Sibby Online

Celebrity scientists living high off the hog of billions in grants

Cory Heidelberger probably won't like Mark Steyn's accusing global warming scientist are perpetuating their lie for the sake of greed:

Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:

And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

That's laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.

If anyone needs newspapers, it ought to be for stories like this. If there were no impending ecopalypse, then "climate science" would be a relatively obscure field, as it was up to a generation ago. Now it produces celebrity scientists living high off the hog of billions in grants. They thus have a vested interest in maintaining the planet's-gonna-fry line. So what do the media do? Instead of exposing the thesis to rigorous journalistic examination, they stage fluffy green stunts, run soft-focus "living green" features with Hollywood "activists", and at a time of massive staff cutbacks in every other department create the positions of specialist "climate correspondent" and "environmental reporter" and fill them with sycophantic promoters of the Big Scare to the point that, as Dr Mann coos approvingly to The New York Times, "you've taken the words out of my mouth".

Consensus used to push Progressive's agenda

Joseph Farah explains:

It's a funny thing about "consensus."

Often we are told that because society has reached a "consensus" on a given topic, debate about it should be all but extinguished.

Those who are not part of the "consensus" are often ridiculed and marginalized.

Those who are part of the "consensus" feel perfectly justified in imposing their view on the rest of the country – even the world.

For example, next month there's a United Nations convention in Copenhagen at which the powers that be plan to reinvent the way the world is governed on the basis of a "consensus" that man-made, catastrophic climate change is an imminent threat to the planet.

Of course, first you have to ask yourself: "Is there really a consensus among the world's population that man's activity on the planet presents an imminent threat to survival?"

The answer, of course, is no. Not only is there no consensus, I'm not even aware of any effort to conduct scientific surveys to determine if there is.

The second question you have to ask is this: "Would it matter if there were such a consensus?"

The answer, of course, is no. It wouldn't matter because the world is not and should not be governed on the basis of consensus. In fact, the world shouldn't be governed at all – unless or when God Himself descends from heaven with a shout and imposes His own righteous, all-knowing judgments upon it.

Yet, next month, we're told, because of "consensus," decisions are going to be made at this U.N. convention that will affect the lives of every man, woman and child on the planet – and we will take some significant steps toward global governance.

So be very wary when people cite "consensus" as a reason for doing anything. It's a trick. It's political sleight of hand. It's a con game – much like "man-made, catastrophic climate change." Neither one is real – and it wouldn't matter if they were. Both are merely excuses for actions that others want to impose on the rest of us.

"Consensus" is also used as an excuse right here in the United States to indoctrinate your children into "climate change" hysteria. I doubt there is a public school anywhere in America not teaching "man-made, catastrophic climate change" as fact. How do they get away with it? Well, they'll tell you there's a "consensus" among scientists on the subject.

Dubai tipping us off on the debt crisis

Vox Days has this interesting piece of economic analysis:

2007, the international financial elite knew very well that there were serious problems with the world's largest banks. Perfectly good loans were being called, long-standing corporate relationships were being cast aside for short-term benefit and there was a palpable perception of something wicked on its way. While news of the so-called credit crunch was duly reported by all the major newspapers, few outside the financial world had any idea that consequences such as the meltdown of 2008 were rapidly approaching.

But if you knew what to look for, it was fairly obvious that something big and ugly was developing, which was why I wrote that "the United States was fast approaching an interesting juncture" in my WND column published March 24, 2008. In a similar manner, what appears to be the minor matter of a Dubai-based corporation requesting a six-month moratorium on its debt payments looks very much like a warning that the next stage in the global financial crisis will be upon us soon.

Debt is the primary cause of significant economic shocks, both to the upside and the downside. This is because it magnifies profitable activity, and it multiplies losses. The following chart from Morgan Stanley shows the historical level of total debt compared to U.S. gross domestic product; note that the relative amount of debt was actually increasing from 1929 through 1933 as GDP shrank and governments and corporations attempted to stave off the effects of the contraction through debt-financed spending.

 
The spike in financial and government-sponsored enterprise debt that has taken place over the last decade is particularly problematic because it has only a tangential relationship with genuine market-driven economic activity. For example, Dubai World is a government-sponsored enterprise and its giant, gaudy projects have long been a byword for inexplicable and unsupportable excess. If the emirate does default on part or all of the Dubai World debt, this should serve as confirmation that the debt-deleveraging process indicated in the Federal Reserve's credit statistics has begun on a global scale.

It is no secret that many of the large banks around the world are technically insolvent. While accounting rules have been rewritten to permit them to continue valuing assets at elevated levels compared to what they could be reasonably expected to command if sold on the open market, this does not change the fact that the collateral supporting much of the world's public and private debt is worth less than the debt it theoretically supports. This can be seen in the FDIC's account of estimated and actual losses; I estimate that bank assets are only worth around 60 percent of their reported valuations on average despite the eight-month rally in the stock markets. This is why banks are increasingly unwilling to lend money despite the central-bank-suppressed interest rates that enable them to hold deposits at essentially no cost to themselves.

This is not a sustainable situation. There is presently around $3.75 in debt for every $1 in national income, whereas the historical chart indicates that the national economy can normally support around $1.50. Therefore, the elimination of a significant portion of the cumulative debt should be anticipated; in macroeconomic terms this indicates a decline in total public, private and corporate debt from $57 trillion to $21 trillion. This process of debt-deleveraging last took place during the Great Depression. The fact that the level of global debt is higher now than it was in the 1930s is why I believe that the consequence of the current deleveraging will likely be an economic event that is an order of magnitude larger.

It is important to remember that the signal event of the global Great Depression was not the stock-market crash of October 1929, but the failure of the Austrian Creditanstalt bank 19 months later, in May 1931. (In light of the FDIC's strategy of having "good" banks take over "bad" bank assets, it is probably worth noting that it was the Creditanstalt's forced takeover of the bankrupt Bodencreditanstalt that caused it to fail.) Is the feared default of Dubai World the modern equivalent of the Creditanstalt collapse? It is impossible to say at this point, but it is safe to assume that if Dubai is not the first in a wave of international debt-failures, it will be among them once another institution sets the long-delayed process in motion. And in any case, it is certainly a flashing red signal that the economic crisis is far from over despite the widespread reports of global recovery.

If you're interested in understanding more about the dependence of modern economies and the global financial system on debt, I would encourage you to take a look at "The Return of the Great Depression," which describes both the system and the debt-deleveraging process in some detail. Amazon is now offering the Kindle edition for only $1.59.

More on Climategate scandal

Christopher Booker details the Climategate scandal:

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

Four corners of deceit includes Obamaism

Ellis Washington picks up on Rush Limbaugh's analysis of the gobal warming liars:

On Thursday, Nov. 19, a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and released 160 megabytes of confidential files onto the Internet – including 1,079 emails and 72 documents.

Over the past 10 days, those materials have now been posted all over the Internet and reveal what most rational people have thought all along – that anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming is perhaps the biggest scientific hoax in the past 150 years, or since publication of Charles Darwin's treatise on evolution, "The Origin of Species" (1859).

Last Tuesday, radio host Rush Limbaugh, in his commentary on the recent climate-change scandal, put this outrage in a bigger context he referred to as the "four corners of deceit" which consist of: government, academia, science and media.

This theory is placed in the paradigm of two worldviews that have warred against each other since antiquity – Veritas vs. Infidus – a worldview based on Truth vs. a worldview based on the Big Lie.

Liberalism with its multiplicity of manifestations – paganism, humanism, Enlightenment, Darwinism, progressivism, Marxism, socialism, fascism, communism, naturalism, Nazism, Statism, Obamaism – is all part of the same existential Big Lie.

Writer James Delingpole said of the climate-change hoax:

"Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."

The difference between socialism and capitalism, or a democracy and a constitutional republic

Today's government schools are to prevent us from knowing that we are accepting a totalitarian state:

Is homeschooling compatible with socialism and vice-versa? Apparently not, for homeschooling means parental control of education, and that is anathema to socialists.

The most important institution in a socialist society is a government-owned and -controlled education system in which children can be indoctrinated to willingly accept state control of their lives. Public-school teachers are not freedom fighters. They are government employees who must obey the mandates of the state.

In a socialist system, the state owns the children. Parents are merely breeders, and since homeschoolers tend to like large families, the population-control socialists will no doubt try to abolish homeschooling.

In communist Russia, which was known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the state owned the means of production and just about everything else. Farmers could not own their own land. They were forced to work on collective farms, totally subservient to the dictates of the government. In fact, the government was called the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The official religion was atheism. That perverse regime lasted 75 years and finally collapsed because it was so completely at odds with human nature.

Cuba and North Korea are totalitarian states in which there is no individual freedom to speak of. China, which is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, has adopted a limited capitalist economy in order to help it grow economically. But all newspapers and publishing companies are controlled by the government. Freedom of speech does not exist, and religion is tightly controlled. Homeschooling obviously has no place in that kind of regime.

And now in America, we have a socialist president in the White House and a Congress controlled by the Marxist left wing of the Democratic party. These socialists already have a government-controlled education system which is turning out young Americans who don’t know the difference between socialism and capitalism, or a democracy and a constitutional republic. They have been so totally dumbed down that they are willing to accept the chains of socialist control over their lives as inevitable. And since it promises economic security – the security of enslavement – why fight it?

The reason why the socialists in power are determined to saddle the nation with a universal, national health-care system is because it will give them complete control over the lives of everyone, including homeschoolers who will be forced to accept government-imposed health insurance. All of this is patently unconstitutional. But socialists have always considered the United States Constitution to be an obstacle to their goal of total power.

Is Obama on drugs?

Eills Washingotn wonders:

Just as 150 years ago the academic world replaced scientific skepticism with cult devotion, holding naturalist Charles Darwin's work as the greatest scientific discovery since Newton, and deified his suppositions as beyond questioning, so have we in modern times through the New World Order and socialism worshiped at the pagan altar of global warming ("climate change").

We allow this Groupthink, despite the existence of irrefutable proof from these phony scientists' own e-mails that all of their scientific data was a fraud perpetrated to get government grants, to further the "green movement" and to "save the planet."

With this voluminous amount of materials now public regarding this climate-change scam, what has the Stalinist-controlled media done over the past 10 days since this story broke? Absolutely nothing.

The New York Times is reluctant to give any substantive coverage because the hackers violated the scientists' "privacy" in obtaining the incriminating materials.

The only substantive analysis about this story to date has been on Fox News, on the alternative media and on conservative talk radio.

Socialists, liberals and progressives feel entitled to lie, steal, cheat and even kill to further their agenda at all costs. Why? Because it is done all in the name of a moral cause greater than ourselves; whether we are talking about saving the polar bear, the spotted owl, snail darter, saving the planet, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, or upholding the unchallengeable secular principles of science, as Machiavelli stated:

"The end justifies the means."

And what does our exalted leader, President Barack Obama, have to say about this? Well, Obama boldly proclaimed that the world has moved "one step closer" to a "strong operational agreement" on climate change at next month's Copenhagen summit. Countries must "reach a strong operational agreement that will confront the threat of climate change while serving as a stepping-stone to a legally binding treaty," he told a press conference with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

I thought to myself, is this guy crazy? Is Obama on drugs? Is Obama that insulated from reality that 5 days after the greatest international scandal in science was exposed since Darwinian evolution 150 years ago, Obama doesn't express outrage that the scientists and scientific data behind the climate-change–green movement is all a Big Lie? Moreover, he displays his arrogance even more by redoubling his efforts to cram this climate-change fascism down the throats of the American people. Efforts the anti-climate-change scientists have shown will return our technology use to the year "1867"!

Remember the infamous words of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, who said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

Indeed, we believed in the Big Lie of Darwinian evolution and got separation of law from morality, eugenics, Nazism, scientific mythology dominating the academy and influencing law, policy and culture. We believe man-made climate change and have already spent billions on policies related to the "green movement" which is a contrived hoax.

These modern-day fascists in government, in the academy, in science and in the media are so narcissistic in their zeal to save the world they will do so even if it means destroying the world. Liberalism is so sick and delusional that these people think they have the power to affect the temperature of the earth, which most scientists realize is predicated not on man, but primarily on the sun.

The four deceits, government, academia, science and media, are all dominated by Machiavellian hacks in Washington, D.C., in Hollywood, in the academy, in corporate America, in science and at the United Nations. Now that we know the truth behind this climate-change scandal from the e-mails at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, any person in a position of power to effect energy policy who believes in man-made or anthropogenic climate-change nonsense should all be given a nice straitjacket and put inside a padded cell at the insane asylum.

The Progressive's need for validation

Phil Elmore explains another mental illness of those who are running both political parties:

What do Adam Lambert, Cass Sunstein, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama have in common? They share it with countless other political leftists – those who can be described, variously, as "liberals" (a euphemism that belies the word's roots and traditional meanings), as "progressives" (another euphemism that confuses or mislabels as progress what is merely invasive government control), often as "Democrats" and perhaps most accurately as "socialists." They use the technology of popular culture mass-media – television and, increasingly, streaming/real-time or downloaded video and audio available online, which forms an increasing portion of Americans' entertainment and news consumption – to tell us, over and over again, what we should think because they think it. This is a fundamental expression of insecurity. It is the need for validation, and it forms the backbone of all left-wing sociopolitical thought.

The stimulus insanity to continue

Not suprised to hear that the fools in DC will continue the insanity and America's addiction to debt:

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama signed a combined nearly $1.5 trillion in federal spending in the attempt to correct the nation's economic tailspin, but with unemployment soaring over 10 percent, Congress is gearing up to pass yet another economic "stimulus" package, perhaps as soon as January.

The Los Angeles Times reports that President Obama and fellow Democrats in particular are in process of assembling a new jobs package that would devote unspecified billions of dollars to projects meant to put people back on payrolls in 2010. The House version of "stimulus 3.0" may even be pushed through as quickly as next month.

The Times cites Democratic House members disappointed that Obama's $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act wasn't larger and pledging to press a for a new, substantial spending plan to address unemployment.

"I hope we don't play around the edges with this and we do what will work. Invest the money now," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. "We have to create jobs, and we have to create them right away."

Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, however, believes that more government spending will do nothing to solve unemployment.

"There is no doubt that the original stimulus failed to create jobs, and has in fact probably cost additional jobs and prolonged the recession," he said. "To create jobs we need to lower the tax burden to stimulate investment, which is the exact opposite of what the Democrats did earlier this year and now contemplate again."

Reports over the success of the last stimulus package are widely mixed, with the White House claiming the spending has created or saved over 640,000 jobs. At the same time, the Government Accountability Office has already discounted tens of thousands of those jobs and found "a range of significant reporting and processing problems that need to be addressed."

Regardless of how miscalculated the 640,000 number may be, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 16 million people, or 10.2 percent of the workforce, unemployed in October, a rise of 3.49 million jobs lost since Obama took office in January.

Copenhagen shuts out WorldNetDaily

The last thing the liars of the Global Warming faux crisis builders want is a media exposing the truth:

Attorneys for WND today threatened the United Nations with a lawsuit for its refusal, thus far, to issue press credentials for coverage of the global climate-change convention next month in Copenhagen.

WND's senior staff writer Jerome Corsi has been seeking the credentials from the U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change for weeks – providing all of the documentation requested and establishing his bona fides as a full-time reporter for the largest independent English-language Internet news organization in the world.

Until today, despite repeated requests, the UNFCCC had refused to acknowledge whether Corsi, a two-time No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, will be permitted to attend the meetings that have been hailed by organizers as a major step forward in "global governance."

The UNFCCC press office sent an e-mail to Corsi today insisting the agency had not responded because it is dealing with more than 4,000 applications and must "examine each on a case-by-case basis."

"We regret that you have had to wait so long; however, it is not for any political reason. We would be happy to refer your application to New York for further consideration," the e-mail said.

"It takes time to make arrangements to travel to Copenhagen for an extended period, and I began to believe the U.N. was stalling," said Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND. "So we are formally putting the U.N. on notice that we will not accept its nondecision lying down."

The conference begins Dec. 7.

"Your refusal to respond to these contacts leads to the conclusion that UNFCCC believes that if it ignores Dr. Corsi, he 'will go away,'" wrote Gary Kreep of the U.S. Justice Foundation. "Nothing can be further from the truth. If he is denied press credentials to this event as a result of the acts, or omissions, of UNFCCC, litigation will ensue that will result in substantial negative press coverage for UNFCCC, and for the attendees at the Copenhagen Conference as well. The specter of UNFCCC trying to allow attendance at the conference only of journalists who will report in what UNFCCC views to be a positive manner on the conference will not sit well with the American public, no matter what the outcome of the litigation."

Reasons for thanksgiving

To give thanks I will repost a my 2004 Thanksgiving message. But before I do I would like to point out that since that time I have learned that there are many Republicans who are also progressives and it was they who attacked me in more personal ways than the Democrats. The leader of that GOP effort in South Dakota is Pat Powers, who came onto the South Dakota blogosphere in 2005. So today I dedicate this repost to him as I pray for his great awakening to the Truth from God:

Today I am reflecting on how thankful we are to have chosen John Thune to represent us in the U.S. Senate beginning January 4^th. I found this to further reinforce the importance of the 2004 election results:

Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

This is the ending to a Richard J. Maybury piece called, "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax". Here is the introduction:

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving's real meaning.

My motivation to search for this report came from Rush Limbaugh’s mention of William Bradford. Here is what Maybury said about Bradford:

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies filled," but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.

What few of us may know is that the Pilgrims came to America and were experimenting with socialism:

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

Here is how Bradford solved the problem:

This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Today I am more thankful than ever. I am thankful for all the comforts and goods and services we have that make our life much more enjoyable verses the difficulties that faced our Pilgrims. I am thankful to the Founding Fathers who fought for freedom and set up the Constitution so that generations to come could enjoy the fruits of freedom.

I am also thankful for one development above all others today. That would be the Internet. Today I can utilize the freedom provided by the First Amendment. After becoming frustrated by the stifling of that important right by the Argus Leader, I am blessed to be able to speak my mind here.

I am also thankful that my message may have been a small factor in helping the truth about the socialistic beliefs of the left and one of their leader’s, Tom Daschle, to have become known to more people than what would have happened if I had not started this web site. I am also thankful to all of the members of the Dakota Blog Alliance.

But I am the most thankful to all those who have participated in the democratic process by reading the findings of the blog alliance and took action.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, including those on the left. May you find the wisdom to understand the errors of socialism and that there is nothing progressive about the ideology of today's so-called liberals.

Today I am reflecting on how thankful we are to have chosen John Thune to represent us in the U.S. Senate beginning January 4^th. I found this to further reinforce the importance of the 2004 election results:

Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

This is the ending to a Richard J. Maybury piece called, "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax". Here is the introduction:

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving's real meaning.

My motivation to search for this report came from Rush Limbaugh’s mention of William Bradford. Here is what Maybury said about Bradford:

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies filled," but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.

What few of us may know is that the Pilgrims came to America and were experimenting with socialism:

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

Here is how Bradford solved the problem:

This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Today I am more thankful than ever. I am thankful for all the comforts and goods and services we have that make our life much more enjoyable verses the difficulties that faced our Pilgrims. I am thankful to the Founding Fathers who fought for freedom and set up the Constitution so that generations to come could enjoy the fruits of freedom.

I am also thankful for one development above all others today. That would be the Internet. Today I can utilize the freedom provided by the First Amendment. After becoming frustrated by the stifling of that important right by the Argus Leader, I am blessed to be able to speak my mind here.

I am also thankful that my message may have been a small factor in helping the truth about the socialistic beliefs of the left and one of their leader’s, Tom Daschle, to have become known to more people than what would have happened if I had not started this web site. I am also thankful to all of the members of the Dakota Blog Alliance.

But I am the most thankful to all those who have participated in the democratic process by reading the findings of the blog alliance and took action.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, including those on the left. May you find the wisdom to understand the errors of socialism and that there is nothing progressive about the ideology of today's so-called liberals.

A partial win for radical socialism is a complete defeat for freedom and liberty

Dave Welch says it:

Amidst the onslaught of tyranny flowing from what is now our own Red Square in Washington, D.C., we are witnessing the development of our version of Poland's Solidarity movement. I was privileged to be part of a gathering of some of the most outstanding Christian scholars, clergy, theologians and organizational leaders of our day a couple of months ago. Standing before us was the man whom many, myself included, consider the reigning "patriarch" of biblically grounded, Christ-centered cultural reformation, Chuck Colson. Standing next to him and moderating the meeting was the dynamic Robert George of Princeton University.

The Manhattan Declaration was launched into the public sphere of spiritual, cultural, moral and political battle last Friday as the result of that meeting and represents what all present believe to be the foundational issues of our day. Life, marriage and religious liberty rise above even health care, national debt, economic recessions and, I would propose, even national security.

The reason is simple in that as Scripture admonishes us and legions of clergy from Jonathan Mayhew to James Kennedy, Christian leaders from John Winthrop to James Dobson and historians/scholars from John Witherspoon to David Barton, Marshall Foster and Peter Marshall have challenged us:

If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3)

The soul-selling political prostitution that occurred over the weekend as enough key Democrats were purchased by their party leaders to achieve a cloture vote in the Senate on the Stalinist takeover of our health-care system was a tragic fruit of a nation that has lived as if we can serve two masters.

Take for example the raising of the abortion funding issue that we scurried to oppose – meaning that if that provision were taken out we essentially acquiesced that we could live with the rest of this Obamination. We exulted in changing poll numbers that averaged "only" 47 percent of those surveyed in favor and 48 percent opposed.

Once again we see a nation in a civil war of basic values, and one side must prevail. A partial win for radical socialism is a complete defeat for freedom and liberty.

Our National nightmare

From David Limbaugh:

In a Democratic fundraising speech in Iowa over the weekend, Vice President Joe Biden told party loyalists that opponents of the Obama administration's agenda "should be worried about us, for we are their worst nightmare." Duh.

Finally we can agree on something, Joe. Even the liberal New York Times reports that at the current level of federal spending, the annual interest on the national debt will exceed $700 billion by 2019 – compared with $202 billion this year. Some forecasters predict it will be much higher. This additional half-trillion dollars a year in interest is more than our current combined expenditures on education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oh, and the Times isn't even factoring in the cap-and-trade nightmare you and Barack have in store for us, Joe – you know, that urgent legislation to catapult the nation back into Third World status based on hysteria generated by fraudulent science and corrupt zealots and politicians.

Nor is the Times including in its calculations the additional debt that would result from Obamacare.

Joe, when the New York Times is sounding the warnings over the exploding national debt, you and Barack insist not only on not reversing your disastrous course but also on making it worse. How can reasonable people assume anything other than that you are trying to run this nation into the ground financially?

Don't dare keep telling us your hyper-ambitious spending is a necessary evil required to deliver us from a financial crisis you inherited. Whatever crisis we face is debt-related, purely and simply. Everything else is manageable. Yet you all are deliberately increasing our indebtedness as far as the eye can see, without the slightest pretense of scaling back in this millennium. In fact, you are laboring to establish further entitlements and institutional changes that would generate exponential burdens on our debt and would be enormously difficult for any responsible and financially sane successor to undo, much less reverse.

Adding insult to injury, you are spending this money not to improve ("stimulate") the economy – which even the most politically and economically illiterate should now realize – but to restructure American society, dismantle our free-enterprise system and impose in its place a command-control economy and political system – in which life's decisions, including over our private health care, are dictated from Washington.

But while you and Barack are hoisting your wrecking ball, could you please spare us the pseudo-sanctimony and transparent populism in telling us that it will take "grit and determination" to outlast the "special interests" on Wall Street and the insurance industry to pass your destructive agenda?

Cash for Clunkers put gas guzzlers on South Dakota roads

This ought to drive Cory Heidelberger nuts:

Across America, people bought Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics more than any other vehicles during last summer's popular Cash for Clunkers program.

In South Dakota, they bought pickups.

The clunkers program was designed to jump-start the nation's economy and take gas-guzzling vehicles off the road.

But an analysis of government data by the Argus Leader shows that in South Dakota, the program might have served as a gift from taxpayers to car buyers and dealerships.

The program's two best-selling vehicles in the state were the Chevy Silverado and Ford F150, two four-wheel drive pickup trucks that average less than 20 miles per gallon of gas.

Reinflating the bubble

The housing bubble created the current recession, and now it looks like it is being reinflated:

First-time buyers taking advantage of a special tax credit gave sales of existing homes in October their biggest surge in a decade. That raises hopes for a turnaround in the housing market and pleases Wall Street.

While rising foreclosures and vanishing jobs still threaten the comeback, there now are bidding wars for houses in some cities, and home sales almost are 36 percent above their low point in January.

In Sioux Falls, first-time buyer activity doubled from a baseline of about 20 percent of purchases in recent years. Barton Hacker, chief executive officer of the Realtor Association of the Sioux Empire, said the increase to 38 percent is largely because of the tax credit.

Note the "pleases Wall Street". It is time the Progressives understand that Wall Street does not represent "free market acpitalism", but instead the beneficiaries of socialism.