Dakota Beacon

Huxley is much more sinister, almost devilish, in his perception.

A shared vision as exemplified by the institutions of family, school and church serves as a glue to hold a society together. That was taught in Freshman Sociology a half century ago. In a postmodern world where all three institutions struggle with a changing identity, there is a greatly diminished unifying sense of connectedness. It seems every individual stands alone. Alienation would rightly describe this condition.

If true, Huxley’s vision foretold our predicament more accurately than did Orwell’s.

If a defensive, elitist posture rules the day in the Republican party, the Voice of freedom calling from the grass roots of this great country and amplified by the Tea Party movement, could be drowned out again.   

However if Republicans listen and support ALL candidates endorsed by the Republican party, the results in November may not be everything we hope for, but the groundwork will be laid to build on for 2012. 

Without the bedrock conservative principles espoused by Barry Goldwater in 1964, there may have been no place for Ronald Reagan to stand in 1980. 

Reagan might say, "Let's Win One for the Gipper!"

In “anchor baby” chain migration, the proponents of unlimited illegal immigration must explain how a criminal (one who has broken the law, in other words) in a foreign country in which he is not a citizen himself, may be permitted to bestow the impressive gift of citizenship on another, whether it is his own offspring or not.  This is merely a case of exploitation of infants. 

I didn’t have a brother. I wished I would have, especially a younger brother, someone to beat around on and teach all the wrong things to. It was fun watching my two sons grow up and have little exchanges and do things together. My older son was very patient with his younger sibling and they were both interested in video games and sports.

One time my younger son was watching TV and the older boy went in the bathroom and came out with a toothbrush.

Decisive action is long overdue. Liberals must be reduced to harmless minorities in government. "Conservative" politicians who haven't the guts to support truth, logic, sound economics, objective science, and rational social policy must be fired. It is time to shut down the ideology that almost liquefied the American brain. Liberalism has got to go.

The Sick Bastards have done it again,  NDSU’s old spending habits, CEO Michael Unhjem was another wonder boy, F-M’s gross domestic product was over $10 billion, the future of Minot was somewhat in doubt, 25% of the shelter’s clients are American Indian women, Trends in ND newspapers, Forum Publisher Bill Marcil (74) should know his job, Author Louise Erdrich,  ND women living beyond 100, sheer grit and perseverance, DAKTOIDS

What is the real agenda of Measure Two, the captive-hunting initiative on the November ballot? Is it simply the abolishing hunting of farmed elk and deer. One of the big question marks out there amongst the public is, "people own domestic elk and deer?" They were purchased from the federal government or the U.S. Biological Survey back in the 1920s, same time as buffalo. They are several generations removed from the wild. They are private property same as buffalo.

Instead of arguing about debates and trying to dodge criticism, candidates must fulfill their duty to address the issues.

North Dakota's taxpayers and voters deserve to know each candidate's positions, but the time recently spent on petty arguments has been wasted and discussions about important topics stand idle.  Voters have a right to understand their candidate's ideas and candidates are obliged to share them.

We have to deal with the scourge of arrogant, reality-ignoring, elite theorists in economics, global warming, and the social sciences. The smug "experts" tell us to forget the data. Forget logic. Forget all of reality. They, the great seers of the way that things should be, will tell us the way in which we must imagine things to be. How shall the seers pass on their wisdom? Why, they'll use their "models," of course.

Since the aims of the New Society were fundamentally impossible, resistance continued and partly succeeded. God and human nature still existed and asserted themselves through men like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II, who struck chords in millions and undermined the legitimacy of the New Society.

The scope of the state must be expanded to include even the inspection of our motives. It isn't enough to ban overt "discrimination," since we may be "discriminating" furtively; and because we may be lying about our real motives, the state must also enforce outward compliance with "civil rights" laws (by imposing racial quotas and the like). Meanwhile, more and more things are said to be "discriminatory," including marriage.

All this must be most encouraging to the sort of people who think of the state as an instrument for the complete overhauling of society and human relations. What better starting point for such a project than a presumption of guilt against -- well, everyone?

When someone is described as having a "career as an environmental activist," you know you are dealing with a lefty ideologue. But for our edification, we turn to the source in which the claim appears.

Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism is a truly amazing scholarly triumph for an author who is only in his early 40s. It demonstrates the highest level of scholarship and is wonderfully written, and by an author for whom English is not his first language. Ultimately, it does what every biography of an intellectual giant should do: It makes the reader want to go back and reread Mises’ own works in light of Hülsmann’s analysis. Anyone at all interested in the life and work of the greatest economist of the 20th century should avail himself of this biography.

Many in the audience were quite surprised that the United Kingdom has no property tax today, later echoing the number one question I received at the state fair in July “How will we fund police and fire without property taxes?” Of course the answer is simple…it is spelled “O” “I” “L”. I’m confident that local officials would prioritize police and fire over, for example, the monorail transportation system proposed last week by a “progressive” to be constructed between the combined campuses of UND and NDSU, which would be perhaps called the University of North Dakota State University. And the media says that tea partiers are kooks!

The news media is quick to point out government waste in the Defense Department and the Pentagon, but tend to ignore waste associated with the Department of Education, the Justice Department and Health and Human Services. Who would ever think a tiny agency like OSHA would pass out billions of tax dollars in walk around money? It flies under the radar.

He anticipates a double-dip recession, Potter again proved to be nimble, ND Norwegians seem more intensely Norwegian than the real thing, 80,000 Somali immigrants live in Minnesota, the road to the island must be raised six feet, The column is a must for ND baseball fans, a harbinger of things to come, Not a good idea, even the, I can never begin to say what I owe to North Dakota, a physically frail urban aristocrat with a Harvard education, NDSU dealt similar shocks to Montana and Minnesota, the bankruptcy of Mexicana Airlines, hallucinogenic mushrooms, DAKTOIDS

I've spent much of this summer with a grandson who, at age eleven, already has, to my dismay, an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies. In some obscure way it seemed fitting that he should induce me, one August evening, to watch the video of Gus Van Sant's curious remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic, PSYCHO, the direct ancestor of today's epidemic of slasher films.

After telling the state media and everyone else who will listen.....the Burleigh County State's Attorney WILL prove that they did not withhold evidence. Only they can not. Prevarication? Confusion? Deception? You decide.

The saga of the public destruction of Sandy Blunt with nothing but lies, using your tax money continues.

Liberals don't leave morals to locals. And sadly for America, the liberal echo chamber houses nothing resembling traditional morals. Moral paralysis passes for wisdom. Shrewd-sounding dictums earn stroking.

The echo chamber hubbub surrounding the Ground Zero Mosque has at times grown deafening. Preachers preach tolerance while ridiculing anyone who observes that the 9/11 attacks fell in line with more than a millennium of history. The preachers advise kindness while viciously demonizing people who argue that a mosque intentionally located near the site of the deadliest attack is meant as a shrine to the most immoral act imaginable -- mass murder.

Global warming zealots began pushing the human-causation fallacy in the late 1980s. Since then, warmists' echo chamber conditioning has produced shriller and shriller predictions, none of which has, or ever will, come true.

Alas, one saving grace from this sad episode is that it helped produce the death of détente and the birth of the Reagan presidency, but only after an even more painful period, namely four horrendous years under President Jimmy Carter—made possible by Gerald Ford. Ford gave way to Reagan. And with the advent of that sea-change at the head of the GOP, accommodation was out and ‘rollback’—i.e., the goal of undermining the USSR—was in. It was that tectonic shift at the Republican helm that sealed the fate of the Soviet empire.”

North Dakota has been one of a small handful of states that has been able to maintain strong economic growth throughout the national recession.  As leading financial experts warn of the dangers of a double-dip recession, policymakers in Washington are now considering a measure that could bring North Dakota's economy to a screeching halt.

ND universities are open to most of the state’s high school graduates, Best Schools for B Students, No, the team is not called Mama Grizzlies, it's Vandals, we all admired the Earl Pomeroy bobblehead, Pop Goes the Weasel, How to win friends and influence people, The Indian and the White Guy, Devils Lake Basin Technical Review Team, We can recount their warts some other day, The sheriff needs a 25 percent budget increase, a person with an expensive medical problem might commit a crime to obtain treatment, DAKTOIDS

Have Your Investments Taken a Hit?  Another Investment Attack Is Coming!
 
If you think that your investments have been hard-hit with the economic downturn, another hit is on the horizon.  And if you are a senior, many of your investments are in the cross-hairs.  Many seniors - 59% exactly - receive dividend income from many companies, including utility companies, as a part of their retirement.  Unfortunately it's not just limited to seniors - working families and their retirement investments are being targeted as well.

Billy Wilder's death at 95 summoned generous eulogies, and most of them rang true. He was an excellent writer-director, one of Hollywood's rare originals. At his best -- in perhaps a dozen of his many films -- he displayed a caustic wit unusual in that sentimental, formulaic medium. And who else in the film industry could have produced movies as different as DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE APARTMENT?

Private Markwardt and his decorated Vietnam Veteran Grandfather Rollie Port

The recruits were standing at attention.  What a sight to see.  Six companies of America’s greatest and  brightest young men and women who have committed themselves to service to their country.  Soldiers one and all.  Standing tall and proud in their camouflage and black berets, ready to serve when called.   Willing to make the extreme sacrifice for their country.  They are American Soldiers.

Nearly 13.5 million innocents were murdered by Hitler, Stalin, and Pot. Three terrorists voluntarily checked out of Gitmo. No staunch liberal would seriously doubt the equivalence. Size doesn’t matter. America is every bit the monster that those murderous regimes were, simply because a liberal says so.