Dakota Beacon

Dr. Paul Kengor—reacts to the Empire State Building Lighting Partners’ rejection of a request to light up the Empire State Building for Mother Teresa on the centennial of her birth this August 26. The rebuff is all the more discourteous when Dr. Kengor recalls that “the Empire State last October paused to recognize Mao’s communist China, which was responsible for 60-70 million deaths, the single greatest slaughter of humanity in history, dwarfing Hitler’s terror by six-fold.

So, the saintly nun who comforted the sick as they died in her arms in destitute Calcutta, soothing souls in their final earthly moments, an act of sheer selflessness she did as ‘something beautiful for God,’ was refused. To the contrary, Red China, byproduct of a murderous Marxist despot, where collectivization starved to death more people in three years than Mother Teresa could meet in a lifetime, was recognized. Chairman Mao is howling from his grave.

Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians noted that certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “female genital mutilation”. So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They’re not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a “ritual nick” to young girls.

A few years back, I thought even fainthearted western liberals might draw the line at “FGM”. After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, many of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

Der Spiegel, an impeccably liberal magazine, summed up the remorseless Islamization of Europe in a recent headline: “How Much Allah Can The Old Continent Bear?” Well, what’s wrong with a little Allah-lite? The AAP thinks you can hop on the Sharia express, and only ride a couple of stops. In such ostensibly minor concessions, the “ritual nick” we’re performing is on ourselves. Further cuts will follow.

That’s two botched terrorist attacks in five months. Perhaps Democrats, the Obama Administration and their media need to focus less on TEA Parties, and more on those that are at war with us.

So the mighty savior to the little people, the spreader-of-wealth to the oppressed, is actually pushing Federal Reserve and overall Treasury Department policies that remove wealth from the little people (due to near-zero savings interest rates) and spread the wealth to the corporate entities that donated most to the savior's presidential campaign.

The messiah wears no clothes. But the ideologically complicit media will never show the naked body to the people.

Why not 20 seconds? That would seem more appropriate… after all, the statistics recorded on our collective approval of this Nation’s Supreme Court mandated voluntary child slaughter would prove that 20 seconds is just the right amount of time needed to justify the taking of an innocent life. Just do the math. 1.5 million abortions per year equals 4109 abortions per day… which equals approximately 180 per hour… which equals 3 abortions every minute… and one child murdered every 20 seconds in this land of the free and home of the brave.

Years of unjustified and unaffordable government spending have brought us to the precipice of national bankruptcy. When investor demand for government debt falls below the bloated supply, interest rates will surge and the Fed will probably inflate like mad. We will suffer massive business failures, surging unemployment, a colossal debt implosion and/or a severely depreciated (if not utterly ruined) currency, and significantly lower standards of living. The greatest threat to our country’s future is chronic overspending by the federal government. We are racing toward national bankruptcy. Once again, bipartisan economic ignorance is the problem. Neither political party seems ready to tackle the spending problem.

American voters have a large and scary database on the socialist tidal wave with which liberal ideologues seem willing to drown the people. The database now includes the fact that 61 percent of liberals embrace socialism. If voters heed the moment of clarity, then November will see the firing of elected representatives who threaten to act out of arrogant liberal insanity. Voters will fire representatives who deem it okay to summon miseries guaranteed by the most devastating ideology in the history of civilization. In 2012, voters will fire the most arrogant ideologue of all.

The liberal "mind" allows for such contradictions because one set of beliefs fits the feel-good worldview, while the other contradicts the worldview. The clear thinker would never stand for beliefs that run counter to reality. The clear thinker's need for "beliefs" to be backed by fact and logic will always prohibit a descent into liberal lunacy. The same inability to "think like a liberal" also prevents most clear thinkers from "getting inside the head" of someone who "thinks" as haphazardly as liberals.

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Life is all a game for people who manipulate language to make the world appear to fit the paradise ricocheting around inside the haywired cerebral cortex.

Starr makes the perfect statement to illustrate what rational, clear-thinking, self-respecting, accountable, achievement-oriented Americans are up against:

The gravest problem in America today is not government, per se, but the use of government as a sock puppet for an angry, relentless partisan or interest group movement.  When those groups seize governments then the general welfare, as opposed to the welfare of special groups, melts into limp glop.  The welfare of the citizens of the several states, even the welfare of ordinary San Franciscans, is abandoned so that political bosses can kowtow to particular interests.

Given the demographic advance of Islam in Europe and the de jure advance of Sharia in Europe (the Geert Wilders blasphemy trial) and de facto in America (Comedy Central’s and Yale University Press’ submission to Islamic proscriptions on representations of Mohammed), you wonder why excitable types like Faisal Shahzad are so eager to jump the gun. The Islamization of the west proceeds apace; why draw attention to it and risk a backlash?

Here’s the essence of the problem with contemporary progressives and their movement, which is a gigantic problem for America: One of the only things we really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves and their ideology, is that they favor constant ‘change,’ ‘reform,’ an ever-shifting, ongoing ‘evolution,’ or, yes, progression. And therein is an inherent, significant difficulty: progressivism offers no clear, definable end. The goal-post is always moving, forever pushed further away. Ends are never ends; they always ‘progress,’ with culture and society, banking on the ludicrous assumption that the changes are always (or largely) good.

Do people actually think that Ralph Englestad spent millions of dollars on a sports arena with literally thousand of “Fighting Sioux” logos everywhere you look, in order to make fun of Native Americans?  Come on people!  Ralph Englestad was simply one of thousands of men and women who will always be proud that they were a member of a “Fighting Sioux” Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Volleyball, or Hockey Team.

Has the American regime—i.e., our governing political order—gone insane? Some may think the matter is debatable, but I think we may be taking the first steps on the pathway to political insanity.

In “When Regimes Reach Insanity” professor of political science and fellow for American Studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College—Dr. Marvin Folkertsma—offers a history lesson from 1914 to illustrate “the perspective of a regime that had gone insane,” a regime whose members “were among the most highly educated, culturally sophisticated, and technologically advanced people on earth” and still “perpetrated acts of unspeakable insanity.” “Naturally, not all regimes are alike and therefore do not go insane in the same way,” the author will admit, but with nearly a century to reflect on such instances of insanity, the relevance of this “experience to contemporary politics perhaps becomes clearer with an understanding of what a regime is.” In his latest editorial, Dr. Folkertsma will assess the sanity of a regime.

Cell phones are everywhere, and their numbers seem to be even higher in Europe.  I have stood among the multitudes at an intersection in the middle of Rome and found it difficult to find even a handful of people not talking on their cells.

This elevating and ennobling view of American government means that the rights of greedy, creepy, leftists in Wall Street firms are just as sacred to us as our own rights.  The process of freedom is our cause.  We view government like we view juries.  Verdicts should not be based upon group interest and laws should not either. When government acts, it should be only in the general welfare, and those words of Article I are in direct conflict with the toxin of “our group’s interest.”  We defend Wall Street not because Wall Street likes or helps us, but because it is right.

Government has a role only as an unbiased arbitrator of those parts of life which the marketplace cannot mediate.  When government acts this way, as it should, then parties and factions still remain, and they still quarrel and feud, but if government is robust, then the mischief of parties is controlled.  So when the KKK lynches a black, more government is required and when Storm Troopers terrorized German streets or Mafia internecine wars decimate Sicily, more government is required.  Factions are the infection, and when these infect government, we are lost.  The abuse of government for special interests, not just government, is the mortal blow at liberty.

The "transcendent" moment in the 1960s that Lowry invokes was actually a transfer of power. Black voters have used their "basic right" to advance what they want, and while Lowry recounts this fact, he does so in a selective fashion. His "transcendent" moment does not take into account the scope and depth of the changes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Lowry recalls the past in the way certain Frenchmen used to talk about their Revolution, by praising the storming of the Bastille and then treating the next 20 years of bloody history as anticlimactic. Why bother to discuss what does not fit one's current issue? But historical processes have a tendency to go on and on, rather than end at the moment the narrator might wish.

The problem with this manipulated history is its patent dishonesty. The civil rights movement led to monumental changes such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, together with the introduction of affirmative action programs and anti-discrimination laws for a wide range of designated minorities. While some people undoubtedly benefited from these changes, the end result has been to make limited, decentralized government more difficult for those of us who value it. What is widely seen as a positive thing also has its negative aspects.

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Obama is the worst of the worst: morally vacuous and economically illiterate. The socialist-minded messiah is allowed to gather all the wealth that he can wrap into his messiah-like arms, but we "capitalists" must be subject to messianic whims of fairness. It does not even occur to the messiah that limiting what an individual can earn limits the destinations to which the individual can disperse the earnings. Of course, the assumption at work in the messiah's mind is that government should take the "excess" earnings and distribute as government deems "fair."

Lord Omdahl has observed that many ordinary citizens of this state flash copies of the Constitution about without the necessary intellectual pedigree.  Having real jobs and families in the real world, these people may not have had time to study the documents of the Founding Fathers to the depth required by Lord Omdahl.  Never mind that constitutional lawyers differ widely on the interpretation and applicability of these documents, never mind that an entire branch of government composed of some very bright people has been created to interpret the Constitution according to the intentions of the Founding Fathers—and never mind that the resurrection of popular interest in the Constitution among the general population is something praiseworthy.  His Lordship has pronounced that the average North Dakotan is not to concern himself with matters best left to his superiors. Lacking the level of insight required (Lord Omdahl’s), the rest of us should just shut up!

They call themselves the Red River Freethinkers! Well, they’re half right. They are from the Fargo Red River area, and I assume they are not incarcerated, so that makes them free; but thinkers they are not. If they really were thinkers you would think that they would be able to read and think through our Constitution well enough that they would understand its intentions.

The demoralization of the left will affect 2010, but the biggest bite could be in 2012, when Obama faces voters again.   If an Obama Malaise keeps growing after 2010, that could embolden leftist Democrats to challenge him for the nomination - that happened to Johnson in 1968 and to Carter in 1980.  We have a chance and we must not throw it away.  Now is the time to be energized, be bold, and be sure.  If the left is tired, scared, and unsure that is our chance to reclaim America.  Carter led us to Reagan.  Obama may lead us to a similar victory. 

Arizona has thrown a small wrench into the works of Democrats’ “Plan B”, or fallback option.  In the face of mounting hostility to its programs and awareness of the flawed underlying political philosophy by an increasingly angry and activated voting public, it appears that only a massive version of “Ballot Box 13” can turn the trick and pull the Democrat chestnuts out of the inferno.  The current edition of the tried-and-true method would depend on illegal aliens voting by means of “amnesty”.  This is the reason for the hysterical race baiting on the Left in reaction to the people of Arizona acting in their own defense.

America's national security and America's economic security are tied directly to America's energy security. Yet the Obama administration seems determined to use every tool at its disposal to unilaterally disarm the exploration and recovery of our own natural resources while dictators and communist regimes happily enable our dependency on foreign energy.

All of these intrusions on states' rights are aimed right at fossil fuels and the energy economy and are driven by political ideology rather than economic and scientific reality.

Bacchus has a vision, and like all radical environmentalists with a vision, he is prepared to force "trade rules" on the entire world to bring the vision to fruition. And also like radical environmentalists, he argues from the fundamentally flawed assumption that "climate change" is human-caused and that humans can do something to stop the climate from changing. Bacchus wants to "hasten the spread of green technologies worldwide." How to achieve the hastening? With "the rules of the World Trade Organization."

The "transfer and dissemination of new technologies" is code for what all global wealth redistributionists envision: forcible handover of technology from wealthy countries to poor countries.

Sure, as Bacchus claims, "Trade can indeed be green--if we use the tools of our rule-based trading system wisely." Wonder who will make the rules.