Landscapes

As a certified "mad walker" who sets a goal of 1,250 miles per year (5,000 miles every four years), indulging occasionally in insensate literary projects, we appreciated Joyce Carol Oates' essay "Running and Writing" in Great Writers on the Art of Fiction (ed. James Daley, Dover Books 2007), pp. 153 - 158. To wit:

"A good run ... is (akin) to a good dream ... as musicians experience the uncanny phenomenon of tissue memory in their fingertips, so runner(s) feel ... extensions of an imagining self.

"Writers and poets (famously) love to be in motion ... English Romantic Poets were inspired by long walks in all weathers: Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District, Shelley in Italy ("I walk until I am stopped, but I never am stopped"). New England Transcendentalists, most notably Henry Thoreau, were ceaseless walkers. Thoreau acknowledged that if he spent less than four hours a day outdoors "in motion," he needed almost "to atone for sin."

Like Samuel Johnson before him, who ranged London at all hours, Charles Dickens in his middle years suffered an insomnia "that propelled him onto the London streets at night." His haunting essay Night Walks hints that this terrible "night restlessness" revealed a soul-in-passage, compelled to press on "through darkness and pattering rain." Walt Whitman "tramped impressive distances ... we feel the walker's pulse-beat in his breathless, incantatory poems." Henry James (of all people) "loved to walk for miles in London."

"Stories come to us as wraiths, embodying a vision," writes Joyce Carol Oates. "Outdoor movement amounts to meditation ... (as if) waking dreams keep us from actual madness." St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430) was notorious for perambulating night and day. An entire philosophical school, the Peripatetics, marched up and down their 100-yard long colonnaded Stoa engaged for hours in speculations purposely divorced from inkpots and scrolls.

As large, hairless, bipedal primates, humans inherit a compulsive kinetic tendency-- nature designs us to range in long, loping strides across primordial grasslands, savannahs, spreading veldts. From earliest times human minds have focused of necessity on end-points, covering intervening distances in easy, fluid steps. Awake and aware yet strangely disembodied, our streams-of-consciousness bear onwards to far-distant goals. Like floating or flying, this sense of sweeping forward relegates doubts and fears to an imaginary realm where dangers pose no obstacle, however real.

Serious walkers accept their fate neither as an accident nor by design, but rather as a discipline imposed by that most rigid of all task-masters-- themselves. Walking surfaces unbidden; like flotsam washed ashore, by meditative wind-and-tide it's something you just do. "The greatest poverty is not to live in the natural world"... and we recall in 1996 noticing a small, skyward patch of light which turned out to be a "long period" comet called Hale-Bopp in 150,000-year hyperbolic orbit on the Sun. Hale-Bopp shone briefly opposite Earth across our entire solar system, and will re-appear in due course after 75,000 years.

We could do without Hale-Bopp, but we cannot do without the vision such a body represents. Here is a phenomenon so remote in Space and Time, yet real, that contemplative steps become imperative. Eventually we all will take a final step, beyond which lies another road. Meantime, pursue your Journey looking skyward, for that way lies the stars.

The Destroyer

Speaking of Nuberu, ancient Sumer's earth-like planet in close orbit about our sun Sol's mysterious brown-dwarf companion (a Jupiter-size body called "the Destroyer" in creation myths based on priestly sky-watchers' millennia-long "portent astronomy"): By Hubble telescope and earlier observations, binary stars make up eight out of ten (80%) of all galactic systems. Due to its distance and eccentric orbit, Nuberu's unobserved --conventionally unsuspected-- parent sun approaches Sol only at intervals of 3,600 years. When this occurs we might expect all manner of periodic disturbances, ranging from orbital and Oort Cloud perturbations to climatic, volcanic, and other geophysical effects on Earth.

Interestingly, an esoteric Dark Age work known as the Kolbrin (Culbrian) Bible, said to have been salvaged from Glastonbury Abbey following an arson attack in AD 1184, collects secular historical accounts of worldwide cataclysms datable by Sumerian cuneiform to about 5200 BC. As recounted by Kolbrin's 6-book Egyptian Texts, these events were followed 3,600 years later by Pharaoh's biblical Ten Plagues recounted as divine retribution in the Old Testament's Book of Exodus (c. 1600 BC). Tying Moses to New Testament prophesies, Kolbrin preserves a 5-book set of Celtic Texts in form of a "survivors' diary" rather than a revelation, extrapolating from Exodus and the later Crucifixion to an end-of-days scenario set thirty-six hundred years after Pharaoh's troubles, i.e. in this, our early 21st Century AD.

Well, now! Most dime-a-dozen Doomsday forecasts do not cite Sumerian portent-astronomy from c. 5200 BC in context of Egypt's Ten Mosaic Plagues, nor are they Dark Age manuscripts traceable to 12th Century monastic libraries. Moreover, for Kolbrin purposes Glastonbury Abbey seems singularly a propos. Founded in the mid-6th Century, endowed by Kings of Wessex from AD 712, this "rich and powerful" community in Somersetshire had compiled legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail for centuries before the Conquest. The Abbey's famed collections extended far-afield, most certainly to Alexandrine and Syriac repositories where Sumerian records of interest would remain semi-intact.

The plot thickens. In Crop Circle Connector, a major archive source despite certain, um, credulous or even conspiricist tendencies, an article by one Marshall Masters dated 07/26/2008 discusses a "Planet X / Nibiru" (sic) circle that appeared in Avebury, Wiltshire (U.K.) on 07/15/2008, ten days before (qv). On the basis of this quite elaborate, large-scale diagram, Masters asserts that during the Winter Solstice of 2012 planetary alignments "clearly indicate" that our ninth planet Pluto is poised for violent expulsion from the solar system. This could occur only in context of a major gravitational anomaly such as Sumer's dark Destroyer swinging close to Sol again with Nuberu in tow. Whatever earthly disruptions follow, they are sure to be unpleasant, sweetheart.

Strangely enough, December 22, 2012 is the date specified by Aztec and Mayan astrologic/zodiacal canons for the 26,000-year completion of a Great Cycle, when Earth's precession comes full-circle to "fold the page again." Various New Age doom-sayers have exploited this sophisticated Long Count calendar (which employs zero in its positional notation) to independently predict Earthly disasters ranging from magnetic-reversal to Pole shifts, even plate-tectonic upheavals due to a "galactic realignment" casting Sol off-balance from the Milky Way's vast plane-of-the-ecliptic.

Since Meso-American and Aztec cultures perished many centuries ago, their forecasts are certainly disinterested. Even so, an unseen brown-dwarf Destroyer in an eccentric 3,600-hundred year orbit about Sol impinging on Earth coincident with these antique Codices' 26,000-year calendrical cycle seems far-fetched. But viewed in conjunction with recent Crop Circles, Glastonbury's Kolbrin Bible, and cuneiform astronomical records of Sumer, major upheavals would have ample precedent. Hogwash, say all reputable commentators.

It had better be.

Equal Protection

As of Tuesday, 2 December 2008, BHO and Dean's DNC have ignored a Monday deadline for responding to Philadelphia attorney Philip J. Berg's October 30th petition for a U.S. Supreme Court "writ of certiorari" demanding that BHO produce independently verifiable documentation of his eligibility to serve as U.S. Chief Executive.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) officials charged with protecting citizens' public interests in such cases (there have been many) "dodged questions" concerning the status of Berg's writ. True to bureaucratic form, Federal authorities in the U.S. Solicitor General's Office and the U.S. Supreme Court referred inquiries back to the FEC.

"This reeks of collusion," writes Jeff Schreiber, legal correspondent for various right-leaning "public interest" non-profit organizations. "Perhaps the FEC and other respondents feel they can get away with not taking (Berg's) allegations seriously." Of course as non-partisan Federal agencies the FEC, Solicitor General's Office, and Supreme Court staff are prohibited by statute from favoring --nevermind effectively representing-- private parties such as BHO, his campaign organization, and the DNC. Try this as a Republican and see what happens.

This sets a template for a Banana Administration approach to bureaucratic and judicial challenges from any quarter: Ignore deadlines, treat legal policies and procedures with contempt, act without regard for disinterested, impartial rulings in the --apparently justified-- expectation that no-one (certainly no mere private citizen) will ever bring you to account.

Such run-arounds, in violation of every established code and precedent, will sound a knell for Governance in every constructive sense. What we see here, months before a feckless and malfeasant BHO smirks as he takes his Oath, is but a precursor of the next four years. If U.S. Courts and all-powerful bureaucratic entities such as the FEC and Solicitor General's Office, so quick to rule-or-ruin in most cases, cannot bring themselves to address ultimately simple issues regarding BHO's Hawaiian Birth Certificate, they will compensate by mounting crack downs only in politically safe contexts, meaning against BHO opponents (boy, are we tough!).

Thus perishes American democracy. Having elected this bizarro fraud, who's to say it isn't well-deserved?

Hansen Strikes Again

From an article by Christopher Booker in the U.K. Telegraph, cited in ICECAP, we read, "(In) a surreal scientific blunder [sic] ... NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science [GISS, Hansen's notorious Warmist platform] (has) announced that last month was the hottest October on record." This despite "plummeting temperatures" worldwide, while GISS's rival National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ranked October as only the 70th warmest globally since 1894 (114 years).

An "astonishing discovery" by Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit (who originally debunked Mann's hyper-fraudulent "Hockey Stick" graph) reveals that this "glaring anomaly" results from the fact that GISS's data "were not based on October readings at all (!). Figures from ... (September) had simply been carried over and repeated two months running."

Anyone who continues to grant Warmists such as Hansen, recipient of $700k off-the-books payouts by Soros among others, the slightest ethical or scientific credibility deserves a corresponding "carbon credit" deficit bestowed in person by Al Gore on behalf of bottomlessly corrupt official Washington. But then, we ain't seen nuttin' yet.

Paramilitary Stormtroops

From a half-hour BHO TV blitz last night (Wednesday, October 29th), reports are that a Banana administration would budget near a trillion dollars (!) to finance a "National Civilian Defense Force" equipped and trained to military standards. This would not be a citizens' militia, nor a National Guard adjunct under State Governors' command, but a full-fledged uniformed Federal paramilitary force, organized by Platoon, Company, Battalion et al.-- a force-structure parallel to but apart from all existing U.S. military units.

"Uniformed civilians:" Unquestionably, politicized stormtrooper battalions, brownshirts tasked with enforcing extreme-left diktats by Presidential order (meaning BHO) in defiance of any legislative or judicial --read, Constitutional-- prerogative. These would typically be black or Hispanic slum dwellers, recruited for gang-member/street-fighting skills, rewarded not only with public paychecks but with drugs and opportunities for looting "white" central cities and surrounding suburbs for which BHO and his glowering wife have always expressed abhorrence and contempt.

Marrying extreme-left Red Guards with fascist street-thugs is BHO's recipe for race war, the very "helter-skelter" sought by Manson's hippie murderers endorsed by Banana intimates such as Ayers and Dorhn, Farrakhan, putrid Black Supremacists in the Wright mode. Under cover of offering employment and training to oppressed minorities, prominently including illegal immigrants, assembling an NCDF 250,000-strong would take no more than months, say by end-2009 at latest.

The primary mission of this criminal army would be to ensure that no free election ever endangered dictatorial rule by BHO and his adherents. From the Presidential Cabinet to Congress and the Courts, not to mention academic, corporate, and media venues, any slightest opposition would result in "disappearances" familiar to Statist demagogues from Buenos Aires to Peking and BHO's church-burning cousin Odinga in Nairobi, Kenya.

Far-fetched? Like many a grisly creep before him, BHO has laid out his plans and the vile tyranny behind them in articles, books, interviews and theses over near a quarter-century. Given a complaisant and complicit far-left Congress, we submit there are no limits to this creepy dissimulator's destructive ambitions. Voices already call for America's incumbent Administration to resign months before Inauguration Day, the better to hasten the onset of unchecked Rule by BHO Diktat, enforced by his own private army of looting, racist thugs.

Great bridges may stand centuries above roiling streams. But lose one or more strategic bolts, down they crash into the current, washed away as if they'd never been. So too, the American Experiment, even now a mere 220 years a-borning. Down your quiet suburban street will march a singing company of camouflage-wearing, black tee-shirted NCDF recruits, glorying in brutal assaults their Leader and Messiah, BHO, advocated in Kenya less than a year ago.

Elections

Federal elections are held the first Tuesday in November in even-numbered years; Presidential elections occur in years divisible by four. This practice dates from 1845, superseding diverse voting schedules set from mid-September through early November, a source of multiple-State voting and other rampant frauds.

Early November was chosen because harvests were in and winter storms were not yet a risk to travelers; Tuesdays, because Federal polls were usually in County Seats, typically a day's round-trip for rural residents for whom Sunday was a sabboth-day of rest.

Tax filings are due in April because that gives the maximum six months to Election Day, when voters heeding promises to spread-the-wealth have half a year before the tab comes due. Should that change to (say) mid-October, incumbent politicians could face an electoral backlash endangering their hard-earned 10-hour weeks, 4 - 6 months time-off when out of session, multiple health, travel, pension and other self-awarded benefits.

"Nothing is changed, John Brown-- nothing is changed" (Stephen Vincent Benet). Credit Eugene Volokh's Volokh Conspiracy for suggesting this reprise.

The Village Blacksmith: Aliens

The Village Blacksmith: Aliens

Aliens may have missed the boat for now, but Dystopian Dreamboy will be out there broadcasting a beacon to show them the way.

Blowin' in the Wind

Welcome to "Anonymous," who commented on a post below and is now good enough to say we may have some common ground. Your correspondent sincerely hopes so. My response: Attitudes don't interest me, at 68 years old and a survivor of the Tet Offensive. What politicians say matters only as an indication of what they'll do in office, and that judgment is a question of common sense. This election is not politics as usual. Obama is a threat to everything our nation stands for, and to our way of life.

Whether or not the Democrat candidate is a Muslim, there's no doubt he is a terrorist sympathizer endorsed by every totalitarian thug from Libya to Tehran to William Ayers. Elect him and he will gut America's defenses and open our government to our sworn enemies. Tens of thousands will die within six months; we only hope we and our families are not among them.

There is a reality out there, just as there was in the 1930s when Hitler was coming to power in Germany and Joseph Stalin was murdering Russia's kulaks by the millions. Obama broke U.S. law traveling to Kenya and campaigning for his cousin, Raila Odinga, a rancid Marxist gangster. They are birds of a feather. Odinga virtually makes war on his own people, who are black. Obama can't wait to make war on white Americans. That's not racist hate-mongering, that's just a rational expectation from the plain words of his mentors and spiritual advisors, Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan. Anyone who empowers these fascist thugs will deserve what they get. Facts matter, and their agenda is crystal clear.

Abstraction notions of "fairness" and so on are fine, but there's nothing "fair" about slavery, and Obama wants to turn us all into "wards of the state." No civil rights, no control over our own
lives, no rule of law. He is on record saying the Constitution is flawed because it prescribes "negative freedoms" - what the government can't do to you. But if there's nothing the State can't do, then of course it can do anything. Some may look forward to such vile tyranny, or serfdom, as Hayek said, as an "escape from freedom." But they don't understand what this means. I've lived overseas and have felt the oppression Obama stands for. Once a regime like this takes over, it can last 1,000 years. Let's hope Americans stop it now. The crisis is upon us.

Crisis of Socialism

Delayed since Orwell's time c. 1948, the Crisis of Socialism is now upon us. Something-for-nothing, the pyramiding of ever more volatile financial instruments atop tottering piles of "monetized" (unsecured) debt, now reveals itself for the Ponzi Scheme it is.

For some three generations now, those who experienced the 1930s Depression and survived World War II have engendered a "spread the wealth" mentality that stifles competition, innovation; radically compromises individual initiative and responsibility; blasts healthcare, pensions, self-reliant opportunity at their very roots.

Collectivist Statists must always revert to eating their seed-corn. When previous generations' hard-earned social capital --including education, merit-based employment, housing-- has finally been expended by wastrel "populist" (read Socialist) regimes, the surprise is that economic pies cannot be re-distributed because there are no pies.

Libraries of studies, centuries of cruel experience attest that National or International Socialisms (Nazism, Communism et al.) rapidly degrade to nihilistic death-cults sacrificing acolytes in high proportion on Statist altars glorifying class (Marx), race (Hitler), sectarian dogma (Reformation orthodoxies, today's secular alarmists, always militant Islam).

Must this be our "human condition," or may timeless Enlightenment ideals exemplified by America's founders, unique in history, somehow nurture individual aspirations that hold rapacious Socialisms and their atavistic, reactionary State at bay?

In matters of life-and-death it seems that Eliot's "hollow men," Hoffer's "true believers," benighted Islamists of every stripe will choose the latter. On the most basic level, if parents and children --families-- do not eventually band together in defense of Life, humanity will face a global Dark Age so destructive of civilized relations, so prolonged, that no new Renaissance ever will or likely even can emerge.

Harry Leroy at Agincourt

On October 25th, 1415, St Crispin's Day, English long-bowmen under King Henry V defeated French chivalry at the Battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare's immortal composition of "Harry Leroy's" address to his outnumbered troops lives on 593 years later: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." Mayhap in these parlous times, beleaguered citizens could use a dose of Harry's spirit, withal the confidence to prevail against great odds in a far better cause:

"And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day."

Fight the good fight, ever keep the Faith.

Communist Takeover

Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama denies that he is a Communist. Yet his mass manipulations, vote fraud, personal corruption, socialist policies, and contempt for the U.S. people and their Constitution would finally succeed in subverting the American experiment in liberty and justice for all under the rule of law. This Manchurian Candidate has no respect for American traditions and is probably not even a U.S. citizen.

As Rome entered on its road to disintegration, ushering in a Dark Age that lasted for 1,000 years, Cicero, one of his country's greatest patriots and statesmen, wrote, " A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly against the city, but the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through the alley and heard in the very halls of government itself. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist." (Quote from "The American Spectator.")

George Washington agreed. And when asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had agreed to propose, Benjamin Franklin replied, "A republic - if you can keep it." We're about to find out how strong the ideal of democracy is, when a band of traitors has snuck inside the gates.

Aliens

Aliens were supposed to be here yesterday

Not that I read the Daily Star or even believed this for more than a second, I discovered it while browsing Fark.com and contemplating economics. The part that stands out, especially in these uncertain financial times, was that the bookies stopped taking bets after they reached a point were their liabilities exceeded the amount they could easily pay off. Let's consider this for a moment.

Bookies unlike banks clearly aren't going to get bailed out and probably have an even tougher time of getting loans, thusly we can say bookies do not carry much if any moral hazard. Although I am unfamiliar with the gambling laws of the U.K. and most other countries, I feel it would be safe to assume that it is a heavily regulated industry, at least the legal portion. In the U.S. casinos and legal gambling institutions are required by law to have available enough cash to cover every bet they take or chip they play. That being said, we all know that casinos and bookies play the odds and the odds are in their favor usually. Obviously the odds of an Alien encounter are astronomical, pun intended.

So here is my question, because legal bookies are heavily regulated and forced to cover their bets, make them act more responsible? or because no one will bail them out?

Perhaps I am making too broad a generalization, but it would appear to me that this would be in conflict with Adam Smith's invisible hand, thusly banks and finincial instituitons need more regulation, or decrease moral hazard?

The Moose is Loose

GOP VP Candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gets up at 3:00 AM to hunt moose. Today the moose in her sights is Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Hussein Obama-Soetoro. The Internet has now coined a new word: to be "moosed" means that Gov. Palin has hit her target.

She certainly has. Obama, the Left's lying Marxist stealth candidate, who is probably a non-practicing Muslim and may not even be an American citizen, is down ten percentage points against the McCain-Palin Republican ticket. More and more negative facts are now coming out about Obama and his buffoonish running mate, Sen. Biden. The Village Blacksmith predicts that McCain and Palin will destroy both Dems in the upcoming Presidential debates.

We expect a major Republican victory in November. Question is to what extent it will carry over to the Congressional elections. Dems will probably keep control of the House and Senate, but let's just see. They are so slimy, and so wrong, and so opposed to America's interests on virtually every issue that it's just possible a majority of voters will indeed vote for the real change this country needs.

Amethyst Initiative

Most people know by now that many college Presidents and Chancellors have signed on to a movement calling for a reduction of the drinking age. With the name Amethyst coming from the Greeks mythology where said stone would protect the Greeks from there own drunkenness. Important to note as this will affect the Greek communities at these institutions directly, but before we get to that let's take a look back at 1984 and see how this began.

The National minimum Drinking Age Act passed Congress in the summer of 1984 any state that did not adopt 21 as the minimum drinking age was deprived of 10%, now 5%, of the highway funds it may attain.

In 1987 South Dakota challenged the constitutionality of the Act in South Dakota v. Dole naming Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole as the defendant as her office was responsible for enforcing the legislation. S. Dakota, a state where at the age of 19, teens could purchase beer with only a 3.2% alcohol content. The Act was challenged on the grounds that it violated the 21st amendment, which repealed prohibition, and the 10th amendment, preventing federal regulation of states. However the Supreme court upheld the act 7-2, saying that withholding highway funds was only to pressure states, and did not compel them and that the 21st did not garuntee the right for persons 18 to drink.

So then what? Teens stayed away from alcohol until 21? Obviously not, it went underground and then it eventually became a problem for the Universities to deal with. Institutions were blindsided by reports of students dieing from alcohol poisoning, violence and sexual abuse related to drinking, the current National Inter-Fraternal Council President says he deals on average with 20 issues a week relating to the above. Being that the most Greek communities dominate or are a large part of the social scene, and most have a limited self-governing system--meaning that they enforce and can make their own laws but answer to the University and subsequently take their cue from the University's Administration--Universities only course of action besides handing out leaflets, was to then regulate the Greeks. It worked for a time, they asked the Greeks to have only BYOB parties, to register them with the respective Greek offices, have lists of all who are attending complete with birthdays and limit the amount people can bring in to parties.

During this time, however, a new binge drinking culture began emerging at Universities one that still remains today. Universities were in a difficult position, they couldn't stop students from drinking, but still were confronted by drinking related incidents. The breaking point and realization that this was a serious problem came not in 2004 when Middlebury Pres. John McCardell, Jr. wrote a notable article in the New York Times, but later in 2007 when the Dean of Students and 2 school officials from the University of Ryder in New Jersey, were charged in relation to a student's death at a fraternity from drinking, he had a BAC of .426. The Mecer County Prosecutor who filed the charges had this to say "The ramifications of this for colleges and universities in New Jersey, and across the country, is that it will send some kind of message that the standards of college life, when it relates to alcohol, need to be policed carefully." The message was heard and Universities realized that not only were their actions were not working but more improtantly the age limit was ineffective. Soon if they are not talking with their students and drinking they will be talking to the police.

Lord Mayor of London

The new mayor of London, England, is a an attractive, intelligent, urbane conservative in the Thatcher-Reagan mold. Boris Johnson is also an American citizen, born in the U.S.A. That makes him eligible to become President of the United States in 2012-2016. We can't wait.

He Speaks!

Herewith snippets from a refreshingly pithy "Open Letter to Environmentalists" by John Coleman, KUSI meteorologist, founder of TV's "Weather Channel" (May 4, 2008):

"(Your) war against fossil fuels has (degenerated) to a massive scare campaign. ... (Your) science is wrong: There is no significant man-made Global Warming under way, and ... your computer projections of weather chaos are (seriously) flawed.

"(Abandon) this Global Warming frenzy ... stop screaming, 'The sky is falling!'. It is not."

"Weather chaos"-- the modeling problem goes deeper far than that. By mathematical definition, no complex, chaotic system can ever be "modeled" to yield valid projections. In fact, the more complex the model, the less realistic its forecasts become. Climatologists continually "tweaking" inputs and processes guarantee that their creations will diverge from Nature at accelerating rates.

Rational, secular worldviews apparently cannot accept certain fundamental limitations. As Coleman hints, that does not alter Nature's way one whit.

January 2009

Election results from the May 6 Democrat primaries in Indiana and North Carolina give Indiana to Clinton by a small margin, and North Carolina to Obama by a crushing 14-points. MzBill's Indiana "triumph" is certainly attributable to Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," without which she would probably also have sunk considerably lower in NC. We look forward to the demographic breakdown of Obama's victory, since NC has a large black population. In the general election this fall, decent white voters will overwhelm blind black racists.

Indiana and North Carolina reinforce our perception that most people can't stand the Clintons, and that Obama's appeal beyond ultra-left, hate-America, race-conscious Democrats is limited. Now, however, we think it unlikely that Clinton will generate strong enough popular support to cause the Democrats' August convention in Denver to Scrap the Sheik and Switch to the B-tch. Unless something truly horrific engulfs Obama (such as outright treason with Muslim Iran, of which we consider him not only capable but predisposed), this odious incompetent will campaign against Republican John McCain.

John McCain, Bob Dole redux with the difference that many Republicans can't stand him, will win the Presidency. His margin will be small but sufficient. Obama will continue to divide the country, but his black nationalist, socialist agenda will have been exposed and discredited. So McCain will mouth the oath of office this January (we don't believe a word he says).

We see two positives. At least McCain has the respect of the armed forces and will defend America by force if necessary. His Supreme Court appointees will show some evidence of having read the Constitution and respecting the rule of law. McCain's not smart enough cut tax rates, and he's a global warming dupe who can't wait to turn the U.S. over to illegal immigrants. But he's better than Obama. Imagine Louis Farrakhan as Secretary of State.

The Great Divide

Political consensus holds that Hillary's 4-point squeaker in Indiana yesterday (Tuesday, May 6) was "entirely due" to Republican cross-over votes (credit Limbaugh's "OpChaos"). Drudge Report has MzBill "lending" her campaign some $6-million (of clandestine Saudi contributions) to stagger on, though Obama's extreme-left media partisans unanimously ordain this vile anti-Semite, Black Supremacist, rancid entitlement snob [standard lexicon] of necessity the D-rats' nominee.

Does MzBill expect that the Banana will surface additional Ayers, Rezkos, Wrights --terrorists, crooks, fringe-kook pulpiteers-- so that D-rat superdelegates will topple towards her in exhaustion when Big O's negatives become impossible? Must Obama's "skinist" constituency, no matter how betrayed, nonetheless turn out in force come November to extend their hate-America franchise?

Writing in "American Thinker", one Taru Taylor puts Obama in context of Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington (1880) vs. the demagogic agitator W.E.B. DuBois (1903). Washington's proudly self-reliant, bootstrap Americanism stands in brutal contrast to DuBois' "slave mentality" of perpetual resentment, promoting poverty and ignorance as cheap-junk excuses for socio-cultural malaise. As Taylor puts it, DuBois' black "Talented Tenth" rule over their benighted brethren as "elitist parasites who inhabit a Limbo between White bourgeois heaven and Black proletarian hell." [Taylor is talented, and black.]

Tough stuff, apropos to Jackson, Sharpton, Wright. BTW is not contrary to DuBois, but in stark contradiction-- they share no common ground. A century and a quarter past Tuskegee, we know where the Banana stands. Whose side are you on?

Children's Day

In Japan, May 5th is designated "Children's Day". Alas, since 1981 (27 years) the popping of rice-wine corks has been distinctly muted.

"All Aboard!" the Tokyo Express to demographic oblivion. Every year since Reagan's inauguration, the number of Japanese aged 14-years or younger has progressively declined. As of April 2008, grade-schoolers numbered 17,250,000, down 130,000 (-.75%) from a year earlier. This is a record low, the fewest kiddies since statistics first tabulated pre-adolescents back in 1950.

Worse yet, Japan's Internal Affairs Ministry reports that the ratio of flaming youth to total population has now shrunk to 13.5% over 34 years from 1974-- another record low, which shows no signs of any rebound. At 1.3% (13 per 1,000), Japan's fertility rate falls well below the standard 2.1% (21 per 1,000) required to sustain a population. By 2050, the Ministry estimates that Japan's native workforce could shrink by a third, to some 42.3-million if demographic trends continue.

Japan is not alone in facing catastrophic population shifts. Continental Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, also exhibit extreme negative birth-rates. Africa, Asia, Latin America, are by no means immune... drawing on polygamous sinkholes, even Lands of Araby show frissons of concern.

What is it about the Modern Era of free-market peace-and-prosperity in developed countries since the 1950s that fosters (sic) abandonment of home and family, long thought humanity's most basic urge? Mayhap a new Darwinian selection-process gathers steam, whereby functional parents willing to forego material gratifications for the benefit of their posterity will "go forth and multiply", inherit the Earth by virtual default.

What Igor Shatarevich has called "The Socialist Phenomenon" (Harper, 1975), foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, puts "something for nothing" generations in perspective. Living well betimes, at nightfall they leave not even Names. "That which ye sow, that shall ye also reap"... who cannot bring himself to sacrifice for others, our precious Little Ones, deserves oblivion. Protest they may, but those evading the most fundamental biological necessity partake a Culture of Death of which they themselves are the first victims.

Curse of the Climatologists

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocates have taken waterline hits lately-- what's a good Grant Recipient to do? Consider:

-- On April 21st, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (a slave to realism, due to satellite launch protocols) "confirmed that an impending (natural) phase-shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO, PDS)" will likely result in significantly cooler global temperatures from 2010 to 2029 (two decades).

-- On May 1st, Germany's Leibnitz Institute of Marine Sciences (LIMS) reported that Gulf Stream circulation in the North Atlantic ("Meridional Overturning Circulation", MOC) has entered an unambiguous down-phase, a cyclical decline "associated with cooler North Atlantic temperatures for up to eighty years" (through 2080 - 2090). This pattern, says the LIMS, explicitly resembles an earlier 40-year MOC prevailing from 1940 - 1979.

To arms! AGW's true believers rally their pseudo-scenarios in two ways. First, as Britain's Hadley Center (for climate studies) states, "(we expect) that man-made [anthropogenic] global warming will superimpose itself on natural (climatic) variations"-- i.e. that .009% CO2 emissions (one part per 100,000) will swamp atmospheric/oceanic factors determining planetary temperatures over 8 - 10+ decades. Ya think?

Second, AGW types increasingly rely on fudging temperature statistics dating from the 1950s and before: By claiming that original records somehow understated temperature readings during the last cooling phase (1940 - '79), Warmists lower their statistical base so that today's numbers appear relatively higher (warmer) in cyclical context. Comments Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, who fingered this ploy in debunking Mann's notorious "hockey stick" graph in 2002, "Not only is there no natural or statistical evidence requiring such (downward) adjustment, but resort to shameless historical re-writes has characterized non-objective, politicized climate advocacy for many years."

Indeed, Warmists' phony Consensus continues to unravel. Critics increasingly dispute AGW propaganda in detail, expose the ludicrous presuppositions underlying their aggregate scenarios. To wit:

As of May 2, 2008, the U.K Telegraph relates that "IPCC models [the UN's risible Kyoto warmsters] admittedly do not factor in any actual events (!), such as strength of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic or cyclical El Nino warming in the Pacific" (!!). That said, it follows that AGW scenarios do not (cannot?) address standard solar-radiation factors (sunspots, Maunder Minimums, etc.), geophysical or plate-tectonic climate elements-- outside their taxaholic bureaucratic enclaves, anything at all. What's that you say?-- your grant's away!

Reviewing a Nature Journal article by Hadley Center Warm-worts, the eminent Dr. Roger Pelke baldly noted: "If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with (current warming) predictions, then so too is everything." Yet in the NYT, one Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, asserts that "Too many think that Global Warming means monotonic, relentlessly escalating temperatures worldwide." But if "warming" is not global, shows no consistent upside patterns... then as Pelke says, neither will anything, including a major cooling shift. (Pelke means, an end of the Interglacial Holocene going back 10,000 years.) Whatever his purported credentials, NCAR's Trenberth might benefit from a remedial course in freshman logic.

We write at length, not expecting any audience but because cyberspace has the great virtue of preserving everything. Years from now, when AGW extremism has gone the way of Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" (1969), these Blacksmith comments will cheerfully remain. We post at one remove, of course... unlike Steve McIntyre et al. we claim neither expertise nor much originality. But independent private citizens assessing facts in place of "mere opinion", citing Nature's reality in opposition to cultists' drivel, is surely no bad thing.

Arbitrary, agenda-driven "climate models" promote circular-reasoned academic computer programs. Absent all "actual facts," designed to validate flawed suppositions in advance, these elaborate fantasy-exercises are entitled to no respect whatever. Such foolish fads cannot persist indefinitely

Pacific Decadal Shift

As of May Day, NASA has announced that due to a "Pacific Decadal Shift " (PDS), the years 2010 - 2029 will likely represent a global cooling phase. Of course, this looming PDS is but one climatological factor out of many, nor does NASA provide context or perspective on any related non-PDS episodes. But this scenario accords well with alternating warming/cooling phases of increasing frequency from 1890, the end of a 500-year Little Ice Age from the late-middle 14th Century (about AD 1350).

Over fifty years, 1890 - 1939, Earth experienced an extreme warming rebound. From 1940 - 1979, forty years, patterns turned noticeably cold (remember Newsweek's notorious glacial alarmism?). Then over thirty years, 1980 - 2009 has devolved a relatively milder stage, though satellite data indicates not warming but a stable climate regime from 1996/98. So NASA's 20-year extrapolation (2010 - 2029) precisely fits a 120-year old pattern.

Alas, cycles of ever-higher frequencies, greater amplitudes must end when global thermostats crash by simultaneously switching on and off. After an inchoate period of conflicting, rapid shifts through (say) 2069 (thirty years from 2029), quite possibly our Holocene Interglacial will become one with Nineveh and Tyre as Ice Time proceeds on cyclical schedule for 110,000 years. We're overdue by 1,500 years already.

Global climate is "chaotic" in Lorenz's fractal-geometric sense (non-random, but strictly indeterminate). Nature, objective reality, cares nothing for skewed computer models, which by mathematical necessity are useless anyhow. But cycles are cycles, whatever elements or factors they entail. We've warned the kids, as this 21st Century wears on, to seek out lower latitudes. By 2029 if not before, the weight of "cooling" evidence will be undeniable.

Take Us to Your Leader

Per an article by Nick Bostrum in MIT's "Technology Review" (April-May 2008):

In the late 1940s, when the UFO craze was just starting, Enrico Fermi of the Manhattan Project was asked whether he credited UFOs as driven by extraterrestrial intelligence. Fermi was not interested in UFOs as such. Instead he asked, if Visitors are with us, "then where are they?"

The real question is, Where have they been? Martian microbes, huge creatures plumbing 50-mile deep oceans on Enceladus are one thing-- high-tech extraterrestrial civilizations are another. By Clarke's Law, sufficiently advanced technologies are "indistinguishable from magic". What matters is a scientific/technological culture, not whether it evolved from (say) giant squid or insectivorous arthropods.

Our Milky Way Galaxy is some 100-thousand light years in diameter, comprising 100-billion stars. But Virgo, the great galaxy centering our Local Group, contains 3-trillion stars, thirty times the Milky Way's, with billions of large globular clusters disposed around a disk ten times our size (one billion LY diameter). Virgo is 65-million LYs away, so what we see coincides with the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) boundary, when the Chicxulub meteor-strike in Yucatan extinguished the dinosaurs forever. On a scale of 1-inch = 100,000 LYs, Virgo is some 54 feet (650 inches) beyond the Milky Way... the (visible) Universe itself extends some 2.25 miles, to 45th Street from the base of Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village.

Anyhow, to answer Fermi, we assume that "stars like dust" are veritable swamps of (by definition) extraterrestrial life. But by the statistical "principle of mediocrity", whereby any given sample or even set of samples tends to cluster around a mean, high-tech alien civilizations will likely rise and fall in isolation: Separated by 25,000 LYs in space, easily 100-million years of time.

Even should instantaneous teleportation or some quantum-physical effect render such a culture capable of journeying anywhere, at any time, chances are that, first, exploration would be defeated by sheer number [Carl Sagan]; or second, that no contact could occur because within that space/time reference-frame there would be nothing to contact.

Suppose the Black Ships did land in Central Park tomorrow. Our first question should not be "Who are you?" or "Where are you from?" but "Why are you here?"

When Captain James Cook landed in Hawaii in 1776, native cultures perished; by 1890, 80% of the aboriginal habitants were gone. In 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz's fast-carrier fleet touched stone-age Fiji: Within a generation, the islands had joined the UN, prospered under Australian territorial administration-- from cannibalism to Big Macs by 1970s.

Who then are our Starfarers? Frankly, we'd rather wait another 500 years or so before we have to ask the question.

Churchill Agonistes

Endlessly quotable, a Ulysses of adventure, Winston Churchill continues to fascinate all comers. Apropos our current literary project, we find the Great Commoner described in Aristotelian terms: "(Churchill's) great virtue lay in choosing well."

Fight or flight?-- courage (says Aristotle) is a moral virtue, prudence an intellectual one. Active yet contemplative, Churchill excelled at both: "By precept and example, he wove thought and action seamlessly, heroically together." Aristotle asserts that "magnanimity", greatness of soul and spirit, is humankind's great excellence.

Of all Americans, we think Abraham Lincoln most sanctifies Aristotle's insight. (Washington too, in different contexts.) Yeats wrote, "The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the Life or of the Work." Perhaps for we mere mortals... but Churchill, Washington and Lincoln attained magnanimity as of Mahatmas, "a beauty of the spirit that transfigures you and me."

One could do worse than meditate these matters. "And will a' not come again?"

Ways to Say

Vodkapundit and assorted other bloggers have transmitted some dozen advisories on the disgraceful PCBS destruction of Roget's Thesaurus ten days ago. Though we've reverted to a 1911 version, relatively disordered and obsolete, a fellow sufferer informs us that a site called FreeThesaurus.net (qv) is a more than adequate replacement.

Indeed it is... site posts 30,000 main entries with 2,500,000+ synonyms. In contrast to Roget's (sic) genuinely stupid results for "Father" or "Weapon", FreeThesaurus.net lists dozens upon dozens of stated or implied equivalents, including "City Fathers", "Holy Father"; elder, patriarch, senior, ad infinitum. Verb forms and turns-of-phrase receive extensive treatment. Nothing could reveal more starkly the crude ideological bias behind Roget's desecration.

If our own and Vodkapundit's reaction to gutting Roget's is any indication, that originally appealing site will be out of business in three months. Good riddance.

Out of Camelot, a Banana Peeled

Current campaign commentary has degenerated to cliches... the only question seems to be, will Denver's Superdelegates in August plump for BHO (aka "the Banana") or the egregious MzBill, wife of the First Black President so characterized because prosecuting violations of his Presidential Oath amounted to "lynch law."

Since LBJ in 1964, no D-rat presidential candidate has ever won the national "white vote." Over decades, blacks voting 90%+ en bloc have become D-rats' indispensable core constituency. The Obama Phenomenon was thus inevitable, however long-delayed.

In 2008, however, the Banana's problem is not race but character and personality: A Statist demagogue espousing typically vile anti-Semitism, an exclusionary group-identity, rancid entitlement snobbery the more outrageous for being entirely unearned. A feckless, rootless Leftard, the Banana seeks out racist Black Supremacists, certified crooks and terrorists, hate-America types of all stripes foreign and domestic. His wife, code-named Michelle, is only the most vocal.

D-rats nominated the first Catholic (Al Smith, in 1928); the first female VP (Geraldine Ferraro/Zacaro in 1984-- she preferred her maiden name [sic] to that of her notorious Mafioso spouse)... now comes the first black candidate, so divorced from America's mainstream that Kenya, Indonesia, Muslim cesspools East and West have come to seem like front-porch enclaves in Dubuque.

We hope indeed that MzBill and the Banana will tally losing totals come November 2008. But as Victor David Hansen says, the worry is how their validation of Pastor Putrid's hateful rhetoric will carry on-- does not this guarantee that our next racist demagogue will be "quite white," i.e. that the next Senator Bilbo's crazed rants will seem unassailable because the Banana and his coterie proclaimed them first?

The Civil War is long since ended. The dialectical rebound from 1960s perverse "Black Liberation" is just gearing up. Meantime, benighted Superdelegates must eventually decide: Write off their black vote, probably forever, accepting riots in the streets to go with MzBill's blackmailing extortionists for patronage reasons; or watch whites riot (per "Recreate '68") as their Feminazi favorite shrinks before a Candidate of Color incapable of winning but a single State?

If only McCain would campaign for dogcatcher, opening his convention to Bobby Jindal, Fred Thomson, or any competent Conviction Candidate!

Ansel Adam's Yosemite

I bring it up for two reasons, one I need to look at letters instead of numbers for a bit, and two because his photos are littered in buildings across campus. I have seen them often and not thought much of them, they are attractive and eye catching, I've stopped and looked at a couple but more often than not I'm involved in my thoughts and en route to somewhere else. It was only today that I happened to been studying in the Rawls building; a quiet place, with the open architecture one would find in a computer applied to a "new age" building. However Rawls is part of the Krannert School of Management where they have, out in the open, free copies of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times for the taking, I usually pick up the WSJ and glance at whatever shock and awe picture the NYT has determined to stain its front page. However, today the travel section of the NYT had been removed from the Sunday edition and was sitting on a chair next to the rack where the papers are kept in the margin I noticed the name Ansel Adams. I did not think of it immediately, but was stirred and once I turned to the page, remembered instantly. I had known nothing about this man except the prints I had seen and his name written in bold block letters along the bottom of the prints, upon reading this piece (online version found here) I soon had a new found respect for his work, and realized someone had actually put thought into the interior aesthetics of the buildings on campus, imagine walking into the Electrical Engineering building and seeing "Bridalveil Fall" on the wall; I'm sure some EE majors feel like they are heading down that fall at times. All in all they are refreshing scenery in buildings where students can easily drown in the knowledge required for their major and forget whats out THERE, Yosemite is truly a national treasure.

Roget's Hijacked

Anyone who doubts that "Roget's II" represents a a dumbed-down, skewed and truncated, ideologically sabotaged "update" (by an acknowledged radical femmer masquerading as a disinterested PhD) might visit Vodkapundit and associated sites. Roget's 175-year old reference is available in other forms --we've substituted an English-French version from 1911-- but really, this latest text represents censorship, not "editing".

Try "father", which returns "A male parent", period. No noun synonyms, no verb forms (bear, engender, foster, nurture etc.), no turns-of-phrase. As for "weapon": What of "rapier wit" and so on? Rumor? This eviscerated Roget's is a Dick-and-Jane monument to duckspeak PCBS, no longer a thesaurus at all-- an assault on language as communication in Orwell's fundamental sense. Depriving work-a-day writers of this classic tool (for what?) is an absolute insult.

What's next, "dictionaries" with amended definitions, encyclopedias careful to fit all history, philosophy, cross-referenced bibliographies to Mde. BS Femmer's mold? Betcha she's beavering at it, as we speak.

The Internet Rumor Mill: Entirely Unreliable

You can stop your stomachs from churning. We've seen this happen before, where blogs are tools in the propagation of rumors. A blogger gets hold of a meme and runs with it. Instapundit seems to me very credulous. A recent example I've seen: "The University of Kentucky no longer mentions the Jewish holocaust in history classes," is a lie. Checking Pyrthroes' claim below I went to thesaurus.com which is the online cousin of Roget's. It is linked to dictionary.com and encyclopedia.com here. It's true there is no return for "weapon." However, there is a definition for it and an encyclopedia entry for it. Likewise, if you try "sword" in the thesaurus, you do get a reply. I conclude that this is simply bad software. The existence of "sword" in the thesaurus belies the notion that there's a conspiracy, no? That "phallo-centric" term would surely have been expunged before "weapon," no?

Roget's Thesaurus

From Glenn Reynolds' "Instapundit" via "Vodkapundit" we have learned and verified that Roget's Thesaurus, a classic English-language reference, has been "edited" --brutally censored-- to reflect ur-Left PCBS speech codes that now render this standard work completely worthless. ("Weapon", for example, returns "no results". Feministical, peacenik, vicious partisan rants go on for pages.)

We've E-mailed a website or two concerning this, but are cynical enough to think that Roget's invaluable tool is lost forever. Is his Thesaurus such a nerd-like technical compendium that no-one cares? Do we not see that dictionaries, encyclopedias, historical biographies and bibliographies et al. will not survive this vicious totalitarian assault?

Composing "Alligator" in three volumes over some time now, forfeiting Roget makes one's stomach churn.

Hurricane Gore

Newsmax reports that Kerry Emanuel, a "prominent MIT hurricane scientist", has repudiated assertions that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) drives tropical storm systems that grow to hurricanes. Computer models project scenarios in wild divergence from reality, asserts Prof. Emanuel, previously cited as a major authority by Gore-bastic acolytes. Though hurricanes have strengthened over the past thirty years (1979, satellites' first global coverage), their annual incidence has lessened: "(Our) models ... (fail at) reproducing Nature," says Emanuel.

Strange... since at least the mid-19th Century, before "climatology" became an acknowledged technical if not scientific discipline ["models" are no substitute for controlled experiments, which by definition cannot obtain], atmospheric studies have unequivocally defined cyclic phenomena that cancel or reinforce in overlapping waves. Lorenz's "butterfly effect", the basis of Chaos Theory [Lorenz just died at age 96], asserts that non-random processes may yet be indeterminate: On self-similar ("fractal") scales, chance and necessity drive patterns from root biases entirely too subtle to detect. Wholly determined, yes, but also unpredictable because consequences in fractal-geometric detail are unknown, unknowable.

Short-term climate cycles are just that. Whatever engendered oscillating fluctuations centuries ago, modern industrial civilization is not a factor. And since cycles by definition DO repeat, why waste literally billions of dollars to re-state the obvious, when by Chaos Theory no meaningful cause-and-effect correlation of factors is evident, or can be.

In any case, top aides to AGW skeptics in the U.S. Congress --Senator James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, for one-- boldly assert that 2007 represented a "tipping point" for AGW alarmists, that as new-found skeptics like Emanuel speak out 2008 may finally drive a stake through Global Warming's vampire heart, restore a modicum of scrutiny to this latest ur-Leftist campaign to bleed free-enterprise capitalism to death by a thousand pseudo-scientific cuts.

The 19th Day of April, 1775

Our esteemed nephew, Brent, was born 21 years ago today - on April 19, Patriots Day in Massachusetts, the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride and and the Battles of Lexington and Concord that began the American Revolution. "Embattled farmers," our determined ancestors among them, picked off nearly every British officer and sent 800 of King George's professional troops fleeing back to Boston in mounting panic. Only the timely arrival of reinforcements saved their precipitous retreat from becoming a wholesale rout.

A couple of months later the British army sallied forth again, this time to attack Rebel fortifications overlooking Boston from the high ground known as Breed's, now Bunker, Hill. Up marched the disciplined, red coated lines, wave on wave, drums rat-tatting and bag pipes scirling. Sun glistened on thousands of leveled musket barrels with terrible splendor.

"Steady, men!" called Brent's cousin, Capt. William Prescott. "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes!"

Volleys roared from behind wicker breastworks packed with earth. Gaps appeared in the British line, but the ranks closed and pressed on up the hill. Three times the British fell back and three times they rallied and surged forward. The Patriots were running out of ammunition. Peter Hayward, a giant blacksmith "with arms like oak trees," called his black, Indian-fighting dog, leaped the parapet, and charged into the enemy line, "raging like a demon (and) cracking British skulls like egg shells" with the butt of his musket as his ferocious hound sprang for their throats.

George Washington sounded the retreat, leaving England in possession of the field. But when the attackers mustered their force they found that, again, nearly every officer was dead and that casualties were nearly 50%. The Revolution lasted another eight years, but the British army never set foot out of Boston again.

Bunker Hill is a proud part of America's heritage - the "Glorious Cause" of freedom and democracy. Brent, an Eagle Scout and ROTC cadet at Purdue University, is only the latest on the eternal roll of honor. We hoist a glass in his honor on this special day!

What, Me Debate?

Last Thursday night, April 17, Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama (www.townhall.com/michaelbarone/ 08/04/19) debated with his opponent, Mrs. Bill Clinton, preparatory to the important Pennsylvania primary this coming Tuesday. One of the two moderators was George Stephanoupolos, press secretary in Democrat President Bill Clinton's administration - hardly an antagonistic participant. But Stephanoupolos had the nerve to go beyond Obama's general campaign talking points, raising issues of substance important to an informed vote.

Stephanoupolos probably intended to give Obama the opportunity to add substance to his rhetoric. But Pastor Wright's protege' - the popular Chicago pol who announced his Senate bid only two years ago from the home of his friend, Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers - is widely considered to have made a fool of himself. Without going into detail, this Harvard Law graduate held a press conference next day and announced that he would not engage in further debates, because the questions were "unfair."

A leading contender for President of the United States now refuses to discuss his position on matters of vital public policy! "Trust me!" smirks Obama. So here's another question for the man who disdains to wear an American flag pin: Why should we? Are half of all Americans really that stupid? What will it take for Democrats to wake up and smell the snake oil?

Green Machines

Arthur St. Antoine, "Asphalt Jungle" (editorial) in Motor Trend, 04/18/2008 (Friday)

http://blogs.motortrend.com/6245781/editorials/is-the-earth-producing-more-oil/index.html

Brazils' deep-ocean Sugar Loaf of 33-billion bbls cannot possibly originate as fossil residues. Nor can Russia's 40,000-foot drill-shafts (42,350 ft. = eight miles). If petrochemicals ooze up as hydrocarbons, converted to "fossil fuel" deposits by abiogenic action under geophysical heat and pressure, oil becomes an eco-friendly renewable resource and whacked-out Greenies must bark their tarnation bow-wows elsewhere.

Over-population, crop failures, resource depletion; air-and-water contamination, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), mutating plagues-- Gaia runs a fever, life is a disease. What must we do to be saved? Chant mantras, kiss my ring, send money, says Al Gore. Fifty years of such tripe, and we haven't cited Nuclear Power yet.

Pysch tests akin to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personlity Profile (MMPP) dating from the 1950s are beginning to predict "leftist" tendencies based on parentage (functional two-parent --father and mother-- households) , narcissism ("compensatory self-esteem" deriving not from material deprivation but its spoiled-brat opposite, instant gratification where nothing is ever enough); and temperament, defined as Optimism regarding potential self-fulfillment vs. Pessimism that projects one's personal sense of failure and unworthiness onto others, transferred for safety's sake into public/political domains.

In other words, extreme partisan proclivities are "built in", innate, irrational symptoms of deep-seated personality traits. "Robber barons" sublimate ambitions constructively (cf: "Edifice complex"); others less talented default en masse to "rob Peter" principles, claiming entitlements --something for nothing-- rather than admit themselves incapable of ordering their own destinies.

Circumstances, people change... but suppose that by First Grade, psych-testing revealed with 95% probability where a subject's partisan leanings lay. Would productive sectors move in self-defense to winnow that chaff, or stand passively aside awaiting legions of new tapeworms prepared to smash-and-grab anything and everything worthwhile?

Ripples in the Stream

Recent financial news relates that Citibank has written down $14-billion of assets, eliminated 9,000 jobs in 1-Qtr-08. "We're not happy with these results," said newly-appointed CEO Vikram Pandit during a Wall Street conference call [yuh don' say]. On 'tother hand, analysts/traders view Citibank as "padded" by its global consumer and wealth-management operations, which compensate for sub-prime losses plus tens of billions of dollars vanished into thin air via "derivative" transactions which no-one at Citi even pretends to understand.

Meantime, as search-engine-of-record, Google Corp. recorded a 30% leap in profits from Dec-07 through end-March 2008. In context, Google shares have dropped 35% on a $75-billion "evaporation of shareholder value" over that same period. Google closed Thursday, 17 April 2008, at $449.54 per share (10:1 split, anyone?). The company's founders jet about in custom-fitted 747s, comparable to Saudi princes' low-end conveyances.

Anyone care to bet where the U.S. economy is headed, or markets either: Great Depression (Soros), slow-growth re-adjustment (Bernanke), lingering recession (unanimous press verdict, until a Democrat takes office)? Strange how pessimism regarding D-rat political prospects --Obama and MzBill-- correlates with investor optimism. Seems ye olde Consumer Confidence is also picking up.

"Hey-hey, ho-ho, prosperity has got to go!" Over to you, Karl.

Democrat Pathology

A reader has called our political posts here "negative" and "bitter." We consider this a natural response when the highest Congressional leaders in the $4-trillion U.S. government, and two widely accepted candidates for President, aggressively undermine and obstruct our county's difficult and deadly on-going war to defeat the enemy that killed 3,000 innocent civilians in cold blood. Nor are we alone in this perception.

Quin Hillyer writes today in "The American Spectator" about the first anniversary "of what might be the most craven public statement by a wartime elected leader in the history of the United States." Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said, "I believe ... this war is lost."

President Bush's "surge" in American troops in Iraq had barely begun, but Reid's mind was already made up. A week later, blind to facts, heedless of his effect on troop morale, and perfectly content to encourage the enemy, this corrupt, incompetent Nevada hack repeated his statement and called the nation's Commander in Chief "a liar." Reid never said this about frat-boy President Bill Clinton, who was disbarred for lying to a court under oath. Millions of loyal, patriotic American soldiers gave their lives to make Harry Reid possible. He must think they're pretty stupid.

George Bush's surge has worked brilliantly, and the war in Iraq is all but won. What are we to make of the leaders of a major political party who so eagerly offer aid and comfort to the enemy? And of their campaign contributors, like George Soros? And of the people who vote them into office? It is true, not mere rhetoric, to call them fools and traitors.

Hillyer concludes that the Left's attitude "can be described only as a potentially deadly pathology." Democrats are so beyond reason on so many issues, even so beyond common sense, that they appear collectively unbalanced. Yet our future may be in their hands. Normal citizens may well be negative and bitter at the prospect.

Observations by Will Rogers

"The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." "Things will get better - despite our efforts to improve them."

Loyal Opposition

Reaction to Wednesday's Pennsylvania press conference ("debate") accumulates. In "American Spectator," one Quin Hillyer addresses contemporary D-rat partisanship as not merely a symptom but a contagion, a disease. In brief:

From Reid and Mde. Frum/Pelosi down, since Election 2000 if not before, hyper-partisan ultra-Leftists have hijacked the party of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK. Cliche this may be, but Hillyer spells it out-- "Rank irresponsibility, outlandish rhetoric, flat-out denial" of reality on every level. On America's economy, national defense, socio-cultural wellbeing from education and healthcare to pension planning, Congressional Democrats (sic) play word-games without regard for ruinous consequences already evident, inevitably worsening under virtual legislative sabotage.

To proclaim before America's sworn enemies that their own country is "morally indefensible on the world stage" (Gore, Kerry, Barack Banana and MzBill) is not only a treacherous betrayal on its face, but self-evident propaganda without facts, logic, even a smidgen of goodwill. Public figures espousing such positions, in defiance of all American experience, represent a virulent pathology antithetical to every force for good.

Given Obama and MzBill, whether a well-meaning, rational, marginally loyal Leftist opposition is even possible in 2008 America remains an open question. Hecatombs of dead in Vietnam, Cambodia, very near Iraq; burn food for fuel, let peons starve; observe scorched-earth Detroit, New Orleans, Boston-Chicago-Philadelphia: If you would see D-rat monuments, look around.

Obama's Waterloo

Commentary on last night's debate in Pennsylvania with MzBill of Tuzla fame (Wednesday, April 16th) is unanimously of opinion that the Banana's media cocoon has unraveled to bring forth a strangely mutated butterfly. To wit: Barack exposed himself not merely as an "empty suit" in matters of Capital Gains taxes, Second Amendment rights and national defense, but as an absolute clueless dolt concerning his party's bedrock Middle America constituents.

We suggest that Barry-baby open a Black Liberation funeral parlor in downtown Chicago, next to his "spiritual mentor's" Church of the God Damn, where his first memorial service could mount an open casket displaying the rouged and wrinkled corpse of 2008's incompetent, corrupt, hate-America excuse for Harry Truman's once-great coalition. C'mon, Barry-- that's one area where MzBill can't compete.

Links in Blacksmith Posts

To link to another site, 1) highlight the text in your post that you want linked; 2) click the greenish "link" icon on the menu bar above, fifth from left after "font"; and, 3) enter the web address of the linked article in the box as shown. That should do it.

Refuting IPCC

Link to www.NewsBusters.org/Blogs/Noel-Sheppard/2008/04/Nobel-Prize for letter from a real (vs. PCBS) Nobel Laureate to the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In brief, one Svend Hendriksen decisively refutes Al Gore's "anthropgenic CO2" schtick over 22,00 years (includes graph).

Seems past time that AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) scamsters met scientific come-uppance in the real world. Like Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (1969), Limits to Growth ("peak oil", etc.), The Hot Zone (Great Plagues) and so on, Gore's latest Leftard scare ends cowering before objective natural processes. This blatant fraud and eco-phony has the nerve to accuse detractors of "false conscious" mind-crimes in Gaia's holy name.

Gore is not yet sixty-five. Will his seventieth birthday celebrate Ice Time in the way that Ehrlich has been shown up for the asinine Chicken Little that he is?

The "Liberal" Elite

The linked article in Townhall by George F. Will is the clearest expose' of so-called liberalism that we have seen. This seasoned columnist makes the point that Hillary Clinton merely lies about facts. But Barack Obama is, himself, a lie. This left wing extremist's entire persona of "hope" and "change" is a fraud. He is certainly a racist hate-monger who only calls himself a Christian for camouflage. Now Obama's "confidential" speech in San Francisco last Friday reveals him as a stunningly arrogant, condescending elitist. This beneficiary of the best education that America has to offer has no respect for his fellow citizens, and certainly no appreciation for his country's transcendent ideals. He would be more at home in Tehran.

Latest polls show The Banana down by 20% against Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary, coming up on April 22. We can't wait to see how the Democrats deal with this lying loser, who leads in the delegate count for their party's Presidential nomination. Herewith a prediction: Clinton will be the Democrat nominee and McCain will win a decisive majority, if not an historic landslide (which I don't rule out, as MzBill's utter unfitness becomes increasingly obvious). If the Republicans also regain control of Congress, the Treason Party may not completely recover.

Choices

"Anonymous" comments on other comments in "The Grand Inquisitor." We answer, yes, of course times change. But progress means changing for the better, and the on-going loss of fundamental American values we are witnessing today is quite the opposite. The collectivist assault on liberty and justice affects the quality of our lives and the character of our civilization. To minimize these foul usurpations by calling them "my" narrow-minded prejudices enables Anonymous to pretend that they aren't all that important. If "liberty and justice" are just words, then they are abstractions not worth defending. Big mistake.

George Washington warned, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Why is Mao's "barrel of a gun" so difficult to understand?

It is indeed a sad and bitter day when the inestimable gifts purchased with the blood and sacrifice of generations of patriots - our forefathers - are not valued, but foolishly neglected and thrown away. We are betraying our heritage, and the consequences will be dire. Like the German people on Kristalnacht, when you hear the stamp of jackboots at your door it is too late.

We can debate when the assault on America's founding principles began. The process is always gradual: Hitler laughingly referred to it as "salami tactics." We propose the direct election of senators certified by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan when the states had not, in fact, approved this Constitutional amendment. Carpetbaggers like Hillary Clinton can now pretend to represent New York while having no connection with it. Populist Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who followed Taft, not Teddy Roosevelt, instituted the per capita income tax, opening the door to the tyranny of the majority and the destructive welfare state. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society accelerated the process, and Republican George W. Bush added prescription drug entitlements. The pitch is always "something for nothing," but it's the current voters who get the benefit and their children and grandchildren who get the bill.

Anonymous offers the typical ad hominem by saying that your writer's "tone echoes the liberal eugenicism [he] supposedly denounce[s]." Really? My critic should look up the definition of words he doesn't understand, but he is right about "liberal eugenics." Ethnic cleansing appeals to people who don't value others' lives. As a matter of fact your writer actually does oppose mass murder, which leftists are prone to think of as "social engineering." Stalin's slaughter of the Kulaks, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and Pol Pot's "killing fields" come to mind, all ideologically motivated atrocities without parallel in sane society. We find this kind of moral relativism abhorrent, but recognize Anonymous' need to posture in the absence of disciplined thought.

What solutions do we propose? The enemies of freedom are too delusional, or worse, selfish and ignorant, to recognize their own best interest, so reasoned argument is wasted. They can only be defeated politically. Numerous structural fixes come to mind, which we'll discuss at leisure. The 20th Century's encroachments on freedom can be reversed, but the longer we wait the more difficult and dangerous the task becomes. Thomas Jefferson declares that "when government becomes destructive of [man's natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." That day will come.

In the meantime, we note that Communist China has aroused a worldwide storm of protest over its outrageous tyranny in Tibet. It may also be true that the stark incompetence, disloyalty and arrogance of this year's Presidential candidates may finally get enough people's attention to prompt the necessary debate on where the nation has gone wrong. Could the scales be falling? Anonymous sighs, "we can't go back to the 1950s." Who said we wanted to? Just another Straw Man. As Prythroes writes in his "Inquisitor" comment, better to ask where we'll be in 2018. Time is getting short.

The Grand Inquisitor

In Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, the above says to a silent Christ:

Oh never, never can they(the masses) feed themselves without us. No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us "make us your slaves, but feed us."

Five Years On

For perspective on this day, link to JulesCrittenden.com/2007/04/08/April-8-2003/
wherein is related a vignette of early combat in Iraq which every contemporary congressional D-rat first supported with enthusiasm.

The war against Saddam Hussein (as in Barack) was won by June 2003. Courtesy of Assad's Syria and Ahmadinejad's Iran, mop-up operations took the standard four years to complete, essentially ending in mid-summer 2007. Now that al Sadr's "Mahdi Army" is in full retreat, by Labor Day 2008 even the worst defeatists (Pelosi, Reid et al.) are due to bolt down great, heaping fewmets of proverbial crow.

Iraq Militias

As of Monday (04/07/08) we read that Maliki has demanded that Sadr's Iran-sponsored militia must disband or face annihilation by Iraqi Army forces operating with minimal American participation. Mookie the Wookie's response is a face-saving statement to effect that his Mahdi Army (sic) will de-commission if an appropriate gaggle of Mullahs so desires.

Given clerical mandate, Sadr's force in Basra may well cave to Iraqi vs. American military pressure. If so, Iran will have suffered a setback; Basra will be relieved of Sadr's vigilante terrorists; and Maliki's central government will definitely have enhanced its credibility.

Crocker and Petraeus are due to report developments before Pelosi's wretched Fifth Columnists tomorrow (Tuesday). We guarantee that nothing either of them says will be reported honestly.

Partners in Peace and Freedom

Today, in a major and naturally under-reported political milestone, Mr. Allawi, the new prime minister of Iraq, gave a short speech when swearing in the country's first independent government. The PM promised to "crush the outlaws" of al-Aqaida who are responsible for a bloody assassination spree in Fallujah, a vicious attempt to delay the turn-over that has left hundreds dead. Allawi had sought to restrain the United States' response in Fallujah - until he learned that he himself was targeted for death.

"I warn the forces of terror once again," now declares the prime minister. "We will not forget who stood with us and against us in this crisis."

With us and against us. Even in the Middle East, if not in Pastor Wright's United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, normal people recognize the difference between the forces of hate and murder and America's protectors of peace and freedom. -- Our thanks to Grim's Hall, "True Believers," heartily recommended.

The Unprofitable Servant

In 1794 Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence and 3rd President of the United States, began separating the moral teachings of Jesus from the Bible's accretion of supernatural elements and imposed dogma. Calling his book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually from the Gospels," he focused on Christ's essential message of love and service. Jefferson's unique and influential volume appeared in print only at the turn of the twentieth century, when it became a tradition to present it to new members of Congress. Our copy is from Dover Publications, New York, 2006.

The Left's fashionable "Liberation Theology" is careful to over-look this passage from Matthew xxv, 14-30, "The Parable of the Talents" (pp. 76-77; our condensation). We notice that its title obscures its theme. But Jesus celebrates the virtues of capitalism and warns where sloth and default will lead:

For the kingdom of heaven is a man traveling into a far country, who called his servants and delivered unto them his goods for safe-keeping. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, according to their abilities, and went on his journey.

Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with them, and earned five more. Likewise he that had received two gained two more; but he that had received one talent went and buried it in the earth.

After a long time the lord of those servants came again, and reckoned with them. And he that had received the five talents said, "Lord, behold, I have gained beside them five talents more." His lord said unto him, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant! As thou hast been faithful over these few things, now shalt ye rule over many things: enter into the joy of thy lord."

He also that had received two talents came and said, "Lord, thou deliverdest unto me two talents; behold, I have gained two other talents beside them." And his lord said unto him, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant! Thou too hast been faithful over these few things: I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of thy lord."

Then he that had received the one talent came and said, "Lord, I know that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown and gathering where thou hast not strawed. And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, here is that which is thine."

His lord answered and said unto him, "Thou wicked, slothful servant, thou knowest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed. Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

"Therefore take the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

"And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Our Puritan ancestors saw themselves as servants of God, and interpreted this parable to mean that they were entrusted to increase what was given to them. Their Puritan Ethic viewed material prosperity as the reward of competent diligence, a sign of divine favor. But they labored in the Lord's vineyard not for themselves alone. Their creed was harsh and demanding, because they feared God and took His Kingdom seriously. Charity was their hope for salvation, and they knew that they could not give from empty hands.

We recognize that the profound parables of Jesus teach truth at many levels. The saying "I reap where I have not sown" is easy to mistake; but the Lord is not a farmer. "Seed" takes different forms - it is an investment in the future that must not just be buried in the ground, but watched over and husbanded till harvest time. Jesus himself says here that of all the forms of seed, capital (talent indeed!) is among the most important.

Clearing Underbrush

As the nation's presidential campaigns grind forward, much is said about the candidates' economic prescriptions for this country. Whoever is elected this November, and whichever political party controls Congress, the new President's policies will affect our lives in direct and noticeable ways. Can we agree that the fundamental duty of our elected representatives is to protect our lives and property, and to preserve our freedom with equal justice under law? Surely it is obvious that the fellow citizens who we send to Washington and temporarily entrust with ultimate power are stewards, not nannies. They have no business imposing "experiments" attempting to force us into some arbitrary "social engineering" template.

Who has, earns, or inherits more or less money is not the government's business. Rich and poor must receive equal respect, for to legislate otherwise is to create privileged classes contrary to our founding principles, special interests each scrambling for power to oppress the other. Justice and wisdom demand treating all conditions fairly, the rich because they are the engine of culture and prosperity and the poor because we value human life and recognize its infinite potential.

The fundamental problem with democracy, recognized since ancient Greece, is the "tyranny of the majority." Greedy, lawless mobs will always band together to vote themselves benefits at their neighbors' expense, and ruthless, equally lawless aristocracies arise precisely to prevent it. America's founding fathers were acutely aware of this fatal flaw and designed the U.S. Constitution to minimize the danger.

Clinton and Obama, the two Democrat candidates, both advocate rapacious economic policies that defy this reality of human nature and ignore the gigantic, miserable failure of every socialist regime ever imposed. Surely we need not bring up the ghastly results of the Soviet Union; China; Cuba; North Korea. Clinton and Obama graduated from the elite Yale and Harvard Law Schools, respectively. But the goal of higher education goes beyond academic knowledge. Study and reflection are supposed to induce wisdom and integrity: the ability to recognize the difference between right and wrong and make principled choices between them. These two flunk. Either they don't know that socialism is Frederick Hayek's Road to Serfdom - or they don't care. They should be running for dog catcher.

John McCain, the so-called Republican who won his party's nomination with Democrat cross-over votes, inspires a bit more confidence, but not much. We're tired of hearing him demagogue about "tax cuts for the rich" when 1% of earners pay 39% of income taxes collected, and wonder what he thinks he's going to Washington to do. Memo to Big John: the President's job is to serve all the people in the broad, long term national interest. You're not elected to subject us to the European Union; to oppress us with junk science like Al Gore's global warming bunk; to throw our borders open to all comers; or to subvert the Constitution by ignoring the Bill of Rights. This guy graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy ranked 594th in his Class of 598! He's not very smart, just smarter than his opponents. Where is the vision? Where is the inspiration? All we see is arrogant, short sighted attitudinizing.

This election is the nadir of high principle. We only hope that when the wheel turns, as it will, the hero who rides to the rescue of the Republic is George Washington, and not Adolf Hitler.

Winning the West

A reader asks whether my argument for the morality of European conquest in "Winning the West" would apply if the Chinese decided they needed more natural resources or room for expansion (see comment). My answer is, "yes, of course!" Japan put this theory into practice on Dec. 7, 1941. We call it Pearl Harbor Day.

China is free to invade North America anytime it chooses. Earnest appeals for peace won't stop them, so we would resort, in the words of Clausewitz, to "diplomacy by other means." America would crush Beijing's invasion fleet in less time than it takes to say "Hiroshima." That part of my post made the point that between nations there is no law, because no higher authority exists to enforce one. Self preservation is the most moral of all acts, and self defense is just another way of stating it. The 2nd Amendment to our Constitution recognizes this imperative by giving each citizen the right "to keep and bear arms."

The morality of survival is obvious to those who value freedom and recognize their duty to sacrifice in its defense. But my post made another important point as well. It is that the Indians benefited greatly when Europeans brought the blessings of civilization to their savage, stone age cultures. They should thank us.

The canard that dead Indians can't benefit ducks the issue. The European conquest of North America was tragically brutal in many ways, but the Indians themselves were barbarians. We defeated them on their own terms. Now the lives of their descendants have the potential to be infinitely superior to the objective misery and squalor of their past, honorable as it was in its time and romanticized as it has been. But the Red Men themselves are responsible to realize what white civilization has to offer. Real warriors rise to the occasion. Japan's noble Samurai certainly did.

We enjoy reading Sir Walter Scott's colorful tales of Ivanhoe and King Arthur's knights, but no one in their right mind would volunteer to return to the Middle Ages, so very dark in more than name. We urge those who value truth to study the native Americans' actual pre-Columbian way of life, as we have, and compare it with these welcome, worthy citizens' vastly greater opportunities in the 21st Century. One can be content enough in a dugout or tepee, knowing no better. But when we do know better, we recognize the waste. The time has come to shake out that old buffalo robe and create a moth-free Happy Hunting Ground.

The Turtle

In April 2007 John and Terry Blake celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. John requested a Speech by Toad. We were honored to comply, and long association inspired us to call our presentation,

"The Turtle"

Once upon a morning merry, while I pondered
Bright and cheery
Over many a quaint and curious volume of for-
Gotten lore -
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there
Came a tapping
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my
Chamber door.

Open then I flung the shutter, when with many
A flirt and flutter
In there tripped a lissome maiden, swirling 'round the
Shift she wore.
Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed
From an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim, whose footfalls tinkled on
The tufted floor.

And that maiden, never flitting, still is sitting,
Still is sitting,
By my knee upon the settee, safe inside
My chamber door;
And her eyes have all the seeming of an angel
That is dreaming,
And my heart to that sweet vision of her loving
Face before,

Now is joined - forever more!

With thanks to Edgar Allan Poe.

Winning the West

Revisionist historians today focus on the short-term harm that white European settlement visited on America’s native people. European civil­iza­tion’s lasting benefits to the Indians are dismissed with the shrug that “the cost was too great.” Certainly it was high, and indeed even to discuss the wholesale destruction of aboriginal cultures in such stark terms seems to imply a callous lack of human feeling.

Yet the inescapable fact is that when the last wild Apache warrior laid down his rifle in 1886, the huge, rich North American continent was united under one sovereign state from coast to coast. Thanks to the vision and determin­ation of our white European forefathers, the United States government is powerful enough to secure the safety of all people within its borders forever (1). Fear and hatred locked settlers and Indians in a fatal dance of destiny. But their real struggle was for a way of life.

To appreciate the essential nature of the Indians’ involuntary sacrifice one has only to imagine how different our lives would be if the South had won the Civil War, or if France or Spain controlled the country west of the Mississippi. To us this is an academic exercise. To 19th Century Americans, it was not. They understood that we must be unified, or that we in turn would be invaded and die. The shelt­ered academics who ignore this reality are not only callous but foolish, and ultimately delusional.

No one claims that the red men’s grievances were without cause. The history of the United States’ dealings with North America’s native inhabitants is a disgusting tale of ruthless avarice, cruelty, fraud, and murder. Colonel Thomas L. McKenney, U.S. Super­intendent of Indian Trade under Presidents Madison through Jackson, was a sincere, honorable man whose experience with his country’s corrupt and crooked Congress parallels the fate of the Indian nations themselves. Not much has changed.

Paleo-anthropologists now believe that the North American aborigines are descended from the race of fierce, tough nomads who have roamed the high deserts of Asia since before the last Ice Age. These people are not Chinese or Korean, but are of separate Mongolian extraction. Racial cousins of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan confronted descendants of the builders of Stonehenge, Saxon barbarians, and Viking marauders translated to the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

Both races committed the most horrifying atrocities against each other. It is fair to say, however, that in general – though not always – the settlers’ and soldiers’ offenses involved straightforward assaults in the heat of battle. The Indians, on the other hand, reserved their most appalling cruelties for defense­less captives tortured at leisure. Nor did reservation life mitigate their savagery. During Apache Chief Geronimo’s last out­break, in Arizona in 1886, his raiders murdered all of a farm family named Philips, except for their five-year-old daughter. Two days later a posse found the little girl alive, hanging on a meat hook (2).

None of this disgrace is excused by observing that, just as earlier in South America, Australia, India, China, and later Africa, profound political, economic, and demographic forces made inevitable civiliza­tion’s invasion and occupation of the American Indians’ immemorial hunting grounds across the North American continent. By the time of the Civil War, “many of the tribes on the eastern side of the Mississippi had vanished or were now shabby, drunken remnants of great races.” Some forty years later, at the turn of the century in 1900, the same could be said of the plains tribes who had lived west of the Mississippi, the great river that their ancestors called the Father of Waters.

President Ulysses S. Grant conquered the West by deliberately starving out the Plains Indians. A grand and ruth­less strategist, Grant waged war by encouraging settlers to kill off the buffalo herds on which the Indians depended for their food and shelter. Within 20 years, between 1870 and 1890, Washington had “depleted their commissary,” with the slaughter of some 30 million of these magnificent animals. Mountains of bleached buffalo bones were turned into fertilizer. A century later the herds are just now starting to recover from their all-but-complete extermination.

Viewing the last 200 years in worldwide perspective, we find destruction of cultures not unique, or even surpris­ing. Whenever different peoples collide, deadly conflict always results. World Wars One and Two were global struggles among the tribal national­ities of Europe and Asia. The scale and destructiveness of these bloody confrontations make America’s 19th Century Indian campaigns look like child’s play. Our Indian Wars took perhaps 5,000 lives over 20 years. In 1916's Battle of the Somme, German machine gunners firing 600 rounds per minute mowed down over 60,000 attacking British soldiers in two days.

Such historic upheavals are not exceptions. Turmoil and change are the norm of our human condition, and to pretend, as racist demagogues like Jeremiah Wright do, that such conflicts are peculiar to Euro­peans, is dishonest drivel. Neanderthal Man died out; Imperial Rome imposed its rule on the Mediter­ranean Basin; Attila’s Huns, “The Scourge of God,” spread havoc throughout the Continent; and in only a few years the Black Death, imported from Asia, wiped out nearly half of Europe’s entire population.

The real story is that the 19th Century witnessed nothing less than a trans­formation of worldwide human society from its immemorial agrarian past to a concentrated, inter­dependent urban industrial culture. The Stone Age lasted some 195,000 years, from the rise of Homo Sapiens to the first stirrings of civilization around the Mediterranean Sea about 6500 BC, only 8,500 years ago. The Indust­rial Rev­olu­tion that replaced animal labor with machine power is just 200 years old, and historians date Modern Times only from the first network radio broadcast in 1920. Horse-and-buggy days are within our grandparents’ living memory. If the past fifteen years are any indication, the new 21st Century will witness even greater changes in humanity’s everyday experience.

Why should American Indians not be part of this process? They might as well try to excuse themselves from life. Nostalgia is one thing, and your author defers to no one in celebrating America’s rich Western as well as Eastern heritage. But it is simply nonsense to pretend that the aboriginal tribes of the Great Plains would be better off living in the Stone Age, frozen in time as human exhibits in a vast zoolog­ical garden. No one, even the Indians, advocates such a thing. So what are they advo­cat­ing? The critics of America’s great surge from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast sound like children, whining for the benefits of Western civilization with none of its respon­sib­ilities.

“Political imperatives were irreconcilable with moral imperatives,” writes Robert M. Utley in The Lance and the Shield, his book on the “life and times of Sitting Bull.” But this facile judgment is not true. Indeed, Utley’s statement libels white American pioneers, our ancestors, by declaring that their settle­ment of the vast empty spaces of post-Ice Age North America, seeking to build a good life for themselves and their posterity, was morally wrong.

Mr. Utley, like most fashionable academics, is too glib by half. Who is he, the safe and secure bene­ficiary of latter-day American freedom and civilization, to say that the conquest of the American West a century ago was immoral? Of what, exactly, does he think morality consists, and what “moral impera­tive” does he refer to? The imperative of allowing wild Indians to raid American frontiers and murder white settlers with impunity? What is “moral” about permitting a few hundred thousand barbaric aborigines to monopolize an entire contin­ent, while millions of other people, who are just as “worthy” and “deserving” as any stone-age savage, fester and starve in crowded, oppressed, stultified Europe?

Only a morally blind intellect­ual elitist could possibly promote such a one-sided view. Utley cannot have taken the trouble to think seriously about he’s saying. He reveals himself as merely another so-called liberal intellect­ual poseur.

All morality derives from ethics, those absolute, timeless, and universal standards that express our highest human nature as rational, responsible, self-conscious beings. Morality is what we consider “right” and “wrong” with reference to ethical standards. Such questions engage the profoundest philosophical issues of ultimate importance, and when a professional historian employs them to analyze and judge momentous events of the past these terms require definition. Utley doesn’t seem to know what they mean.

Your author has expressed his thoughts on this difficult and even controversial subject in an essay, and will summarize them here. Contrary to the deconstructionist fantasy which Marxian nihilists inspired by Nietzsche foist on American campuses today, the world is “real.” “Reality” means “the brute facts of existence, which cannot be denied.” Since reality is objective and absolute, not subjective or relative, there must be, accordingly, an absolute ethical standard that applies to all living things in the real world. The greatest reality that cannot be denied is the difference between life and death. For all animals, indeed all organisms, the ultimate ethical standard is survival.

Religion and other fields of subjective opinion, like history, deal with cultural “mores,” the ever-changing fashions of acceptable behavior dependent on time and place. Ethics, however, are Thomas Jefferson’s “self-evident truths,” eternal verities that exist apart from tran­sitory morals. With the reservation that no end justifies using any means -- only effective ones -- we define actions that are truly necessary to promote the ethic of group survival as in the highest degree “moral.” Right actions lead to happi­ness, prosperity, and health; wrong actions lead to misery, destruction, and death. Wisdom is knowing the difference. The only appeal is to nature, and nature recognizes only winners. Questions of public versus private morality involve considerations of “higher” good, meaning individuals’ responsib­ility to their com­mun­ities. But the standard is the same. Ethical individuals and nations choose life. This is not debatable, for to do otherwise is to be drunk or insane.

Utley entirely begs this transcendent issue, though he does recognize that “pointless regret and guilt over what ‘we’ did to the Indians [is] a historical distortion and an emotional dead end.” No regrets or guilt are approp­riate, however, when we consider the alternatives. We do not say that “might is right;” only that competing groups cannot deny the natural ethic of Charles Darwin’s absolute biological imperative.

The process of white conquest might have been more gentle and orderly. But if Indian cultures had been more advanced or innovative, as were the Japanese, the struggle for ascendancy in North America could well have turned out differently. No one would expect the natives to have pulled their punches, and we would receive no apology from them for their victory. European-Americans, on the other hand, respected the Indian nations and did not commit genocide, as did happen in South America and especial­ly in Tasmania. Most of the North American Indian die-off was caused by cholera and small­pox epidemics, not by hot lead or cold steel. Europeans brought the horse and the wheel, and the New World gave them syphilis.

Sitting Bull, chief of the warlike Dakota Sioux, had a right to say, “All white men are thieves and liars. They took our land, and left us outcasts” (3). But Sitting Bull had fought and lost. His bitter words were wrong, as wrong as those of U.S. cavalrymen who swore that “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The iconic chief’s buffalo-hunting days are gone forever, and life is better for it. Now that the Sioux and their brethren are done being children of nature, we will see what the noble red men are really made of. Let them advance the cause of harmony, mutual under­standing, and human progress, now that they are called to contribute as responsible adult citizens of the modern world.

We trust that the American Indians’ truly great days lie ahead. In the mean­time, anyone red, yellow, white, brown, or black is free to improve the quality of his life by going to live on the prairie in a skin tent with the buffalo and the wolves. Mr. Utley should ask himself why not many choose to do so.

---

1. We appreciate that to write about white Europeans is politically incorrect in 2008. Those who duck this seminal truth are the same people who complain about historical bias and cultural centrism. But why should we be racially biased in favor of red-skinned aborigines, or pretend that the stone age culture we encountered was not an obstacle to civilizing the great American West? Clearly the opposite is true.

2. George Constable, Ed., The Old West.

3. The Canadian Indians had a further complaint. When steel magnate Andrew Carnegie mined the Masabi Range above Lake Michigan for iron ore, Canada’s native tribesmen declared, “First they killed our game and stole our hunting grounds. Now they come back for the dirt.”