Dakota Beacon

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. 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Director Nihad Awad sent a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking for “an agency-wide investigation of the use of outside trainers who offer hostile, stereotypical and grossly inaccurate information about Muslims and Islam to our nation’s security personnel.” Awad calls the trainers “fear-mongers.” The director doesn’t much clarify what is meant by “hostile” and “inaccurate,” but the man does do a great deal of obfuscating.

In his Farewell Address on January 11, 1989, Ronald Reagan spoke these words, “Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what it is allowed to do. ‘We the People’ are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I tried to do these past eight years.”

President Reagan understood the US Constitution with his heart as well as his head. He had internalized the principles our Founding Fathers had succinctly captured in that great document. In exercising those principles as President, he became a great leader and among one of our greatest presidents.

Teacher Pay Issues on a Micro-economic Scale

The foolhardy action of the last legislative session to increase the burden of school boards by a factor of about two-thirds in funding the teacher retirement fund was a short sighted action that will have huge negative economic repercussions in the future. The session repeated the mistakes of California instead of learning from them.

It was 24 years ago, in June 1987, that Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘Tear down this wall.’ In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the foundations that had undergirded world politics for decades were likewise crumbling, John Mearsheimer penned his celebrated article: ‘Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War.’ In the years since, the article has come to embody a specific, nostalgic lament. Yet, viewing Mearsheimer through the prism of today’s circumstances, one must ask: is it really the Cold War that we miss?

Yes, we miss the Cold War. But what we miss far more are leaders who unabashedly trumpet American exceptionalism and who are willing to recognize a fundamental distinction between good and evil.

As a meteorologist and climate scientist, the article " DENNIS PATRICK: "WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE." rings loudly with a message of legit atmospheric science vs the absurd notion, using the manipulation of facts to give the impression that we completely understand, can model and then forecast climate out to 50 years.

Although a brilliant salesman, he's got a lemon with this one and I can't fathom he can make it to the finals. His game-plan is to drown out all the others with kabillions and be the last guy standing by convention-time.  I don't think he can do it.

Editors Note: Thomas Roeser died last Sunday, this is one of his last columns.

Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A Congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than Tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an “office” with “staffers” to “put out” “statements” on the subject.

When Weiners have staffers, it’s very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an “office” to issue “statements” about your Tweets, it’s hardly surprising you’re indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.

In the end, the Congressman was not so “distracted” that he wasn’t able to vote to raise the debt limit. Confronted by his Twitpic, one is tempted to channel Mae West: Is that a debt-ceiling increase in your Fruit of the Looms or are you just pleased to see me? Alas for America, it’s both.

I kept signaling for the curveball, or the knuckleball, or the changeup, but he just wanted to bring that heater. On one pitch, the batter swung and missed, the ball hit my foot, ran up my shin guard, and went 70 feet up in the air and hit a car outside the park. The ump called it a foul, the batter smirked, Bob rolled his eyes, and I grimaced with pain.

The chemistry that tips the emotional lefty pool tables so the balls roll toward Obama caused Rahm Emanuel to get himself kicked out of the lunatic 3rd World insane asylum in the White House after he used 4-letter words to tell the incumbent to change his ways from the concept there is no patriotism but global--and rush to the relatively bucolic order of Chicago Squid politics to keep his sanity. Emanuel's not Weird just a Squid pragmatist weasel born without a moral core.

Editors Note: Thomas Roeser died last Sunday, this is his last column.

Least Tern & Piping Plover protectors, Recreation Interests, flood plain residents (I am in all three categories) ... they all have one thing in common...special interest dispensation at the expense of the number one purpose of the federal Missouri River dam system...FLOOD CONTROL.

Flood control dams are the only civil engineering projects for which I am ashamed of my profession. Egypt & China should be ashamed of Aswan and Three Gorges respectively ...just as we should be ashamed of all of our high dams.

Looking back to the summer of 2010, forecasts of the La Nina predicted winter extremes and spring floods. One story carried in USA Today 10/22/2010 foretold weather extremes in 2011. Reduced precipitation and higher temperatures for most of the southern United States would spark drought and wildfires. The Northern Plains, however, would see more storms, precipitation and flooding. This story was right on target.

So much for the prognostication of manmade global warming. One might just as well believe in misfortune brought on by shooting an albatross as in anthropogenic climate change. I prefer the science of the meteorological explanation of Southern Oscillation.

The stakes in the next election are enormous. The Medicare reform contest could be the one for all the marbles.

The trustees of the Medicare system recently reported that the program will go broke in the year 2024—five years sooner than was projected just last year. The millions of Americans who have been counting on Medicare to be a reliable, stable guarantor of affordable healthcare in their senior years should be asking themselves, ‘Who is responsible for this predicament?’ The short answer is ‘lots of people,’ but let’s start by looking in the mirror.