Dakota Beacon

In the strange pretzel logic of 2020, Twitter has in one move both condemned and protected Joe Biden for his indecent fondling of a little girl while at a public ceremony honoring her parents.  How low does this go?   Biden, one would have thought, went low enough, but Twitter says his behavior is so unacceptable, so egregious . . . that no one dare re-tweet it.  How's that for logic?  They run interference for a child groper.  Good show, Twitter.

THE DIRT DEVIL GOT HIM; IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED; THE CENSUS; INDIAN COUNTRY CENSUS; DIVERSION INCENTIVE; NO RECLAMATION GUARANTEE; RETURNING STUDENT VIRUS SURPRISE; CRIMINAL JUSTICE; POLITICALLY CORRECT?; LLOYD'S TAKE; STUGIS SUPERSPREADER; MINNEAPOLIS QUANDARY; DAKTOIDS

it's a lovely day so I hope you've spent some of it outdoors doing something fun (I did).  But it's Sunday, so I have even more for you!  Today I've been listening to Herb Alpert.  Alpert is a man of many talents - most of us know his trumpet sound but he's done more than that.  Meet Herb Alpert and then sit back and listen to some great Alpert hits. 

Last week marked 75 years since surrender documents were signed aboard the USS Missouri, designating the day as the official Victory over Japan Day and the end of World War II. To help honor the occasion, Dr. James Thrasher shares a personal story of his father’s service to our nation in WWII. Thrasher, who recently found 133 letters written by his father during the war, writes, “I have carefully opened and read each letter. These letters reveal the experiences, fears, feelings, hopes, and dreams of a sailor. I had no idea regarding what my dad went through from boot camp to the news that the war was over.”

Our national election occurs in eight weeks and the choice of presidential candidates could not be starker. One candidate exemplifies the “rules for thee, but not for me” driver of the hard left. The other candidate comes under severe criticism for easing the rules and regulations on the common man. Trump’s supporters have never left him. If anything, the continuing assaults on his administration, himself, and his family have only hardened, if not expanded, his constituency. Defined by their sense of moral superiority, his opponents have tried everything under the sun to terminate his presidency. Yet, he is still present for duty – and may well be re-elected. This cold attempt illustrates the failed, inept looney-left leadership at the helm of Democrats, the media, and the Never-Trumpers. What better way to describe this cabal of sorry narcissistic leaders than as “ham-fisted” and “maladroit.”

Those in authoritiy have been working around the clock to turn Americans against one another and against America and American ideals.  It reaches from the highest levels of our federal government all the way to our nursurey schools.  Please take a look at some examples of this.  We can't survive this kind of social programming.  We cannot go forward on a diet of hate.  This stuff is ugly.  It is evil.  And it is all around us.  Our kids are fed a steady diet of this and it is reinforced every day of their lives throughout their careers.  It needs to stop.  Trump did the right thing but it is only a beginning.  We must all work to get rid of the rest of this sickness.

BLINKING AMBER LIGHT; RELUCTANT MOVE; STATE-OWNED OIL WELLS; DAPL; USE CAUTION ON MINIMUM WAGE; HEARTS ARE THROBBING; HEAD FAKE?; COAL CREEK; THREE SCENARIOS; THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT TRIANGLE; THE OTTO BREMER TRUST; UNSETTLING REPORTS; IMPROVE YOUR PELICAN IQ; DAKTOIDS

Went to the Farmers; Market today - a real  joy, but for one little thing.  The plague masks.  

Yeah.  I know I took a chance with the title of this piece.  But it is true.  As the wag used to say, "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me."  He was right.  This may be the time, if not for paranoia, at least for serious skepticism.  If you are objective about this you will notice that debate and discussion as well as exploration of solutions is being "systemically" shut down.  Doctors who take issue with the accepted position of the "authorities" are all but drummed out of the corps.  Their ideas are not allowed.  Only one idea may be heard, the official one.  It sounds a lot like China, doesn't it?

She found joy in a kind of charity most of us would never dream of attempting, and in an environment we would dread setting foot in.

Mother Teresa robbed the Left of its self-endowed credentials as champions of the poor. When it came to the poor, they talked the talk; but the tiny nun walked the walk.

“Thugs” accurately describes Antifa and BLM activists. In true Marxist fashion, both Antifa and BLM advocate that the means justify the ends. This includes force and violence if intimidation won’t do. Of note, BLM never disassociated itself from the more vicious Antifa. Both are fellow travelers agreeing that America was illegitimately founded and must be reconstituted to suit their own vision. To do this, America must be torn down first and rebuilt later.

A normal person asks a multitude of questions. Who pays for or otherwise supports BLM-Antifa riots? Who funds their domestic terrorism? Who funds per diem, lodging, and travel for out-of-state rioters? Who pays bail for rioters allowing them to return to the streets to engage in further mayhem?

IOWA COULD BE A TAIL WIND; CROSS YOUR FINGERS; SAME TIME NEXT YEAR; ALERUS HEALTH; HUB OF THE WEST; CHEAP MONEY; GRAND PLANS; BUY FARGO; IRIS WESTMAN; CORONAVIRUS CASES ARE ON THE RISE; STURGIS FALLOUT; MINORITY VIEW; WOLF STORY; DAKTOIDS

This month we lost one of the stars of Tex-Mex Latin American music - Trini Lopez  Today we take a look at his career and his music.

America is reeling from a summer of business shutdowns and "pandemic" panic and now an insurrection is underway.  Doubt me?  Look around at our cities.  We have lost our country.  We must act quickly and immediately to win it back.  We must  start with this election - threatened now by the mail-in voting scam - but it cannot end with Trump's re-election.  We must fight on to regain lost ground and then we must remember that "the condition upon which God hath granted liberty to man is eternal vigilance" (JP curran, 1790).    This means we pay close attention to what is being taught to our children, first and foremost.  It is no accident that our streets have been overrun by young people calling for communism.  No accident.  It is our fault, to be sure.  So this is where we begin the long fight back.  

In this two-part series I'm going to discuss why I think America has already been defeated and how, and maybe what we might do to re-win our independence.  Part One  - the "Pandemic".

Reviewing “The Creature from Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin (1994) proved a worthwhile reconsideration of the US debt and deficit issue. Griffin presents a very readable history of the creation and workings of the Federal Reserve System, America’s central bank. The title refers to Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast where a clandestine meeting in November 1910 attended by an elite group of financiers gave birth to the Federal Reserve. His book reads like an unbelievable story of smoke and mirrors; pulleys, cogs, and wheels creating a grand illusion we call money.

Griffin contends that debt is money. He calls it funny money. Others call it fiat money. The center piece in his argument discusses the “Mandrake Mechanism,” a name derived from a 1940s cartoon character called Mandrake the Magician. The mechanism described details the method by which the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing, or out of debt to be more accurate. He reduces the technical to the understandable for the benefit of the lay person.

Voting in 2020 requires Work in being well informed on the various issues, walking or driving to your polling place, protecting others by wearing a mask and physically distancing from other voters, and the Courage to vote in person after determining that you do not fall within groups seriously at risk of death from Covid-19. If you are one of those seriously at risk, the absentee ballot option is probably best for you.

On August 10, Hong Kong police arrested billionaire Jimmy Lai. His crime was to express opposition to the mainland Chinese Communist Party’s aggression against Hong Kong. In this article, Dr. Mark Hendrickson details the life of Lai and how one event changed his path forever. Hendrickson writes, “Lai could have coasted through the rest of his life enjoying his vast fortune, but China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was his epiphany. He adopted a new life mission: to bring freedom to the long-oppressed Chinese people. He left the clothing business and, with no prior experience, started a pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily.”

A CUTE BUFFALO CALF; WRONG DIRECTION; ND BUDGET OPTIMISM; THE JASPER HOTEL; ROAD TRAINS; HAT IN HAND; FORBE NAMES FARGO; "IT COULD BE A REAL ZOO"; BREMER BANK; IN OTHER STATES; ACKNOWLDEGE THE OBVIOUS; DAKTOIDS

It’s not hyperbole to characterize Clinton and other leftists as childish, for such people never matured spiritually, philosophically and morally. The problem is that they can’t be corrected with a spanking, and when they have enough power, well, you might as well then be governed by the malevolent, sociopathic little girl in the Bad Seed.

In the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, no name shone brighter than that of Gene Kelly.  Today would be Kelly's 108th birthday and it seems only fitting to celebrate it with his story and a few of his most notable performances on film.  Sit back and enjoy!

If you are a Democratic Socialist, you belong in Venezuela, where they have been in power for 21 years. Hugo Chavez was elected four times and his successor, Nicolas Maduro was elected once. We Americans do not have the excuse of illiteracy that Venezuelans peasants can rely on to explain their poor choices at the ballot box.

The thing that leftists do that frustrates me the most is their tendency to waste their God-given opportunities, insist on more government and higher taxes, causing their poorly managed state to go bankrupt… and then have the audacity to move to a well governed state and repeat their deficient voting habits.

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In this article, Dr. Earl Tilford looks back on a 21-year military career, his time in Thailand, and how the Vietnam draft affected higher education—especially graduate schools. Tilford writes, “I write this not because I’m on the endangered species list as a mid-septuagenarian trying to ready my soul for eternity. Christ took care of that. I write because serving my tour also shaped my life.”

August . . . sigh.  The last gasp of summer.  It is also the birth month of some great composers, some we associate with the world of classical music - pause and take time out this Sunday evening to listen to some great music and a few facts about the composers who wrote it.

The farther we get into this year, the more absurd and strange it becomes.  We are ordered around by 17-year-old store clerks, demanding that we pull our masks up.  We stand outside stores' doorways reading the sign posted there instructing us as to what we must do and comply with in order to be allowed to enter.  We have spent the whole summer looking at people with their faces covered in wads of cloth, as if in some strange, never-ending nightmare where we are the subjects of some bizarre experiment in someone's unholy lab.  While we are sectioned off, with plexiglass or sheets of plastic from the checkout girls, little holes cut in them to pass money through, when toilet paper shortages are only a faint, fond memory as the horror of 2020 lurches on, we are now subjected to rioting, demands that we turn our homes over to BLM, even as we are about to be ordered to turn them over to our mortgage holders, inasmuch as we have been losing our jobs and livelihoods.  Even so, our governors are overlooking the riots and the arson and looting (occasionally blaming it on Trump) and instead are concentrating on telling us the dire consequences if we should deign to go anywhere without a mask.  Or stand too close to one another, unless we are rioting.  Are you as sick of this as I am?  Are we going to do something about it?  I'd appreciate your opinions.

We have as yet not got the answer, the "magic bullet" for COVID-19.  That, however, has not gotten in the way of a nearly complete shutdown of our nation's economy for the entire summer, American citizens running around in public mumbling through wads of cloth over their faces, standing apart weirdly, not shaking hands.  We are being ordered about by store clerks on their first jobs, who are being ordered about by state governments.  No one is very happy about this.  People are attacking each other over this, we've all had enough of the "new normal".  What we need now is actual normal and an end of acceptance of "mandates" from governors who are overstepping their authority.  We need to take back our lives and use our own best judgment about how to live, we need to restore to doctors the right to prescribe medicines they believe will work - that have been working.  We need to remember this is America, not Communist China or some banana republic.  

As a kid, I enjoyed hanging around adults in conversation. These were grown-ups at play in a silly sort of way. In their words, jargon, and gestures they resembled actors on a living room stage.

Now, as an adult, participating in conversation transitions into more than a spectator sport. Swapping information, sharing stories, and trading ideas with friends hints of quiet leisure. Before radio, TV, and smart devices, conversation in the salons of Europe provided stimulating entertainment. Even today, coffee houses and cafes still offer fine opportunities for pleasant conversation. Talk is cheap and chatting is an inexpensive form of recreation.

Should inheritance taxes be increased? Or should they be abolished? In this article, economist Dr. Mark Hendrickson responds to a recent New York Times article that called for the tax to go up. Hendrickson writes, “Calls to raise inheritance taxes stem from two common failings, one moral, one intellectual.”

It's Sunday - time for a "pick-me-up" and there isn't much more upbeat than a Bobby Darin finger-snapping song.  Darin was a phenomenal star, versatile, with a great sense of humor.  He was a popular guest on many of his era's top entertainment TV shows and had a couple of his own as well.  A songwriter, singer, actor, impressionist, Darin was a unique star.  He really did it all in the entertainment business, on both sides of the camera, as a business manager and producer, mentor, creator and performer.  During his all-too-short lifetime, few were aware of the stresses which both challenged and drove him - his serious lifelong illness, his heartbreak in learning of his true parentage, his devotion to his son, Dodd, his love for the women in his life.  His remarkable intelligence was really no secret to those who were familiar with his work.  Let's take a look back at one of America's greatest entertainers - Bobby Darin.