some people grab their role models where they find them, just as I use relevant examples of disproved and deadly philosophies wherever I find them.
Jim

REFLECTIONS OF A NAZI TYRANNY

2009-10-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

"Daddy, what did you do in the war?" - A common question in fortunate WWII postwar families like mine.
In the turbulence and bitterness of America in 2009 "political correctness", character assassination, and intimidation make dialogue and inquiry all but impossible. Environmentalism, animal rights, socialism, racial divides, and an increasingly powerful and authoritarian central government all seem interwoven with and driven by a deteriorating economy that descends from one "crisis" to another. Desperate people look to a more powerful government as the only salvation and that government is all too willing to take over everyone and everything in a grip it intends never to relax. Government spending has skyrocketed and private enterprises of all kinds are increasingly under government direction. Government opponents in the media are identified and targeted as enemies. Church leaders and institutions are intimidated and told to cooperate or face elimination. A steady drumbeat of "new" laws, many unread by legislators and lied about to an ignorant public, are passed that dramatically change the society. Meetings to organize protests are broken up by "community organizers" that have been told by the President that they will be enlisted in a new domestic police that he plans to establish. This state of affairs could just as easily be used to describe Germany in the 1930's.
Of course there are many exceptions to any comparison of Germany circa the 1930's and the USA today. Today we show no tendency toward foreign conquest, indeed we are pursuing mere conversation for every foreign threat from nuclear weapon proliferation to Moslem Jihadism and Russian power expansionism. Simultaneously, we are embracing communist ideologues (Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba) that 1930's Germans hated and feared would conquer them eventually. In spite of being immersed in a never-ending apology for the worldwide and centuries-old practice of slavery and the conquest of European culture over the primitive culture existing in America circa 1492, we have no national delusion about "restoring" a racial culture of supermen that are superior to all other cultures. While government increasingly divides Americans with racial classifications and programs, no concentration camps or "final solution" are in evidence.
What we do share with Germany circa the 1930's is a radical government agenda and a powerful central government completely controlled by a single party committed to implementing that radical agenda during a time of one economic crisis after another. A thumbnail summary of the domestic (within the country) portion of that agenda might include:
Central Government control of business, banks, health care, insurance and as much else of the economy as possible.
Central Government authority over all lower governments (State, County, City, Local) and any decisions they might make.
Central Government hegemony as a result of a revamped Constitution and the work of radical judges and courts (see the movie Judgment at Nuremberg).
Central government control of religious institutions and religious activities.
Central Government control to be maintained by the party in power.
Central Government power to control any opposition.
Central Government authority over all citizen activity from when they might assemble, what media will be allowed, what speech will be allowed, and who might be allowed a gun to what children would be taught, when persons will be arrested or detained or searched, what property rights will be controlled by government, and who is to be allowed to be better off than others.
I first saw glimmerings of 1930's Germany when the President-to-be remarked about not wanting his daughters to "be punished with a baby". Here was a national leader openly referring to unborn children as deserving of no protection and equivalent to 1930's Jewish, Gypsy, and Disabled Germans that for no other reason than their existence could and should be killed.
Since that time the "new government" has authorized the use of public tax funds for abortions; threatened to eliminate the legal protection of doctors, nurses, and hospitals that will not provide abortions due to moral objections; continuously lied about the eligibility of public funding for abortions in their health care overhaul; proposed panels to make decisions about what care will be allowed the elderly or disabled; and clearly set the table for legalizing and encouraging euthanasia by what new laws they propose and who they have appointed as White House advisors.
Watching the "new government" appoint a gaggle of environmental radicals brought to mind the environmental extremism and nature worship of 1930's Germany. As the new appointees brought a track record of absolute priority for "Native Species" and "Native Ecosystems" to their jobs, one was reminded of 1930's Germany documents and programs aimed at "restoring Pre-Roman plants and animals" to the German Fatherland under the Third Reich. The American obsession with a mythical purity in a pre-Christopher Columbus America is identical to 1930's Germans yearning for a primitive culture that was similarly "spoiled" by a more advanced civilization hundreds of year before. The denigration of "Columbus Day" and the continuing international apologies for what America has wrought throughout the world have only intensifies my impression of this propaganda myth enabling an emerging dictatorship.
The abundance of "new government" animal rights radicals has been yet another reflection of 1930's Germany thinking. As we hear and see White House appointees declare how animals should have "rights" and we see their long histories of radical activism on behalf of animals at the expense of human traditions, uses and legal rights such as ownership one is reminded of a similar belief system on the part of the Leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. In March of 1938 Germany simply absorbed Austria and Hitler made a triumphant entry and tour of several places where he spent his wasted and aimless youth. At his riotous visit to Vienna he first objected to staying at the best hotel because of all the stuffed animals in the lobby only to wind up at the proprietors' suite at the second best hotel where a polar bear rug graced the floor. The Fuehrer "hated hunting" and stayed up most of the night talking with his new puppet Chancellor of Austria. In this regard he would have had much in common with many of the advisors in our "new government".
Then there is all the government hoopla about making us all healthy. The proposed taxes on sodas and fast food and the plans for more exercise for all Americans as in the similar propaganda films of 1930's German civilians exercising happily in large military-like formations is matched with an antithetical government drift to unlimited abortion, withholding of health care to the elderly and disabled, and the foundation for future euthanasia programs.
The constant media exposure of the "new government" leader, the propaganda poster art, the children singing the songs praising the leader and all he does, and the widespread messages to children about how parents are not your role models but rather The State under the Leader are each eerily reminiscent of 1930's Germany.
Some observations and quotes from that period of history shed further light on similarities with today
On Fomenting Racial Division to Have Someone to Blame:
According to Nazi propaganda, the Jews thrived on fomenting division amongst Germans and amongst states. Nazi anti-semitism was racial: "The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race;" however, the Jews were also described as plutocrats exploiting the worker: "As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods." In addition, the Nazis articulated opposition to finance capitalism with an emphasis on anti-Semitic claims that this was manipulated by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers. (Consider "white people" remarks by the President and his pastor. Consider Israel. Consider Insurance Executives and Bankers getting bonuses and Oil Company Executives, etc.)
On the complete lack of any ethic of life or any government role in protecting human life:
Hitler considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State", and praised its early eugenics treatment of deformed children.
"The earth continues to go round, whether it's the man who kills the tiger or the tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it's the law of nature. The world doesn't change; its laws are eternal." (Consider the animal rights and environmental extremists in the White House and what they would teach your children about humanity, morality, and nature.)
On Lying:
"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it." Adolph Hitler
On Education and The Family:
When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community." Adolph Hitler
"We are the joyous Hitler youth,
We do not need any Christian virtue
Our leader is our savior
The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone
We want to be pagans once again." - Song sung by Hitler youth (UUU, UUU, UUUMM!)
On Public Information:
"By the skilful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise." Adolph Hitler
On Public Opinion:
"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think." Adolph Hitler
What good does it do to make such an outrageous comparison? No reasonable person expects the new government to sign and break pacts or to instigate a "blitzkrieg" or absorb our neighbors. What a reasonable person can expect is the new central government to obtain and hold onto all government power just as happened in 1930's Germany. Whether it is good economically (as it was in Germany) is really immaterial. Whether it is good in some small way for you or me is irrelevant. Whether it is misused as it always comes to be in every dictatorship (which is what emerged in 1930's Germany) by either the current or future governments (as it ALWAYS is) is of no moment to Americans consumed with comfort and self-interest. The fact is that once a moderately responsive government is lost (in Germany just as in the 13 Colonies) you can't just remake it without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Also there is no guarantee that you could ever restore this great Republic or anything close to it. Once you lose it, it is lost as millions of Germans would attest.
Just recognizing historical symptoms is something. Knowing what they have led to may be enough to bring us together before it becomes too late. Such has been the lesson of history down through the ages.
"Forewarned forearmed". (From Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes [1547-1616]).

ALARM BELLS

2009-10-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

Were alarm bells going off throughout the Twin Towers after the planes struck them and up until they collapsed? Whether or not the alarms sounded until the buildings collapsed or whether they immediately or eventually malfunctioned, the situation is analogous to America today. Regardless of whether the alarms saved some individuals, or malfunctioned eventually, or perhaps were ignored by persons that could not conceive of what was about to take place; the results were the same, an enormous loss of life and the disappearance of those two buildings (forever?).
16 October 2009, alarm bells were going off all over this great nation. The latest three such bells have come across my desk just this morning.
I. Secretary Clinton just announced "negotiations on a global treaty regulating trade in conventional weapons". She assures us that the US would insist on "leaving it up to the States to 'exclusively' regulate the arms trade within their borders".
A. Article. VI. of The Constitution of the United States says "This Constitution and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; AND ALL TREATIES (my capitalization) made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, SHALL BE THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND (again my capitalization); and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, ANY THING IN THE CONSTITUTION OR LAWS OF ANY STATE TO THE CONTRARY NOT WITHSTANDING (again my capitalization)."
B. The goal is to have the President sign and this rubber-stamp Senate ratify A TREATY that will make the 2nd Amendment no longer a guarantee of the right to bear arms but rather a meaningless and legally outdated "individual right" supplanted by "Treaty Obligations". Assurances by the White House or Congress (now or ever) are meaningless and are frankly lies. Aside from the proven lack of veracity from this White House and this Congress, there is a decided lack of outspoken opponents in today's weak-kneed "opposition".
C. A TREATY obligating the Federal government to "control arms" will Constitutionally change our guaranteed right to bear arms into a permission to be granted or withheld by both State and Federal authorities.
SUCH A TREATY would immediately legitimize illegal gun laws in places like Chicago and Washington, DC since "States would exclusively regulate the arms trade within their borders" By gutting the 2nd Amendment, any Federal interest in protecting the right to bear arms in any State would disappear. Second, it would give the Federal government unchecked authority to tighten down the purchase, possession, sale, and transportation of everything from gun types, gun transfers and gun numbers to gun possession, gun ownership, and gun use. Third it would authorize State and Federal bureaucracies to impose registration, reporting requirements, permit requirements, and rules that would be paid for by taxes (excuse me, "fees"): all of course under the cover of paying for "regulating trade in conventional weapons". Fourth -like to hear it or not- this is a thinly veiled strike by government to eliminate all gun possession, just as Hitler and Lenin did. This American anti-gun campaign is not "Million Moms" or neighbors of schools where shootings are common: it is radical government politicians, their radical supporters, and self-serving bureaucrats doing just what every tyrant from Cromwell to Pol Pot knew had to be done - DISARM the populace you intend to enslave them because eventually (like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) they will fight IF THEY HAVE THE MEANS.
II. Legislation is currently continuing to wend its way through Congress to simply grant by a truly un-Constitutional Act of Congress the Federal government jurisdiction and authority over "all waters of the United Sates". From the humble beginning of the "Rivers and Harbor Act of 1899" (an earlier period of US environmental hysteria like today) in order to give the Federal government a new responsibility to "promote (nautical and riverine) interstate commerce" a Darwinian power evolution of epic proportions was begun. A march of ever-expanding Federal power expansion was marked by:
- In the mid-60's and early 70's The Water Quality Act and Clean Water Act gave Federal bureaucracies growing power over State waters and privately owned water.
- The EPA was begun to "regulate and enforce" all the emerging Federal "responsibilities" over "waters": this of course was in addition to the explosion of Federal regulations by NPS over National Park's "waters" and "their" watersheds, USFWS regulations over National Wildlife Refuge "waters", USFS regulations over all National Forest "waters", and all of these influenced and combined with the largest explosion of Federal "water" regulations by the Federal granddaddy of Federal "water" responsibilities the US Army Corps of Engineers over "all navigable (in the largest sense of that term) waters of the US".
- Wetlands legislation always was a recurring exercise in creating the claim that "navigable" included creeks, sloughs, and every periodically wet soil anywhere; thereby expanding Federal authority over all water everywhere for unchallenged Federal ownership and control.
- The Safe Drinking Water Act tried mightily to show that we "needed" Federal control over any water that might one day be drunk.
- Waterways were used as excuses for things like The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to establish not only Federal authority over certain streams but also jurisdiction over uses of the water; recreation on the water; the "watersheds" and "buffers" and "corridors" and "viewsheds" of such streams; and all associated private property.
- Watersheds came to be defined as all manner of underground water as well as streams and storm runoff. Objections by States to the theft of all these State jurisdictions as well as private property within each State were blunted by Federal grants and assistance that made the State bureaucrats and legislatures mere hostages to Federal bureaucrats and politicians ladling Federal "water" funds to each State. Federal water authority came to be just one more radical tool to dictate where people live, what people would be "allowed to do and not do", and what permits and permissions would cost (i.e. taxes and "fees").
- The Endangered Species Act was molded yet again into a Federal power tool as it came to be used to breach dams, shut down agriculture, and threaten irrigators and other water users.
Thus has the simple, yet naïve, purpose of enabling the Federal government to fulfill its Constitutional role stated in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 "To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" become a threat to the Republic. By ratifying the authority of the Federal government to maintain and improve "the navigable waters of the United States" we created a tool to be envied by dictators down through the ages: a tool of repression that transfers large portions of lesser governmental powers and all ever-greater portions of individual rights to one supreme central government with little awareness by the public thereby verifying the old maxim that whoever controls the water, controls everything.
III. I have just been informed by a friend that "The US Fish and Wildlife Service is planning to make climate change* its highest priority."
(Note the term "climate change" as opposed the term "global warming" that originally got everyone's shorts all wadded up. Forgetting for a moment the silly linkage of CO2 and "warming" or the nebulous quantification of influencing "change" regarding "climate"; the bureaucratic wonder of "climate change" is that, like "job creation" with Stimulus Funds, there is NO measurement possible and there is NO end to the government funding it can generate nor any limit to the Federal government power it can generate throughout society.)
The USFWS draft strategy and action plan are "open" for public comment until November 23, 2009." My friend goes on to inform us that:
- "The literature cited list for this redirection is less than a page long, and reveals something less than full dedication to scientific method."
- "Large scale full landscape conservation measures are featured prominently."
- "I have not yet been able to find a postal address or fax number for comment submission."
- "There is a lot in these plans that will limit private property rights in both the near and long term."
- "The plans include the implementation of huge wildlife corridor cores and buffers, cross-border cooperation for landscape conservation projects, and much, much more."
As an old bureaucrat, allow me to observe that this sort of inevitable and unchecked government expansion of power and expense is being conducted throughout Federal offices. The total costs of all the increased land acquisition, hiring, operations and maintenance will be not only astronomical but will be directly proportional to future losses of private property and future diminishment of the authority of State and local governments to protect the rights and lifestyles of the communities that have relied on them for over 200 years.
These three items (international gun trade regulation, "protecting" "all waters", and massive government programs to prevent the "climate" from "changing") are what H. L. Mencken once famously identified as products of "practical politics". He said, "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." This humorous truism should not deter us from understanding the deadly seriousness of each of these matters. To see any of them alone should send shivers down our spines and elicit calls to throw out every bum (i.e. all of them) in Washington today. To take notice of all three on one day is akin to seeing Attilla the Hun coming over a Hungarian ridge or seeing Luftwaffe bombers and Panzer Divisions streaking across Polish countryside.
Each of these steps toward eventual tyranny should sound an alarm to us all but like hearing the shepherd boy constantly calling "wolf" we have tuned out the alarms. However in all fairness, the clamor of "approaching tyranny" alarms going off all over has never been as great in this Nation as it is today.
Consider all the following alarms in the past year and just how fast we are plunging headlong into a tyrannical government from which there will be no easy escape:
- Federal appointees setting private sector salaries.
- Federal nationalization of banks.
- " " " Insurance companies.
- " " " Automobile companies.
- " " " Health Care.
- ACORN/SEI thugs breaking up citizen assemblies (like SS or communist "organizers").
- "Cap & Trade" legislation that will raise energy and other costs astronomically for no end other than increasing government power and revenue.
- Complex and lengthy laws passed in the dark of night without public notice or even cursory reading by those that vote for them.
- Powerful political offices passed down in families like Kennedy, Rockefeller, Dingell, Biden, Daley, etc.
- Taxes on sodas and "fees" for health care each claimed to be for social justice or health ends but really for nothing but government revenue.
- Proposals to ban foods like bacon and hamburger while giving animals "rights"???
- Proposals to use public taxes to fund abortions.
- Proposals to prohibit hospitals and health workers from refusing to commit abortions or euthanasia on moral grounds under pain of government termination.
- "Wars" between politicians and certain news media and certain churches over disagreement with regime policies.
- Massive deficits, unlike any ever seen in history.
- Government entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac masquerading as "non-government" while working with agencies like the FDIC to browbeat banks into continuing to make bad loans or give money to ACORN thus perpetuating the housing crisis and the unemployment crisis thus keeping the public ripe for "more Federal intervention".
- A steady loss of private property and private property rights to Federal and State wastrels.
- A steady assault on Constitutional rights from bearing arms to freedom of speech, assembly, press, and security of our property from unwarranted search and seizure.
- Government preferments and favoritism for women and blacks in spite of female majorities and blacks everywhere from The White House to Commanding Generals.
- Black athletes and black leaders using "racist" accusations to deny fellow Americans their Constitutional rights where, if the tables were turned and white leaders proclaimed that "certain blacks weren't wanted in nor should be allowed in businesses that were 70% white" there would be an outcry of unfairness just like blacks cannot commit "hate crimes" on whites despite a wildly disparate rate of black-on-white crime in practically every large city.
- We continue to ship Billions to nations that hate us for their oil while refusing to develop or use our own massive deposits of coal, oil, and gas.
- We refuse to build nuclear power plants for the high demand for power while building windmills that kill birds, produce minimal power, and lie still in the summer when power demands are highest.
- Schools that fail at education while propagandizing children about aberrant sexual lifestyles, the passé' nature of religion and marriage, and the need for compliance with the leader's wishes (UUU-UUU-UUMMM!) like every tyrannical dictatorship of recent history.
Just like those Twin Towers after the planes hit them, there should be alarms going off everywhere for each of these things.
Before I began working as a law enforcement officer many years ago a discovery was made that has saved many lives. All American police and emergency vehicles had similar sirens that whined a constant and identical sound while in Europe they used sirens that varied in pitch and played various notes. Lo and behold it was discovered that there were far more serious accidents at the scenes of emergencies in the US than in Europe involving police and emergency vehicles racing to the scene. The reason, it was determined, was that you could not hear similar-sounding sirens while you were in a vehicle with the same siren turned on with the same whine. The answer was to adopt the European sirens and thereby save many American lives by allowing the emergency personnel to remain aware of other racing vehicles heading toward the same destination.
We are each like those emergency vehicles with the old sirens all heading toward Armageddon oblivious to all the others doing exactly the same thing. We ignore gun rights if we have no guns. We ignore water hegemony with the ill-informed impression that anything to "clean" or "save" water must be OK. We ignore the inevitable losses of health care and the loss of human lives to abortion and euthanasia in the mistaken assumption that we will get something else and that we don't expect to "need" an abortion and we will stay healthy by running and eating healthy foods.
Has there ever been an "educated" population of free men and women that so simply and willingly surrendered to the tyrannical rule of a dictator and a gang that all expect to profit like those that surround Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe?
As painful and controversial as all this is to say; it must be said. We are all rushing into a dictatorship as surely as we are angry with those that mention it just like someone shouting "Iceberg!" on an "unsinkable" ship like the Titanic.

WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING?

2009-10-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.
They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?
During the last few decades of the 20th century, our planet did warm
quickly.
Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.
But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.
The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.
And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company
specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.
He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.
He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the
international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.
If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.
Ocean cycles.What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans.
They are the Earth's great heat stores.
" In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down."
According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.
The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically.
The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.
But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.
Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."
So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is
evidence that they have been right all along.
They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.
But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.
The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate
predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.
In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors things that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.
In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.
What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures.
And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.
To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.
Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.
But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.
So what can we expect in the next few years?
Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.
It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).
Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.
One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say its hotting up. Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
Published: 2009/10/09 15:22:46 GMT
(c) BBC MMIX
===========================
Robert Ferguson, President
Science and Public Policy Institute
www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org
bferguson@sppinstitute.org
202-288-5699

GOVT-FUNDED RESEARCH UNIT DESTROYED ORIGINAL CLIMATE DATA

2009-10-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

by Christine Hall
October 5, 2009

Govt-Funded Research Unit Destroyed Original Climate Data
CEI Petitions EPA to Reopen Global Warming Rulemaking
Washington, D.C., October 6, 2009―In the wake of a revelation by a key research institution that it destroyed its original climate data, the Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.
In mid-August the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature data set because of an alleged lack of storage space. The CRU data have been the basis for several of the major international studies that claim we face a global warming crisis. CRU's destruction of data, however, severely undercuts the credibility of those studies.
In a declaration filed with CEI's petition, Cato Institute scholar and climate scientist Patrick Michaels calls CRU's revelation "a totally new element" that "violates basic scientific principles, and "throws even more doubt" on the claims of global warming alarmists.
CEI's petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU's disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA's proposal to regulate carbon dioxide. EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision. As CEI's petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.
CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, "EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data. But CRU's suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable. If EPA doesn't reexamine the implications of this, it's stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face."
Among CRU's funders are the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy - U.S. taxpayers.
Read the CEI petition to the EPA.
Read more about the data dump: The Dog Ate Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels

YIKES! CALIFORNIA CLUES

2009-10-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers
My Minnesota paper informs me "that investigators are searching for clues" to the origin of the latest catastrophic California fires that have taken the lives of firefighters and destroyed numerous homes and their families' belongings. While I take no issue with just punishment for anyone causing, either intentionally or accidentally, a fire; when speaking about "who caused the fire" there is a long list or perpetrators that go unmentioned and unnoticed.
For instance:
-What steps have California Governors, Legislatures, and Universities taken in recent years to change the plant communities that quickly create an abundance of fire fuel annually on public lands?
-Why is there no discussion of non-native plants to supplant the mostly native species that cause such devastation?
-Why is there no discussion of road patterns to serve as firebreaks and access for firefighting? ---Why is there no discussion of encouraging grazing and tree-cutting regimes that pay for themselves and even generate much-needed tax revenue and precious jobs?
-Why is there no exploration of state incentives to restore logging and timber mills or markets for sheep and goats (both of which eat the fuels that otherwise soon become hazardous in California climates) and their many products?
-What has state government done to force federal agencies that own and ("manage" is an untrue depiction of what they currently do) close so much of what was originally California wood, brush, and grass lands that once supported California families but now endanger California families, homes, infrastructure, and budgets?
-What have state government or the media done to refute the federal canard that the agencies "need more money" to reduce fire fuel accumulations on "federal" lands when grazing, logging, road development and maintenance by users have financed fire management and local communities steadily through carefully managed uses of renewable natural resources throughout the last century?
-What is state government doing to stop and reverse the federal trend to make all federal lands roadless wildernesses that are inaccessible and unavailable for public use, revenue generation, and public enjoyment while they accumulate fire fuel at the fastest rate possible?
-What is being done to break the absolute hammerlock that extremist environmental organizations and radical animal rights organizations have on California land management? --
-What has California done to tone down federal demands such as not allowing any brush management where a certain rodent is said to desire to live?
Why have state and federal politicians as well as state and federal bureaucrats been allowed to create these catastrophic fire fuel sumps in the midst and surroundings of California families, homes, and communities? Did the Founding Fathers not see two of the primary goals of government to be insuring "domestic Tranquility" and promoting "the general welfare": how then can we tolerate state and federal governments that do neither? Unlike most "whodunits", clues as to whom and why are everywhere we look. Clues, like failed responsibility and blame, abound.
Positive steps are obvious to any sensible observer:
-Proactive management of plant communities without regard to how long the plants have occurred in California on federal, state, county, and private lands should be mandated on the public lands and encouraged or required for the general welfare on private lands.
-Politicians should demand such solutions and Universities should reacquire the wherewithal to provide such solutions regardless of nature veneration by "scientists, current searches for bogy-men like global warming and "stressed" ecosystems, or specious claims about native and non-native species.
-Private and sustainable uses of plants on public and private lands should be encouraged to reduce or eliminate fire fuel accumulation. Grazing, logging, and other plant uses by private enterprise should be encouraged and managed by government land "managers" to greatly reduce fire fuel accumulation.
-Economic activities that are supported by the use of renewable natural resources by private enterprises should be explored and encouraged to generate funding for government "managers" and local communities to use for fire prevention and other purposes like schools and roads.
-Roads on government lands should be encouraged to both enable fire fighting and fire prevention as well as to allow uses that generate funds to otherwise manage the lands for public uses: wherever feasible such roads should be constructed and maintained by user fees from those public lands.
Note to the reader, I have written about all this before:
-Recent fire-related deaths of firefighters and homeowners seem to be tolerable to Californians. -Property and tax losses in the Billions must be endurable to California rulers and their cohorts.
-Tax bills in the Billions for things that could not only be accomplished without tax money but that would generate user fees and taxes seem to be of no importance to Californians that once upon a time supported the senseless lockup of enormous deposits of Utah low-sulfur coal that could have generated power in Utah for Californians in the midst of a "power crisis".
-Like the revered mountain lions that kill and maim Californians while devastating desirable wildlife species ("yes, Virginia, there are desirable and undesirable wild species"), Californians seem to value cougars and "scientifically" designated plant communities above human lives, local communities, and a citizenry that supports a government rather than the other way around.
Today's papers abound with California's self-immolation of San Joaquin farmers (and the income they provide the state and local governments) in favor of a fairy tale about a certain fish. These fish like the smelt here, the suckers up by Klamath, and the snail darters in Tennessee are merely Lilliputian versions of wolves, that is to say they are surrogates for environmental cabals and all-powerful central government advocates to bring America to heel for their own purposes.
The sea otter debacle off the California coast and its impact on abalone is now a matter of history. Contrast this California sea otter veneration with the current whale worship including killer (oops I forgot we are supposed to call them "Orcas" to make everyone love these killers of the N Pacific and Bering Sea) whales that have greatly decimated the cute sea otters of the Aleutians. If any Californians complained, I must have missed it.
Californians are not alone in these regards: the great "Ivory-billed Woodpecker (extinct for six decades now) March to the Sea" (by bureaucrats and environmentalists, not Sherman) in the South differs from the search for The Abominable Snowman only in the regard that the Yeti doesn't generate millions in federal funding and serve as an excuse and hammer for agencies and The Nature Conservancy to buy and ease more land while shutting down more rural activities (and increasing fire fuel accumulation by the way).
So when they find "who started this fire" I am sure we will all be outraged and call for the maximum penalty. One recently convicted California arsonist is on Death Row as I write this. Another "arsonist" was convicted here in Minnesota recently. He was a Washington DC resident who had loved and enjoyed his N Minnesota cabin every summer for years. He was convicted of letting a garbage fire get away and thereby causing a conflagration. The fact that about a decade before a Minnesota storm downed million of acres of N Minnesota trees that were not cleaned up (much less logged as in "forest management") and soon became fire fuel in search of a match in his area because of federal Park rules, well that went unmentioned. The poor man went home and committed suicide in his garage. No doubt some similar punishment will be meted out in California and we will all think that will help avoid future conflagrations, if only we can pass "Cap and Trade" and "get more money in the US Forest Service budget"!
But it will all work out for "the best". Governors will get reelected. Legislatures will go back to fleecing people. Politicians and bureaucrats will get bonuses, health insurance, and hefty retirements. Environmental organizations will continue reaping their rewards. Government land ownership will continue expanding. Government land agencies will show ever-growing deficits for operations and maintenance budget requests while getting more and more land control. Universities will wail about "warming" and find ever more tiny groupings of heretofore-unnoticed plants and animals to justify government funding for themselves, private property restrictions, and the expansion of government agencies and power. All of these things have never before had a central government (White House and Congress) more favorable to and sympathetic about such problems because the California fire "crises" are viewed as more "opportunities" for imposing larger agendas. Such is "the best" in America today.
The California fire crisis is a symptom of the wider problems faced by more and more states. The more urban the state, the more advanced are these natural resource issues caused by fictitious "science" claims and gullible voters that are but symptoms of the larger national affliction hobbling this country today. The best analogy that comes to mind is that California is like an old Yosemite (how appropriate!) Sam cartoon where Sam goes to draw his two guns and they start going off in his holsters and he rises up off the ground in outrageous fury while failing to realize that he is the source of his own problem. I hereby nominate Yosemite Sam as the State Cartoon Role Model of California.

THE MISSING WORDS

2009-09-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers
Today's newspaper has a half-page environmental fairy tale that is a real tearjerker. Below the picture captioned "A large bull moose peers over the swamp grass, etc., etc." is an article titled, "Warmer weather imperils moose".
We are informed that of the 250,000 moose in the 7 states mentioned, all are doing well except for Minnesota moose that have declined from 12,000 to 7600 since "the 1980's". A parade of "scientists" and "experts" note the following:
- The 110,00 moose in Ontario are causing "concerns similar to those of their U.S. counterparts."
- A moose expert says the Minnesota moose "population is declining". Duh?
- "Researchers said they weren't sure why", but "more study is needed".
- An "Advisory Committee called on the state to do more to preserve and develop moose habitat".
- The same committee "warned last month that climate change threatens moose in Minnesota" despite an observation by its Chairman (a "moose researcher from Michigan Technical University") that "colder weather during the past two years has been good for northern Minnesota moose but the population hasn't measurably improved".
- The august Chairman is billed as someone familiar with the "uneasy relationship between moose and wolves in Michigan's Isle Royal National Park" where the moose population is as low as it has ever been in 50 years and "the shrinking food source provided by the moose threatens the Isle Royal Wolves.
- Finally, a pilot who has been taking tourists out to spot moose for 26 years has dropped his offer of a free flight "if they failed to spot a moose" because "it became too risky."
Biology, Politics, Government Funding, and Big Government are all intertwined in this crude propaganda piece:
Biology - How can moose in the other 6 states have increasing, stable, or populations held in check by hunting, yet Minnesota's decline is threatened by "climate change"? Answer: "Climate change" is a bogus excuse. Moose need browse that is encouraged by forest plant succession. The fact that a large portion of Northern Minnesota moose range is a National Park where forest plants cannot be disturbed by anything other than fire certainly has a lot to do with maturing forests that have less browse species like aspens, birch, Balsam, and willows. Add to that a National Forest that is less and less prone to "disturb" forest succession by logging and maintaining roads and you have a deficit of food, particularly winter food for moose.
Then you have predation. The fact that there are no wolf packs in Maine (60,000 moose) or New Hampshire (4,600 moose "held at that level by hunting") or Vermont (4,000 moose "kept stable through hunting") is significant. Although there are newly introduced wolf packs currently coexisting with 15,000 moose in Idaho ("stable and expanding their range") and 7,700 moose in Wyoming: those wolves are currently decimating the elk and deer populations as they also kill sheep and cattle to increase their numbers. The wolves are killing moose mostly in the winter and as they give birth but not yet in the intensity the wolves have shown elk, deer and livestock that are generally easier to kill. The 150,000 moose in Alaska have their healthy numbers thanks largely to politicians with guts like Governor Palin that ordered aerial gunning to thin wolf numbers to prevent a decrease in moose numbers. Governor Palin was right and frankly is a better biologist than these Minnesota moose "experts" whining in their beer. Oh, one more thing. This decline "since the 1980's": wasn't that shortly after the wolves were given complete federal protection? Wasn't this when trapping and shooting of wolves was prohibited. Wasn't this when the federal government "took over wolves" and states like Minnesota became grant supplicants and "gofers" (no, not gophers as in the U of M) for federal regulators and grant-dispensers? Nah, there couldn't be any relationship there, just coincidence.
Politics - What Minnesota politician would dare to ask why wolf control is not necessary to slow or stop a decline in Moose? What Minnesota politician would dare to call this "climate change" excuse a red herring? What Minnesota politician would stand up to the National Park Service or the US Forest Service and get them to start managing and allowing "public use" of the MINNESOTA renewable natural resources like timber and wildlife that are increasingly declining and going unmanaged as forest fire threats and forest fire fighting become ever greater problems for Minnesotans? US Senator Klobuchar? US Senator Franken? A Governor preparing to run for President? A state legislature and DNR that have grown the most complex hunting and fishing regulations I have encountered in a lifetime of studying hunting and fishing regulations? None of the above would say a thing just like no one will admit to the need to reduce predation by other overpopulated predators like seals and whales that are suppressing already stressed commercial marine fisheries. While the politicians all shake their heads and surely are "willing to do something" for the moose, anything beyond attending meetings and shoveling tax money to state agencies and a bevy of "experts" and "scientists" is (as another great leader recently observed about when life begins) "above" their pay grade.
Government Funding - Is there anyone that doesn't get the connection between "scientists" that call "for more study" for some emotional critter (on which they are "expert") and who will get government funding for said critter. Consider all those butterfly experts and bat scientists and sucker researchers that informed us of the endangered plight of some critter. Who got the subsequent "grants"? Who got the tenure and the assistants and a long string of studies and testimony requests all paid for by you and me? These guys says moose are declining due to climate change although cool years show no positive response. Even though they admit that its' "not clear what they're dying from", they ignore the one big moose killer (wolves) as though it does not exist. Wolf control gives absolute results in a short time; climate change and "pathogens" are never measurable, never-ending sinkhole for government funding and unaccountable career enhancement.
Big Government - As the President departs for Copenhagen to "get the Olympics for Chicago" we are wondering what he and his minions will say about "climate change" and "cap and trade" in December in Copenhagen if he doesn't "get the Olympics". If he sticks to his script "global warming", excuse me "climate change", will be front and center. The proposed "cap and trade" nonsense proposed at home will destroy businesses further and raise taxes precipitously and an international agreement will put the US under yet another Constitution-destroying international Treaty: but not to worry since there will be money flowing from it for things like "the declining moose of Minnesota". So this propaganda piece is yet another building block in the suffocating big government that no one wants but that will provide each of us (we think) with that certain something none of us can do for ourselves.
Oh, the "Missing Words":
HOW MANY moose (or wolves) are "ENOUGH"? Why isn't the fact that there are 150,000 moose thriving in Alaska "enough"? Where is it written that moose or wolves or bears must be EVERYWHERE"?
FOREST MANAGEMENT of Northern Minnesota National Parks and National Forests is absolutely vital to stabilizing and /or increasing moose food supply, particularly in the winter.
PREDATOR CONTROL works in Alaska to stabilize moose. Why is it not even mentioned in Minnesota?
There was NEVER A PERIOD IN HUMAN HISTORY WHEN ANY ANIMAL POPULATION WAS STABLE. WHY MUST MOOSE POPULATIONS BE STABLE NOW?
If Minnesota moose are being decreased by "climate change" WHY ARE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE STATE OF COLORADO STILL TRYING TO ESTABLISH LYNX IN COLORADO? Colorado has always (in known history) been the absolute southern extent of Canada lynx habitat as Minnesota is today for moose. Lynx have come and gone from Colorado for eons. If the world is "warming" how can we continue to introduce a northern species like lynx into habitat we are told is becoming tropical and therefore more appropriate to jaguars and iguanas? Maybe that is why the lynx are found starving to death in Nebraska and New Mexico. The reason "climate change" is not mentioned in the lynx "Recovery" scam is because the lynx introduction is for the purposes of pleasing the rich elites and for stopping ski resorts and roads etc., etc. If "climate change" (i.e. "warming") had anything to do with the critters as occasionally charged regarding critters like lynx and wolverines at the southern extremes of their habitat and federally endangered like wolves and grizzly bears (therefore never in sufficient numbers and subject to being placed anywhere under complete and eternal federal protection) would no more be able to live in the lower 48 than polar bears or ptarmigan but hey, mox nix.
In a nation that is permitting the shredding of the best Constitutional government ever conceived by man, what's wrong with believing in fairy tales as your house burns down around you?

Jim Beers 9/30/09

WHEN DOCUMENTS COME TO LIFE

2009-09-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers
"It's Alive! It's Alive!"
Dr. Frankenstein, when the Monster (Boris Karloff) begins to stir in the 1931 horror film - Frankenstein.
I recently distributed an article (Crime), wherein I made the case for firing and prosecuting federal and state employees that engage in "infringing" on the Constitutional Right "to keep and bear Arms" while they are at work, being paid out of public funds. I similarly argued for the prosecution of state and federal politicians that initiate, fund, or otherwise maintain gun restrictions that "infringe" on the Constitutional Right "to keep and bear arms" while acting in their official capacity and are being paid out of public funds.
My thesis was that unless and until the US Congress calls a Constitutional Convention and the 2nd Amendment is changed or eliminated, politicians and public employees on official duty and in their official capacity must honor and uphold (they used to swear to do this) The Constitution of the United States or face prosecution as a lawbreaker (of the Supreme Law of the Land) and dismissal. The two examples I used were the National Park Service (a hotbed of anti-gun sentiments for decades) and the government of the District of Columbia (another hotbed of governmental officials that, like New York, Chicago, et al blames everything from crime to unemployment and low test scores on guns).
As a result of this proposition I have just been called a "screaming idiot" and "just a bitter ex-federal employee". This articulate argument has changed my mind! Who could help but be swayed by such eloquence?
Additionally, I am in desperate need of public approval. Years ago when I wrote about how dog owners and hunters, trappers, fishermen, ranchers, and farmers all had a stake in the public witch hunt being conducted by HSUS, PETA, et al on cockfighting I found out just how much see themselves in the unjust plight of others. I said that the people OWN those chickens and you are free to go or not go. I said local jurisdictions should have the say about where, when, how, and if cockfighting was to be conducted. I cautioned about letting it become a state or federal issue because power politics would impose the will of whoever pays the politicians the most. That said, I still believe that if and how cockfights by chickens privately owned are eliminated will be the model for everything from banning the use of doge for hunting to raising turkeys and "owning" pets.
Well to make a long story short I was verbally bitten (he was surely rabid) by a famous vet and as a result, most dog owners found me to be verboten in polite company. Could I bear up if this happened again? What if federal employees didn't like me anymore? What if politicians that "run" DC or New York or Chicago (or even The White House) didn't like me? It is too much to bear. I give up: I will even sing (to the President Barack Obama school hymn, formerly known as The Battle Hymn of the Republic) "The Constitution is Alive! It's Alive and I believe, I believe" to prove that I no longer think of the document as a cornerstone but as a golden retriever in love with whoever comes through the door and will feed it.
So The Constitution is no longer relevant as judges from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Harry A. Blackmun have been telling us for years. The law is what they say it is and that has hardly anything to do with the constitution (the lack of capital t & c fits their concept in this regard. Therefore we are free to do whatever we can.
If the 2nd Amendment doesn't "really" mean that the right to bear Arms can't be infringed so therefore it is alright and even admirable for government employees and politicians and appointees like Attorney General Holder and a host of White House (staff?, Czars?, workers?, commissars?, what?) to "infringe" gun ownership the mind boggles at the implications:
- It would obviously be admirable for some racist appointee or bureaucrat or politician to work on manuals about how to deny certain minority citizen groups government services or public facilities or grants or contracts or whatever. What, you say the 15th Amendment prohibits that? You say there are laws against that? Well all those laws are based on that Amendment and hey, just like the 2nd Amendment, those are just words. Hey man, we won this election and now our guy is in power. Suck it up soldier!
- It would also be admirable for some anti-female liberation appointee or bureaucrat or politician to develop ways and places that women could be denied the vote in order to get more anti-womans' lib politicians elected. What's that you say? The 19th Amendment prohibits that. Well big deal. A lot of us think that female voters disrupt democracy so now that we're in power and "our" Attorney General is going to work with certain powerful city and state governments to get female voting to be by permit only. You will have to see a Voting Chief for a female voting permit but really, we don't see where very many females will qualify. This is called the Sullivan Gun Control Law model and it worked fine for guns and we can get around the 19th Amendment and all those silly laws it authorized just like we got aroung the 2nd Amendment thanks to legal trailblazers in the National Park Service and model city governments like the District of Columbia.
- All you folks that got all worked up about the Acorn "ladies" giving advice about tax evasion, cool down. Taxes aren't paid by everyone, take the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Those Acorn ladies and the likes of Geithner and Rangel all understand this "living document" stuff. Sure the 16th Amendment says that the government can collect income taxes but hey man, it doesn't say "everyone" anywhere in that Amendment. The bureaucrats that turned the other way, the fellow politicians that slap those bums on the back and particularly state governments like Maryland that intend to prosecute the man and woman that videotaped the Acorn ladies all understand the nature of a "living" constitution. May they all get big bonuses, big promotions, and big retirements!
It would be admirable if some bureaucrat with time on his or her hands could manualize the Constitutional rights that have already been whittled down or eliminated and how it happened. Then some other poor federal schlub looking for work could make up a flow chart of what is left to be done and how to do it. For instance:
- The Endangered Species Act has already gutted the 5th Amendment protections for private property. What international treaties can be signed to give government control of all private property? What legislation about water or wetlands or animal "welfare" could be passed that would just make the entire 5th Amendment a laughing stock?
- The 1st Amendment wording about religion and speech and the press and assembly are already a joke. Congress and the White House openly joke about Tea Party dufuses and those Congressional Recess meetings were stacked with reactionaries so they can be dismissed and either tightly controlled or eliminated in the future. The words about religion should be sent to our new Islamic allies to see what they could suggest for a better way to "manage" religion. Freedom of speech and the press are already "shaped charges" no longer meant to protect those things: the "living document" approach is to use these as tools to destroy the political opposition of those in power so that their power is maintained.
- The 10th Amendment says all "powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." What a joke! The "United States" has the power and duty to protect the right to bear Arms - so how do New York City and Chicago get the "power" to "infringe" this right? For that matter how does New Jersey or Wisconsin or Massachusetts get the "power" to "infringe" the right of residents and visitors "to keep and bear Arms"? Hey they get it just like the Supreme Court got the power to authorize the slaughter of millions of unborn children and soon the euthanizing of millions of old and disabled adults - they do it the old-fashioned way, they just invent it out of thin air and dare anyone to disagree.
Wow! If only I was still a federal employee I could come up with a new office, (heck why not a Division, why not an agency, why not a Department?) of Constitutional Surgery. This "whatever" could document all the Orwellian wordsmithing to date. We could fill computers with flow charts about what needs to be done for any current Administration and Congress (may Columbia be praised, the source of all bonuses and promotions) to "have their way with the constitution" just like some sailor in Olangapo or St. Pauli. We could get money and personnel for gun bans or minority-free organizations or places where women were barred from voting. We could hire Immams as 1st Amendment consultants and we could have offices of animal welfare and environment to coordinate us with the UN and international radical groups to sponsor treaties (to supercede The Constitution) and to stir up urban elites to gain passage of new draconian laws that undermine The Constitution before anyone figures out what is going on.
This "living document" stuff is a bureaucrat and politician's dream and a citizen's succuba.
So there you have it! I must count myself as the latest convert from a respecter of the US Constitution to a "living document" acolyte that sees The Constitution as both an impediment to great men like our President and the like of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed but a money bonanza to smart, conniving bureaucrats. The world this creates is not fit for most of you but I hope to be one of those standing after the rest of you lose your rights. Oh, didn't I tell you? I plan to be like those two great New Yorkers Rangel and Schumer. Rangel doesn't pay taxes and neither will I. Schumer is a big gun-control pol that has had one of the few gun permits issued in New York, he is my model for keeping my gun.
Therefore I apologize to all those National Park Service gun control stalwarts working on the gun ban in National Parks. I further apologize to all those DC politicians and police that looked the other way when my old Senator Webb carried his loaded handgun through the District from the airport and plopped it on a Congressional X-Ray machine where its discovery was judged "insufficient evidence" by Congressional Police and DC was never even heard from. Had that been a peasant such as me; a felony conviction, a fine and jail time would have been followed up by denial of any future gun ownership or use like hunting and a denial of voting rights as well.
PS You can see from this last why I am a "convert", I am too old to be taking showers with all the scalawags, bureaucrats, politicians, and ne'er do wells that belong in prisons for destroying our Constitution while collecting government paychecks!

Jim Beers
26 September 2009

CRIME

2009-09-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

crime (krim) n. serious violation of human law.
Even a poor non-lawyer like me understands that all US laws are based on and authorized (or else they are Un-Constitutional) by The Constitution of the United States. Theoretically (according to some) The Constitution is a "living document" that "evolves" as out tastes and the fortunes of politicians dictate: other folks like yours truly believe that The Constitution is a firm document that spells out what is and what is not "legal".
Modifications of The Constitution are provided for in Article.V. where it states that Congress may call a Constitutional Convention and propose Amendments. The history of Amendments is checkered to say the least. Remember Prohibition and all the violence and corruption it bred? Did anyone know or admit to the impact of the authorization of a federal income tax that was intended only for millionaires? Was there any awareness of what it meant to change the way US Senators were chosen from appointment by State Legislatures to a popular vote? Nevertheless, The Constitution is what it is and if not honored will ultimately lead to anarchy, chaos, and the rule of the most ruthless among us.
If someone violates a law, he or she violates The Constitution since, as previously noted, The Constitution is the basis and authority for the legitimacy of any law. With this in mind, let's consider two of the many Un-Constitutional practices that have arisen in recent years due to citizen apathy, the unlikelihood of prevailing in open argument in a Constitutional Convention, and the disregard for Constitutional wording rampant today among politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and radical groups seeking radical change.
GUNS
The 2nd Amendment to The Constitution of the United States says, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Question: If the "right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" how can anyone "infringe" my "right to keep and bear arms"?
Cities like New York (1911) and Chicago (1982) infringed the right of all Americans to "keep and bear arms under the banner of "disarming" gangsters and their gangs. States like Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts "infringe" this right under an unmentioned Constitutional right (like the notorious "right to privacy" that was invented to authorize taking the life of unborn children) of State Legislators and Governors to do as they want in "their" State.
Because of these precedents that have been tolerated by those scalawags mentioned in the last sentence of paragraph 3, those that would eliminate the 2nd Amendment without the bothersome and likely unsuccessful process of arguing for it in a Constitutional Convention are emboldened. It seems entirely likely, to them today, that simply electing sympathetic politicians and obtaining appointments of sympathetic judges however that is done (i.e. giving money and election help of many forms). That this Constitutionally repugnant process goes forward is unmentioned by non-gun owners that fail to understand that if the 2nd Amendment is susceptible to such lawlessness, it is only a matter of time until every other Amendment is destroyed similarly by determined foes of the rights mentioned in those Amendments.
Let us consider one other aspect of this issue that seems to be ignored by all participants. How can it be "legal" for politicians and bureaucrats WHILE ON THE PUBLIC PAYROLL to advocate infringing on "the right to keep and bear Arms"? How can National Park Service employees design, lobby for, and enforce infringement of 2nd Amendment rights? How can the Mayor and City Council of the District of Columbia design, establish and enforce a gun ban that clearly infringes 2nd Amendment rights? Don't all these people collect salaries and retirements paid for by all citizens? Since these people are violating The Constitution are they not criminals (i.e. one who commits a crime)?
Is it not an additional violation of law to collect a salary while working to undermine your employer? It is like working for a salary from an oil company while spending your working hours trying to ban all uses of oil: public employees (politicians and bureaucrats) used to be sworn "to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Just as a rogue oil company employee would be fired and forced to return the illegally acquired salary, isn't a public employee (whether elected or hired) obligated to comply with The Constitution while on the public payroll? If National Park Service employees want to advocate 2nd Amendment infringement, let them quit and work to have their elected Representatives call for a Constitutional Convention. If an elected official doesn't like anything about the Constitution let him work to call a Constitutional Convention. Absent an Amendment resulting from a Constitutional Convention such government (State and federal) employees should not be hired or if hired should be fired. Those that have or are advocating or implementing infringement of 2nd Amendment rights should be fired and any salaries paid them while they did so should be returned. Infringing 2nd Amendment rights should be treated no different than infringing other Constitutional freedoms from freedom of speech and freedom of religion to freedom from discrimination to the right of females to vote. To infringe on any of these rights is a crime, to infringe on these rights while being paid to uphold The Constitution is an additional crime as well as an abomination.
PROPERTY
The 5th Amendment to The Constitution of the United States concludes with these words, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Questions: Is it "public use" for the federal government to own, ease, lease, or otherwise control or acquire control over private property that is subsequently closed to "public use"? Is private property "taken" only when purchased or does "taking" begin with and include any overt move by the federal government to initiate a process that will inevitably lead to direct acquisition or easement or control of all or parts of private property?
The federal government has been acquiring land for National Parks since 1916, for the US Forest Service since 1905, and for the National Wildlife Refuge System since 1903. Granting the tenuous but arguable point that a National Park that preserves and interprets a national historic site or that a National Forest that manages a large forest for public benefit or that a National Wildlife Refuge that manages a habitat that is significant for species of National Concern are all legitimate examples of land legitimately "taken for public use": how can any government employee or agency or Administration justify any restriction on "public use" other than use that might harm the resource for which the land was "taken"? The answer is of course there is NO legal justification for such restrictions on non-harmful public uses. For example, Wilderness Declarations; Road Closures; Area Closures; unmanaged and dwindling fish and wildlife resources; logging bans; grazing lease revocations; Gun Bans (prosecute illegal gun uses just as illegal automobile uses or any other illegal behavior should be prosecuted); expensive permits and entry fees, and needlessly complex rules and regulations that intimidate the majority of citizens are all examples of "private property taken for public use" where legitimate and beneficial "public use" is denied. If these legitimate public uses are forbidden shouldn't the property be returned to the public? Shouldn't any public employees, public agencies, or elected politicians (all of whom collect publicly funded salaries) that plan, initiate, or maintain such denials of legitimate public use be prosecuted for violating this Constitutionally authorized reason for such public land acquisition - public use under the 5th Amendment.*
*(Section 8 gives Congress "Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful buildings".)
Any questioning of federal land acquisition and closure is not complete without consideration of the latest "innovations" being used to justify more acquisition, closures and private property control.
First there is the scandalous secrecy and use of federal funds for land acquisition and closure based on "sightings" of a bird no one has seen in 60 years; the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Secret appropriations, a "search that began in Arkansas but soon spread from Louisiana to North Carolina based on nothing but the claims of those that benefit from this fairy tale exposes a Congress of no worth and bureaucrats with no veracity. With absolutely no verification of the existence of this bird that has been extinct for 60 years; land was bought, land was eased, logging uses of private property threatened, hunting was threatened; surrogates for federal officials like The Nature Conservancy and Cornell University grant recipients wandered far and wide designating lands to be acquired and timber management that "had to be restricted" (without compensation) as has been done for decades on behalf of the red-cockaded woodpecker. The mania frenzy that is whipped up by such specious claims about species needs by "scientists" has come to be a tool to override any public input or reasonable public debate about such acquisitions or such use of public funds.
Second there is the biggest use of subterfuge for government acquisition since the Trojan Horse. US Representatives and Senators, leery of growing local resentments about planned government land acquisition and control but anxious to get money and support from national groups clamoring for more and more, never-ending government control of real private property have come up with a giant scam of questionable legality. I am referring here to Congressional "Heritage Area" Designations with attendant funding given to land control advocates. I saw this in Virginia (an 8-County Historic Heritage Area) and it is now being perpetrated in North Dakota (an 800 sq. mi.; 5-County Heritage Area).
Is it "public use" to give federal public funds to a non-public, non-profit Foundation to "Increase recognition of unique resources", or to "Develop a strong sense of place", or to identify "New opportunities for funding and partnerships", or to develop "Sustainable place-based economic development", or to attain "Balanced preservation and promotion"? Of course not!
Just as in Virginia, the non-public, non-profit is a surrogate and silent partner for the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy, and a hodgepodge of historic and environmental extremists that want control of all the private property they can possibly get. The federal funding allow this gaggle of radicals to alternately cajole and intimidate local governments and rural communities. Road projects will be stopped, sewage improvements given even more expensive requirements, land uses will be subjected to more and more controls, and rural living will be more and more difficult as certain parcels are targeted for acquisition, others are targeted for easements and teams of feds and radicals and TNC operatives treat local landowners to the "good-cop/bad cop" treatment regarding acquiring or easing parcels or using their own property productively.
"Heritage Areas" are a government land acquisition process begun as something else to counter public objections and to foster public secrecy that is anathema to a Constitutional Republic. Defining when the acquisition process begins is long overdue to avoid such subterfuges in the future.
When the dust settles remaining parcels and communities will be less productive and then acquisition and land control easements will be "taken" as cheaply and easily as a hungry northern pike grabbing a cheap Chinese spoon trolled behind an outboard.
Questions about land acquisition legitimacy and when the land acquisition process begins must be asked and answered before the real citizen protector - The Constitution of the United States - can be invoked. Like public criminals (both politicians and bureaucrats) destroying selected portions of The Bill of Rights while on the public payroll, public criminals closing public lands to public use, acquiring lands for public use knowing no use will be allowed, and/or engaging in land acquisition subterfuges like Heritage Areas should be prosecuted for violating The Constitution. Unless and until we regain control of these federal politicians and federal bureaucrats THAT WE PAY TO WORK FOR US UNDER CONSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS we will continue to lose our Rights, our Public Property, and our Private Property. Those that would destroy our rights and freedoms are powerless if they are denied these rogue politicians and self-serving bureaucrats. The Constitution of the United States has and will once again preserve Liberty if only we can reinforce and protect it as we should have been doing all along for the past 100 years.

Jim Beers
25 September 2009

THE SUN IS RISING AGAIN OVER A FREE AMERICA

2009-08-22T10:22:00.001-07:00

By Ron Ewart
President, National Association of Rural Landowners
and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues
© Copyright August 21, 2009 - All Rights Reserved

Only on very rare occasions do the American people rise up, as they are doing now. Today, they are grow increasingly outraged over the unconscionable spending of our money, the nationalization of health care, banks and businesses, unwarranted billion-dollar bailouts, irrational cap and trade legislation that threatens to derail our economy, the fraud that is man-caused global warming, amnesty, education, medical and safety-net benefits for illegal aliens, picking winners and losers, edging towards the one-world-order and the unprecedented take over by the federal government of the public "indoctrination" system and the food, land, water and energy production in the United States. It may be one of the largest power grabs by our government in the entire history of America and it is triggering a massive uprising, as well it should.

It has long been believed that there truly is a "silent majority" in America. These are the good folks who want to live their lives independently, responsibly, in the pursuit of their perception of happiness, but with little to no interference from government. As government interference in their lives has multiplied, they find that they can no longer ignore it.
The current national health care debate, that threatens to take over almost every aspect of every citizen's life if the legislation is passed, has been the catalyst for every-day Americans to express their objections to EVERYTHING that government is doing and they are expressing those objections with force and vehemence. So far, the town hall meeting has been the current venue for this outrage, but it is sure to expand to other, even more public venues in the near future. In fact, a massive rally of tens of thousands of concerned Americans is already scheduled in Washington DC for September 12th, 2009. Boston-style tea parties are springing up throughout the land with regularity. No, these are not unruly mobs being directed by high-up operatives in the Republican party, as has been alleged by the left. These are real people with no political stripes, that are concerned about the loss of their freedom and liberty.
Many politicians have been caught off guard and can't understand why the anger is being manifested so aggressively, and worse, so publicly. To say that they are getting an "earful" by otherwise mostly calm, cool and normally inattentive Americans, barely describes the situation.
But opposition to unpopular actions by government can be infectious and millions of Americans are being infected by a new call to patriotism and a return to the principles of freedom, liberty and our constitution, that is uniquely American. Those that speak out and are heard, mirror what millions of other quiet ones strongly believe. If Obama and the rest of the liberal crowd in Washington DC and elsewhere in America, don't back off and soon, the "movement" has all the earmarks of a national, full-fledged peaceful rebellion. It is our firm desire that it stays peaceful.
However, the egos and inflexible, socialist agendas of our current rulers will not be deterred and they will continue on this path to destruction, until it explodes in their faces. And explode it will. No! We don't mean "explode" literally. The window into the minds of the liberal left have been fully exposed for all Americans to see and they are showing little tolerance for it. This was hardly the "change" they had expected from the "Omnipotent One" and his little Chicago elves.
We can only hope that this is not a short-lived flash in the pan event and that all Americans will wake up to their responsibility as the "Consent of the Governed". For if they do not keep up a constant pressure on the inmates that run this asylum, the inmates will keep coming back time after time, as Americans drift back into apathy and inattention.
If the American people do not rise up in a peaceful rebellion now, eventually, the national and international money changers and power brokers will realize their goal of world domination, where national boundaries are blurred, sovereignty is just a word, multiculturalism is the new paradigm, political correctness is mandatory, socialism and a police state is the accepted form of government, mediocrity will be rampant and freedom and liberty will be a long-lost memory in those who once knew freedom, but no longer have a voice, because they will have long-since, died off.
Many of these issues raised here are described in a new book by this author. If you have enjoyed his articles, essays and reports over the last five years, you will definitely enjoy "The Sun is Rising Again Over a Free America". This isn't manufactured "hope", it is real and we can take heart in it. Check it out at http://www.narlo.org/sun.html.

SWINE FLU VACCINATIONS

2009-08-15T01:28:00.001-07:00

Swine flu vaccinations are a matter of personal pro-choice, not government mandate!
Brought to you by Good Neighbor Law Contributing Educators:
John Maulsby DVM, and Taylor H. Haynes M.D.
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A personal testimony - from Dr. Taylor H. Haynes, M.D.

The experience that I had with the swine flu vaccine was in the late seventies early eighties.
I will not take the swine flu shot as I've seen it cause Guillain-Barre'. This form of peripheral polyneuritis - characterized by pain and weakness and sometimes paralysis of the limbs, and can severely debilitate and bring fatal neurologic disorder. Patients suffer loss of use of muscles and muscle wasting. When this condition effects the muscles that breathe for us, death occurs.
My advice is to maintain the best health with a balanced diet coupled with exercise and rest.If one gets the flu, bed rest and as much clear liquid fluids as is possible - - is still the best plan...and one I personally follow.
I will be happy to visit with anyone regards this matter.
Thank you,
Taylor H. Haynes M.D.
rangebeef@aol.com
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A study recommended by Dr. John Maulsby, DVM

Swine Flu is NOT the Problem -- It is the Vaccine that May Harm or Kill You Urgent information to protect yourself and your loved ones … get informed before the swine flu vaccine craze comes to your town.

A Good Neighbor Law note: Swine flu vaccination should never become a government mandate. This is a pro-choice matter; for whether you decide to get a swine flu vaccination for yourself or your child should remain as personal as any other medical decision.
www.GoodNeighborLaw.com
To educate and empower people regarding their rights and responsibilities toward their land and neighbors, through accurate information sharing
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COMMENTS:
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Thank you Very interesting. I was in Taos camping with a man who years ago got the flu shot and lost feeling in his right side and almost died. My father is an MD and when the flu shot first hit the scene, he wouldn't let us get it!!!!! It is loaded with a host of unknowns and at best, a host of really bad stuff. Does it work? For some yes. Having said that, this swine flu vaccine looks spooky to me. Here we have more government run, moneymaking snake oil. Make no mistake that the pharmaceutical companies and our government are ne'er do well bed-fellows. I would suggest staying healthy, wise and aware. ThanksHugh
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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Rec'd note from my friend Jan in WI... this is what she said regarding the Swine Flu vaccinations...
mom's uncle got Guillain Barre from Swine flu shot - I won't be getting one...... and nobody can make me. :) Jan

PROFESSORS AND CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS

2009-08-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Professor Williams: The Providence Journal kindly forwarded the letter you sent me, regarding my recent article in the ProJo. You obviously feel strongly about global warming and energy issues. I hope you will also feel there is a need for discussion and debate, in your classrooms and public forums – as a basic constitutional right … and the foundation of a free and informed citizenry. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that you (a college chemistry professor with a deep interest in climate issues) aren’t aware of the many climate, meteorology and other experts who disagree with manmade climate crisis claims. Those I know on a first-name basis include Tim Ball, Bob Carter, John Christy, Richard Courtney, Piers Corbyn, Joe D’Aleo, Bill Gray, Craig Idso, Richard Keen, David Legates, Dick Lindzen, Pat Michaels, Harrison Schmitt, Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, George Taylor and Anthony Watts. All are honorable, honest, dedicated professionals, who have devoted many years to studying climate issues and trying to raise public awareness about them. The US Senate has published a report listing over 700 climatologists who challenge manmade global warming fears. Lawrence Solomon’s book, The Deniers, provides in-depth bios and discussions of their views. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has a list of 31,000 people with bachelor, master’s and PhD degrees in natural sciences, who likewise disagree with claims that humans and carbon dioxide are causing a climate disaster. A group of 60 German scientists recently issued an Open Letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel challenging manmade global warming fears. The Leipzig Declaration, a 2008 letter from Canadian scientists and other documents provide further examples. On the other side of the ledger, three of the most prominent advocates of human-caused climate disaster don’t even have science backgrounds. Rajenda Pachauri is an economist and railroad engineer; Yvo de Boer is a social worker; and Al Gore took just two college science courses, getting a C in one and a D in the other, according to the Washington Post. As to peer-reviewed publications contesting climate alarmism, you can find a few on Arctic ice conditions here – and get numerous others by going online to sites like WattsUpWithThat; contacting some of the scientists I just mentioned; reading Solomon’s book and the new NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) report; or just use google to find dozens, or even hundreds of studies. You can find the “sham report” at http://www.blogger.com/ – and sharp critiques of it posted on http://www.blogger.com/ and Roger Pielke’s website. As to my professional status, I studied geology, ecology and environmental law, and have been doing energy and climate policy work for 15 years – as an analyst, writer and educator. I am not and never have been a lobbyist. ExxonMobil did give money to organizations where I’ve worked but doesn’t now, and gave a significant portion of that money for anti-malaria work. Ironically, the $23-million total that Exxon gave to think tanks for energy, environment, climate and disease work between 1989 and 2009 is a mere 1/3,400 of the $79 billion that the US government alone has given to scientists, bureaucrats and activists for global warming work since 1989, the vast majority of it to support research and reports that support manmade crisis claims. If $23 million is enough to “buy” the expertise of skeptics, one shudders to think what $79 billion would do. As you are a college professor, I am truly disappointed that you would engage almost solely in ad hominem attacks on me, and that you seem to be poorly versed in the wide range of studies that have been and continue to be conducted on climate change. As carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise, global average temperatures have been declining, hurricanes are not increasing, evidence for a manmade crisis has been increasingly challenged, and the role of natural forces in recent warming and cooling has become increasingly clear and accepted. I’m sure you know that Al Gore collects a six-figure honorarium every time he speaks, while refusing to debate anyone or even take questions that have not been vetted ahead of time. By contrast, when I speak on college campuses, I accept tiny honorariums and am happy to respond to any questions from any attendee, including Greenpeace activists. This is the essence of free speech and open, robust debate, as our Founding Fathers intended. Al Gore clearly does not support these principles. I hope you do, despite the tone of your letter. I am personally in full accord with a letter recently published in the BYU student paper. Institutions of higher learning, wrote PhD geologist and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt and five other climate scientists, “should promote the seeking of truth. Similarly, science is an objective assessment of hypotheses, by testing concepts against actual data and observations; it is not a matter of votes, popularity or virtual unanimity. We are all harmed, if we allow our universities or our science to be politicized.” I hope you also agree. In closing, I assume you are aware of the debate currently raging within the American Chemical Society over a recent global warming “catastrophe” editorial by Chemical and Engineering News editor Rudy Baum. The reaction of many ACS members mirrors the frustration many of us feel about the way scientific principles, methods and debate have been politicized over global warming. For instance: ACS scientist Dennis Malpass: “Your editorial was a disgrace. It was filled with misinformation, half-truths, and ad hominem attacks on those who dare to disagree with you. Shameful!”Edward H. Gleason: “Baum's attempt to close out debate goes against all my scientific training, and to hear this from my ACS is certainly alarming to me ... His use of 'climate-change deniers,' to pillory scientists who do not believe climate change is a crisis, is disingenuous and unscientific.”Geochemist R. Everett Langford: “I am appalled at the condescending attitude of Rudy Baum, Al Gore, President Barack Obama, et al., who essentially tell us that there is no need for further research – that the matter is solved.”I hope you will reconsider the views you expressed in your letter to the Journal, broaden your selection of readings about climate change, and encourage your students and college colleagues to engage in studious research and robust debate on this and other important scientific and public policy issues. Best regards,Paul Driessen

QUESTIONS TO ASK AT TOWN HALL MEETINGS

2009-08-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Rising voter concern about nationalized healthcare has made recent town hall meetings challenging affairs for many members of Congress.

Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. David Legates, Paul Driessen

This article could help spark serious discussion on an equally vital topic that will come up at many town hall meetings this month: energy and global warming
It suggests a number of important, substantive questions that members of Congress need to address, before proceeding further on energy and climate legislation. It could help inspire and energize people to participate in those sessions -- and exercise their First Amendment rights to be fully involved in an informed democratic process.
Thank you for posting it.
All the best,
Paul Driessen

Questions to ask at town hall meetings
Demand answers from your senators and congressman during their August recess
Americans are justifiably wary about Congress rushing to overhaul our healthcare system – 17% of our economy – with little debate, analysis or bipartisan input. They worry that the legislation could affect their costs, free choice, doctor-patient relationships and access to quality care.
They should be even more concerned about complex, thousand-page legislation that would overhaul 100% of our economy – the energy system that powers and enables everything we eat, heat, cool, grow, make, transport, drive and do – to prevent hypothetical manmade catastrophic climate change.
Energy is the Master Resource that makes life possible. Without abundant, reliable, affordable energy, opportunity, progress, job creation, health and civil rights are hobbled and rolled back.
And yet, global warming bills are being rushed into law at warp speed, not just without debate, but with debate vilified as climate holocaust denial, criminal acts and treason against the planet.
Proponents insist a planetary crisis demands instant action. The truth is that President Obama wants to present a US commitment to draconian reductions in plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide at the December Copenhagen climate conference. He wants to pressure China, India and other nations to sacrifice their economic growth to the specter of alleged climate disasters. Copenhagen is the last chance for eco-activists to implement a UN-centered system of global governance, global taxes, and global control of energy, economies and living standards.
Open, robust, unfettered debate is absolutely essential. It is our inalienable right, the foundation of democracy and a free and prosperous America. A good place to start that debate is the town hall meetings that our elected representatives will be holding during their August recess. Here are a few questions that concerned citizens might want to ask.
1) Congressman John Conyers said he didn’t bother reading the bill, before he voted on it, because he would need two lawyers to explain the passages to him. Did you read and understand it? All of it? Then how can we be expected to do so? Why should we be expected to obey it? Why should we let congressmen who can’t understand their own bills control 100% of our economy?
2) Global temperatures are not increasing. Thousands of scientists say humans and carbon dioxide are not causing a climate disaster. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and heat waves are not increasing. Emissions from China and India will quickly replace any CO2 reductions the United States might achieve by taxing and restricting fossil fuel use, crippling our economy, and hurting seniors and poor families most. Why does Congress refuse to allow real debate? Why does it simply assume and decree that we have a global warming crisis and must enact legislation immediately?
3) House Speaker Pelosi recently said “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory,” so that America can slash energy use and emissions, and prevent dangerous climate change. This can only lead to a massive, intrusive Green Nanny State; the end of affordable, reliable energy; a coerced switch to expensive, unreliable wind and solar power; and skyrocketing energy costs that will hammer families and businesses and cost millions of jobs. Why would you support such legislation?
4) Cap-and-trade is a huge tax on the energy we use for everything we make and do. It’s a massive wealth transfer, from consumers to the government, to pay for unprecedented spending increases and more pork for favored businesses and voting blocs. It violates President Obama’s pledge not to tax anyone with incomes below $250,000. It will cost families $1000 to $4,600 per year in extra energy and living expenses. How can you justify voting for such punitive legislation?
5) The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50. Temperatures would have to increase 85 degrees 24/7/365 for a century or more, to melt South Pole ice caps and raise sea levels 20-50 feet. Can you explain how a 0.02% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (from 285 ppm in 1850 to projected 485 ppm) can overturn basic laws of thermodynamics, replace the powerful natural forces that caused Ice Ages and other climate changes in the past, and produce ice-cap meltdowns?
6) Replacing hydrocarbons with “green” energy will require millions of acres of land for turbines, solar panels, geothermal facilities and transmission lines. Do you support relaxing environmental study, endangered species and other laws, to fast-track approval of these projects, despite their impacts on habitats? Or do you want them subjected to the same rules that have stymied thousands of other energy projects, so that renewable energy projects can’t be built, either – and we have a huge “energy gap”?
Do you support protecting the rights of land owners? Or do you favor eminent domain, so that government can seize people’s property and expedite construction of these projects?
7) Replacing hydrocarbons with “green” power will also require hundreds of millions of tons of steel, copper, concrete, fiberglass and rare earth minerals for turbines, solar panels and transmission lines. Do you support opening our lands for renewed exploration and development, so that we can produce these raw materials and create American jobs? Or do you intend to keep US lands off limits, allow eco-activists to file lawsuits to prevent development, and force us to depend on imports for renewable energy, too?
8) The United States spent $79 billion on global warming programs between 1989 and 2008. The vast majority went to scientists, bureaucrats, alarmist groups and propaganda campaigns that say we face a climate disaster. Do you support a law requiring that future spending be split 50:50 between researchers who think humans are causing a climate disaster, and those who believe climate change is mostly natural and cyclical – so that we can have honest, unbiased science … and sound public policy decisions?
9) Claims that we face a climate disaster are based on selected use of questionable temperature data, short-term temperature trends, and scary computer scenarios that even modelers don’t call predictions – but merely possible futures, if numerous assumptions about climate systems, energy generation, carbon dioxide and global economic growth 25-100 years from now turn out to be true. How can you justify transforming (and risking) America’s energy and economic future, based on computer models?
10) The White House and EPA suppressed a government report that said scientific evidence does not support claims that we face a global warming disaster – until after passage of a House bill that would send US carbon dioxide emissions back to 1868 levels. Why did you ignore this dictatorial and fraudulent action? Will you now demand a new debate and new vote? Demand that this report be reviewed and debated fully, before the Senate acts on similar legislation? Penalize EPA for suppressing free speech?
11) The economic pain, job losses and government intrusion into our lives under the House-passed global warming bill would reduce projected global average temperatures in 2050 by an imperceptible 0.1 degrees. That’s largely because 97% of the projected increase in CO2 emissions between now and 2030 will come from developing countries that are building new coal-fired power plants every week, according to the International Energy Agency. Why would you support legislation that is all pain, and no gain?
12) Over 1.5 billion people in China, India and Africa still do not have electricity, for even a light bulb or tiny refrigerator. Almost 2.5 billion people around the world live on less than $2 a day. Millions die every year from diseases that would be largely eradicated with electricity for refrigeration, sanitation, clinics, and industries that generate greater health and prosperity. How can you justify telling them global warming is the biggest threat they face, and they need to get by on wind and solar power, and give up their dreams of better lives, because you are worried about global warming? Doesn’t that violate their most basic human rights – including their right to improved living standards, and to life itself?
Exercise your constitutional rights. Attend town hall meetings. Ask questions. Demand answers. Demand debate. And safeguard your future, and your children’s future.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power • Black Death.

AFRICA'S REAL CLIMATE CRISIS

2009-07-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

By Fiona Kobusingye

It’s not global warming. It’s a science, priorities, honesty and morality crisis.
Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year, say WHO reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.
And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.
Conferences, news stories, television programs, class lectures and one-sided “dialogues” repeat the claim endlessly. Using oil and petrol, even burning wood and charcoal, will dangerously overheat our planet, melt ice caps, flood coastal cities, and cause storms, droughts, disease and extinctions, we’re told.
Over 700 climate scientists and 31,000 other scientists say humans and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide have minimal effects on Earth’s temperature and climate, and there is no global warming crisis. But their views and studies are never invited or even tolerated in these “climate crisis” forums, especially at “ministerial dialogues” staged with United Nations money. Al Gore refuses to debate any of these experts, or even permit questions that he hasn’t approved ahead of time.
Instead, Africans are told climate change “threatens humanity more than HIV/AIDS.” More than 2.2 million dead Africans every year?
We are warned that it would be “nearly impossible to adapt to the loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet,” which would raise sea levels by “5 to 15 meters.” That certainly would impact our coastal communities. But how likely is it?
The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50 degrees F! Summer in its Western Peninsula barely lasts two months and gets maybe 10 degrees above freezing for just a few hours a day. Not even Mr. Gore or UN computer models talk about raising Antarctic temperatures by 85 degrees F year-round. So how is that ice supposed to melt?
Let’s not forget that sea levels have risen 120 meters since the last Ice Age ended. Do the global warming alarmists think cave men fires caused that? Obviously, powerful natural forces caused those ancient glaciers to come and go – and caused the droughts, floods and climate changes that have affected Africa, the Earth and its animals and people for millions of years.
Just consider northern Africa, where green river valleys, hippopotami and happy villages suddenly got turned into the Sahara Desert 4,000 years ago. Scientists don’t know why, but it probably wasn’t Egyptian pharaohs building pyramids and driving chariots.
However, the real problem isn’t questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It’s that they’re being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn’t build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It’s that the almost total absence of electricity is keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It’s that these policies KILL.
The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything we Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming.
The world needs to go on an energy diet, Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us. Well, I have news for them. Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!
Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished.
Not having electricity means millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.
Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.
Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this?
Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.
Meanwhile, China and India are building new coal-fired power plants every week, so that they can lift their people out of poverty. So even if Africa remains impoverished – and the US and Europe switched to windmills and nuclear power – global carbon dioxide levels would continue increasing for decades.
Even worse, the global warming crusaders don’t stop at telling us we can’t have electricity. They also campaign against biotechnology. As American, Brazilian and South African farmers will tell you, biotech seeds increase crop yields, reduce pesticide use, feed more people and help farmers earn more money. New varieties are being developed that can resist droughts – the kind Africa has always experienced, and the ones some claim will increase due to global warming.
Environmental radicals even oppose insecticides and the powerful spatial insect repellant DDT, which Uganda’s Health Ministry is safely using (along with bed nets and modern ACT drugs) to eliminate killer malaria. They claim global warming will make malaria worse. That’s ridiculous, because the disease was once found all over Europe, the United States and even Siberia.
Uganda and Africa need to stop worrying about what the West, the UN and Al Gore say. We need to focus on our own needs, resources and opportunities.
We don’t need more aid – especially the kind that goes mostly to corrupt officials who put the money in private bank accounts, hold global warming propaganda conferences and keep their own people poor. We don’t need rich countries promising climate change assistance (maybe, sometime, ten years from now), if we promise not to develop.
We need to stop acting like ignorant savages, who thought solar eclipses meant the gods were angry with them, and asked witch doctors to bring the sun back. We need to stop listening to global warming witch doctors, who get rich telling us to keep living “indigenous,” impoverished lives.
We need trade, manufacturing, electricity and transportation fuels to power modern industrial economies. We need to do what China and India are doing – develop – and trade more with them.
That is how we will get the jobs, prosperity, health and environmental quality we deserve.

______________
Fiona Kobusingye is chairman of the human rights and economic development group CORE Uganda. In the coming months, CORE will present both Al Gore’s movie and another film, “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” at colleges and other events. It will do what Al Gore and the UN never permit: let people ask questions, debate the films and decide for themselves who is telling the truth, and what Uganda and Africa should do to make life better for their people.

THE CONSTITUTION AS HOPE

2009-07-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

Unnoticed and unmentioned in all the hoopla recently about the black Harvard professor that had to break into his own home and the white officer trying to do his duty is a remark made by President Obama several days into the affair. The President said that some people think he should not have said anything about this local police matter but "I disagree". These final two words are very troublesome and dangerous for us all.
Our Constitution had (until recent years) done a pretty good job of keeping the central government specifically limited in scope, meaning in authority and in what matters they are to be responsible for administering. All else was to remain "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." per the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution. The attitude of the President (and by acquiescence), his appointees, and the Congress to a President that might both "without knowing all the facts" and merely on his own whim declare a (national as in The Presidential or Monarchical sense) position on such a local matter is very, very troubling. Kings of old used to have people killed or imprisoned (in France the King merely had to issue a "Letter de cachet" and the hapless subject was imprisoned or exiled with no recourse to a court of law). The Founding Fathers specifically forbade (they thought) this with the strict role for the national government and all power vested in "States" or "the people".
There are several obvious reasons why the President's attitude is dangerous. There is the precedent when local matters go to local or State or Federal courts that "The President said" or simply the knowledge by Presidential backers or nation-lovers in juries and elsewhere that "The Leader" believes thus and so. There is the created policy potential that local bureaucrats or local or State politicians will "make an example" of the hapless citizens or in this case all police officers identified as having angered "The Leader" and his minions that do things like pass out money and patronage. What I would like to mention is something that, as an old veteran bureaucrat, I believe few are familiar with in this matter.
When the President says something like this about State or local matters publicly and in his capacity as President he sends a strong signal to his appointees, career-hungry bureaucrats, Congress, State politicians, and even State bureaucrats that "a way to get ahead (promotion, bonus, appointment, prestige, grants, favors, etc.) is to discover', expose, and recommend remedies for such instances that suddenly turn up everywhere." The "Secretary" or "Czar" proclaims racist police activity in (fill-in-the-blank). The power-hungry agency head recommends a budget initiative to wipe out racist police activity in State wardens. The Division Officer and the Regional Director ask for "more" for their initiative to document and eliminate racism in (fill-in-the-blank). The young bureaucrat-to-be reports racism in this that and everything. The State delegates and State appointees and State bureaucrats likewise ask for State funding to please The President whose favor they more and more covet. Cooperators and "partners" from certain "Reverends" and lobby groups are found to be all too ready to enable the whole affair in may ways and often undetected until they collect their share of the booty. "But wait (to quote the late great Billy Mays) there is more". The really bad part is yet to come.
As this whole tawdry thing plays out beyond this "beer" business a precedent both real and psychological is enshrined. If The President has a gripe about trapping, or hunting, or pet ownership, or private property rights, or cutting trees, or dams, or animal husbandry etc., etc., ad infinitum: all he need do is mention it a "Voila" the federal government grows into that area and bureaucrats and States and "the people" all bow down like the Scots were doing in that movie Braveheart when the King or his designee could claim new brides for their own instant gratification. The Constitution never envisioned nor could the Founding Fathers have imagined that we would ever become so fat, dumb, and happy that we would let such things take root among us. How many of you horse owners or fishermen or farmers or dog breeders ignored this matter thinking "it doesn't affect me"?
As long as we elect politicians (Federal and State, Democrat and Republican) that let this sort of thing slide, we will reap our own self-contrived whirlwind. When the dust settles the nation will look like Greensburg, Kansas after the tornado only there won't be a bunch of rich greenie outfits willing to put it back together as a model for others. No, our nation will remain in ruins in the eye of a political storm that has no intention of moving on once it has destroyed our nation to make it subject to their own instant gratifications.
Only if the Constitution can be resurrected and made the Supreme Law of the Land once again is there and Hope for any of us, including those that anticipate coming out "on top". The coming elections and Supreme Court rulings will tell the tale. Either we will rule ourselves except for the necessary State government functions and the few (defense and interstate commerce) needs for a central government or we will once again bow down when "The Leader (will he also swim the Yangtze River?) rides through town or face angering a Supreme Authority that grants or withholds "Rights" as suits his purposes. The choice is ours.

SAVE MY RIGHTS, PLEASE

2009-07-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

For the past four decades (since the late 1960's when race riots and "free" love and drugged-up hippies advocating "peace" and the "environment" emerged under a Democrat White House and Democrat-controlled Congress) American history has been dominated by the destruction of "unalienable" and Constitutional Rights with the simultaneous erosion of State and local government authority and the customs, traditions, culture, and freedoms that have been the hallmarks of American society for over 2 centuries. All of those things that distinguished the United States from all other nations and that were the magnets for immigration levels unmatched in world history are being swept away as we disregard our Constitution, embrace European government models, and become abject before other nations for not having been perfect throughout our existence. Anyone not recognizing this truth and not concerned about the breathtaking acceleration of these changes at this time (summer 2009) need not read further.
The radical late 1960's noted above resulted in many destructive trends. Presidents, Congressmen, and even Supreme Court Justices with but a few exceptions catered, for myriad reasons few of which could be called honorable, to the radicals and their Draconian objectives. A few examples make the point:
- The Supreme Court fabricated a "right to privacy" out of thin air thereby legitimizing "recreational" sex and set in motion the deterioration of marriage and family life at the expense of the lives of unborn children. The results also included a growing acceptance of same-sex political demands, debates about killing children now up to two years of age, tolerance for mercy-killing, and consideration of euthanizing the elderly (see current "Health Care" legislative proposals for mandatory "end-of-life" counseling and claims about how "we" (through "our" government) have a right to deny care to the elderly or to force doctors and nurses to perform abortions and euthanize the elderly or disabled ("since we are paying for it"). The loss of the first and most important "unalienable' right "endowed by their Creator" as mentioned in The Declaration of Independence, i.e. "Life", is indisputable for the millions sacrificed with government authority over the past four decades.
- Large cities like Boston, New York City, Chicago, and the Northern New Jersey megalopolis have dominated their State legislatures and forced passage statewide and locally of gun control legislation that clearly "infringes" on the Constitutional "right to bear Arms" that is clearly stated in the US Constitution. Further the government of the District of Columbia, and federal agencies like The National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service (all composed of bureaucrats ostensibly sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States and paid for by US tax dollars) have instigated and enforced extreme infringements (i.e. total bans) on the Constitutional "right to bear Arms". The Supreme Court, Congress, and several Presidents (again all of whom are sworn to uphold the Constitution while being paid by "We the People"!) have supported this destruction of a Constitutional right of millions.
- Congress passes, and Presidents sign, legislation like The Endangered Species Act, examples of which regarding the elimination of private property rights, State's rights, and individual rights would fill books. Congress passes, and Presidents sign, legislation demanding that everyone be classified by race and gender for "preferences" in hiring, contract awards, bonuses, transfers, housing, and on and on: each "preference" given is a right denied another solely on a basis that should be repugnant to anyone believing that "all men are created equal".
- The current "Health Care", "Stimulus Funding", "Buyouts of GMC and Chrysler", "TARP Funding", etc. changes all involve losses of rights for doctors, patients, car buyers, investors, the elderly, young children, and so many others. The rate of passage of recent elimination of rights is staggering and the fact that it is all rushed through as an "emergency" 1.) without public hearings - or 2.) copies made available for public review - or 3.) with Congressional confessions that they have not even read what they pass - or 4.) without any Supreme Court challenges based on enforcement of the US Constitution (the ONLY purpose of a "Supreme" Court), 5.) at the insistence of a President surrounded by radicals of every stripe from abortion expanders to environmental and race extremists to anti-gun and animal rights fanatics.
I have been writing and speaking about this loss of rights for about ten years. My area of interest and expertise tends to be the environment and animal aspects of American society. I support the management and use of wild plants and animals as public property and the ownership and use of domestic animals as private property. I have a long track record with and I am opposed to the unnecessarily restrictive use and insufficient management of public lands. I am opposed to State governments interference with local jurisdiction over domestic animal owners and to federal legislation that goes beyond legitimate "Interstate Commerce" issues. I am opposed to, and despised by, organizations from PETA and HSUS to The Wilderness Society to The Nature Conservancy (the "nest" from which Treasury Secretary "Hank" "Stimulus" Paulson emerged).
None of this is to say that PETA members ought not to be able to advocate veganism or HSUS to collect money for "shelters" (which by the way they do not do). I object when they campaign to stop all hunting or fishing or to force dog breeders out of business or to give "their" animal wardens all manner of un-Constitutional powers. When they attempt to eliminate the ownership and use of all animals (starting with pets and "smart" animals like whales and seals that are so "cute") they must be opposed. Likewise TNC and Greenpeace et al are certainly free to buy property or to advocate avoiding whale meat or seal products; it is when TNC and federal agencies form hidden and illegal partnerships to but and control land or when Greenpeace prevents sensible whale management or recovery of commercial fish stocks that I oppose them. It is when The Wilderness Society and The Sierra Club influence the closure of public lands and the elimination of the management and use of natural resources and when they stack the federal agencies and Universities with fellow travelers that in turn force out resource managers and reinstate pagan worship of nonsense like "Native Ecosystems" and "Wilderness" and "Roadless" and "Electric Motor Only" Areas that they must be opposed. In all of these instances (and there are many more) the "loss of rights" meaning loss of culture, traditions, property, heritage and other aspects of the lives of American citizens is the thing that is most descriptive of the "problem" for those directly affected.
I was fired 10 years ago after 32 years of federal service for doing my job of protecting the rights of State governments to maintain trapping programs dependent on the sale of furs by American trappers to European fur markets. I have since tried to help all those being harmed by government programs like wolf introductions and protection. I have tried to help those threatened by the condemnation of their property by unholy cabals like TNC and Defense bureaucrats. I have tried to help landowners and resource users threatened by the US Fish and Wildlife Service with the loss of irrigation water or the use of property "designated" as "essential" to some bird flock or fish school. I have tried to help farmers and urban children exposed to goose concentrations and the health hazards they present or rural communities facing imminent destruction because of government radicals in control of government lands. I have tried to help dog owners threatened by Nazi-like animal "welfare" laws and animal wardens. What it almost always boils down to is the question, "how do we get anyone to support us?"
In fact, hunters' organizations seldom support trapping. Easterners and urban folks seldom ever consider ranchers and rural people suffering from wolves. Few people care about government land purchases and control unless they feel threatened themselves. Unless you irrigate or know someone that does, helping irrigators never crosses your mind. If you don't have geese pooping all over the park or schoolyard where your children play or polluting your field such that it will not grow anything in large swaths (from poop) you don't care. If you don't breed dogs, the idea of "no-knock" and even "no-warrant" searches to uncover animal abuse seems justifiable as you gaze at your daughter's golden retriever, Buffy. As States are going broke, the erosion of more State's rights to federal bureaucrats to insure more "Stimulus" or "Bailout" or "Subsidy" money seems like a good bargain (at the moment). So who will support whom? What is "the" answer?
I used to try and suggest people and organizations that would help those asking for help as their rights were threatened but alas few cared. I wrote about the need to help say, gamefowl breeders and cock fighters to remain under the auspices of local jurisdictions (as opposed State or federal authorities) but the hate mail and loss of "readers" was large. No, there is only "one" answer to how to save and restore our rights.
When one right can be eliminated, the precedent for other rights to be eliminated is established and enlarged. Whenever we accept that, sure they need a gun in rural areas but here in the urban area they should be banned, you have opened a door that jeopardizes every other right. Until we each understand that you don't have to own or use guns to grasp the importance of the Right of others to "bear Arms" for instance, that Right remains in jeopardy. Until we each accept the Right of citizens to own and use animals, that Right is in jeopardy. Until we each accept that private property can only be "taken" for a public "use" and that the owner must always be compensated, that Right is in jeopardy. Until we can tolerate that while we may be repelled by uses such as gamefowl owners fighting their birds as generations have done for eons and that we may actively oppose such events and places IN OUR COMMUNITY, if we begin to prohibit such legitimate use of animals by their owners everywhere then not only is that Right in jeopardy; so is hunting, fishing, trapping, and animal husbandry from livestock to poultry. In sum, "your rights are my rights and my rights are your rights".
This means speaking out at family gatherings, at lunches, and with neighbors in a positive way about how you may not agree with such and such but others and other communities should CONTINUE TO HAVE THE FREEDOM TO MAINTAIN IT. This means not electing politicians that are amenable to taking away the rights of American citizens whoever they may be or whatever they may do that bothers others, no matter what they promise you. This means assuring that schoolteachers and University staffs uphold American values ("unalienable" rights, and Constitutional dictates) or replacing them. This means federal and State agencies that employ bureaucrats that uphold rather that destroy Constitutional principles. This means once again looking at all neighbors as friends and forthrightly correcting and opposing those that would take away the rights of others.
Although there is apparently a significant part of the citizenry amenable to taking away the rights of others, they, like those limited groups they individually target are limited themselves. Whether you want or oppose some New Mexico town to allow a bullring isn't the question: the question is should a New Mexico town continue to have the jurisdiction to apply community standards to their own town and its residents? The question isn't whether there should be another "Wilderness Declaration": the question is should the federal government be able to buy and control land that is neither managed, used, nor accessible? The question isn't whether I should be able to carry a concealed weapon as authorized by my State government on a federal Park or Refuge in MY State; the question is whether federal bureaucrats sworn to uphold the Constitution can deny me this right by claiming State sovereignty over State land and waters for a purpose unrelated to any national security or other issue?
If we cannot "hang together"; this Administration, Congress, Supreme Court, and craven State governments are rapidly proving the old maxim about therefore, "hanging separately".

24 July 2009

If you found this worthwhile

CRITICAL MASS

2009-07-22T07:53:00.000-07:00

By Ron Ewart

Never, in all of our 70 plus years, have we seen the country so riled up! Never have we heard so much anger in people's voices and in their written messages, as we see today. Never have we seen so many normal, hard-working, responsible Americans take to the streets in tea parties and other forms of protest, to express their anger at what government has done and is doing. Never have we seen so many different solutions to re-claiming our freedom, with many of those solutions based on the simple application of the foundation of our liberty ..... the constitution. The word "Revolution", is uttered quietly amongst some of the more hot-headed types, whose rising emotional frustration has transcended reason and logic.
Some might say it is a terrible, if not a frightening sight. On the other hand we say it is liberating, encouraging and uplifting. This rising anger we are witnessing, is a free country waking up from a deep, deep sleep and it is a sign that critical mass is approaching and approaching rapidly.
Government, who has increased their power over us exponentially over the last 100 years, is beginning to lose confidence in that power. Their hurried actions and the overt use of "dire emergencies", demonstrate that decreasing confidence. They are beginning to FEAR the people, as well they should. They are lying to the people, even more than usual. Cracks are forming in their demeanor and their attacks on the people are increasing, as one of their defenses against rising opposition to their insane laws and unsustainable economic policies.
Politicians are rushing to get unconstitutional laws passed before the people can digest what is in them, but worse, they are passing this foul legislation without even reading it. In government's headlong rush to greater power and control over our lives, more people are waking up and saying not NO, but HELL NO!
Obama, the catalyst to critical mass, is in trouble. His outright socialist agenda is being pried open like a tin can and examined by increasing numbers of skeptical "eyes". His National Health Care proposal is facing increasing opposition and will probably be given the deep six in the next several weeks. Cap and trade legislation is being exposed for what it is, Cap and Con, as is the fraud that is man-caused global warming. As the skepticism rises, other legislation is coming under additional scrutiny as well. Some of us (this author included) saw right through this flim-flam man from the beginning and predicted this would happen.
But what is even more encouraging is the move by state legislatures to distance themselves from the Feds, by passing resolutions declaring their sovereignty under the 9th and 10th Amendments. Montana has declared its state to be a FED-FREE zone regarding the citizens right to keep and bear arms. Other states, like Tennessee, are following suit. More states will jump on the bandwagon soon.
The infallibility and authority of a county sheriff under constitutional law, is showing a new resurgence. Supreme Court decisions have upheld the sheriff's absolute authority within his jurisdiction, including showing the FEDS the door, if they should trespass on that jurisdiction. Heroes, like Sheriff Mack, challenged the Federal Government on his authority and was vindicated by the U. S. Supreme Court.
Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., in a recent article, made a powerful suggestion that freedom could be reclaimed by a conversion of one state at a time, to constitutional principles. He outlined six (6) basic steps to accomplish his plan. We think it is a brilliant plan and has a huge chance of success. You can view the article and his plan at: http://www.newswithviews.com/Vieira/edwin197.htm.
"Americans For Constitutional Enforcement", another freedom group, has developed a somewhat different plan, also showing promise. You can view their website at: www.a4ce.org.
Walt Myers' group, "To Tame A Tyrant", has also put forth concrete solutions to undo what has been done for the last 100 years. You can view his website at: www.tyranttamer.com.
Our organization, the National Association of Rural Landowners, is working to unite and excite the rural landowners of America, who are being asked to bear almost the entire burden of environmental protection, while their city brethren (mostly liberals and Obama voters) are getting off virtually scot-free. Needless to say, rural landowners are growing more angry by the day, as they learn of the environmentalist's unconstitutional plan for their land.
These are just a few of the groups that are increasing in numbers and offering solutions to the powerful enemy we face ..... rising government tyranny. There are many more, but too numerous to mention here.
Yes folks, critical mass is approaching and soon the Feds will be rapidly back-peddling, as more and more of the 545 people who think they run this country, come face to face with an angry Consent of the Governed who DO run this country, and those 545 people won't like what they see. We will reclaim our freedom, as more and more proud Americans unite as one and we reach necessary critical mass.
The right of the people to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, the irrevocable gift from their creator, shall not be infringed. At critical mass, we will make sure these rights are not infringed. Government should be afraid, very afraid, as the people approach the event horizon to critical mass, where the power of the people will overwhelm the intransigence and arrogance of government tyranny.
"Government only responds to the rising collective voices of millions of Americans who demand that government stay within its constitutional limits. No other power, short of armed revolution, will have any affect on them. If you don't care, neither do they and their power rises accordingly. That is exactly the "State of the Union" today."

FEDERAL TYRANNY

2009-07-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

As we squirm about federalized "health care", financial "bailouts", auto company "buyouts", and "cap and trade" seizure of every aspect of American life; we are assuaged by the media, bureaucrats, politicians, and other federal harlots to "trust" the federal government and its intentions.
This nation was formed (i.e. a Constitution formed a "federal" government) to provide for our common defense and to encourage (not discourage) interstate commerce. It was precisely because every Founding Father knew that an all-powerful government would lead to abuse and eventually tyranny that the Constitution carefully proscribed the duties and limits of the necessary but feared central government. One such example of the increasingly omnipresent FEDERAL TYRANNY in America today has just come to my attention.
I have a Minnesota Concealed Carry Pistol Permit. One of the primary reasons for this is that often I hunt or fish alone and as I age I am more aware of my apparent vulnerability to robbers, drunks, or other nefarious persons when I am alone at a boat landing at 3 AM or in a tent asleep or simply alone in the woods. As a former City, State, and Federal law enforcement officer I am only too aware of how crimes occur and how they can turn deadly very quickly. The potential victims options are limited and as the old saying goes, "I would rather be tried by 12 than carried by six".
Enter the FEDERAL government. Federal agencies and Federal employees are formed to and sworn to "uphold the CONSTITUTION of the United States of America". The Constitution plainly states "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". On what basis can any Federal employees or Federal agencies or Federal appointees or Federal politicians "infringe" on this Constitutional RIGHT?
The Federal government (by Congressional authorization) claimed 260 River miles of the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to Wabasha, Minnesota in 1924 as the newly formed Upper Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge to (ostensibly) "protect" 240,000 acres of floodplain. In fact today, just like all the closed and unmanaged (i.e. "Native ecosystems", "Natural Area", "Roadless Areas", Wilderness", etc.) closures of National Forests, this National Wildlife Refuge is a hodgepodge of closed areas, electric motor areas, etc. public "use" regulations so as to make any use complicated and legally perilous to the casual user. This area is one I would like to hunt ducks on this fall so I am trying to familiarize myself with all the intricacies of its use.
As I prepared to take my canoe to some boat landings I had checked out recently, it occurred to me to check the regulations regarding carrying of my concealed weapon. The regulations only mention authorizing using or possessing a gun when legally hunting in an "open to hunting" area. So what of legally carrying a pistol in Minnesota waters (or are they "really" Federal waters)? I know barge workers and pleasure boat owners that routinely carry pistols on their persons and in their vessels in all four states as a wise matter of personal protection. Why is there any concern here in Minnesota on Minnesota waters by Federal bureaucrats even though the other three states "in the refuge" (WI, IL, and IA) are notorious anti-concealed weapons states? I should have known better: once the National Park Service almost a century ago got away with gun-bans as part of their "save-the-animals-from-the-hunters" charge, other Federal agencies inevitably figured they were vested with such ANTI-CONSTITUTIONAL POWERS as well.
There are four "District Offices" for the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge, one in each of the four States (shades of those defense contractors everyone condemns for putting their plants and employees in every state to make every Federal politician an advocate). First, the Minnesota office had no one in that could answer a question and they didn't know if anyone would be in today. Second, the Wisconsin office had a confusing answering machine and after a couple of calls I was told that there was no one that could answer my question but I could leave a message and someone would get back "later" (than today?). Third, the Iowa office also had no one that could answer a question but likewise I could leave a message for some "later" call-back. So I called the Illinois office and got the first helpful answer from a receptionist that the fellow that could answer such a question would be back in about an hour and she was sure he would call me.
He called later and told me that "No, you cannot carry a pistol on the refuge." Not only is it "illegal" per Federal regulations to carry it, it is illegal to have it in your boat. When I asked if it was prohibited to leave it in the vehicle, he said that shouldn't be a problem since you can't park on the refuge. When I told him I was just at a Federal boat ramp where I would have to park my vehicle, he said , oh yes in that case you would be in violation by having a pistol in your vehicle (this vehicle prohibition for otherwise lawful carry is a common ploy by anti-gun folks to make it increasingly inconvenient and dangerous to exercise your legal 2nd Amendment right). He concluded with "WE don't allow pistols on the refuge" (did he have a frog in his pocket or who was this ominous "WE"?).
When he detected my disgust he informed me that there is legislation proposed to change that and he would be glad to cite it for me. I told him to never mind. Sure, I will write a letter to President Obama or one of his appointees or to Speaker Pelosi or to Senator Reid or to one of my Senators (Franken or Klobuchar) and ask for a Federal Agency to respect the 2nd Amendment. Maybe I should write the State government as they are desperately trying to get every Federal "Stimulus" nickel and ask them to stand up to the Federal government FOR taking away 2nd Amendment rights AND MINNESOTA SOVEREIGNTY ON MINNESOTA LANDS AND WATERS FROM MINNESOTA RESIDENTS? (Writing these autocrats about things they either oppose or shrink from is reminds me of old Esquire cartoon I once saw wherein a long line of bearded slaves chained neck and foot is winding its way past enormous Roman soldiers with spears on a dock with a moored galley with hundreds of oars sticking out each side. One of the shinny little bearded guys looks up and smiles saying, "My what a magnificent ship, I wonder what makes it go?")
Folks this sort of insidious Federal Tyranny has been going on too long. It seeps into our daily lives like WD-40 and it provides precedent after precedent to feed its own growth. The National Wildlife Refuge managers will take this as an attack on them. The US Fish and Wildlife Service will take this as "sour grapes" from an ex-employee. The Department of the Interior will just smile and wonder who is this upstart that questions US? The Presidential crew and Congressional staffs will say this is exactly the sort of person to beware of and put me on some list to teach me a lesson as a warning to others.
The lesson here concerns way more than pistols or refuges or useless bureaucrats. The lesson is the shredding of the Constitution by those sworn to uphold it; the lesson is the craven acquiescence of state government to allow the theft of Constitutional State's Rights for the pottage of Federal dollars; the lesson here is the way in which the constant success of such thefts of liberty has accelerated the fall of this nation from "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" to the land of the handout and the home of the helot. "What does one dead helot matter when 'WE' know what's best?"
"Helot" was the name given to serfs in Sparta. They were "owned" by the state and leased out to landholders (i.e. the rulers). The tyranny of Sparta is being reborn by the FEDERAL TYRANNY in modern America. By the way, where is Sparta today and whatever happened to the helots?

THE RULING CLASS

2009-07-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

By Jim Beers

The United States of America is (are?) now being ruled by a self-serving ruling class. Like ancient European aristocracies, Asian ruling families, African chieftain families, and South American civilization rulers before them; current American rulers (President and Congress et al) are consolidating all existing power in their own hands by the raw exercise of legislation enforced by unrestrained government workers.
This increasingly absolute power of the Federal government is being created from two sources:
First, are the stolen "self evident" "truths" mentioned in The Declaration of Independence regarding "all Men" as "endowed" by "their Creator" and therefore described as "unalienable Rights". These individual "Rights" are increasingly seen as grants of government; for example I refer you to the latest Supreme Court nominee's refusal to recognize that any of us has the "right" to protect our own Life, i.e. the first "Right" mentioned in The Declaration as in "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness".
Second, are the myriad stolen "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States" that "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" as stated in the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Examples of stolen State "powers" range from ultimate authority over lands owned by federal agencies (almost ½ the landmass) and animal use proscriptions to public works standards and so-called educational requirements. Examples of stolen "powers" of the "people" are elimination of parental control of their own children regarding birth control, same-sex encouragement, and abortion to gun control, suppression of free speech, and "equality" for all Americans.
Like ruling classes down through history (Pharaohs, Caesar, Napoleon, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Chavez, etc.), a determined leader surrounds himself (is the masculine case permissible in this historically accurate instance??) with a clique of like-minded individuals that expect to benefit from the creation of an absolute authority over others. This "clique" or ruling class consists not only of the visible second rung of rulers around the Supreme Leader but also of the always much larger mob of often unnoticed bureaucrats and enforcers whose job and position depends on the ruling class and its continued strength.
While more often than not the emergence of absolute ruling authorities wielded by a ruling class is the result of violence; the emerging absolute federal authority in The United States of America is seemingly emerging, thus far, as a result of three things:
First is the growing portion of the population (almost 50 %) that does not pay any income taxes. This has given rise to the mistaken notion by many that some magical phenomenon like voting into office politicians that always promise you "more" can sustain itself. This gives rise to the ancient canard that there is only so much wealth and that only by taking it from others can we prosper. This lie is as "old as the hills" and as false as a "moon made of green cheese".
Second, the explosion of unmarried couples "living together without benefit of matrimony", children born out of wedlock, fatherless families, small families (few brothers and sisters), same-sex lifestyles, single "professionals" (especially women), and "environmental" "religious" pronouncements that there are "too many people" have all combined to create a society of lonely and despairing individuals. If there is "no one to take care of me" the allure of promised government health care, prohibited unhealthy diets, enforced "green" lifestyles, bureaucratically designed "sharing the wealth" programs, etc. combine to offer the "only" hope if illness, old age, or hard times occurs. Somehow the lifestyle of Russians under communism has been marketed as preferable to the USA of the past 220 years.
Third is the cynical manipulation of "science" and "equality" by the ruling class to bamboozle American citizens into ignoring Ben Franklin's truism made in 1755 (more than twenty years before the Revolution) that "Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Consider a few current examples of such manipulations by an electorate behaving as though the lessons of history no longer apply to us:
- Health Care is to be made a federal program wherein bureaucrats will control costs and make it widely available to all. As if the costs will not be astronomical, and specialists will not disappear (no longer profitable), and new drugs and devices will no longer be developed (lack of return on the investment), and workers will no longer work long hours for less pay, and we will not begin seeing doctors like the 3 "British" doctors from Pakistan and Syria that tried to blow up or burn down the Scottish airport, and as if prominent "rulers" from Ted Kennedy to Senator Byrd will "get in line" with the rest of us and abide by some bureaucrat's ruling that they are "too old" for certain treatments or that they should just "take a pain pill" as former "ruler" Tom Daschle recommends.
-Life is being marginalized still further by government financing of foreign abortions, funding abortions throughout the USA, and forcing all doctors and nurses to perform abortions. The lives of the elderly and disabled children will be further endangered by bureaucrats wielding life-and-death authority over treatments based on government "costs" and "quality of life" "regulations". Simultaneously, domestic and wild animals are to be "given rights" and elevated in status compared to humans so that human uses will be eliminated as human life is denigrated and made subservient to human government's "ruling class".
- Abundant energy resources are ignored and the American economy is starved for affordable power as we bemoan "paying for foreign oil" and tout unproven and totally inadequate alternatives as realistic. All the while our dollar drops in relative value and jobs and tax revenues disappear. The inevitable resulting jump in energy costs for everyone is ignored, denied, and accepted by a gullible electorate expecting other free benefits elsewhere.
- Global "cooling" of the 70's and 80's is morphed into global "warming" of the past 15 years and then into "climate change" as inarguable reasons (actually they are extreme contradictions) for signing international treaties and forcing domestic federal control over all human activities based on "Carbon" creation! Has there ever been as absurd a "science" claim and a resulting national acquiescence to forced submission to absolute authority? In a world where dinosaurs roamed in jungles extending to the Poles and recent glaciers scarred the land, dose anyone really believe that Dust Bowls and hot trends and cool trends are the result of recent activities? Does anyone really believe that "Carbon" "causes" warming, cooling or climate change? Has the world climate ever been stable or ought it to be? Does anyone really believe that human adjustment results are either knowable or that they could influence, much less override, the impacts of sunspots and historic worldwide weather factors? Finally, how can anyone propose with a straight face that giving an all-powerful absolute authority more power and money could somehow result in predictable and stable weather that may in and of itself for the first time ever (if such were even possible) result in greatly unforeseen and unknown negative effects? It would all be too funny if it were not such a deadly serious tool of those expecting to benefit from associating with an (in their opinion) inevitable ruling class.
- There is the "tax the rich" cry behind all of these prohibitively expensive proposals while the unavoidable impacts on reduced businesses, reduced investing, and economic decline by making business or wealth a liability (unless you are part of the ruling class) is denied.
- Defense and intelligence programs are diminished publicly as Al Qaeda and similar terror groups grow, as Iran proceeds to join North Korea in using nuclear weapons as a deadly bargaining chip, as Russia renews claims on lost Soviet "Republics", and as Cuba and Venezuela are encouraged by diplomacy that seems to have no real interest in protecting America. This function, to "provide for the common defense" is arguably the premiere reason given in the Preamble of The Constitution of the United States of America why "We the People" did "ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America. If the federal government cannot or will not defend us, what need have we of them?
- Government forms from job applications to contract bids and Census forms require "race" and "sex" classification identifiers as necessary to hire, award contracts, determine receivers of government largesse, and to permit race and sex pandering for votes by ruling class members seeking to maintain lifetime positions and even to pass on their positions and comparable positions to family members and collaborators. How does this square with being "created equal"?
What are we to make of all these contradictions?
- Constitutional wording ignored as in government gun control and creation of invisible words to assert a "right to privacy" as in Roe v. Wade.
- National defense diminished in a dangerous world while silly science like climate change, "native ecosystems", and "endangered species" is used to force submission to a more powerful central government.
- Taxing and debt growth that has everywhere caused economic decline and citizen oppression justified by vilifying those that pay taxes to those that pay no taxes.
What is the answer? The only peaceful hope is to rid ourselves of this permanent ruling class. That means voting them out of office in no uncertain terms. To do this, we must find worthy replacements committed to freedom and not to a career as a lifetime politician.
As I have said before, the only viable role model today is Governor Palin. Whether or not you agree with her politics, it is American citizens like her that are needed to step forward. We need citizens that, like her, admit to working with either party or others that are committed to rectifying what is happening today. We need fearless politicians like her that can turn their back when they feel it is best and not just do what others want them to do. We need men and women, young and old, like Governor Palin that will stand up to the entrenched rulers in both parties and we need them before it is too late.
There is a humorous and historic ring to all these media mavens, Republican "insiders", and Democrat "analysts" decrying her "lack of experience" and her "need for education" on all the "technicalities" of modern government.
Remember two things:
None of the Founding Fathers were "experienced" politicians and their "Declaration of Independence" and "Constitution" exceeded any comparable documents in human history. What they had was common sense, a sound education, and commitment just like Governor Palin.
Just as "patriotism" is often the last refuge of scoundrels, so too is the "need for education" the only way professional bureaucrats and politicians (the ruling class) have of denying "outsiders" any traction to create reforms. Prior to 1867, only one in five adult males in England and Wales could vote. The Representation of the People Act of 1867 enfranchised all male householders that included the urban working class. Commenting on the passage of this revolutionary (for England and Wales at this time) bill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke (a "ruling class" guy if ever there was one) said that regarding the working masses there was now a need to "educate" them sufficiently "if they are to perform worthily their task of governing".
Shades of Governor Sarah Palin!

FEDS DEMAND HOT TOLIET PAPER!

2009-07-21T12:28:00.000-07:00

Feds Now Defining Toilet Paper? Gore's home state breaks 1897 cold record - Congressman faces angry voters on climate vote - Nobel Winner Wishes for 'horrid things' to convince skeptics - July 20., 2009
Go to www.ClimateDepot.com for latest climate entertainment and links.
GOP Rep. Mike Castle (DE) faces angry voters over his support of climate bill: 'I can't understand for the life of me how you could be one of the GOP traitors!' - 'Booed by crowd when he says he believes in man-made global warming'
400 protesters say no to Congressional climate bill in W. VA: 'I love the climate just the way it is'
Have we reached bottom? Congressman proposes legislation calling on fed agency to define toilet paper! - 'Term 'toilet tissue' means toilet tissue, as determined under regulations prescribed by the Secretary'
'Find ways to exaggerate': Nobel Prize-winning economist wishes for 'tornadoes' and 'a lot of horrid things' to convince Americans of global warming threat!
Excerpt: I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening -- you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth -- that would get people very concerned about climate change.
NYT movie critic suggests mankind 'does not deserve to live anyway' if we don't heed global warming warnings!
Summer Cold Breaks 1897 Temp Record in Gore's Home State -- Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga Set Or Tie Record Lows
Excerpt: NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Cool weather that led to record low temperatures will take its time leaving Tennessee. Nashville dropped to 59 degrees early Monday and Knoxville bottomed out at 60 degrees -- both tying records for the date. Nashville's high temperature on Sunday was 77 degrees, a record low for a high temperature on July 19. The previous record was 79 degrees set in 1897. The National Weather Service reported the temperature in Chattanooga dipped to 59 degrees Monday morning, eclipsing the previous record for the date of 60 degrees, set in 1947. Early Sunday morning, the Tri-Cities set a new low for the date, reaching 54 degrees and breaking the old record of 55 degrees, set in 1984.
Farmers reject global warming: 'We like more CO2, because then our crops grow and we have food to eat'
'Media has created too much hype just for nothing'
Video: Climatologist Christy on 'the Morality of Climate Change'
Omaha breaks 1873 cold record during Summer
Co-author Markey of climate bill: 'We must bring soaring temperatures from global warming back to normal'
COLD AND SNOW INVADE SOUTH AMERICA
U.S. Summer Chill: '868 Lowest Max temps and 651 Low temps recorded for week of July 19'
Michigan sweet corn, tomato crop delayed because of cold - 'We are having to close the windows because it's too cold outside. I still haven't run the ac yet this year'
Peoria ties 1892 cold temp record
Connecticut: Unseasonably cold spring leads to smaller crops -- 'big challenge to farmers'
Global Sea Level Updated at UC - still flattening -- 'maybe slight DOWNTREND since 2006'
Claim: Ancient map of 1531 Disproves Global Warming
Parts of Michigan break 1914 cold temp records
'Global Tropical Cyclone energy nearing record low levels of inactivity - lowest in 50-years'
Minnesota: Cold prompts 'sudden influx of mice indoors' -- Sweaters in summer? Jackets in July?
Summer Cold Breaks 1897 Temp Record in Gore's Home State
Minnesota: Cold prompts 'sudden influx of mice indoors' -- Sweaters in summer? Jackets in July?
'Unseasonably cold temps' create 'hungrier than usual' bears in Canada
Quiet Sun: 'Sun has gone back to blank after having had just one sunspot group'
'Hiatus between Solar Cycle 23 and the next cycle is unprecedented in nearly a 100 years'
Another cool summer day for Chicago -- challenges 85 year old cold temp record
Climate Fear Promoter slams Climate Depot! Morano has 'abandoned intellectual integrity' by highlighting record cold temps - 'As soon are you start listing how cold it was in Idaho or India...You lose the only thing that science really has -- honesty' -- 'Rachel Carson didn't win by playing their game'
NYC breaks 'Summer cool' streak: '46 consecutive days without reaching 85° - longest since 1916'
Record cold hits the tropics
U.S. Navy Atmospheric Scientist: 'Dire warnings about 'runaway warming' and climate 'tipping points' cannot be taken seriously' - 'As history has often shown, consensus is the last refuge of poor science'
Minnesota: No lie about July; we're about to take the high out of high -- may break 1939 cold record
Meteorologist says man not cause of climate issue: 'We could very well be headed for a cool period'
Wisconsin set to see coldest July day since 1900
Nebraska Cold Weather: 'Two-thirds of the cedars died over the winter'
N. Dakota farmer on Cold July: 'Gore should be out here and tell us about this global warming stuff'
NASA GISS reports June is 2nd warmest month after only 1998
UK: 'Is it always so cold in July?'
Not so peachy: Ohio cold snap takes bite out of local peach harvest
Kenya: Cold weather in tea growing areas is expected to cut production
Brrrrr. Canadian fed up with July's 'unseasonably cold nights with heavy frost'
'If this is what we can expect of global warming then it might be wise to hang on to our long John's'
'Weather continues to run unseasonably cool...concern over delayed crops and possibility of frost damage on corn'
Rain and cool weather wash away millions of tourism dollars in Northeast
Scientist: 'Cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades'
Moment of Clarity: 'If we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing'
NYC fails to reach 85°F in June - first time since 1916
New Yorkers ask: 'Wherefort art thou, summer?'
Marc Morano Climate Depot

HANSEN OPPOSES CLIMATE BILL!

2009-07-17T09:30:00.001-07:00

Brought to you by Marc Morano - - - www.ClimateDepot.com

'A monstrous absurdity...less than worthless!' - Plus: G8 Leaders embrace 'climate astrology' - Trying to control Earth's thermostat is 'Madness of our age'
NASA Warming Scientist Hansen Blasts Obama's 'Counterfeit' Climate Bill - Calls it 'a monstrous absurdity...less than worthless!' - July 9, 2009
NASA's James Hansen: The Waxman-Markey bill, a monstrous absurdity hatched in Washington after energetic insemination by special interests. For all its "green" aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like "cap-and-trade" scheme. [...] The fact is that the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. Their bill is an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions. It's less than worthless
Read Hansen here:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/1875/NASA-Warming-Scientist-Hansen-Blasts-Obamas-Counterfeit-Climate-Bill--Calls-it-a-monstrous-absurdityless-than-worthless
Morano: G8 Leaders embrace 'climate astrology' - Trying to control Earth's thermostat is 'Madness of our age' - July 10, 2009
Excerpt: A leading skeptic of "manmade global warming" says Group of Eight leaders have embraced a new movement he calls "climate astrology." [.] Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com, says it is ridiculous for the G8 leaders to believe they have the power to turn up or down the earth's thermostat. "This is the height of arrogance," he exclaims. "This is the madness of our age that world leaders, including our own president, can go up there with a straight face and act as though they can control the earth's thermostat -- act as though they control nature." Morano compares the G8 leaders' mindset to a Third World mentality. "In Uganda, they're blaming drought and disease on angry gods," he notes, "and people are saying, 'Oh, if only they knew. They need to be educated [and told that] it's manmade climate change.' "Well, who actually needs to be educated here?," Morano asks. "Is it the Ugandans who blame bad weather on angry gods -- or is it Western leaders who actually think they can control the climate?" Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that science tells him for certain what the earth will be like 100 years from now -- which leads Morano to ask: "At what point should Secretary Chu be on a boardwalk with a full deck of tarot cards dispensing this?"
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=598036

4TH OF JULY REDUX?

2009-07-09T08:21:00.001-07:00

By Jim Beers July 8, 2009

The Declaration of Independence was adopted in the midst of The Revolutionary War by all the Colonies except New York on the 4th of July 1776. The Colonial Congress ordered it signed (by John Hancock, President of the Congress and Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Congress) and distributed immediately to inform one and all why we were in rebellion against English rule. As Thomas Jefferson described The Declaration it was "an expression of the American mind". By January 18, 1777 all 56 signers had placed their signatures on the document. In 1781 the Colonies won a military victory and 2 years later Britain officially recognized our Independence as proclaimed in The Declaration of Independence.
Historians, scholars, and common men worldwide have marveled for centuries now at the concepts affirmed in The Declaration. Religious leaders and preachers throughout the western world have frequently mentioned The Declaration as a model basis for any government that truly aims to be "for, by, and of the people". Now that the fireworks have died down and all the leftover bratwursts have been consumed it is a fair time to ask how the 2009 "American mind" compares to 1776.
The Declaration affirmed in no uncertain terms "We hold these truths to be self evident":
-- "that all men are created equal".
How "equal" are government race and sex categories required on forms and in the Census as the basis for representation, contracts, hiring, promotions, housing, government services, etc.?
-- "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights".
What "Right" does any of us recognize as "unalienable" any more? For that matter, the mention of a "Creator" in any public document or in any public place like a school today is merely a basis for ACLU lawsuits and public disgrace and punishment for the "offender". "Rights" have become whatever the majority wants or whatever elected politicians condone while considering themselves first of all.
-- "that among these are Life".
Abortion is rampant at all stages of pregnancy and we pay for foreign nations to kill their young as well. Simultaneously the federal courts have prosecuted people for 90 years for destroying a Migratory (federally protected) bird EGG since the egg is the protected bird in the eyes of the law, how absurd is that? How can euthanasia and assisted suicide and even killing children up to six months of age (if they may not have a "good quality of life") ever be consistent with an "unalienable Right" to "Life"?
-- "Liberty"
How is "Liberty" recognized and protected by Endangered Species preferences that harm citizens? What about growing prohibitions against hunting, trapping, fishing, timber cutting, grazing, home building, and the freedom to buy certain vehicles or to live on or use private property? How is "Liberty" affected when one group of citizens objects by outlawing other citizens using their own animal property as they (and their families for generations before them) have done for eons?
-- "the pursuit of Happiness".
How is "Happiness" affected by the forced imposition of the "Happiness" ideas of others? From vehicle size to home location to what we eat, we are being forced to live as others would have us do. Recently I visited a large hospital and saw the "No Smoking Anywhere" sign as I entered by a large construction site on the grounds. Now I don't smoke and I can sympathize with smoking bans indoors and by entries on private property however, what basis is there for the hospital do-gooders preventing those construction workers in the open under God's sky from smoking? The answer is of course that we have become so inured to a majority rule overriding "unalienable" "Rights" that such prohibitions are accepted and serve as the basis for food prohibitions and other lifestyle "Happiness" prohibitions in the future. The matter of smoking for those workers is and should have remained simply a matter between them personally and God.
I could go on here but space and my time are limited. Suffice to say that we have strayed far from those shining principles laid out so eloquently in The Declaration of Independence. Currently, the President and the Congress are accelerating this erosion of these principles by advocating without any credible opposition:
- Government owned and run businesses from auto companies to insurance companies and banks.
- Eliminating the freedom of Catholic hospitals and health workers like doctors and nurses to refuse to take the Life of an unborn child.
- Federal spending that will destroy our economy and (if the nation survives) hobble our children and grandchildren with unimaginable debt.
- A gargantuan tax scheme ("Cap & Trade") based on an imaginary threat (climate change) that human ingenuity can always adapt to but that no government can ever "change".
- A socialized medicine program that has everywhere eliminated specialist doctors, timely health services, health care options for the elderly and very young, rural health care, and established governmental authority over who will live and who will die ("since we pay for it we get to determine who gets what").
The reader that has gone this far might rightly ask what is to be done? Isn't the America founded on the Declaration of Independence far preferable to that which we have today?
These are good questions and the answer, short of the solution for which the Signers of the Declaration placed their "lives and fortunes" on the line for, may have been buried in the news this week. Just as "Cap & Trade" and "Socialized Medicine" bills passed the US House of Representatives while the country, media, and TV remained enthralled with Michael Jackson; so too in all the punditry prognostications about how dumb and what a quitter Governor Palin is for resigning the Alaskan Governorship we may be missing the real story.
Of the 56 Signers of The Declaration the majority were well-educated and prosperous. A few were entirely self-taught. One was a sea captain. Almost a quarter were planters and a few were truly farmers. Four were educated as ministers. Some were merchants and shippers. What they all had in abundance was courage and a sense of purpose.
Disregarding what you think of Governor Palin, she has given us a ray of hope. The current arguments about "experience" would have amused The Founding Fathers. Had they accepted that, well I guess they would have gone to the Parliament in London to get some power hungry politicians with lots of "experience" (Jeffords and Specter come to mind) to form and run the new country. Thank God none of them were that stupid.
The current Democrat and Republican Parties and politicians have carried us down the road (particularly over the past four decades) to the mess we are in today. The Party platforms differ in little more than speed and commitment. The lifelong politicians we have today are little better than the entrenched aristocrats in the Parliament that we threw off in 1776. There is about as much likelihood of "reforming" them into agents of the principles laid out in The Declaration of Independence as there is in training a cat to retrieve ducks.
How do you replace them when the Parties will simply replace the losers with other "team" (i.e. "Party") players? The answer is what we all saw Governor Palin do in Alaska. She took on the "Party" and began changing things despite not only the opposition but also despite her own (?) Party. Where do such people come from? The Party Convention? Not Hardly. The children of those that vacate the office like Dingell and Biden? Crooked politicians that get elected no matter what like Marion Barry and Alcee Hastings? No, they come from right where Governor Palin comes from - individual American citizens with "courage and a sense of purpose" like those Signers of The Declaration of Independence. Redux means "brought back, resurgent" and if ever there was a need for this word, this is it! If it cannot be done by such people reforming one (or both) of the "Parties" or by forming a new Party then God help us all.

SPORT FISH & WILDLIFE RESTORATION

2009-07-09T08:19:00.001-07:00

By Jim Beers July 7, 2009

As hunters and trappers and fishermen see a White House and federal agencies stuffed with anti-hunting, anti-gun rights, environmental extremists and as an unfettered US House and Senate are churning out all manner of extremist and costly legislation; questions are being raised about minor things that we ignored for years but which are beginning to appear as razors that have been quietly slashing our hunting, trapping, and fishing heritage, traditions, and rights. I speak here of the federal programs originally known as the Pittman Robertson (1936) and Dingell-Johnson (1950) Acts.
These two Acts provided that the federal government collect excise taxes on certain items and that each year these funds be apportioned to all State fish and wildlife agencies for "Wildlife Restoration" and "Sport Fish Restoration" projects. Funds for "Wildlife Restoration" are derived from an 11 percent excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition; a 10 percent tax on pistols and revolvers, one-half of which may be used by the States for hunter safety programs; and an11-percent excise tax on bows, arrows, and their parts and accessories. Funds for "Sport Fish Restoration" are derived from a 10-percent excise tax on certain items of sport fishing tackle (Internal Revenue Code of 1954, sec. 4161), a 3-percent excise tax on fish finders and electric trolling motors, import duties on fishing tackle, yachts and pleasure craft, interest on the account, and a portion of motorboat fuel tax revenues and small engine fuel taxes. The current annual collections vary from $500 Million to over a Billion considering the ongoing stampede for arms and ammunition in anticipation of federal government attempts to subvert the 2nd Amendment to The Constitution of the United States of America.
These Acts have been manipulated and amended by politicians to name Amendments after themselves (Wallop-Breaux); to gain votes from certain blocs like boat owners and archers; and to give favors to ethnic voting groups like Puerto Ricans and Samoans. Importation of arms and fishing tackle has made up increasing amounts of these taxed items while federal bureaucrats have increasingly ignored the collection of these import taxes and as importers have exploited the indifference of federal bureaucrats by smuggling (the correct term) such items to competitive retail outlet stores. While there are strict rules for use of the funds by state agencies, required 5-year audits and "oversight" by federal bureaucrats are intermittent, poorly administered, and ideologically driven by federal and now state bureaucrats enacting agendas aimed ultimately at destroying hunting, fishing, and trapping. State fish and wildlife Directors want to be free to please the Governors that appoint them like offering (illegally) to allow a prison to be built on wildlife areas or to put wildlife vehicles in state motor pools for use by others. So, just like federal thieves, state thieves exist and benefit personally from foregone or slipshod oversight and audits.
All that said, let us focus on the terms "Wildlife" and "Sport Fish" and "Restoration".
- "Wildlife" in the original Act and in the eyes of American citizens meant deer, turkeys, ducks, pheasants, etc. (i.e. "GAME" animals whether or not they were present during the Ice Age, were eaten by Sitting Bull, or were brought over from China or Europe on a sailing ship). The "sporting" uses were what generated the funds and thus did everyone understand that game animals were to be the primary beneficiaries of the funding. The other animals that shared habitats with and benefited from the MANAGEMENT AND EXISTENCE of the habitats for those game animals were significant but secondary beneficiaries of much of the projects generated by the collected taxes. Harmful animals were to be controlled thus benefiting rural America while other "users" like campers, hikers, school groups, canoeists, and birdwatchers, etc. were always free to use the purchased wildlife areas and facilities like boat ramps.
- "Sport Fish" in the original Act was necessary because "Commercial Fish" and "Marine Fish" were jealously guarded (meaning they generated employees and funding) functions of the Commerce Department as opposed the Interior Department where the US Fish and Wildlife Service was ensconced. Consider for the moment how the Endangered Species Act divided the whales and seals and porpoises from other "endangered" animals between the Commerce and Interior Departments. (National Marine Fisheries Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service always "cooperated" for environmental benefit like the CIA and FBI always shared info with other agencies for the common good.)
- Finally, the term "Restoration" always (up until the radical 60's and 70's) meant the active "MANAGEMENT" of these desired (i.e. GAME and SPORT FISH) species to levels, distribution, abundance, and harvest levels known to previous generations CONSISTENT WITH THE EXPANDING AMERICAN SOCIETY, AMERICAN RIGHTS, AND AMERICAN TRADITIONS.
For the sake of brevity, let me observe that the White House, Congress, federal agencies, and state agencies have for the past 4 decades hired, promoted, and encouraged anti-management (of all natural resources), anti -use (of fish, wildlife, timber, forage, and other resources both renewable and non-renewable) acolytes of extremist environmental urban agendas. From destroying property rights to imposing deadly and destructive animals on an increasingly disarmed rural citizenry, politicians and bureaucrats have catered to urban voters unaffected by their work and international agendas to increase federal employment and power at the expense of State Constitutional authorities, local government controls, and individual rights.
These politicians and bureaucrats now interpret and write laws and regulations using our three terms thus:
- "Wildlife" means all "Mother Nature's (?)" creatures from snakes to lizards and rats. In fact, since the "Game" animals have gotten so much over the years we need to treat the other species like women and minorities under the "Equal" opportunity or employment Acts (i.e. award lots of "preferences" no matter the results).
- "Sport Fish" should be interpreted very broadly to include the other fish being eaten by or associated with the "sport fish" and funding of research should focus on getting money to environmental activist professors to establish all manner of "ecological" dependence and connections within the "aquatic community" to justify the broadest possible use of "Sport" fish project money from destroying dams to re-establishing "population segments" recently invented at nearby University Environmental Global Research Centers.
- "Restoration" means just that; "restoration" but not restoration of abundant game animals: no, "restoration" means restoration of the imaginary and vaunted "Native Ecosystem". Therefore, funds do not necessarily go to the encouragement of desired and useful species as well as the suppression of harmful animal populations; instead they may be used for "Invasive" (not necessarily harmful to civilization or the desired animals - just someone's idea of what not ought to be) "Species", "Introduced Species", "Native Species" (often very harmful to game species), etc., etc. The funds can go to whatever destroys hunting like "Prairie Restoration" in Iowa just South of my home that decimates pheasant and Hungarian partridge populations or cougar protection that decreases hunting species, rural safety, animal husbandry, pet ownership, etc., etc.
While they mumble about the esoteric pristine goals of their agendas, these environmental and animal rights extremists are ultimately working to impose an American society where guns, hunting, fishing, trapping and a whole host of other things from pet ownership to animal husbandry are forbidden by government fiat. It has been going on for four decades now and I have been writing about it for 10 years, ever since the Government Accounting Office found that the US Fish and Wildlife Service had STOLEN $45 to 60 Million FROM THE FUNDS COLLECTED FOR STATE WILDLIFE AND FISH PROGRAMS in a two year period to do two things rejected by Congress (introducing wolves into Yellowstone and opening a California Office to collaborate with West Coast radicals) and to pay top managers handsome bonuses for political pandering. The real kicker was that when the state agencies were notified, THEY NEVER ASKED FOR THE MONEY TO BE REPLACED! In other words the anti's stole millions from OUR fish and wildlife programs to use to destroy OUR hunting, fishing, and trapping and OUR (?) state agencies were more beholden to those thieves than to you and me (and things have only gotten worse since then).
It is my opinion that this decay of our traditions for four decades now parallels other cultural declines like the loss of parental rights to teachers and bureaucrats in such areas as same-sex indoctrination, birth control availability and abortion services; the loss of property rights resulting in un-Constitutional "Kelo"-takings unlawful impositions on property owners by governments; the loss of State's Rights to federal mandates accompanying funding like transportation and education funds; the emergence of government-owned businesses; socialized medicine ostensibly for the poor that will eliminate specialists, force abortion provisions everywhere thus closing Catholic hospitals and eliminating Catholic health care providers, lethal rationing of health care to the very young and the elderly and on and on. We have let lies and power-hungry individuals enrich themselves by eliminating the very things that have made this country great. No longer can a local community prohibit or allow cockfighting pits in accord with their own local community standards: state and federal laws prohibit it. No longer can State governments ration or manage natural resources or regulate gun possession on the gargantuan federal estates within the State: federal law supercedes them. Duplicitously, the federal government declares their own helplessness in oppressing American citizens and their rights by citing voluntarily-signed International and UN "Treaties" and "Conventions" that only we treat as inviolate.
As the American "barn" of freedom and liberty is burning all around us, many of us are beginning to take notice of how our "concern" for things that should never have become government matters and our indifference because we have been "busy" have led us to this point. Is it too late? What can we do? God help us because I do not know what to say. The three terms discussed here are but a symptom of a larger cancer we have ignored too long.
The theft of our liberties by those who would replace our Constitution with raw power wielded by themselves is like the attempted bank robbery by the James-Younger Gang in Northfield Minnesota in September of 1876. In spite of the fact that there were eight experienced armed robbers and most townsmen were out hunting prairie chickens - a few ill-armed townsmen men killed and wounded several of the robbers and with neighboring posses hunted down all but two that got away. The money was saved and although a brave clerk was murdered the town survived and thrives today. Most importantly, NO NORTHFIELD BANK HAS BEEN ROBBED SINCE THAT ILL-FATED "RAID"!
Americans of every stripe are beginning to see that their rights and heritage are being stolen and the results are even more catastrophic than the loss of everyone's money in an 1876 Minnesota town. For too long we have been hiding under our beds while these robbers have been helping themselves to our rights, liberties, traditions, and heritage. Just as those Minnesota townsmen were deadly serious about their money and families and town, so too must we become about our rights and Constitutional government.

US GOVERNMENT'S CLIMATE CON-JOB

2009-06-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

By Paul Driessen
Suppose a company doctored data, misrepresented study findings, replaced observations with computer simulations, and hired PR flacks to promote its new "wonder drug." News stories, congressional hearings and subpoenas would be in overdrive. Fines and jail sentences would follow. And rightly so.
But where "climate catastrophe" and government "science" are involved, the standards change. Junk science, falsified data, worthless computer disaster scenarios and phony news stories are rewarded - not punished.
Americans are being made victims of the biggest con-job and propaganda campaign in US history. It's vital that they become aware of the facts, so that they can take action.
Looming passage of this job-killing climate legislation mkes this is a vital and timely article. Thank you for posting it.
Paul

US government's climate con-job

Obama administration "report" on climate change is deceitful, scare-mongering, bogus science
Suppose a company doctored data, misrepresented study findings, replaced observations with computer simulations, and hired PR flacks to promote its new "wonder drug." News stories, congressional hearings and subpoenas would be in overdrive. Fines and jail sentences would follow. And rightly so.
But the standards change when "climate catastrophe" is involved.
The White House has made global warming the centerpiece of its revenue-raising and energy policies. A House of Representatives 942-page bill would tax, regulate and penalize all US hydrocarbon energy use, to "save the planet from climate disaster." The Senate promises an August vote.
But average global temperatures peaked in 1998 and since have fallen slightly, even as carbon dioxide levels continue to climb. Thousands of scientists say CO2 has little effect on planetary temperatures, and there is no climate crisis. Few developed countries are ready to commit economic suicide, by agreeing to reduce their CO2 emissions by a fraction of what the House bill demands for the United States.
Americans are beginning to realize the legislation would cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars for a hypothetical 0.1 degree F reduction in global temperatures. Most put global warming dead last in a Pew Research list of 20 concerns.
The government's answer to these inconvenient truths is simple.
Issue another report by government scientists carefully selected to exclude any who don't subscribe to climate Armageddon. Ignore contrary data and analyses. Crank out more bogus computer-generated worst-case scenarios. Hire an activist media firm that specializes in environmental scare campaigns. And spend tens of millions hyping every imaginable climate disaster:
Rising sea levels, floods in lower Manhattan, California beaches permanently submerged. Ferocious hurricanes, floods and droughts. Food shortages, epidemic diseases, a quadrupling of heat-wave deaths in Chicago. Aged sewer systems convulsing from massive storm runoff. Wildflowers disappearing from Rocky Mountain slopes and polar bears from the Arctic. Leisure time gone, as people struggle to survive.
"Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" is the "most up-to-date, authoritative, comprehensive" analysis ever done on how human-caused warming affects the United States, deadpans Obama "science" advisor John Holdren.
Actually, it's the most flagrant attempted con-job and propaganda campaign in US history.
If it helps Congress enact cap-and-tax legislation, it will give activists, courts and bureaucrats control over virtually every aspect of our lives. It will enable them to confiscate hard-earned dollars, convert them to payoffs for activists and companies that get on the climate-crisis bandwagon, consign uncooperative companies and scientists to the ash heap of history, and conceal the exorbitant costs of restrictive energy policies - on families, industries, jobs and transportation - until long after the bill becomes law.
The bogus "report" conflates and confuses human activities and emissions with the powerful natural forces that have caused major and minor climate changes and weather anomalies since the dawn of time - from the Carboniferous Period to the Age of Dinosaurs, from the Big Ice Ages and interglacial periods to the Little Ice Age, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, Dust Bowl and countless others. It relies on conjecture, conformist thinking and conspicuous elimination of contrary, skeptical, realist scientists and studies that do not support climate cataclysm conjecture and ideology.
The authors "largely ignored" critical comments to earlier drafts and made the final version "even more alarmist" than infamous UN "summaries" of global warming "crises," says Joseph D'Aleo, first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee. The report is simply "wrong on many of its claims" and marks "an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA," D'Aleo concludes.
University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. says the report "misrepresents" his own work, makes claims that are not supported by citations provided, relies heavily on analyses that were never peer reviewed, ignores peer-reviewed studies that reach opposite conclusions from those proclaimed by the report, and cites analyses that do not support conclusions rendered.
"I didn't notice a single recognized hurricane expert in the list of authors," says NOAA Hurricane Research Division scientist Stanley Goldenberg. The report relies heavily on surface temperature data from monitoring stations located next to parking lots and air conditioning exhaust ports - falsely skewing temperature records upward - other experts noted. It is lead-heavy on assumptions, assertions and speculation - hydrogen-light on evidence.
But the most egregious miscarriage of science in this agit-prop exercise is its near-total dependence on worst-case scenarios conjured up by computer models. That's where it gets its litany of "Day After Tomorrow" Hollywood disasters.
These climate models have never been validated by actual observations, notes Professor Robert Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at Australia's James Cook University. Indeed, Australia's own climate modeling agency (CSIRO) stresses that climate change scenarios are based on computer models that "involve simplifications of [real world] processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted . for the accuracy of forecasts inferred" from its reports.
"Modeling results are interesting - but worthless for setting public policy," says Carter. But that is exactly how they're being used.
Sure, it's conceivable that Antarctica could melt, and cause sea levels to rise 20 feet, as Al Gore and the government con-artists suggest. Greenhouse gases would merely have to increase average annual Antarctic temperatures from their current -50 degrees F to +40 degrees for a century or two, to melt 200,000 cubic miles of South Pole icecaps. A mere 90-degree swing.
That may be as likely as having the planet overrun by raptors and T-rexes cloned from DNA in fossilized mosquitoes. But it's conceivable. And in the realm of global warming politics, that's all that matters. As MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen observes, "global warming has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own, quite removed from science."
As one climate activist group put it: "The task . is not to persuade by rational argument." It is "to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. The 'facts' need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken." The strategy is to treat "climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is the route to mass behavior change."
This is the kind of science, transparency, honesty and accountability we have come to expect over "human-caused climate chaos."
If the congressional, administration and activist conspirators behind this massive deceit were in the private sector - peddling bogus drugs, rather than bogus science - they'd quickly become convicts. Instead of jail time, though, they'll probably get bonus checks. _____________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.

CO2 - MONTHLY REPORT and more!

2009-06-12T15:23:00.000-07:00

Here are a number of recent papers from Science and Public Policy - that you may want to read. This will help legislators and voters understand some key issues.

Please look at them:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/futility_and_danger_of_co2_mitigation.html

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/_global_warming_painting_your_roof_white_and_the_chattanooga_chu-chu.html

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/global_warming_brings_more_and_less_tornadoes.html

Most particularly is our Monthly CO2 Report, which is full of up to date information and science:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/monthly_co2_report_may.html

Regards,

Bob

Robert Ferguson, President
Science and Public Policy

AMERICA'S OLDER VERSION OF THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE!

2009-06-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

By Ron Ewart
President/ National Association of Rural Landowners
© Copyright June 7, 2009 - All Rights Reserved

Radical national and international environmentalists, the United Nations, the European Union and the U. S. Congress have all adopted the policy commonly known as the "Precautionary Principle", which goes like this: "..... if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action."
The principle implies that there is a responsibility for the government to intervene and protect the public, or the environment, from exposure to harm where scientific investigation discovers a "plausible" risk (that could be anything folks) in the course of having screened for other suspected causes. (If they screen at all) The protections that mitigate suspected risks can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that more robustly support an alternative explanation (but new scientific findings are never found). In some legal systems, as in the law of the European Union, the precautionary principle is also a general and compulsory principle of law. (Clever these Europeans. We saved their butts, twice, and they are still trying to convert us to their distorted, socialist ideology.)
Nevertheless, we can virtually guarantee you that even if new scientific evidence emerged to make a law, limits or prohibitions unnecessary, there would be no desire on the part of politicians to undo the law. One only need look at the increasing science against man caused global warming. In spite of the mounting evidence against it, the United States Government is still moving ahead to enact CO2 emission limits and cap and trade legislation.
Here is another principle in politics: "Once a law, always a law." Laws don't get repealed unless the "people" force the politicians to do it.
But this so-called precautionary principle, isn't a principle at all. It is an irrational policy by government to do whatever it damn well pleases, under the guise of taking or preventing some action, usually in the form of a new law to control the people, even if there is no compelling evidence that such action, or preventing such action, is necessary. They just arbitrarily do it. CO2 emission limits and cap and trade legislation to slow down or stop the fraud that is man-caused global warming, are two of the more glaring examples of this "principle". Much of environmental protection passed by the U. S. Congress under the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Restoration act, the Marine Mammals protection Act and the Salmon Recovery Act etc., fall into this irrational category. International environmental treaties have been ratified by our Congress using this insane rationale. So essentially, the United States has done what the European Union has done and has incorporated the "Precautionary Principle" into American law. The American people had absolutely no say in the matter.
However, the Founding Fathers had a different version of the Precautionary Principle and it was embedded in the Declaration of Independence in the second paragraph: "..... that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness ....... and ..... then the Framers codified their all-encompassing precautionary principle into the Second Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, wherein it states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The Founding Fathers not only believed that government would increase its powers over time, but had 2,000 years of history to prove that it has happened in virtually every culture. Thus, their precautionary principle against government increasing its power to the point of tyranny, was to make sure that Americans would be armed in such event. So why then would government, whose sworn duty is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, be in such a hurry to relieve you of that right and take your guns away, or make gun ownership impotent by taking your ammunition away, or making it too expensive? They are doing it for the simple reason to strip you of your power, contained in the Founding Father's precautionary principle, so as to increase their power and have nothing to fear from you.
If we allow government to repeal the second Amendment by whatever means, the American People's Precautionary Principle, our only recourse against rising tyranny may be what the colonials had to do against the dictatorial rule of King George the III. It is our firm hope that it never comes to that, but like all alternatives, the least desired alternative must be considered as a final course of action, if all other alternatives fail.
If you would like to learn more about the "Precautionary Principle", we encourage you to read a 1999 article in the Reason Magazine entitled "Precautionary Tale". You'll get an idea on how the environmental movement has been and is using this so-called principle to effect law and legislation in every country on the planet. The following paragraph is an excerpt from the article:
"At this year's (1999) annual meeting of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science in Anaheim, California, in a symposium titled "The Precautionary Principle: A Revolution in Environmental Policymaking?", environmental advocates and academics insisted that a principle of ultimate precaution should trump all other considerations in future environmental and technological policy making. They pointed out that the Principle has already been incorporated into several international treaties, including the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which require developed nations to cut back dramatically on the burning of fossil fuels to reduce the putative threat of global warming. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is already using it to help guide its promulgation of new regulations on synthetic chemicals."
Access Reason Magazine article at: http://www.reason.com/news/show/30977.html.
All most all governments, including the U. S. Government, have bought into this environmentalist scam, hook, line and sinker. That is why it is still absolutely necessary, if freedom is to prevail, that we perpetually maintain and protect America's older version of the Precautionary Principle, the Second Amendment as a precaution against, well you know ...........
Ron Ewart

WHEN DO WE START JAILING AND EXECUTING GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS?

2009-06-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

Please note: In my past 3 years as volunteer editor of Good Neighbor Law, I've witnessed far too many horrific injustices forced on our decent, law-abiding American citizens.
The following takes the prize!
Actions brought on by non-government groups like Moveon.org, Nature Conservancy and media, with possible enforcement by government employees (includes elected officials)partners, have reached critical mass. They are worse than the vigilante actions of the Freemans...and have a following bigger than Jim Jones!
Please...take to heart the seriousness of the following alert by Marc Morano.
Then call your elected officials immediately and DEMAND they "Stop attacking decent, law-abiding Americans!!"
DEMAND they force Al Gore to publically debate any one of the thousand scientists who've proven man does not make the climate change. Demand this!
DEMAND: "DO NOT TAKE ONE STEP TOWARDS INITIATION OF ANY LAW THAT'S CONNECTED WITH ANY PART OF THE GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHANGE SCAM!"
DEMAND: Immediate investigation of global warming/climate change grifters, for when exposed, their actions will prove out more daunting than Bernie Madoff's.
Thank you,
Roni Bell Sylvester
Vounteer Editor www.GoodNeighborLaw.com
__________________________________________________________________________________

Shock Call To Action: 'At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers' -- 'Shouldn't we start punishing them now?'
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 - By Marc Morano - Climate Depot
[ Update: 8:44 AM ET: Talking Points Memo (TPM) has removed the article from their website. "The file you are looking for has not been found" - But the url with a portion of the chilling message lingers as evidence: "at-what-point-do-we-jail-or-ex..." - http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/crazedandconfused/2009/06/at-what-point-do-we-jail-or-ex.php?ref=reccafe - Climate Depot has also saved a screen shot of the original article.]
A public appeal has been issued by an influential U.S. website asking: "At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers." The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S. The anonymous posting, dated June 2, 2009, referred to dissenters of man-made global warming fears as "greedy bastards" who use "bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool" to "distort data."
The Talking Points Memo article continues: "So when the right wing f*cktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn't we start punishing them now?"
The article also claims the "vast majority" of scientists agree that man-made warming "can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth."
The full text of the Talking Points Memo is reproduced below:
(Note: The entry is posted under the anonymous byline "The Insolent Braggart") At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?

June 2, 2009, 9:42PM

What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don't want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it's a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.
So when the right wing f*cktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn't we start punishing them now?

Climate Depot Editor's Note:
The Talking Points Memo appeal to execute skeptics is not unique. As the science behind man-made global warming fears utterly collapses, many of the biggest promoters of the theory and environmental activists are growing increasingly desperate.
NASA's James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for "high crimes against humanity." Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics of 2007 declaring "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors" In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies "criminal enterprises" and declared CEO's 'should be in jail... for all of eternity."
In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics. In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown "into jail." In 2007, The Weather Channel's climate expert called for withholding certification of skeptical meteorologists.
A 2008 report found that 'climate blasphemy' is replacing traditional religious blasphemy. In addition, a July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation
In 2007, then EPA Chief Vowed to Probe E-mail Threatening to 'Destroy' Career of Climate Skeptic and dissenters of warming fears have been called 'Climate Criminals' who are committing 'Terracide' (killing of Planet Earth) (July 25, 2007) In addition, in May 2009, Climate Depot Was Banned in Louisiana! See: State official sought to 'shut down' climate skeptic's testimony at hearing
Below are many more examples of the threats, name calling and intimidation skeptics have faced in recent times.
November 12, 2007: UN official warns ignoring warming would be 'criminally irresponsible' Excerpt: The U.N.'s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be "criminally irresponsible." Yvo de Boer's comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating.
September 29. 2007: VA State Climatologist skeptical of global warming loses job after clash with Governor: 'I was told that I could not speak in public' Excerpt: Michaels has argued that the climate is becoming warmer but that the consequences will not be as dire as others have predicted. Gov. Kaine had warned. Michaels not to use his official title in discussing his views. "I resigned as Virginia state climatologist because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist," Michaels said in a statement this week provided by the libertarian Cato Institute, where he has been a fellow since 1992. "It was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction." (LINK)
Skeptical State Climatologist in Oregon has title threatened by Governor (February 8, 2007) Excerpt: "[State Climatologist George Taylor] does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change...So the [Oregon] governor wants to take that title from Taylor and make it a position that he would appoint. In an exclusive interview with KGW-TV, Governor Ted Kulongoski confirmed he wants to take that title from Taylor.
Skeptical State Climatologist in Delaware silenced by Governor (May 2, 2007) Excerpt: Legates is a state climatologist in Delaware, and he teaches at the university. He`s not part of the mythical climate consensus. In fact, Legates believes that we oversimplify climate by just blaming greenhouse gases. One day he received a letter from the governor, saying his views do not concur with those of the administration, so if he wants to speak out, it must be as an individual, not as a state climatologist. So essentially, you can have the title of state climatologist unless he`s talking about his views on climate?
October 28, 2008: License to dissent: 'Internet should be nationalized as a public utility' to combat global warming skepticism - Australian Herald Sun - Excerpt: British journalism lecturer and warming alarmist Alex Lockwood says my blog is a menace to the planet. Skeptical bloggers like me need bringing into line, and Lockwood tells a journalism seminar of some options: There is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate skepticism online is free to contest scientific fact. But there is enough here already to put forward some of the ideas in circulation. One of the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf, and lead for Google's Internet for Everyone project, made a recent suggestion that the Internet should be nationalized as a public utility. As tech policy blogger Jim Harper argues, "giving power over the Internet to well-heeled interests and self-interested politicians" is, and I quote, "a bad idea." Or in the UK every new online publication could be required to register with the recently announced Internet watchdog...
November 5, 2008: UK Scientist: 'BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE' - UK Daily Express
Excerpt: FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists. His crime? Bellamy says he doesn't believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why - and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.
U.N. official says it's 'completely immoral' to doubt global warming fears (May 10, 2007)
Excerpt: UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared "it's completely immoral, even, to question" the UN's scientific "consensus."
Former US Vice President Al Gore compared global warming skeptics to people who 'believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona' (June 20, 2006)
Gore Refuses to Hear Skeptical Global Warming Views (Video)
UK environment secretary David Miliband said 'those who deny [climate change] are the flat-Earthers of the twenty-first century' (October 6, 2006)
Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics (January 17, 2007) Excerpt: The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.
Related Links:
Democrats Refuse to Allow Skeptic to Testify Alongside Gore At Congressional Hearing - April 23, 2009
S. African UN Scientist: 'The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart -- Heads will roll!' - April 2009
Climate Depot Editorial: We would all be doomed if we actually faced climate 'crisis' - Cap-and-trade equals all economic pain for no climate gain
Warming theory 'dying the death of a thousand cuts' - Ocean Conveyor Belt Model Broken: 'Models are significantly wrong' - May 2009
Climate Fears RIP...for 30 years!? - Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades' study finds - Discovery.com - March 2, 2009
Japanese Scientist compares global warming to 'astrology'
U.S. Senate Report: 700 Plus Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Warming Claims
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/1096/Shock-Call-To-Action-At-what-point-do-we-jail-or-execute-global-warming-deniers--Shouldnt-we-start-punishing-them-now
Marc Morano

NAIS LISTENING SESSION, JUNE 1ST COLORADO

2009-06-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

USDA - NAIS "listening session" - June 1, 2009 Loveland, CO
Good Neighbor Law filed request with APHIS for comments from all "listening sessions."
When received, comments will be posted on www.GoodNeighborLaw.com
If you testified June 1st in Loveland, your comments are welcome here!
________________________________________________________________
A REPORT BY SHARON CROGHAN

Greetings all,

I attended the USDA listening stop at The Ranch yesterday.
There were ~175 people in attendance.
Everyone who signed up to speak was allowed to do so. We were asked to keep our comments to 3 minutes, but the timer wasn't being very strict. I was ¾ of the way through my comments, when I looked at the timer and it wasn't even turned on - the gentleman running the timer, turned the green light on for me and signaled I could keep going.
Here is how the numbers went, by my count. We were called up in groups of 5 and I counted at the end of each group to be sure I had hash marks under each category equally 5. One group had 4 and the last group was 3, one being a very young fellow of maybe 9 or 10. This kid was dynamic, spoke from his heart and will be a great leader someday, probably is one now. others reported 62 speakers, I think there were 57, but I missed one here or there.
5 - supporters of mandatory NAIS
10 - Tweeners (those who said they favored NAIS in a voluntary form only or something similar)
40 solid no to NAIS speakers.
The supporters of NAIS were: a pork producer, representatives from the dairy industry, one beef producer and a Colorado APHIS employee - I think the director of this area or region. I don't think most people keeping track included him in the list of supporters, but since he spoke I included him.
The pork producer said he fully participated in nais. According to him, he could not make a profit selling pork to US consumers, so he had to ship overseas and even with better prices on the world market, he was still barely making a living. He didn't explain why he thought mandatory nais for all would help him.
One of the dairymen speaking in favor of mandatory nais, participates fully in nais now, as did the cattle rancher.
DHI, Dairy Herd Improvement, requires premise id in order for DHI to purchase milk. There was at least one DHI rep there who spoke, there may have been 2.
The supporters of nais were all about animal health, consumer confidence, disease prevention and added value to their products. Most acknowledged nais would not prevent disease, but stop the spread of a potentially devastating disease more quickly than the current system. No real explanation or evidence was presented by anyone on how nais would actually increase their bottom line only that they believed it would.
The tweeners, were primarily Farm Bureau representatives, they hailed from Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska - I didn't take many notes, as it was all being recorded and transcribed by a court reporter. Seems to me, the FB has been for mandatory nais, changing their message only recently. Their messages were all similar: nais is coming in some form or another, better to support the voluntary program, rather than have congress mandate it in a less desirable form.
The basic message brought by the no nais majority, was no nais. Most supported utilizing local agencies, already in place, which have historically proven their ability to track and eradicate disease, rather than a national system. Many also pointed out the fact that our borders are a primary introduction points for disease and should be closed until the health of Mexican and Canadian cattle could be guaranteed.
Chuck Sylvester, Good Neighbor Law founder www.goodneighborlaw.com received a standing ovation for his speech chastising USDA for "pimping" our 4H kids with premise id! Thanks Chuck! We love you. check out the website.
Of the speakers opposing nais, I was one of only 3 consumers. I don't exactly fit in the "consumer" category as we have horses and raise an occasional hog, have had chickens and ducks., my points were in support of producers, rather than my own, personal opposition to nais. The majority of people there were producers: mostly cow/calf or finishers, one man from SE Colorado had beef and sheep. A few self sustainers, ie raised their own for themselves, spoke against, but there was no one there specifically representing horses, goats, fowl...i was a bit disappointed by this.
A wonderful lady from Nebraska pointed out, this listening tour was being held during farmers and ranchers busiest time of the year and it was a huge burden for people to be away from their ranches, while the USDA and APHIS employees conducting the meetings were there doing their jobs, being paid, while we all were taking time off from our work or leaving it for others to do, or it was all waiting for us to come home to catch it up.
Repeatedly throughout the meeting the "facilitators" reminded us this meeting was not an attempt to reach a consensus about what parts of NAIS we could live with, we were reminded several time, the afternoon sessions were about giving us the opportunity to express our concerns further and offering solutions to the problems we see with NAIS and not about reaching a consensus.
Upon arriving, we were given an information packet, each packet had a colored dot on the front, which signified your afternoon break out group. The dots were only suggestions, they were not trying to divide and concur us, rather just have smaller groups for more personal discussions. At least, that is what they said. We could sit in on any group we desired.
Inside our packets was a list of seven questions, which were common complaints with the nais plan. These questions are posted on the Federal Register notice about the meetings. We were asked to address these questions in the afternoon session and offer solutions or compromises we could live with to our concerns with the current nais plan. There were 13 people in the group I sat in on. No one spoke directly to these questions, but continued to express an unwillingness to participate in nais in any form, with specific real world examples as to why they opposed the plan. There were 2 pro-nais people in my group and a brand inspector from WY, who wants a better trace back system than the current brand inspection process, but readily admitted the current system used in WY was very good, but not perfect.
One lady, in my group, who claimed to be anti-nais, but clearly kept steering the comments back to a solution or some kind of consensus on a system we could all live with. She was also very polite, but definitely a facilitator type, she thanked people for their comments, but "we are getting off topic and need to find a solution we can all live with.."
The afternoon meeting facilitators were skilled negotiators, they were soft spoken, never answered questions posed, politely reminded us they did not know NAIS well enough to answer questions. If someone asked or made several points, they repeated the points, always saying am I understanding you correctly? Are these the points you are trying to make? I don't want to misinterpret your questions, points or put words in your mouths?
Actual conversations were impossible, as you had to have the microphone to speak, as all conversations were recorded and would be transcribed for Mr. Vilsack to read at a later date, without names, of course.
To me the whole session felt more like an "okay, we listened, now go home and shut up" session.
So, it is very important to continues to voice your opposition to nais. if you haven't left a comment at the usda comment site, do so: www.usda.gov/nais
These are only my observations from the meeting, others certainly will have a different opinion about what when on and why. Hopefully, others who attended the meeting will post comments.
Sharon Croghan - Colorado

AMERICAN CAPITALISM GONE WITH A WHIMPER

2009-05-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

By Stanislav Mishin
Russia

27.04.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-american_capitalism-0
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our H oly Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.
These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?
These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.
Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his compa ny. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.
So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.
So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.
The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.
The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.
Stanislav Mishin
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina

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IN A SOLDIER'S NAME

2009-05-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

By Ron Ewart

Many years ago, when I was in high school, I ran into kind of a strange, lonely, muscular young man with a keen intellect and a quick and inquiring mind. He was full of life and future promise. Many nights we would sit in his 1940 coup until well after midnight, discussing philosophy, science, religion, school, cars, women, politics and airplanes. Not necessarily in that order. Sometimes during our talks, he would sketch out cars, free hand. The detail in his drawings was astounding, in both depth and perspective. It was as if he could see every detail of the car he held in his mind and then transferred that detail through his arm and hand, to the paper. This skill he possessed, was indeed a gift but a gift that never blossomed into a full-blown talent.
On many occasions, we went camping and fishing together and thrived on our talks. It was if our minds were one, each searching together for life's truths. On one fishing trip with he and another friend, we arrived late at the trail head and set up a lean-to to sleep, before the climb to the lake the next day. Around 4 AM in the morning, a mouse ran over my friend's outstretched arm, that sent him flying out of his sleeping bag with a curse. Of course that woke up me and our other friend up and so we broke camp and headed up the trail. It was raining and the climb was steep. Around 10:00 AM we stopped for lunch. The three of us ended up eating three days supply of food at that one sitting and decided to Hell with the climb to the lake, hiked out to the car and drove back to town. Later that night we all went to see a late show. All told, we had been up for almost 36 hours. But when you are young, sleep wasn't all that important.
Young men tend to be idealistic, as we were, but it was the beginning of a life-long friendship between my friend and I. This young man was talented by every measure. He could have been anything he wanted to be. Instead his choice lead him down a path he could have never imagined, much less desired.
After high school, we went our separate ways. He joined the Army and my knowledge of his Army life was sparse. Occasionally, I would receive a letter or a post card with a short note. He told me of his relationship with a German girl that had soured and made him ill to the point that he lost his sight and he ended up in San Francisco's Presidio Hospital. I remember thinking at the time that the story was a little strange. I drove all the way from Seattle to San Francisco to visit him in the hospital. I was told later that his sight returned after two holes were bored in his skull to relieve the pressure. His recovery extended into months.
He eventually was discharged from the service, later married and had one child. For some reason I can't, to this day, understand, I did not see or talk to him much after he married. I remember he became quite religious, never suspecting why.
Several years ago I visited him in his home on Bainbridge Island, Washington. He had retired from his job at Boeings and could not work. He was confined to his home, could barely walk and got around mostly with a cane, or in a wheel chair. His legs had ballooned up to nearly three times their normal size. I never asked him about them, not wanting to embarrass him.
In late 2004, I learned that he had been transferred to the VA Hospital in Seattle, so I went to visit him. I finally got up the courage to ask him about his legs. As he sat on his hospital bed, he appeared unshaven, somewhat disheveled, wearing a maroon shirt, an Army ranger hat and shorts, which exposed his legs. They were grotesquely immense and covered with white scales and red blotches. He could only get around in a wheel chair, but still he possessed an uncanny quit wit and humor.
He began his story by telling me that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for well over two years, prior to the U. S. military build up. Because his mission as an Army Ranger was secret, he maintained his German cover story, at least to me. He explained that as torture, his captors would put him in a cage suspended from a rope and then lower his body in the river, with just his head showing, for days at a time. The river was essentially a human sewer. The VA doctors believed that river fungus attacked his legs, causing the unsightly conditions and the bloating, that lasted the rest of his life.
I asked how he escaped and he said that Army helicopters flew over and blasted the prison camp. He described buildings disintegrating, while trucks and bodies were flying through the air. His two guards were distracted by the attack and one ran off. The other guard looked away for a second, which was my friend's opportunity. He grabbed a shovel and dispatched the second guard with one blow. He then reached down and picked up the guard's automatic weapon and ran into the jungle. He wandered for days with no idea where he was until he found himself somewhere in Thailand. Friendly soldiers took him to safety. Later, he was transferred to Presidio Hospital in San Francisco where his injuries from captivity were treated. That was when I visited him, not having any clue to the real events. For the rest of his life he was plagued by the memories of his ordeal. Even so, he never lost his sense of humor.
Unfortunately, the doctors couldn't do much for him and he was transferred to an old soldiers' home near Port Orchard, WA to live out the rest of his painful life. On July 4, 2006, American Independence Day, this brave man, this patriot, this hero of his country, succumbed to his injuries and indignities suffered at the hands of his captors, while a prisoner of war in Viet Nam. He gave his life for our country and his country spat upon him for that sacrifice.
This man was behind enemy lines in the hands of brutal and cruel Viet Nam captors for well over two years. He wasn't supposed to be there and the NSA came to him after he was repatriated and removed any record from his home of ever having been in Viet Nam. His Army records were lost in a St. Louis archives fire. The only thing available was a DD-214 that listed him being discharged in 1959 as a private. He was in fact, a sergeant. He received no medals even though he was a prisoner of war and escaped. The VA never paid a dime for his final days in the nursing home. That's what our government did for this man.
I wrote letters to senators, congressmen, the head of the VA and to the Special Forces Association. As best I could, I researched his military service. I was told that the hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco was torn down in 2000. No one there seemed to know where his records were. The NSA knows he was in Viet Nam and probably has records of it. The Hospital at the Presidio knows he was at the hospital and the records are somewhere in archives. I know he was at Presidio because I visited him in person, when I learned he had arrived there. He died without ever being recognized by his Country for the sacrifices he was forced to make.
So why is his story relevant? Because he is one of hundreds of thousands of brave men and women that were ordered by our government to sacrifice their lives, limbs and minds in the defense of our Constitutional freedoms, in a foreign land. But now those very freedoms and our property rights are under attack by our own Government. We must now fight with a government that has subscribed to the doctrine that environmental protection and socialist agendas, trump constitutional liberties, while they steal our land, our money and our freedom. If we look away from this battle and do nothing, we dishonor the sacrifices of my friend and many other brave souls who endured and are enduring, unimaginable hardships across the front lines from our enemies, so that all of us can remain free.
So I ask in his name, Robert C. Copeland, husband, father, American hero and patriot, that you join with me in making sure that the foundation of this great Nation and our Constitution, are forever protected and vigorously defended. I ask that together we take up our weapons of legislative and judicial actions and civil disobedience in this fight against our Government, so that my friend's sacrifice and those of his brave brethren will have not been in vain.
We must realize that our government's attack on our constitutional liberties is growing and endless. This country of WE THE PEOPLE is supposed to be a country of WE THE PEOPLE, not THEM THE GOVERNMENT. WE THE PEOPLE have been hiding under a rock and if we allow the destruction of our Constitution, it won't be the Twin Towers that will have tumbled down, it will be our whole way of life and the very foundation that made and kept us free. For without our Constitution we are just another country immersed in socialism, mind-numbing mediocrity and vanishing liberty and my friend's sacrifice and the sacrifice of so many other brave souls, will have been for naught.
On this Memorial Day in the year of our Lord 2009, in his name, I here so dedicate this brief story of Robert Copeland's life and his sacrifices that he gave for his Country. And to all others who have so sacrificed, I hereby dedicate my life to the preservation of liberty here at home, that they so valiantly dedicated their lives to our freedom, abroad.

FREEDOM'S SAFETY VALVE

2009-05-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

By Ron Ewart, President

"The 10th Amendment, Freedom's Safety Valve"
© Copyright May 20, 2009 - All Rights Reserved

The wisdom of the Founding Fathers borders on providence. How was it that their perspective of individual freedom was so clear in their minds and so succinct in their words? How was it that they were able to insert so many road blocks in our founding documents, to government tyranny? First, they limited the power and scope of the central government authority by specifying what those powers were. Knowing that those limits might not stop the exponential growth of a central government, they inserted the "Separation of Powers" doctrine that balanced the power of the three branches of government against each other. These wise men weren't even sure if constitutional limits and the Separation of Powers was sufficient to inhibit the all-too insidious desire by politicians to increase their power, so they gave all those rights that were not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, to the states and to the people, via the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The wisdom of these great men may have just saved the United States of America from self-immolation, if not trial by the fire of revolution. That central government would move to increase its power is not an unknown phenomenon. We have 5,000 years of history that proves men in power will do whatever is necessary to expand their power, including circumventing the very documents that authorize their power. We should not be surprised that the American central government has parroted that history and their violations of the limits on their power, expand almost daily. What remains to be seen is whether the Founding Father's safety valve in the 10th Amendment, can restore the power to the consent of the governed, that last ditch answer, that last of all alternatives before revolution becomes the final solution ..... the supreme power that is reserved to the states and the people.
Well take heart. The 10th Amendment is alive and well and showing its teeth. Tired of the lust for power that exists in that den of thieves in Washington DC, robbers of the public treasury, legislators in many states are once again, showing their independence ..... the independence that is embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments to the U. S. Constitution. Several states have already passed resolutions warning the central government that they have exceeded their limited powers and the states are exercising their rights and powers under the 10th Amendment. Some states are even strengthening the 2nd Amendment by passing resolutions informing the government that any firearms or ammunition manufactured in their state and kept in their state, do not fall under any jurisdiction of the federal government.
This sudden rise in state courage, is infectious. Other state legislatures are following suit. There is now a new organization called "The Patrick Henry Caucus", inviting legislators from all levels of government to join with them in preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state in which the individual legislator holds residence.
Yes Americans! That unstoppable spirit of freedom is on the rise and it must infuriate those in power, for otherwise why would the American government, under the offices of Homeland Security, issue a report on potential extremists who would dare to proclaim their rights under the constitution (imagine that), believe in the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman, believe that abortion is murder, believe that amnesty for illegal aliens is just plain wrong, and these so-called extremists are now being labeled by government as a threat to national security? Why would they say that returning veterans who have served this country honorably by laying down their lives for our freedom, are potential extremists who would be vulnerable to extremists acts? Why indeed!
Thomas Jefferson said: "When the people fear the government, we have tyranny. When the government fears the people, we have liberty." The government is beginning to fear the people once again and they grow nervous. As they grow more apprehensive of the people's rise to reclaim their freedom, they will do even more crazy things to increase their power over us and increase their enforcement of a growing body of unconstitutional law.
Barry Goldwater said: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice." We hail the constitutional extremists who stand up for liberty. We wave our right hand in the air, in support of the tea party revolution. We take our hats off to those who believe that amnesty for illegals is wrong, that abortion is murder and that the constitution is worth defending, even with our lives. We are proud to be a part of the idea that freedom is the natural order and that whatever is necessary to preserve that freedom is indeed, not a vice.
Every day we stand in amazement at the wisdom of our Founding Fathers and the skill and knowledge they exhibited in giving us (at great cost) a solid foundation (our Constitution) that works to preserve freedom and inhibit tyranny.
We ask that all those of you who know of a legislator who is supporting 9th and 10th Amendment resolutions in their state, to personally thank and encourage them. They need your support. They are truly domestic heroes and America needs every last one of them, if she is to remain free.
In the name of those Founding Fathers and all those who cherish freedom, we hereby claim our right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, without undo, unnecessary and unconstitutional government interference, so help us God.
Ron Ewart, President
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS
P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027
425 222-4742 or 1 800 682-7848
(Fax No. 425 222-4743)
Website: www.narlo.org

THERE IS NO FREEDOM, WITHOUT INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

2009-05-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

By Ron Ewart
© Copyright May 17, 2009 - All Rights Reserved

The noise is shattering. It shudders the air for almost a hundred miles. It shakes the ground upon which you stand, as you witness in awe, man's almost arrogant defiance of the forces of nature. It belches unimaginable fire and smoke from its tail and slowly, it breaks the bonds of Earth's gravity and rises ever faster, arcing into an azure sky. It screeches in anger against Earth's attempts to pull it back. A long, curving stream of white smoke outlines its path into the awaiting heavens. In but a minute it is nothing but a spec against a backdrop of blue. Suddenly a soundless puff of flame and smoke mark the separation of its lift-off stage rockets. Spaceship Discovery has broken free of Earth and reaches for the stars, at five miles per second.
For centuries, a six-foot tall biped, who walked out of the jungles and grasslands of yesteryear, some 20,000 years ago, has been on a torturous path to go ever farther and faster and to even defy the chains of gravity that binds him to the Earth. Over the last five millennium, each of his decisions for war or peace, has driven him towards an unseen goal, a need to explore and to fulfill his insatiable desire to learn more about himself and his universe. But that drive made an exponential leap into the future, when a small band of men on a new continent, decided that freedom had a greater value than life itself. They were committed to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in the defense of liberty. From that fateful decision and the resulting struggle, individual freedom was born.
Along the way man has made many mistakes, but along the way he has made great strides as well ..... ever since his creativity, industriousness, ambition and generosity were unleashed under that greatest of all symbols of freedom, the American flag. It is that individual freedom that has brought man to the edge of jumping off this once infinitely large planet and to reach his outstretched "hand" into the secrets and mysteries of an infinite Universe. The question is, can he keep up the pace of this quest, if he allows freedom to slip from his grasp ..... that very freedom that has allowed him to reach such unimaginable heights, in just a short 233 years.
It is said by many that America is a free country and many come here because of the perception that it is a free country. However, by any measure, it is anything but a free country because without individual freedom, there is no freedom and individual freedom has been trashed, as the first 10 Amendments of the U. S. Constitution, (the original Bill of Rights) that guarantee our individual freedom, have been, or will be repealed, one by one. Oh sure, there is still freedom of speech, sort of. And the freedom to worship in a religion of one's choice is still pretty much in tact. The Third Amendment about soldiers being quartered in private residences during time of war has not been breached since the civil war, as far as we know. But the Second amendment and the Fourth, Fifth, the Eighth, the Ninth, the Tenth and the Fourteenth have been badly bruised, if not outright repealed by actions of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government, that operate in concert with each other to entrench their power over the states and the people. The "Separation of Powers" doctrine, as enshrined in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, is essentially dead, or in its final death throes.
The Fourth Amendment requiring "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated", is being violated every day by government, in its pursuit to make you secure, at the expense of your liberty.
The Fifth Amendment stating that: No person shall.........."be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation", is all but irrelevant. Government takes, reduces your right-of-use, or decreases the value of your property consistently, by act, law, regulation, restriction, ordinance and eminent domain abuse, without due process and without just compensation. U. S. Supreme Court decisions have aided and abetted the destruction of the Fifth Amendment, by sanctioning government police powers, way beyond the limits of the constitution.
The Eighth Amendment stating that: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" has been rendered meaningless, as the penalty for violating some draconian environmental regulation mounts into thousands upon thousands of dollars in fines and can even be criminalized that can result in lengthy incarceration. Woe be to the man who violates an environmental regulation, for he shall be crucified on the alter of the enviro-viper.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments stating respectively that: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" and "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people", are no longer relevant. The Federal Government has so exceeded its enumerated powers contained in the Constitution, as to render "states rights" and the "rights of the people" virtually non-existent. The Feds write federal mandates, forcing the states to comply and if they don't, the Feds withhold federal money for other federal programs run by the states. So the states capitulate to the rising power of the Feds with their "beaks" pointing skyward for federal dollars, like baby birds in a nest, waiting for their federal "mother" to deliver their next meal.
The sanctity and dignity of human life and the human spirit (or soul if you will) only has meaning when there is "free choice". That human spirit has a driving force to survive first and then express itself through its individual wants and desires second. Creativity, industriousness, ingenuity and compassion are the expression of those individual wants and desires. Such expression is different in every human being. Some expressions are good, while still others are evil. Some of those wants and desires complement each other. Nevertheless, it is from these wants and desires, tempered with a large dose of morality, from which most human achievement and advances in the human condition occur. These characteristics are most abundant when the individual has free choice.
In the book, "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, her philosophy of the individual and individual freedom was embodied in one chapter in the book entitled, "This is John Galt Speaking". We have excerpted a few paragraphs from this chapter, as they are relevant to this discussion. (Bold emphasis our ours)
"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch–or build a cyclotron–without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think."
"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature, the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of our stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function to think or to evade that effort is an act of free choice. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival–so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think'"
"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe; existence or non-existence–and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that effort, it ceases to exist. It is only the concept of "Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil."
"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction."
Man, on the other hand, can act for his own survival, or his own destruction. He can either choose life or death, or he can choose freedom, or enslavement. If the power of government rises, man can choose either to resist that power, or capitulate to that power. In America, we have a foundation of law, our Constitution, that allows us to not only resist government's rising power, but to reduce the power of government without having to resort to revolution. But to do so, man must choose individual freedom and be willing to pay the price required for the preservation, protection and defense of that freedom. To do otherwise, is to be condemned to be an indentured slave to others who own his life, his liberty and his property, as well as the fruits of his labors. To do otherwise, is worse than death.