Dakota Beacon

Call the ethanol wealth redistribution scheme a subsidy or a tax credit. Or call the ruse what it certainly is—a sacrament of the Church of the Green Dragon. Names are irrelevant. Renaming a life-sucking parasite a rose leaves the host no less dead. Propping up businesses destined to lose money is a waste of money. All the various fantasy-world counterarguments disintegrate when confronted with real-world data and sound logic.

Vice President Joe Biden made the news again this week. Three weeks ago, Biden was in the news because of reports he had denounced Tea Party members as ‘terrorists,’ a claim his spokespeople have attempted to deny. This week, Biden was in the news because he did not denounce the communist Chinese for their vicious one-child policy, a claim his spokespeople have attempted to deny. Joe Biden has performed an interesting inversion of reality: Tea Party members haven’t killed anyone; China’s one-child policy has generated the deaths of countless millions. Beyond those direct deaths, China grapples with the demographic-cultural nightmare of some 43-million ‘missing women,’ as Chinese families opt to abort baby girls in preference of baby boys.

Please do not be too hard on the Corps of Engineers. They employ some of the best hydrologic, hydraulic, and structural engineers on the planet; and the worst political environment possible, with less then competent politicians having been looking over their shoulders for decades. That micromanagement by politicians must end and be replaced with logic and vigilance that is maintained over time.

The real problem will come decades from now when the high dams are all filled up with silt, something the original designers knew would happen eventually, but ignored because it would not happen in their lifetime and because of the pomposity of politicians in believing that nature can be tamed. So a moratorium of all new building of habitable structures within the natural overbank of the Missouri is an additional necessity.

The axiom that Europeans haven’t the intestinal fortitude to defend themselves and their culture could be just a story. And the story may be part of a meme  war.

Perhaps Europeans can fight, but have simply been paralyzed by stories that they tell themselves. Memes, like parasites, render Europeans incapable of thinking clearly about their own survival. Instead, the Euros live to serve their high-minded ideals. But the ideals, which are the memes, live only to destroy their hosts.

When the Conservative Democrat Bourbons ended Reconstruction, they had reduced the role of blacks but did not try to eliminate them or prevent their advancement. With the overthrow of the Conservative Democrats and beginning in 1890, however, the new governing class of Populists and Progressives replaced reasonable literacy requirements with ones that voters be able to read and explain the state constitution. They used these harsher requirements against the literate as well as the illiterate blacks to achieve a virtually all-white electorate, closed off employment opportunities for blacks, and instituted a regime of racial suppression that lasted more than half a century.

So why would women pregnant with twins want to ‘minus’ one? The main reasons cited in the Times article were ‘social’ and ‘emotional’—not medical. Women want to avoid the stresses and deprivations of raising twins, often even construing their ‘choice’ as an act of love that benefits both the terminated and surviving twin. As one proponent admitted, it is really about women exercising their freedom to ‘fashion their lives how they want.”

An increasingly used ‘medical’ procedure that some women want and some physicians provide—also known as a ‘twin reduction. In the 1970s and 1980s, pro-choice activists ridiculed what they claimed were illegitimate ‘slippery slope’ arguments made by pro-lifers about what moral horrors might be generated by an absolute right to abortion.

The slippery slope is here. And we are picking up speed.

Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for twenty minutes but he’s already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign:

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington DC as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

I wish Governor Perry well in his stated goal of banishing Washington to the periphery of Americans’ lives. One way he could set the tone is by foregoing much of the waste and excess that attends the imperial Presidency. Believe it or not, many presidents and prime ministers manage to get by with only a 14-car or even a four-car motorcade. I know: Hard to imagine, but there it is. A post-prosperity America that has dug itself into a multi-trillion-dollar hole will eventually have to stop digging. When it does so, the Government of the United States will have to learn to do more with less. A good place to start would be restoring the lifestyle of the president to something Calvin Coolidge might recognize.

Winter will arrive before housing is available, someone saw this as a business opportunity, “Fighting Sioux” nickname, no staff members “blew the whistle”, “How is the gravely thing working for you?, Man of many talents, ND placed 17th from the bottom, This is one of the last things we had, What convenience store?, The poverty rate is rising, the oil boom has caused a greater gap, Bismarck-Mandan has twice the market potential of Grand Forks, DAKTOIDS

The developing story at Dickinson State University has confirmed one thing to those investigating the situation:  taxpayers need whistleblowers in government that do not let fear stop them from doing what is right.

Ever since we started looking into this situation in mid-July, the biggest stumbling block to uncovering the truth has been a distinct fear of retaliation against anyone who "spills the beans."  From day one, the story was the same - "here's some great information, but it didn't come from me." 

We are living through an historic time: What is unfolding before our eyes is nothing less than the unravelling of the present world order.

The immediate cause of this unravelling is the disintegration of the world's reserve currency – the American dollar.

As things are coming to a head, we will have a stark choice: We either honestly face the inescapable consequences of the fix we are in, or we seek a false sense of protection and safety in the arms of our government.

The policies in the University System that demand higher enrollment numbers regardless of cost or benefit to the state in the long term have contributed to this situation. 

Clearly, there is a loss of focus as to who university officials have been hired to serve - students as future taxpayers, and their taxpaying parents.

And the Fargo Forum can minimize this issue all they want, it is still a story worth reporting.

It has always seemed to me that the argument for American military intervention in other nations rests on shaky ground. Contending that the United States must “police” the world, “build” nations, “spread” democracy, and “fight” for other people’s freedom sounds convincing, even lofty. But sacrificing human and economic treasure to fight for people who’ve shown little willingness to fight for themselves smacks of contrived moral superiority and is logically indefensible.

Progressive high-mindedness has bred the American welfare state. Consequently, trillions must be cut from spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and Obamacare repealed — if we are to avert a final downslide into a European-style socialist democracy. Yet on the other hand, what about “defense spending”–a grand illusion of linguistic gymnastics? Where will the trillions come from to support the military spending necessitated by a continuation of neocon high-mindedness?

How much is Chancellor Bill Goetz's actions going to cost North Dakota Taxpayers in legal fees and severance pay?

Now the question for the taxpayers is: "How much will Chancellor Bill Goetz's efforts to cover-up the scandal by firing Richard McCallum as quickly as possible cost the taxpayers by way of severance pay and legal fees?"

Today Congress doesn't even bother arguing its authority to enact this or that law. It assumes a limitless power to do as it pleases - on gun control, tobacco, "a patients' bill of rights," and such entitlements as Social Security and Medicare. So we now live under the "consolidated" government the Constitution was designed to prevent.

The pity is that even conservatives and their legal scholars have forgotten the Constitution and allow their enemies to rewrite the political ground rules. The unequivocal text can't be changed by the courts or superseded by case law. Lincoln understood it; today's conservatives don't.

Some interesting inferences may be drawn from the Iowa Straw Poll of 2011, held last weekend.  The first and most obvious, is of course, that Tim Pawlenty’s race is run.  Voters assessed his performance (chiefly against Michele Bachmann) and decided they’d rather have her.  The beleaguered but ever popular Bachmann dealt deftly with the many irrelevant questions handed her by the panel of pundits who clearly wanted to trivialize her candidacy (and failed to do so).  Indeed, when the nation has suffered its first ever bond downgrade, an event in which Bachmann stood out as a leader against the deal that sealed said downgrade, what could they do?  To ask her anything about relevant issues would be to deliver up to her a tacit endorsement. 

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:

“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

Minot was one of the most optimistic small cities, Justice comes slowly in Minot, “his baby mamma was dead”, he cooked the enrollment books, “If financing can be finalized”, state’s best track and field performers ever, Vikings quarterbacks from the past 12 seasons, less publicized cases of overland flooding, Crystal Springs is a 134 acre lake, closed by landslides, a 20,000 mile bicycle trip,

Some estimate that our true unemployed number is in the low 20% range. Is that where some of the deficit is going? To keep an additional 11% of our able-bodied people in idleness?

Why work if the benefits of not working are as good as working? Why get out of the house and brave the elements when the food stamps arrive through the mail in a magnetic stripe card? The heating allowance comes in the mail? The unemployment check comes in the mail? The tax preparer does a free return to the IRS who will send a check in the mail for Earned Income Tax Credit. Medicaid is in place for you. Why work?

Our only grandson (age 6) left us today. He was with us for nine days, and it was  nonstop action. We enjoyed lots of bike rides, motorcycle rides, trampoline, pool, foosball, legos, Sponge Bob Square Pants, and other activities. We played baseball (he is the Cubs, I am the Indians), basketball, and golf. The other day he announced to me that he was not afraid of me. I asked him why that was and he said that I wasn’t the real boss of this house, Gammy (my wife) was. Oh how things have changed (or have they?).

What in fact is the primary function of the Office of the President?  From where does it get the power?  Power to do what?  From where does the vision of what WE the people want come? 35,000 innocent 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!”

There are many legislators that have long stuck their necks out in attempts to fix the problems at North Dakota's University System.  They have been shouted down at every turn, and attacked for being too old fashioned. 

Hopefully this latest situation reinforces their zeal to fix these problems.

Neither pack of professional politicians is sincere about reducing spending or debt.  Arguments on left and right continue to go in one ear and out the other.  Both sides cling doggedly to their damned ideological agendas.  And Americans have grown sick of the cesspool government created by all the doggedness, gamesmanship, and dishonesty.  We are stupendously disgusted at coming out on the losing end of immoral deals struck by immoral lawmakers to solve problems which those lawmakers created in the first place. 

Starting over is starting to look like our best option.