Saturday, September 5, 2015

Glacial Facts

I know that some people believe what that want to believe and disregard facts. I call them libtards. So for the non-libtards, here are some glacial facts.

Fact 1: It is a historical fact that the glacier in Glacier Bay began its retreat around 1750. By the time Capt. George Vancouver arrived there in 1794 the glacier still filled most of the bay but had already retreated some miles. [Hence the name of the bay]
By 1900 Glacier Bay was mostly ice-free.

Fact 2:
The Huna Tlingit people have lived for more than 4,000 years around the Bay. In the oral tradition of the Huna Tlingit people, it is said that the glacier has advanced and retreated a number of times during their occupation of the area. [I am willing to take their word for it]

All of this happened long before human emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, could have had any impact.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Islam Is Islam

I am persuaded that there are no modifiers to Islam. Radical Islam is redundant. Islam started with thievery, murder and slavery. It advanced to assassinations and conquests. Churchill and T. E. Lawrence both understood that it is not a religion at all.

Churchill wrote in 1899 in The River Wars

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.


A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.


Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

We are going to have to face the fact that democracy and Islam are not in any compatible. We are going to have to eliminate Islam to have peace.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Justice Kennedy’s Bitter Truth

The same-sex marriage ruling will unleash the legal furies against those who disagree with it.

This exactly expresses my view.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

Published in the Wall Street Journal June 29, 2015 7:26 p.m. ET

In the heady days since Anthony Kennedy unearthed a constitutional right for Americans “to define and express their identity,” the extravagance of the Supreme Court’s claim has taken some by surprise. It shouldn’t have. In finding for same-sex marriage the way he did, Justice Kennedy made official what he made inevitable a quarter-century back.

That was in 1992. The occasion was a Supreme Court decision on abortion into which Mr. Kennedy inserted a new definition of liberty. Where Thomas Jefferson had grounded human liberty in self-evident truth, Mr. Kennedy holds that the mere self suffices.

“At the heart of liberty,” he wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Now he has followed through. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the court substitutes for the laws passed by the people acting through their state legislatures a new constitutional right to “dignity” based on the court’s “better informed understanding.”

Back when poor Harry Blackmun in Roe v. Wade established a right to privacy that likewise appears nowhere in the Constitution, he wrote under the conceit that his decision would resolve the issue once and for all. Instead, his 1973 ruling launched the culture wars.

Obergefell is Roe on steroids. Roe legalized a market for abortion for those who wanted them and those who provided them. It was qualified by conscience protections plus riders attached to federal legislation greatly limiting the use of taxpayer dollars to underwrite the practice. So Roe didn’t demand much of those on the other side—or on the sidelines.

Obergefell is another thing altogether. In one of the great flimflams of American life, it is a prescription for endless litigation smuggled in under libertarian clothing. This began with the opening question put to all those who held the classic view of marriage: What can it possibly matter to you, they were asked, if two men or two women who love each other call their relationship marriage?

We learned that it matters a great deal.

It matters to Brendan Eich, who was forced to resign last year as CEO of the company he co-founded after it became public that he had donated $1,000 to Proposition 8, the successful California ballot measure banning same-sex marriage.

It matters to Chick-fil-A, which in 2012 saw the mayors of Chicago and Boston declare the restaurant chain had no place in their cities because its chief executive held the same view of marriage thatBarack Obama held until very recently.

It matters to Catholic Charities, which in several states has been forced out of the adoption business either because the charity does not offer same-sex spousal benefits or declines to place children for adoption with same-sex couples.

It matters for cake bakers, photographers, florists, jewelers and pizza-parlor owners who happily serve gay customers but draw the line at assisting gay weddings.

Finally, it matters to all religious schools and religious institutions. Give the Obama administration its due: The president’s solicitor general admitted during the Obergefell oral argument that a victory for same-sex marriage would put the tax-exempt status of such institutions on the chopping block.

The reason for all this is that the right for men to marry men or women to marry women is only half of the equation—and not even the most important half at that.

The other half involves antidiscrimination statutes and regulations, not to mention the discretion of federal, state and even private bureaucracies regarding everything from funding and accreditation to tax exemption.

In short, there is nothing live-and-let-live about the way this movement has operated the past few years, and to pretend otherwise requires a willful blindness. Now, with Obergefell, the full furies have been released.

As Justice Samuel Alito suggested in his dissent, thousands of Americans who never dreamed that the issue would affect them will soon get highly personal lessons in how the legalization of same-sex marriage by judicial fiat threatens their schools, their institutions and even their livelihoods. This is not your father’s culture war.

A century ago, another Supreme Court justice famously wrote that the Constitution “is made for people of fundamentally differing views.” How far we have traveled since.

Those seeking to crush all dissent from the new judicial orthodoxy on marriage will not always win, not least because the right to the free exercise of religion—in bald contrast to Mr. Kennedy’s right to dignity—is in fact in the Constitution. Still, however individual cases may turn out, by foreclosing the option for democratic debate and compromise the Supreme Court has ensured a bitter national harvest.

Welcome to Justice Kennedy’s world. Where upholding the Kennedy definition of liberty—the right to define your own truth—turns out to mean denying that same right to millions of Americans who define marriage and truth in a way different from his.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

PUT ME IN CHARGE . . .

    
Not my words, but I have had similar thoughts.

Put me in charge of food stamps. No cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.


Put me in charge of Medicaid.   The first thing I'd do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine.       If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, or smoke, then get a job. There’s nothing the matter with a vasectomy for the fathers who don't support their children!! 

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried.     If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360,  then get a job and your own place.


In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you.  We will sell your 22-inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the "common good."


Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary.  If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self-esteem," consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self-esteem.


If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Some Of Us Are Wired All Wrong

I was in the Navy when the Beatles released their first songs. They were still insanely popular when I got home in 1966. I recall a neighbor girl who went to Atlanta to see them. I thought she was crazy. So I grew up during Beatlemania. I recall images like this one.

followers

Did she later join Jim Jones and drink Kool-Aid? Or perhaps she voted for Obama twice? In spite of 20 years of knowledge that HRC is serial liar, will she vote for her?

It’s not Obama or HRC or any other politician, it’s us folks.

Pogo

Friday, April 24, 2015

George Will

April 15 - Free speech has never been, in the history of our republic, more comprehensively, aggressively and dangerously threatened than it is now. The Alien and Sedition Acts arose from a temporary, transitory fever and were in any case sunsetted and disappeared.

Today’s attack is different. It’s an attack on the theory of freedom of speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech and indeed if listened to carefully and plumbed fully, what we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake. . . .

Yesterday the Democratic Party, the oldest political party in the world, the party that guided this country through two world wars and is more responsible than any other for the shape of the modern American state—the Democratic Party’s leading and prohibitively favored frontrunner candidate for the presidential nomination announced four goals for her public life going forward, one of which is to amend the Bill of Rights to make it less protective. It’s an astonishing event. She said that she wants to change the First Amendment in order to further empower the political class to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political speech about the political class—and so far as I can tell there’s not a ripple of commentary about this on the stagnant waters of the American journalistic community.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

On Displaying the Confederate Battle Flag

You should already have heard about the design your own license plate program in Texas. Seems some folks want the Confederate Flag on their plate. Texas says no. The Supremes are going to discuss whether displaying a confederate battle flag on your custom license plate is protected by free speech.

If a state is going to create a license plate program where people can make statements with their license plates, then people should be able to make the statement they want to make.  Let's assume for a moment that everyone who wants to display this symbol on their car is a racist.  Shouldn't we be thrilled if they want to do so?  Here would be a program where racists would voluntarily self-identify to all as a racist (they would even pay extra to do so!)  What would be a greater public service?

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Unqualified and Lazy

Blogger Doug Ross at Director Blue spent some time with the facility members who worked with Barack Obama in Chicago. We always suspected he was a bad Professor, as he taught the Constitution which he now blatantly ignores on a daily basis as President. But now we know, he’s just a bad guy…

I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct.

The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

This guy has always been a fake. He has little to no history which anyone can verify. His social security numbers don’t match the state he was born in. His college applications for student aid are not published, he was editor of a law review where he never published and article, his thesis is unobtainable. He is a fake, a liar, and the biggest fraud played on the American public.

Environmental Religion

 

Environmentalism is a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

From a speech by the late novelist Michael Crichton to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, 2003:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. . . .

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

Thursday, March 5, 2015

The Sharon Statement

On Sept. 11, 1960, a group of young conservatives who met at the home of William F. Buckley Jr. in Sharon, Conn., issued what became known as the Sharon Statement; written by M. Stanton Evans, who died Tuesday at age 80, the statement asserted these beliefs:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

That the genius of the Constitution—the division of powers—is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;

That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace; and

That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?

Saturday, February 28, 2015

His Legacy

The task that Barack Obama is dumping on the next U.S. president, of either party, is overwhelming.

Here’s the job description: Needed, a U.S. president able to confront a world in chaos, rebuild shattered alliances, revive the country’s demoralized intelligence services and senior officer corps, manage foreign and domestic demands with a budget that will be drained for years by fantastically expensive debt servicing, and along the way restore public faith in an array of deeply politicized federal bureaucracies—Justice, HHS, EPA, Labor, Internal Revenue, the NLRB, FCC, EEOC, even the Federal Reserve.

Another Eight Years Of Progressive Policy?

No one expects anything from the Democrats. They will back, accept or acquiesce in a coronation. This will not be called passive but disciplined. But when you think about it—one of our two major parties, in a time of considerable national peril, will settle its presidential nomination without vigorous debate—it is weird and disturbing.

Peggy Noonan

His Goal?

Some will argue that Obama’s true goal is the creation of a global Islamic caliphate.

They’re burning and beheading victims in the name of Islam, but President Obama delivered a major speech on combating violent extremism — while refusing to use the words “Muslim terrorists.”

Obama has not shown any leadership in Europe against Russian designs in Ukraine, or any other international conflict, because it’s just not important to him. It doesn’t fit with his long-term goals, so he just pays it lip service. He has to keep his eye on the ball.

The goal of this administration is to weaken American power so the United States cannot stop the formation of the caliphate from North Africa to Pakistan. Even more frightening is that Obama is attempting to radically change the population of the United States through illegal immigration so that eventually, a Muslim U.S.A. will join his new kingdom.

The Obama administration’s agenda is to allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon to destroy Israel and bring the entire Levant into the caliphate.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Churchill on Islam in 1899

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.


The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the
Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.


No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.


Sir Winston Churchill; (Source: The River War, first edition, Vol II, pages 248-250 London ).