Dakota Beacon

Something subtle and disturbing is happening under parents’ radar. Growing numbers of progressive educators are twisting a four-thousand-year-old concept in order to induce schoolchildren to adopt amoral worldviews.  A trend gathering steam nationwide teaches conflict resolution based on “restorative justice.” Though traditionally applied in criminal situations, progressives are adapting the technique to the classroom.

If not stopped, school-based “restorative justice” will cast yet another generation morally adrift, but this time like 1960s flower children on steroids. America will have to deal with widespread societal implications.

The question is not whether the police should advise suspects of their rights, but whether the Constitution requires them to do so. It plainly doesn't, so the Court has had to offer hopelessly serpentine opinions to disguise its policy preferences as constitutional mandates, appealing not to the text of the Constitution but to nebulous "penumbras" and "emanations."

The rule of law is supposed to be predictable. The Supreme Court is anything but. The clearest proof that we live under the rule of men, not law, is that the Court has become an oracle. If you want to guess how it will rule in a given case, reading the Constitution will be no help at all in anticipating its whims.

I kicked off my summer reading program with “The Creature from Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin, Appleton, WI: American Opinion (1994). Seasons change but my reading never stops.

No, this is not a “B” novel. It is a very readable history of the creation and workings of the Federal Reserve System. The title refers to Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast where a clandestine meeting in Novermber 1910 attended by an elite group of financiers gave birth to the Federal Reserve. This is the unbelievable story of smoke and mirrors; pulleys, cogs and wheels that create the grand illusion called money.

One of the arguments for healthcare reform is that millions of Americans with employer-provided healthcare are underinsured. Proponents of this view are saying that people are underinsured if they are paying too many of their healthcare costs out-of-pocket. Quite the contrary, a little reflection on what insurance is and is supposed to do suggests that the problem is really the opposite: many, if not most Americans are overinsured—they have too much health insurance coverage!

Socialism’s barren arguments and addle-headed proponents offer an opportunity for capitalists to espouse the free market. As countries around the world watch their economies tank as a result of failed socialist policies, the field is ripe for a new evangelization of economic freedom. Because leftists refuse to present either socialism or capitalism fairly, we must teach those closest to us about capitalism. Anglo-French writer-historian Hilaire Belloc wrote that “to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself.” Unless the greatness of the free market is proclaimed often by those who know the truth, the paternalistic elitists will control every aspect of our lives.

Liberals don't like the constitutional plan; they regard it as a "reactionary" obstacle to "progressive" (read: limitless) government. So they have adopted a clever strategy of arbitrarily inflating a few pet phrases in the document to nullify the rest, thereby making nonsense of the whole and frustrating its purpose of preventing monopolistic government.

But conservatives - and honest people generally - ought to know better.

Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet – coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men. On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl In Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year old college student from Georgia. 

You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. “Amina Arraf” was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the liberal worldview is a fiction.

U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, state had a 2010 GDP of about $35 billion, Governor Dalrymple and his wife, Sociologists will dissect the differences, Somalis in Minnesota and ND, base realignment and closure. Enjoy flooding!, Puppy Dog Coulee, a throbbing hangover, compensation of regional health care executives, Amtrak service in Rugby - Devils Lake and Grand Forks, school bus racing, UND Fighting Sioux nickname, People of ND “want the name”, Global Electric Motorcar

America no longer requires immigration (nor can afford the cost of its support) and the third-world immigration we are seeing today is not assimilating, nor, indeed, assimilable.  It is heavily weighted in anti-American outlook, in contrast with that of a century ago.  We don’t need this. It is destructive of America and if we don’t discuss it now, tomorrow may be too late.  We are fast reaching a critical mass of alien culture in many communities.  “Multiculturalism” is being substituted by our leaders for American values and our own law and Constitution.  Shall Americans choose “diversity” or freedom and American culture?  One must replace the other.  We cannot, by definition, have both.

Will Americans Exchange American Values and Freedom for “Multiculturalism”?

Thanks to Leon Malberg of Dickinson

Pop was larger-than-life. Born in Nebraska in 1904, he epitomized the strong, silent prototype of the era. As a father-figure, he was stern and strict—no touchy-feely stuff. Pop believed that the school of hard knocks is the best educator. Disdaining cautionary warnings, he stood aside while I took my knocks. Pops lived for duty. There was right and wrong, and it was his duty—and mine—to do right.

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson—celebrates his Pop’s lifetime of service to others while recalling a few of his memorable encounters with celebrities, including: a young Mitt Romney and his father, George, then Michigan’s governor; the notorious Detroit-area mobster Santo “Sam” Perrone; and the only American gold medalist at the ’64 winter Olympics.

Jefferson is so often cited and embraced both by liberals and other assorted progressives as well as conservatives and libertarians. Yet, Jefferson held some beliefs that don’t square with today’s liberal progressive thinking. To illustrate, here are some revealing quotes by Jefferson suggesting his probable opposition to some contemporary signature policies if he were alive today.

This November the citizens of San Francisco will decide whether to ban circumcision, a practice that dates from antiquity and is embraced by at least three of the world’s major religions. Now, the fact that something stretches far back into human history is by no means a guarantee that it has social value. Slavery, human sacrifice, and arranged marriages for adolescents also have long histories, but, thankfully, are no longer accepted by Western societies. The question is whether circumcision belongs on this list. It doesn’t. The root issues are not medical, but political.

An Arizona State University professor wants to train physical scientists to be social engineers. Political science professor David Guston contends that “stakeholders” in academia and industry should work with consumers and the feds to manage the “societal implications” of “environmental health and safety issues” surrounding certain technological breakthroughs. Private sector engineers would team with government bureaucrats to fashion industry regulation. The approach would turbo-charge an existing culture of crony capitalism. Guston calls his concept “anticipatory governance.” Clear thinkers call it scary.

C.S. Lewis was alarmed by another development we now take for granted: state control of education. He wrote: "I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the free-born mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.

The Right needs to watch its collective tongue and maintain the integrity of our language.  Why walk to the beat of the civilization destroyers’ drummer?  If the left wants to manipulate the language, we should let them descend into a parallel universe of linguistic insanity without us.

As for the subordination of Truth to agendas, to do it is to confess error.  For a man who cannot stand on Truth is one who is standing behind a lie.  It is a compulsion born of a very dark spirit, indeed.

The Americans that I respect understand that “a commitment is a commitment”; that honorable people do not just drop an engagement for a more attractive “mission”. We can’t just wave a wand and turn our fine military into Acorn workers! Thank God for the leaders in our military that understand that the words commitment, honor, and sacrifice mean something…and for the fine troops that sign up voluntarily to protect us from evil throughout the world. And as for left wing reporters…they can all just go to hell.

Others, too, are guilty.  Ann Coulter supports Chris Christie.  Rush Limbaugh has not condemned these “green movement” Republicans.  He has not said that they are “unacceptable”.  They are unacceptable.  We cannot accept them because they will accelerate our nation’s demise.  They are part of the problem.  Anyone who supports them, however reluctantly, is also a part of the problem.  The Republican elites need to hear it from conservatives:  if the nominee supports the “green” agenda, it will tear the party apart.  That conservatives will not come back.  Only in this way can the Republican Party - and America – be saved.

There is no better way to proclaim your lack of spiritual and philosophical depth than by, two decades after the fall of communism, disclosing that you’re Marxist.  Yet this is precisely what Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama did during a speech before 150 Chinese students at the University of Minnesota this month.  Journalist Tsering Namgyal reports on the story at Religion Dispatches, writing, “‘as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I consider myself a Marxist.’  ‘But not a Leninist,’ he [the Lama] clarified.”

Well, that’s a relief.  Those Leninists can really kill ya’.  Marxists will just murder you.

The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.

The oceans will do just fine.  It’s America that’s drowning.

Water everywhere, the worst flooding Bismarck and Minot have ever experienced, Minot evacuated 10,000 residents, too little, too late, diplomatic concern about water from Devils Lake, The future of the service doesn’t look good, Fargo’s homegrown Great Plains Software, Nodaks make good business people, Nodaks like lots of government, a spot at the bottom of Ward County, “The Black Rectangle Project”, homes assessed over $1 million, NHL back to Winnipeg, best all-around athlete from ND, drowning graveyards

My generation should be ashamed of what we have done to younger Americans. No, we haven’t sold them into child prostitution, but we have placed them in bondage to the most massive debts in world history. We have led these innocent lambs to a financial slaughterhouse.

If the debt burden continues to mount, eventually the young will perceive the enormity of the burden that older generations have imposed on them, and there will be a backlash. They might rebel against the crushing debt burden by repudiating it—an outright default. However, I doubt it will come to that. Uncle Sam has already started to default on those debts—not explicitly, but stealthily, by having the Federal Reserve inflate our debts away. It is likely that there will be a hyperinflationary blow off or a deflationary implosion, either of which will extinguish trillions of dollars of debt before many of today’s children are grown.

Bryson is a perfectly natural pick to run Commerce for a Barack Obama whose worldview epitomizes the vision of the anointed. No one in human history has made the socialistic central planning model work. Every time the socioeconomic visions of anointed ones have been tried, misery has been the result. But Barrack will change all that.

The UN, “renewable energy” companies like Edison, people like Bryson, and Bryson’s champion, Barack Obama, lay claim to the all-knowingness required to buck the trend, beat the odds, and make the impossible possible. Using methods that have repeatedly built living hells, the Obamas, Brysons, and other elitist-corporatist-clueless visionaries of the new reality will fashion a wind-powered, emerald-forested, chicken-in-every-pot utopian paradise.

Mexicans have been slaughtered in Mexico by murdering squads of drug cartels since their President cracked down on the drug traffic. When will Obama order troops down there?  Why has he not done it already, since he is interfering everywhere else in the name of “birthing democracies”?  Study a little history, my friends, while you still have the time and the FREEDOM to do so.  Like Orwell said in Animal farm, ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL---which after the “utopian change” became mysteriously changed, in fact one might even say miraculously changed, to:  BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS!”  Read and learn!  Remember, when the producer’s incentive to produce is destroyed through excessive government intervention, regulations, and taxation; the consumers have only one option left; to consume each other; because while it is possible to “subsidize and mandate” the production of food stamps, even Michelle Obama has not developed a way to give them nutritional value.  It would be, however, the crowning climax of her campaign to starve out obesity, but only if they go easy on the Irish “beer.”

They are now required by their own city government to share the fate of those who would have lived quietly and humbly in single-wide mobile homes but weren’t allowed - hoist by their own petard, as it were.   It awaits to be seen what the good folks in New Jersey will do.  Some of them are clinging to their properties more or less as a legacy of defiance of the government’s power to confiscate what rightfully belongs to them, on principle.  They are worthy of our deepest respect.  These people are not expecting to make a killing on this.  They expect to lose for every day they hold out, but they do recognize a principle when they see it and they do have the right sort of attitude about what is best “for the community as a whole”.  And that is the freedom to enjoy ownership of our own property, as God and John Adams intended.