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Occupy Mobs Organized by Obama Operatives?

2011-10-30T16:28:00.000-07:00

Occupy Mobs Organized by Obama Operatives
As Robin of Berkeley explained in her article that I featured on September 7, 2011, the mobs we see and the violent language we hear have been organized and encouraged by Obama operatives as Barack Obama stands back and pretends otherwise. These are the ‘brown shirts’ of the 1930’s now befouling the streets of our major cities in 2011-2012 – all in the pursuit of an Obama re-election. This is a community organizer at work encouraging class warfare and violence against successful people – in the guise of equality and social justice.

I said during the summer of 2008 that Barack Obama was the most dangerous man ever to appear on the national scene in our country, and nothing I have seen since then makes me think I may have been wrong.

The following article was uncovered by Andrew Breitbart, the journalist to whom all Americans who love freedom owe so much. Biggovernment .com is Breitbart’s website.

Barack Obama organized Occupy Chicago in 1988 using means and to ends eirily similar to today’s ‘Occupy’ mobs. Why would anyone think he is not behind the mobs now protesting something or other today – especially since William Ayers is prominently featured in the current Occupy Chicago mob scene?
Barack Obama Led #OccupyChicago – Circa 1988

by Joel B. Pollak Biggovernment.com
Just twenty or so years ago, Barack Obama wouldn’t just have supported the Occupy protests.

He would have organized them.

From Stanley Kurtz’s essential Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, pp. 117-8:

In fact, Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties [in 1988]: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders into dropping a landfill expansion deal.

We know of Obama’s involvement in this demonstration only because his supporters in 2008 felt it necessary to rebut charges that, contrary to his claims of inter-racial healing, he had organized exclusively with blacks. Only then did Obama’s former colleagues from UNO [United Neighborhood Organization, a largely Mexican group] of Chicago reveal that he had helped to plan and lead this multi-ethnic demonstration against landfill expansion on Chicago’s South Side.

…Shouting “No deals!” somewhere between eighty and a hundred UNO-DCP [Developing Communities Project, a black group organized by Obama] marched to a local bank. There they broke into a meeting being conducted by the bank president and local community leaders. The group was exploring the possibility of a deal with Waste Management. The protestors, presumably including Obama, surrounded the meeting table while [Mary-Ellen] Montes [of UNO] told the negotiators, “We will fight you every step of the way.”

Obama was also likely involved with other aggressive UNO protests, including protests for school reform, through which he likely met former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers is involved in the Occupy protests today.

In the 1990s, Obama maintained his ties to radical activists, and “channel[ed] foundation funding to his confrontational Alinskyite colleagues.”

It’s clear that Obama’s ties to the Occupy movement–its forbears, its tactics, and some of its current luminaries–run deep.

This is what “community organizing” looks like.

Obama’s Jobs Plan

2011-09-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Obama’s Jobs Plan and a Video
It is common knowledge that American business owners and managers are sitting on billions that could be invested in projects that would create jobs.

I ran my own business for 13 years; I have some idea of what a business owner considers when evaluating whether or not to make an investment that, as a side effect, will create more jobs.

The thousands of new regulations and the dozens of new taxes are having a massive dampening effect on this type of investment. Temporary gimmicks, like reducing the payroll tax on employees only and extending the Bush tax cuts only for a limited time, have no effect. Business owners want some certainty about the future environment, and all they see are the continued imposition of new regulations and the continued attempts to add new taxes and tax increases.

It is virtually impossible today for an entrepreneur to start a new business, as I did in 1968, because of the stifling and unnecessary regulations that are in place.

President Obama is being devious, or he simply has no conception of how business and our economy works!

This is what business owners face right now (21 new taxes):

1. A 156 percent increase in the federal excise tax on tobacco

2. Obamacare Individual Mandate Excise Tax (takes effect in Jan 2014)

3. Obamacare Employer Mandate Tax (takes effect Jan. 2014)

4. Obamacare Surtax on Investment Income (Tax hike of $123 billion/takes effect Jan. 2013)

5. Obamacare Excise Tax on Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans (Tax hike of $32 bil/takes effect Jan. 2018)

6. Obamacare Hike in Medicare Payroll Tax (Tax hike of $86.8 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

7. Obamacare Medicine Cabinet Tax (Tax hike of $5 bil/took effect Jan. 2011)

8. Obamacare HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike (Tax hike of $1.4 bil/took effect Jan. 2011)

9. Obamacare Flexible Spending Account Cap – aka “Special Needs Kids Tax” (Tax hike of $13 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

10. Obamacare Tax on Medical Device Manufacturers (Tax hike of $20 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

11. Obamacare "Haircut" for Medical Itemized Deduction from 7.5% to 10% of AGI (Tax hike of $15.2 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

12. Obamacare Tax on Indoor Tanning Services (Tax hike of $2.7 billion/took effect July 2010)

13. Obamacare elimination of tax deduction for employer-provided retirement Rx drug coverage in coordination with Medicare Part D (Tax hike of $4.5 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

14. Obamacare Blue Cross/Blue Shield Tax Hike (Tax hike of $0.4 bil/took effect Jan. 1 2010)

15. Obamacare Excise Tax on Charitable Hospitals (Min$/took effect immediately)

16. Obamacare Tax on Innovator Drug Companies (Tax hike of $22.2 bil/took effect Jan. 2010)

17. Obamacare Tax on Health Insurers (Tax hike of $60.1 bil/takes effect Jan. 2014)

18. Obamacare $500,000 Annual Executive Compensation Limit for Health Insurance Executives (Tax hike of $0.6 bil/takes effect Jan 2013)

19. Obamacare Employer Reporting of Insurance on W-2 ($min/takes effect Jan. 2012)

20. Obamacare “Black liquor” tax hike (Tax hike of $23.6 billion/took effect immediately)

21. Obamacare Codification of the “economic substance doctrine” (Tax hike of $4.5 billion/took effect immediately)

All tax information summarized from the Americans for Tax Reform website.

This whole mess isn’t a bit funny, but we all need a laugh sometime. Watch this Obama impersonator for some laughs:

What to Think About Black-on-White Violence

2011-08-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

I certainly understand why the media and politicians shy away from confronting the outbreak of black-on-white violence that seems to have broken out recently. We do not want to lose the gains made in racial harmony and civil rights since the 1960's, nor do we want to place labels on any ethnic group. But just as we have to face the fact that virtually all terrorists are Muslims to deal with the problem, so must we deal with inter-racial violence before lots of white people decide they must carry firearms to protect themselves.

Why does this seem to be happening now? Is it because black people are suffering disproportionately from the failures of Obamanomics? Have we reached a tipping point with respect to the violent behavior of fatherless children? Is it another symptom of the general breakdown of American society we see on all sides from television programs designed for ignorant slobs to incivility and invectives in our politics? Can it possibly be a black reaction to the criticisms being heaped on a failed black president? I don't know the answers, but we need answers and effective action fast.

The Racial Violence that Dare Not Speak Its Name

By John T. Bennett August 30, 2011 American Thinker

Recent flash mob violence has alerted Americans to a troubling wave of sadistic racial mayhem. A notable outbreak occurred in Denver in 2009, setting a pattern of delay, denial, and silence. Now that same scourge has returned to Denver, among many other places.

In 2009, a four month wave of mayhem broke out in Denver. There were at least 26 violent robberies committed by two black gangs. The victims were -- without exception -- whites and Hispanics. When the dust settled from that initial spate of violence, victims were left with injuries ranging from a skull fracture to broken noses and shattered eye sockets. The local Denver ABC news affiliate summarized the crime spree:
Black gangs roaming downtown Denver often vented their hatred for white victims before assaulting and robbing them during a four-month crime wave, according to interviews and court records obtained by 7NEWS.

That is not the language of a conservative commentator; it's simply a mainstream local news report from an American city that has witnessed widespread racial violence.

The first-hand accounts and surveillance videos of the 2009 attacks are shocking. These weren't sucker punches or fair fights -- the attackers swing madly and rapidly with a viciousness that can only come from blind cruelty. The victims, who can be seen in interviews, were kind-looking, ordinary people. The victims were mostly either gay or straight couples. They didn't provoke the attacks in any conceivable way. The attackers sometimes fractured skulls, or broke eye sockets, and left one victim in a coma. There were a total of 26 attacks from July 17 to Nov. 17.

An incredible 38 people were arrested in connection with this campaign of racist violence. Thirty were ultimately charged, all black. Has this number of arrests been made against any violent white supremacist or right wing organization in the last 50 years?

The story first came to light in 2009 when a source inside the Denver police department said that the department was "keeping the public in the dark" about the attacks. Court documents show that the police did indeed have knowledge of a pattern of racial attacks, but remained silent for 27 days. One victim complained that, had the police informed the public sooner, he could have protected himself.

The same group responsible for that violence is suspected in the murder of Andrew Graham, a young graduate student who was senselessly shot in 2010.

Late last month, Denver saw a possible return to violence, as couples leaving restaurants were being attacked by a group of black men with baseball bats. The Denver Police have renewed warnings of those attacks.

The brutality in Denver is disturbingly similar to violence occurring elsewhere, nationwide. In the last few months alone, a young white lady named Shaina Perry was taunted and beaten in Milwaukee. A young white man named Carter Strange had his skull fractured by a mob in South Carolina. Dawid Strucinski was beaten into a coma by a mob in Bayonne. Anna Taylor, Emily Guendelsberger, and Thomas Fitzgerald were beaten and kicked to the ground in separate Philadelphia flash mobs. Every weekend in July, mobs have attacked in Greensboro, NC. In a mostly-white suburb of Cleveland, witnesses reported large groups of "teens" walking through the streets, "shouting profanities and racial epithets," and one man was viciously beaten while leaving a restaurant with his wife and friends. In all of those cases, the victims were white and the attackers were black.

Then there are the ominous stories that no one has ever heard about. For instance, a mob of 150 "young people" descended on a small, predominantly white NJ town named Winfield Township during a firefighter's carnival. Perhaps the townspeople are merely lucky that there wasn't violence. Isn't the racial mob mentality scary enough that we shouldn't have to wait for violence before we take it seriously?

It cannot be emphasized enough that these attacks often occur in suburban areas where the black groups have to leave their own neighborhoods and purposefully travel to areas that are predominantly non-black, to attack non-black victims. For instance, in one of the many flash mob attacks in Chicago, Trovulus Pickett, 17, is part of a group that attacked and robbed several victims, including a 68-year-old doctor. The attacks occurred in the North side, which is 15 miles away from Pickett's home. This indicates a serious level of planning and potential racial targeting. If these were just run-of-the mill robberies, it wouldn't be too surprising. But the social problem we're looking at is large groups, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, sometimes armed, engaging in racially-focused violent crimes.

There is quite simply no way for a politically correct society to grasp these events, much less effectively deal with them. Liberals have reached the depths of self-deception and self-censorship in response. The Washington Post, New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, have all openly stated that they will refuse to report on the racial facts of these violent crimes. The Los Angeles Times explains that they don't want to "unfairly stigmatize racial groups." They prefer the soft bigotry of low expectations instead.

These flash mobs have turned the comfortable narrative of racism on its head.

Politicians, the media, academics, and the legal community do not have the capacity to face the issue. The reigning dogma of white racism is too deeply entrenched.

There is a small grievance industry built around condemning white racism and intolerance, real or imagined. Indeed, the welfare state itself is in large part based on the assumption that whites need to give more to achieve racial equality, as reflected in President Obama's lament that the civil rights movement didn't focus on economic redistribution. Legal treatises complain that the racist white power structure grows into the bitter fruit of anti-minority racist violence. For instance, the work of Mari Matsuda and Richard Delgado is featured in countless undergraduate courses, and is ubiquitous in graduate and law school courses. They argue that hate speech is a severe social problem and that such speech, along with other tools of racism, keeps minorities in an inferior position (1). While academics dwell on hateful speech, the actual violence continues. We all pay the price, as racial guilt is used to extort tax money for the welfare state, which fosters the mobs. The PC status quo will not acknowledge the fact that the worst form of racism today is black mob violence.

We Need to Call Them Bastards Again

2011-08-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

We have learned that they may be black, or they may be white, but one thing that links the rioters in London, Philadelphia and Wisconsin is that they are fatherless children of welfare, and they hate us. In England, more than 50% of births are to unwed mothers; in the USA it has risen to over 40%.

Senator Moynihan, who coined the phrase, “defining deviancy down”, warned us that this was coming. Children, particularly boy children, need fathers who work, both to discipline them and to set an example for them. In Moynihan’s time the statistics were just starting to move; today it’s clear: before President Johnson’s Great Society and its expansion of government benefits, the percent of children of unwed mothers for both blacks and whites was only 5%. Today it’s 33% for whites and 72% for blacks, even higher for Hispanics, and society is unraveling.
Left Click to Enlarge

We need to make more changes in welfare, specifically AFDC. I wouldn’t change things for those now getting benefits, but, unless there is some form of real disability involved, we need to make welfare a temporary program to handle emergency situations. The unintended consequences of today’s welfare programs are destroying the people who get the benefits, and, shortly, they will be out there destroying the rest of us. Obama's broken promises of hope and change have also accelerated the destructive process. See The Sleeping Giant Awakens.

Unfortunately the acceptance by society of unwed births has also had devastating effects on the moral choices being made by women who are not on welfare:

Women in 20s, 30s Are Driving Trend, Report Shows

By Rob Stein and Donna St. George Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Katrina Stanfield, 25, is raising her 3-year-old daughter in Middletown, Md., without a husband because she and her boyfriend decided that marriage would not work for them.

Heidy Gonzalez, 21, is living with her two children and their father in Mount Rainier, but tying the knot is not a priority for them now.

Emily Smatchetti, 38, is a single mother of a toddler in Miami because she had not found the right man and worried that time was running out. So she found a sperm donor.

The mothers are part of a far-reaching social trend unfolding across the United States: The number of children being born out of wedlock has risen sharply in recent years, driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s opting to have children without getting married. Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.

"It's been a huge increase -- a dramatic increase," said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which documented the shift in detail yesterday for the first time, based on an analysis of birth certificates nationwide. "It's quite striking."

Although the report did not examine the reasons for the increase, Ventura and other experts cite a confluence of factors, including a lessening of the social stigma associated with unmarried motherhood, an increase in couples delaying or forgoing marriage, and growing numbers of financially independent women and older and single women deciding to have children on their own after delaying childbearing.

"I think this is the tipping point," said Rosanna Hertz, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Wellesley College. "This is becoming increasingly the norm. The old adage that 'first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage' just no longer holds true."

The trend has unfolded despite decades of political and social hand-wringing over the issue, such as Vice President Dan Quayle's attack on the unmarried television mother Murphy Brown, President Bill Clinton's revamp of welfare and President George W. Bush's focus on "family values." President Obama has said that one of his priorities is reducing abortions, in part by helping women who become pregnant and want to keep their children.

Some experts said the trend represents a positive change for many women, allowing them to avoid becoming social outcasts, being forced to give up their babies for adoption or having abortions, and letting them raise children in nontraditional families.

"Women can have children on their own, and it's not going to destroy your employment, and it's not going to mean that you'll be made a pariah by the community," Hertz said. "It's much more socially acceptable."

But others said the trend is disturbing because children who grow up without stable, two-parent families tend not to fare as well in many ways.

"I look at this and say, maybe this trend is what young adults want or stumble into, but it's not in the best interest of children," said Sarah Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

About 1.7 million babies were born to unmarried women in 2007, a 26 percent rise from 1.4 million in 2002 and more than double the number in 1980, according to the new report. Unmarried women accounted for 39.7 percent of all U.S. births in 2007 -- up from 34 percent in 2002 and more than double the percentage in 1980.

"If you see 10 babies in the room, four them were born to women who were not married," Ventura said.

Although experts have been concerned about a recent uptick in births to older teenagers after years of decline, that is not the driving force in the overall trend but more likely a reflection of it, Ventura said. Instead, much of the rise is due to significant increases in births among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s.

Between 2002 and 2006, the rate at which unmarried women in that age group were having babies increased between 13 percent and 34 percent, the report found.

The rates increased for all races, but they remained highest and rose fastest for Hispanics and blacks. There were 106 births to every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women in 2006, 72 per 1,000 blacks, 32 per 1,000 whites and 26 per 1,000 Asians, the report showed.

The percentage of babies born to unmarried women in the United States is starting to look more like that in many European countries, the data shows. For example, the proportion of babies born to unmarried women is about 66 percent in Iceland, 55 percent in Sweden, 50 percent in France and 44 percent in the United Kingdom.
In many of those countries, couples are living together instead of getting married, which is also the case in the United States. Previous research indicates that about 40 percent of births to unmarried women occur in households where couples are cohabitating.

Gonzalez, the mother who lives with her children's father in Mount Rainier, said marriage has not loomed as a necessity for them. "Time goes by and we think about other stuff -- and we think about rent," she said. This holds true, she said, for most of her friends. "Most of the people I know just live with their baby's father or boyfriend and don't get married," she said.

Other couples today feel less compelled to marry just because they are having a child.

"It seems to be more wrong to be in a marriage with someone who you don't love and consider to be your best friend than not to be in a marriage at all," said Barbara Katz Rothman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. "It's not that people care less about marriage. In some ways, it's because they care more."

Stanfield and her boyfriend tried living together after she got pregnant, but he moved out when it became clear to both of them that they were not compatible, she said.

"He's a good dad and a good person, but he's just not right for me," Stanfield said.
In New Carrollton, Natrice McKenzie, 25, a teller supervisor at a bank, said she did not set out to become a single mother but has no regrets.

"Getting married was something I had in mind, but that basically was not what happened," said McKenzie, pregnant with her third child. She said it can be difficult, and she knows she is far from unique. "Nowadays it's becoming more like, single moms are everywhere," she said.

Alana Hill, 33, sees family history as an important influence. A single mother in Silver Spring who works as a dancer and a dance teacher, Hill was raised by a single mother and was part of a large extended family in which most of the mothers were not married. Except for grandparents, "I didn't have a role model of a husband and a wife who were married for years," she said. Even when she was very young, her foremost wish, she said, was motherhood, not marriage. "I knew I wanted a child," she said.

Smatchetti, who works as a U.S. attorney in Miami, said she is glad that she had the option of using a sperm donor after a long-term relationship ended.

"I didn't want to pick the wrong person just to have kid, so I just decided to go ahead and do it and work on the relationship later," she said. "It's hard, but in a good way."

The Evolution Battleground

2011-03-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

On the question of Darwinism, my friends and readers know that I spent many years trying not to think too much about what I had been taught about purposeless evolution - versus belief in a Supreme Being. They know also that in my later years I have concluded that 1. evolution only plays a minor role in the development of life, 2. in any case evolution is most probably part of God's plan anyway, and 3. that Darwin was right about at least one thing: that all life forms are related.

A defining moment came for me when I read Dr. Michael Behe's book, "Darwin's Black Box", in which Behe, a prominent microbiologist, pointed out the existence of irreducibly complex mechanisms contained in living cells that could not possibly have come into existence through evolutionary processes. Said mechanisms could not be seen until the invention of the electron microscope, a tool that was unknown to scientists of Darwin's time. Behe has made further conclusions about the limits of evolution, and his thoughts have been complimented by many other scientists - most notably in my mind by Dr. Francis Collins, the leader of the project that mapped the human genome. Dr. Collins, , the recipient of the nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, who had previously been an atheist, said of this experience, "I have looked into the mind of God".

Although the number of scientists who agree with Dr. Behe and Dr. Collins has grown tremendously, the scientific community which controls major organizations and publications continue to downplay their work, and, in the case of Dr. Behe, continuously attempt to refute his major conclusions. Just as global warming advocates constantly say that "the issue has been decided", so also do Behe opponents say over-and-over that "everyone knows that Behe has been proven wrong". One of Dr. Behe's major talents is his ability to explain complex phenomena to lay audiences. As a lay person, I don't understand the technical details discussed in the article below, but I thought it important to show that the argument isn't over, it has just begun. If you like, you can scan the article and focus on the conclusion (in red) at the end.

Michael Behe Hasn't Been Refuted on the Flagellum

Jonathan M. March 15, 2011 Evolution News

Those of us who have been reading the literature surrounding the ID/evolution controversy for any length of time will be quite acquainted with the standard Darwinian retort with regards the "Behean" argument for irreducible complexity as far as the bacterial flagellum is concerned. There seems to be this unanimity of opinion among Darwinian theorists that the claims of irreducible complexity with respect to the bacterial flagellum have been refuted, and that we ID proponents are constantly shifting the goal posts, burying our heads in the sand, and generally clutching at straws. Indeed, one person on Facebook recently remarked,
"My main gripe with the ID proponents is that they never seem to give up. How many times do you need to be told that something is wrong before you'll admit it? How many times does ID need to be refuted in the peer reviewed media before you'll give it up as a lost cause? The bacterial flagellum irreducible complexity story is completely and utterly dead. It's wrong. Get over it."

I recently brought up the flagellum, as a documented instance of irreducible complexity, at a lunch bar Q&A session on the science/faith intersect, and received responses to much the same effect.

But is this claim actually true? Has this argument been refuted by critics? About a year ago, I read Why Intelligent Design Fails - A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (edited by Matt Young and Taner Edis). Chapter 5 of that book was contributed by Ian Musgrave and is titled "Evolution of the Bacterial Flagellum." Targeted as a response to Michael Behe and William Dembski, Musgrave attempts to dispel of the notion of irreducible complexity once and for all. Reading his chapter, I recall being deeply unimpressed. On page 82 of the book, Musgrave offers us the following argument:

Here is a possible scenario for the evolution of the eubacterial flagellum: a secretory system arose first, based around the SMC rod and pore-forming complex, which was the common ancestor of the type-III secretory system and the flagellar system. Association of an ion pump (which later became the motor protein) to this structure improved secretion. Even today, the motor proteins, part of a family of secretion-driving proteins, can freely dissociate and reassociate with the flagellar structure. The rod- and pore-forming complex may even have rotated at this stage, as it does in some gliding-motility systems. The protoflagellar filament arose next as part of the protein-secretion structure (compare the Pseudomonas pilus, the Salmonella filamentous appendages, and the E. coli filamentous structures). Gliding-twitching motility arose at this stage or later and was then refined into swimming motility. Regulation and switching can be added later, because there are modern eubacteria that lack these attributes but function well in their environment.(Shah and Sockett 1995). At every stage there is a benefit to the changes in the structure.Indeed, Mark Pallen and Nick Matzke make a very similar argument in their 2006 Nature Reviews article (a paper which was raised by an audience member during the recent UK Behe tour). Ken Miller is also reputed for routinely making similar claims regarding the flagellum's evolution from the Type III Secretion System based largely on considerations of protein sequence homologies.

So, do these points succeed in laying to rest that pesky business of intelligent design once and for all? Well, actually no; they don't. In fact, I submit that the arguments of all of the aforementioned gentlemen fundamentally trivialize several important issues.

First and foremost, it trivializes the sheer complexity and sophistication of the flagellar system -- both its assembly apparatus, and its state-of-the-art design motif. Actually, the process by which the bacterial flagellum is self-assembled within the cell is so sophisticated that I have long struggled to convey it in an accessible way to lay-persons. Its core concepts are notoriously difficult to grasp for those not accustomed to thinking about the system or for those encountering it for the first time. But, at the same time, the mechanistic basis of flagellar assembly is so breath-takingly elegant and mesmerizing that the sheer engineering brilliance of the flagellar motor -- and, indeed, the magnitude of the challenge it brings to Darwinism -- cannot be properly appreciated without at minimum a cursory knowledge of its underpinning operations. Let's take a peek.

The Self-Assembly of the Flagellar Apparatus

The synthesis of the bacterial flagellum requires the orchestrated expression of more than 60 gene products. Its biosynthesis within the cell is orchestrated by genes which are organised into a tightly ordered cascade in which expression of one gene at a given level requires the prior expression of another gene at a higher level. The paradigm, or model, organism for flagellar assembly is Salmonella, a bacterium of the family Enterobacteriaceae. My discussion thus pertains principally to Salmonella, unless otherwise indicated.

The flagellar system in Salmonella has three classes of promoters (promoters are akin to a kind of molecular toggle switch which can initiate gene expression when recognised by RNA polymerase and an associated specialised protein called a "sigma factor"). These three classes of promoters are uninspirationally dubbed "Class I," "Class II," and "Class III." This sequential transcription is coupled to the process of flagellar assembly. Class I contains only two genes in one operon (called FlhD and FlhC). Class II consists of 35 genes across eight operons (including genes involved in the assembly of the hook-basal-body and other components of the flagellum, as well as the export apparatus and two regulatory genes called "FliA" and "FlgM"). Those genes which are involved in the synthesis of the filament are controlled by the Class III promoters.

The Class I promoter drives the expression of a master regulator (particular to the Enterobacteriaceae of which Salmonella is a member) called "FldH4C2" (don't worry about remembering it!). This enteric master regulator then turns on the Class II promoters in association with a sigma factor, σ70 (remember, I said that a sigma factor is a type of protein which enables specific binding of RNA polymerase to gene promoters). The Class II promoters are then responsible for the gene expression of the hook-basal-body subunits and its regulators, including another sigma factor called σ28 (which is encoded by a gene called FliA) and its anti-sigma factor, FlgM (anti-sigma factors, as their name suggests, binds to sigma factors to inhibit their transcriptional activity). The sigma factor σ28 is required to activate the Class III promoters. But here we potentially run into a problem. It makes absolutely no sense to start expressing the flagellin monomers before completion of the Hook-Basal-Body construction. Thus, in order to inhibit the σ28, the anti-sigma factor (FlgM) alluded to above inhibits its activity and prohibits it from interacting with the RNA polymerase holoenzyme complex. When construction of the Hook-Basal-Body is completed, the anti-sigma factor FlgM is secreted through the flagellar structures which are produced by the expression of the Class II hook-basal-body genes. The Class III promoters (which are responsible for the expression of flagellin monomers, the chemotaxis system and the motorforce generators) are then finally activated by the σ28 and the flagellum can be completed.

But it gets better. The flagellar export system (that is, the means by which FlgM is removed from the cell) has two substrate-specificity states: rod-/hook-type substrates and filament-type substrates. During the process of flagellar assembly, this substrate-specificity switch has to flick from the former of those states to the latter. Proteins which form part of the hook and rod need to be exported before those which form the filament. But how does this switch in substrate-specificity take place?

A membrane-bound protein called FlhB is the key player in this process. There is also a flagellar hook-length protein which is responsible for making sure that the hook length is of the right size (around 55nm) called FliK. This same protein is also responsible for initiating the switch export substrate specificity. As it turns out, without FliK, both the ability to switch and export filament and the hook length control are completely lost. FliK has two key domains, i.e. the N-terminal and C-terminal domains. During hook assembly, FliKN functions as a molecular sensor and transmitter of information on hook length. When the hook reaches the right length, the information is transmitted to FliKC and FliKCT, resulting in a conformational change, which in turn results in FliKCT binding to FlhBC. This, in turn, results in a conformational change in FlhBC.
This causes the substrate specificity switch.

Flagellar assembly begins in the cytoplasmic membrane, progresses through the periplasmic space and finally extends outside the cell. The flagellum basically consists of two main parts: the secretion system and the axial structure. The principle components of the axial structure are FlgG for the rod, FlgE for the hook, and FliC for the filament. All of these assemble with the assistance of a cap protein (FlgJ, FlgD and FliD respectively). Of those, only FliD remains at the tip of the filament in the finished product. Other components of the axial structure (called FlgB, FlgC and FlgF) connect the rod and MS ring complex. The hook and filament are connected by FlgK and FlgL.

When the C ring and C rod attach to the M ring at its cytoplasmic surface, the MS ring complex -- which is the structural foundation of the apparatus -- can begin to secrete flagellar proteins.

The rod structure is built through the peptidoglycan layer. But its growth it isn't able to proceed past the physical barrier presented by the outer membrane without assistance. So, the just-alluded-to outer ring complex cuts a hole in the membrane, so that the hook can grow beneath the FlgD scaffold until it reaches the critical length of 55nm. Then the substrates which are being secreted can switch from the rod-hook mode to flageellin mode, FlgD can be replaced by hook-associated-proteins, and the filament continues to grow. Without the presence of the cap protein FliD, these flagellin monomers become lost. This cap protein is thus essential for the process to take place.

Why the Flagellum Evolution From the T3SS Doesn't Work

One might have thought that the description given above should be more than enough to render the hand-waving gestures of Kenneth Miller et al. trivializations in the extreme. But it gets even worse for the Darwinian story. Why exactly is flagellum biosynthesis so tightly regulated and orchestrated? Not only do the energy demands render the flagellum an extremely expensive system to run, but untimely expression of flagellum proteins may induce a strong immune response in the host system, something no bacterium wants to do.

What is the significance of this from the standpoint of evolutionary rationale?

Well, flagellin monomers are somewhat potent cytokine inducers. If you are a Yersinia organism in possession of a Type-III Secretion System the last thing you want to do is display those flagellin peptides to the macrophages. Such would be liable to significantly countermand the Yersinia's anti-inflammatory strategy.

Conclusion

My description, given above, has really only scratched the surface of this spectacular item of nano-technology (for more detail, see here). I have not, for the sake of brevity, even discussed the remarkable processes of chemotaxis, two component signal transduction circuitry, rotational switching, and the proton motive force by which the flagellum is powered. But the bottom line is that modern Darwinian theory -- as classically understood -- has come no where close to explaining the origin of this remarkably complex and sophisticated motor engine. Just as Darwinian "explanations" of the eye may, at first, appear convincing to the uninitiated, largely unacquainted with the sheer engineering marvel of the biochemistry and molecular basis of vision, so too do the evolutionary "explanations" of the flagellum rapidly become void of any persuasiveness when one considers the molecular details of the system. When one couples the above details with demonstrations of the sheer impotence of neo-Darwinism to produce novel protein folds and novel protein-protein binding sites, do you really think that this system can be cobbled together by virtue of slight, successive modification, one small step at a time? Given that neo-Darwinism's key selling point lies in its purported efficacy in explaining away the overwhelming appearance of design, doesn't it stand to reason that its demonstrable impotence throws the design postulate back on the table as a viable and respectable scientific proposition?

Douglas Axe of the Biologic Institute showed in one recent paper in the journal Bio-complexity that the model of gene duplication and recruitment only works if very few changes are required to acquire novel selectable utility or neo-functionalization.

If a duplicated gene is neutral (in terms of its cost to the organism), then the maximum number of mutations that a novel innovation in a bacterial population can require is up to six. If the duplicated gene has a slightly negative fitness cost, the maximum number drops to two or fewer (not inclusive of the duplication itself).

It seems that the bacterial flagellum is as much a -- and perhaps a greater -- challenge to Darwinism as it was when Behe first wrote Darwin's Black Box in 1996.

Wisconsin Video Explains Education Decline

2011-03-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

Fifteen-year-old students from the United States rank 25th out of 30 advanced nations in math and 24th in science, according to The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get “, says Walter Williams in “Nation needs major reforms in education.”

Even worse, Latino and black students are two to three years behind white students of the same age, according to McKinsey & Company, in releasing its recent report entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools”
Could this video explain why education in the USA is failing so miserably? Do you want these thugs teaching your children?

If video doesn't load, go here.

Boo Hoo Congressman Ellison

2011-03-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

As part of a well- rchestrated attack to smear Representative King and his Congressional Committee's attempt to define Islamic terrorism and its new tactics, Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota went on television yesterday, apparently sobbing uncontrollably at the unfairness of it all. We have written before about Ellison and his ties to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and his anti-Jewish associatiosn.
Rep. Keith Ellison’s Bigotry
The congressman told a teachable story this morning. One problem: It’s untrue.

Matthew Shaffer MARCH 10, 2011 National Review
This morning, Rep. Keith Ellison (Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, Minn.) appropriated a hearing on Islamic radicalism by weeping his way through a speech about whata-buncha-nasty-bigots Americans are. He chose as his case in point Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Pakistani-born Muslim American who rushed to lower Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, to assist in rescue efforts, and died in the collapse of the World Trade Center. Here’s how Representative Ellison tells the story of the aftermath of his death:

"After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens."

Does Ellison’s account check out with reality?

No. It is actually pretty close to the opposite of the truth. In fact, six weeks after the September 11 attacks — before Hamdani’s remains were identified, which Ellison implies to be the turning point of public perception — Congress signed the PATRIOT Act into law with this line included: “Many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have acted heroically during the attacks on the United States, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Pakistani descent, who is believed to have gone to the World Trade Center to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.” That is, Hamdani was actually singled out for particular high honors among the thousands of victims of the September 11 attacks.

There’s little evidence of the “rumors” of which Ellison speaks, either. Poke around yourself. Go to Google and search for Mohammed Salman Hamdani’s name, using various time frames from before today’s hearings (say, in the week after the September 11 attack). You’ll discover two discordant sets of returns: none for sites and news reports accusing Hamdani of being a terrorist, and many thousands of pages honoring him as a hero while claiming that he was “widely accused” of being a terrorist.

Web pages that do source the claim that Hamndani was “widely accused” of being a terrorist typically trace back to a single report from the New York Post , dated Oct. 12, 2001, and titled “Missing — or Hiding? Mystery of NYPD Cadet from Pakistan.” The piece has been taken offline, but its content is preserved elsewhere.
Here’s what the New York Post wrote:

His family distributed missing-person fliers in the fear that the 23-year- old, who is trained as an emergency medical technician, went instead to the World Trade Center to help and was killed.

But investigators for the FBI and NYPD have since questioned the family about which Internet chat rooms he visited and if he was political.

Hamdani, a graduate of Queens College with a biochemistry degree, had been in the NYPD cadet program for three years. He became “inactive” because he needed to work full time, his mother said.

Police sources said he hadn’t been to work at the NYPD since April, but he still carried official identification.

One source told the Post : “That tells me they’re not looking for this guy at the bottom of the rubble. The thing that bothers me is, if he is up to some tricks, he can walk past anybody [using the ID card].”

Hamdani’s mother, who has been in the United States for two decades, denied her son was political or a religious fundamentalist. Cops at the Midtown Tunnel reported spotting someone who looked like Hamdani yesterday morning.

So the Post reported 1) that Hamdani’s family believed he died in the WTC attacks, 2) that the FBI asked Hamdani’s mother a few background questions after a mistaken sighting, and 3) that an unnamed source felt such questioning implied guilt. No doubt, that was hard on the grieving mother. But frankly, this — a mistaken sighting, and very preliminary investigations of many people, most of whom turn out to be innocent — is the kind of thing that inevitably happens after a major terrorist attack.

After that questioning, the FBI didn’t go farther in a serious investigation, and, a week later, Hamdani was singled out for honors by the United States’ executive and legislative branches with those lines in the PATRIOT Act that immortalized his story.

Then, he was eulogized by the New York Times , had scholarship funds named after him, was honored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (both of whom went barefoot to honor Muslim practice) at his funeral, and has been celebrated over and over again by the media.

The belief that Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a victim of anti-Muslim bigotry was never based in reality. It was manufactured by the Left as a rhetorical prop, exploited as a bludgeon against people who want to talk seriously about terrorism. If Hamdani was singled out for his faith, it would appear he was singled out for especially high honors. Most 9/11 victims were not half so celebrated as he was.

Rather than suffering from apocryphal American anti-Muslim bigotry, Salman Hamdani appears to have benefited from America’s eager inclusiveness.

Americans have long seen Mohammed Salman Hamdani as a hero. Too bad Representative Ellison saw him only as a prop.

The Two Obamas and What They Mean

2011-02-18T17:19:00.000-08:00

The Two Obamas

My friends and readers surely understand that I believe that Barack Obama is the most dangerous man ever to appear in national politics. By dangerous, I mean that his actions threaten the future aspirations, prosperity, security and the freedom of average Americans. Up until now, I have been critical in a piecemeal fashion of his policies and programs, believing him to be a naïve liberal, a socialist and a one-worlder. He is much more than that.

Some of my friends call him an “idiot” and say that his policies make no sense and are failures. Others, both liberal supporters and conservative critics, point out that there are contradictions in what he does and what he says. There are no contradictions. Now that I have read and digested an extraordinary and convincing work by Dinesh D’Souza on Obama entitled, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”, I now understand better what he is up to and how amazingly successful he has been in attaining his objectives, which are none other than to cripple America’s power and transfer America’s wealth to those from whom Obama thinks we have stolen it.

I think a wider understanding of the subject in this book is so important that I have purchased a quantity of “Roots” to loan out to anyone known to me. Just email me with your mailing address.

Last week I wrote a brief review of “Roots”. Here below is a much more complete review:

D'Souza's theory is that our President is driven by an anti-colonialist ideological hatred.

D'Souza claims to be a lot like Obama: both with cosmopolitan backgrounds, with roots in former colonized countries, nonwhite, influenced by mixed marriages, born the same year, attended Ivy League colleges and graduating the same year.

What seemed to inspire the author to write this book was an article he read back in 2008, in the London Telegraph titled "Barack Obama's Lost Brother Found in Kenya". The 26 year old George Hussein Obama was found living in a Nairobi slum. "I live here on less than a dollar a month." George said. Humiliated by his poverty, he confessed he never mentioned the famous half-brother. The two Obamas met briefly in 2006 when Barack was a senator, but the two didn't connect. D'Souza was shocked that the Senator, with a net worth in the millions of dollars did not lift a finger to help a destitute close relative. George wanted to be a mechanic, and D'Souza raised a couple thousand dollars to help George move out of his hut. By then D'Souza believes the Obama's presidential campaign caught up with the guy, and George was apparently told to go into hiding.

D'Souza believes that since childhood, Obama's dream was always to become an anti-colonial warrior. And also that his father's dream became his own. He makes the important distinction: Obama's first book is not titled "Dreams OF My Father" but "Dreams FROM My Father", a distinction that convinces D'Souza that the son admits he has inherited his father's dreams.

They wanted to change the systems, the hierarchies and change history. The problem, as D'Souza puts it: "How does a man like Obama get elected in a country which has virtually no awareness of the defining events of his life, no concern for the injustices that move him, and consequently no sense of urgency about the need to put the resolution of the colonial problem at the forefront of the national agenda?

Another important question from D'Souza: is Obama a descendent and disciple of Martin Luther King? No. Obama's politics arise from a very different source than Martin Luther King's dream. D'Souza says that MLK's dream is irrelevant to Obama's worldview.

Obama studied carefully the anti-colonial activist and writer Frantz Fanon. He acknowledges Fanon in `Dreams from My Father' numerous times.

Acording to D'Souza, Fanon should be credited to placing the mask on Obama, translating the "anti-colonial ideas into the language and imagery of modern American politics." D'Souza also says Obama added "his own vision and strategy".

Fanon wrote: "The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too... For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries... Europe is literally a creation of the Third Word." The awareness, Fanon concludes, produces a double realization: the realization by the colonized people that it is their due and the realization by the capitalist powers that they must pay."

Obama befriended the radical Bill Ayers. Ayers wrote about his own take: "We had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide." and "What kind of a system is it that allows the U.S. to seize the destinies of the Vietnamese people?" D'Souza says: "The Vietnam war was America's attempt to stop communism. But that is not how Bill Ayers and Ho Chi Minh saw it. For Ho and Bill, this was an anti-colonial struggle." Bill Ayers was an anti-colonial friend of Obama.

Alinsky advocated for the activist to join the middle class, because they have the power; to adopt their style and attitude, to dress like them, to act like them, to smile a lot because smiles are a great way to disguise rage and contempt. This way, the activist will build a rapport with ordinary Americans and mobilize them on behalf of radical causes.

D'Souza continues: "The critique of neocolonialism espoused by Obama's father operates on the conviction that Western banks, investment houses, insurance companies, oil and mineral companies, and - we can add for good measure - the automobile and the pharmaceutical industries, are owned and operated by rich fat cats. This group - let's call it the overclass - achieves its position by exploiting the weak and the poor. As he argued in his paper, Obama Sr. sought to use the power of the state to bring down this overclass." Meaning subduing neocolonial institutions Obama blocks offshore drilling for oil by United States.

Obama underwrites offshore drilling for oil.... by Brazil with loans of 2 billion dollars, and also for Mexico. And not a drop of that oil will get to U.S.

D'Souza insists that to Obama the issue is not protecting the environment, its about shifting the balance of energy consumption away from the West and toward the developing world.

Through Cap and Trade Obama will curb America's energy production and consumption.

China is the world's no.1 leading producer of carbon dioxide. China accounted for most of the growth in the year's global greenhouse emissions. India was next. Neither of them care about reducing emissions. The agreement coming out of the UN Summit proposed that the West fork over 100 Billion dollars do developing countries. Obama administration supports this measure!

During his time in the Senate Obama sponsored the Global Poverty Act, that would have commited the United States to spending over 800 Billion Dollars over a decade to eradicate poverty in the Third World. D'Souza believes Obama wants to make the rich nations poorer and the poor nations richer and that America and the West are using too much of the Earth resources. D'Souza point out that this is a huge theme with Obama; he never stops talking about it.

For almost 10 years America has been fighting the `war on terrorism'. President Obama has called an end to this. D'Souza believes Obama is conducting a war against what he considers to be the biggest rogue state of all: United States of America.

In "The Audacity of Hope", Obama faults America for its role in supporting the repressive Suharto regime in Indonesia.

D'Souza points out that similar accusations come from Chavez in Venezuela, Russia, Zimbabwe, North Korea and the Islamic nations and that Obama's answer is to curtail America's power and influence.

Dinesh D'Souza gives two cheers (not three, because of the suffering inflicted) for colonialism. The British left a legacy previously alien in traditional Indian culture: democracy, rule of law, human rights, self-determination, individualism, people with better taste, opinions, morals and intellect, a capacity for better government, a free press, modern universities and research laboratories. Thanks to the Brits, English is D'Souza first language and he wrote this great book and many great other books before it.

D'Souza points out there is only one continent that missed out on the growth curve: Africa - with the exception of South Africa. The rest of Africa, as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan put it, is a "cocktail of disasters", a lethal combo of poverty, repression, civil war, and AIDS.

D'Souza makes the point: the suffering of Africa is not due to Colonialism. As D'Souza points it out, Africa was colonized for little more than half a century, or a single lifetime. He says that a strong case can be made that Africa's problem isn't colonialism but too little colonialism.

D'Souza adds that the British did stop slavery in Africa, reduced if not prevented tribal conflict, and constructed a railway network through Uganda and Kenya - built, by the way, by importing 30,000 "coolies" from India. Obama knows about this because he writes about it, and D'Souza knows because his great grandfather was one of those coolies.

But too few Africans were provided with decent jobs or decent education. D'Souza says the Western powers were hampered in their attention to the needs of two world wars and a Great Depression. D'Souza's incredible conclusion: "colonization in Africa was a tragedy - but it might not have been had colonization lasted longer, as it did in India."

For most part Africa rejected the route of the free market capitalism and adopted a route of centralized planning and African socialism. Overall, Africa rejected pro-capitalist Jomo Kanyatta's approach in favor of the socialist approach of Barack Obama Sr. Dictators like Mobutu in Zaire, Idi Amin in Uganda, Banda in Malawi, Mugabe in Zimbabwe are "thugs who learned the language of anti-colonialism and used it as a pretext to confiscate property and appropriate it for themselves and their cronies." "These men continued for decades to blame the failure of their societies on the legacy of colonialism, freeing them from the responsibility of raising the people's standard of living.

D'Souza quotes Obama in his speech in Ghana: "Africa gives off less greenhouse gas than any other part of the world, but it is the most threatened by climate change." Obama pledged "substantial increases in our foreign assistance", including technical assistance for crop production. Falling back into campaign mode, Obama concluded "Yes we can! Thank you very much."

D'Souza concludes that "anti-colonialism is dead; no one in today's world cares about it - except the man in the White House. He is the last anti-colonial. We are now living in a new world.

And while most of the world is facing the challenges and seizing the opportunities of the twenty-first century, Obama refuses to embrace the promise of the growth - for his African homeland or for the country he was elected to lead."

D'Souza also claims Obama is hurting the world, because Obama is removing the protection United States offers, the role of policeman, so much needed everywhere. The author points out the United States has no intention of ruling or seeking tribute from other countries. Obama threatens the stability of the world and may allow America to lapse into a second-class position as Britain did.

D'Souza:
"If Obama has his way, America would look a lot like Obama's father wanted Kenya to look: government-run cooperatives rationing land and natural resources in order to enjoy a modest self-sufficiency."

Halleluyah

2010-11-26T13:24:00.000-08:00

Two Videos We All Need To See

2010-09-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

Somehow we have let liberals convince us that belief in God is uncool, and that our Founding Fathers did not really want God involved in the course of our great nation. What the Constitution really says is that government must not impose a particular religion on our people. Liberal judges have been twisting this simple prohibition to suit their own beliefs. We are not going to solve our problems unless we understand again that there is something greater than ouselves.

Thanks to Mason and Tony for these videos.

Mexico opens California office

2010-06-04T06:41:00.001-07:00

Mexico opens California office to provide ID for illegals
By: Sara A. Carter
National Security Correspondent
June 3, 2010

The Mexican government is opening a satellite consular office on Catalina Island -- a small resort off the California coast with a history of drug smuggling and human trafficking -- to provide the island's illegal Mexican immigrants with identification cards, The Washington Examiner has learned.
The Mexican consular office in Los Angeles issued a flier, a copy of which was obtained by The Examiner, listing the Catalina Island Country Club as the location of its satellite office. It invites Mexicans to visit the office to obtain the identification, called matricular cards, by appointment.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican whose district includes Catalina Island, said handing out matricular cards will exacerbate an already dangerous situation.
"Handing out matricular cards to Mexicans who are not in this country legally is wrong no matter where it's done," he said. "But on Catalina it will do more damage. It's a small island but there's evidence it's being used as a portal for illegals to access mainland California."
Rohrabacher added, "If there were a large number of Americans illegally in Mexico and the U.S. consulate was making it easier for them to stay, Mexico would never permit it."
Mexican officials with the consular office in Los Angeles could not be reached immediately for comment. The matricular consular identification card, is issued by the Mexican government to Mexican nationals residing outside the country, regardless of immigration status. The purpose is to provide identification for opening bank accounts and obtaining other services. But the cards are usually used to skirt U.S. immigration laws, since Mexicans in the country legally have documents proving that status, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.
In 2004 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI officials called the card an unreliable form of identification. The agency said that Mexico lacks a centralized database for them, which could lead to forgery, duplication, and other forms of abuse.
Officers with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said their agency was asked by Mexican officials not to enforce U.S. immigration laws on the island while the cards were being issued.
"It amazes me every time that the Mexican government has the gall to tell us what to do," said an ICE official, who asked not to be named. "More surprisingly is how many times we stand by and let them. This is just an example of one of hundreds of requests we've had to deal with."
In April, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies seized a boat carrying large quantities of marijuana and detained three Mexican nationals who said they were being smuggled into the United States.
The island has a sizable Mexican migrant population. Most are undocumented low-income workers.
1:15pm UPDATE:

Mexican government officials have moved their satellite consular office from the Catalina Island Country Club to a Catholic Church – citing protection under the Geneva Convention.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Mexico-opens-California-office-to-provide-ID-for-illegals-95434969.html

The Administration, Rebutted

2010-02-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

The Obama administration is now resorting to outright lies in its attempts to get out from under its disastrous decision to grant Miranda rights to the Christmas bomber. This follows on to its decision to try KSM in New York City and to its inability to brand the Fort Hood massacre as an Islamic terrorist act, which it clearly was. It has become clear even to their well-wishers that politics and ideology are getting in the way of their responsibility to defend the lives of American citizens, and to use every legal means to gain intelligence that will help us thwart other planned attacks.

President Bush and his team handled this problem brilliantly and saved many American lives – in particular in thwarting the attempt to blow up 10 jetliners in the air over the Atlantic. British cooperation, which is now in limbo, was a major factor in this intelligence coup.

One set of lies they are telling derives from Obama’s calculation that few will remember the actual facts of the Richard Reid (the shoe-bomber) and the Zacarias Moussaoui (the 20th 9/11 attacker) cases. They are trotting out Robert Gibbs and John Brennan to say, over and over, that they aren’t doing anything different than President Bush did in these two cases – conveniently ignoring the fact that military tribunals had not been authorized by Congress nor had they been setup prior to these cases.

The Obamaites are also twisting the facts of the Jose Padilla case, as Powerline points out this morning:

The Administration, Rebutted

February 11, 2010 PowerLine

Senator Jeff Sessions takes John Brennan to task for his op-ed claiming that giving a terrorist a lawyer and telling him he can remain silent doesn't impair our ability to gather intelligence:

(If video doesn't load, go here.
In what must seem a bitter irony to many who voted for Obama, the administration is now at great pains to justify its anti-terrorism policies by claiming that they are the same as those of the once-dreaded Bush administration. Most recently, press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking on MSNBC this morning, invoked the fact that the Bush administration ultimately prosecuted Jose Padilla in a civilian court. Not only that, Gibbs said, "Jose Padilla was made an enemy combatant so that we could get him to talk. And guess what happened when we made him an enemy combatant, he didn't talk. He did talk when he was transferred back into a civilian court."

This was a lie, plain and simple, as Tom Joscelyn explains:

In fact, Jose Padilla only started cooperating once he was transferred into the military's custody and interrogated.

Jose Padilla was arrested at the Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002. At the time, U.S. authorities had multiple reasons to be suspicious of him. Most importantly, senior al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah had been taken into custody in late March 2002 and provided information to authorities that led to the identification of both Padilla and his would-be accomplice, Binyam Mohamed. The two were identified as al Qaeda recruits who had been tasked with a mission inside the U.S.--namely, an attack on a high-rise apartment building.

Thus, when Padilla was initially detained by the FBI in May 2002 authorities knew he was up to no good. The FBI questioned Padilla for several hours but got nowhere. A copy of the FBI's 302 memo written after the initial questioning of Padilla shows that al Qaeda's man gave the bureau nothing. Padilla talked about his personal history but said nothing about his real intentions or his nefarious friends.

The FBI even offered to put Padilla up in a hotel so they could continue their conversation. But when the agents tried to turn the conversation towards Padilla's al Qaeda ties, he shut down the interview. "He stood up and told me the interview was over and it was time for him to go," Fincher recalled during testimony.

Padilla was then read a Miranda warning, arrested on a material witness warrant and transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York.

There he stayed for one month without giving up anything of importance to the FBI. During that time...the Bush administration weighed its options, ultimately deciding to designate Padilla an enemy combatant. After Padilla was transferred to the brig on June 9, 2002, the leading newspapers noted the chief reason for the move: Padilla wasn't cooperating with authorities.

"Officials said Padilla has refused to cooperate since his arrest," the Los Angeles Times reported. The New York Times elaborated: "Officials have justified his detention [in military custody] by saying he is considered to be an enemy combatant. He has refused to cooperate with the authorities who have questioned him." ...

Padilla would ultimately talk. But, contrary to Gibbs and Brennan, it wasn't until he was placed in the military's custody--not when he was returned to the civilian court system.

On June 1, 2004, the Defense Department released a memo summarizing what was known about Padilla both before and after he was transferred into the military's custody. The second page of the memo contains two paragraphs concerning what authorities had learned about Padilla up until June 9, 2002, the day he was transferred into the military's custody. As the aforementioned press accounts make clear, authorities had garnered no information from Padilla himself. The DoD cited "intelligence information" and "our information" but no admissions by Padilla. Nearly all of the information on Padilla up until that point came from other al Qaeda detainees and sources.

The memo then reads: "Since that time [June 9, 2002], additional and more detailed intelligence information about Jose Padilla has been developed and made available in unclassified form."

That additional information includes several pages of unclassified intelligence, including a number of admissions by Padilla, which were corroborated by other detainees.

Joscelyn goes on to chronicle the significant admissions that Padilla made after he was transferred to military custody.

Dishonesty has become the hallmark of the Obama administration. Obama and his cohorts know that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to research the truth of their public statements. Knowing, too, that the press is compliant, Obama believes that he and his subordinates can get away with just about any whopper they choose to tell. Perhaps so. Yet, in just one year the American public has lost confidence in the administration's credibility. The sort of wanton fabrication that Obama, Gibbs, Brennan and others in the administration are engaged in can only accelerate that process.

The Real Problem Behind the 'Climategate' E-mails, Long, but a Must Read

2009-12-10T15:08:00.000-08:00

Al Gore and other global warming alarmists are busily spinning the implications and the importance of the information and the corruption revealed by the leaked (or hacked) e-mails from leading man-made global warming activist scientists. All of the mainstream media, to the extent that they are even mentioning "Climategate", have joined in to repeat ad nauseum that the e-mails reveal nothing important. This is simply not true. Those e-mails do not just reveal a conspiracy to hide the fact that global warming has actually been global cooling for the last eleven years, they reveal that the whole thesis of global warming is badly flawed.

This is a long and difficult post to read, but it is the best and most complete explanation of the fraudulent data manipulation that has taken place - and what the data really shows about natural global temperature changes.

Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline

By Marc Sheppard December 06, 2009 American Thinker

Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.

As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.

So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.

First and foremost -- contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion.

In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists – those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.

Truth be told -- even reasonably reliable instrumental readings are a relatively modern convenience, limiting CRU’s global measured temperature database to a start date somewhere in the mid-19th century. That’s why global temperature charts based on actual readings typically use a base year of 1850 or somewhere thereabouts.

And yet -- most historical temperature charts, including the one Al Gore preached before in An Inconvenient Truth, go way back to 1000 AD. That’s where proxies come in.

While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.

They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.

And while reconstructions -- as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called -- can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.

Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.

Warmist Public Enemy Number One: The Medieval Warming Period

It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels several degrees warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. And then began the modern warming period, which was by no means unique and appears to have ended with the millennium itself.

Originally, even the IPCC accepted that pre-20th century analysis. In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings.

But this image of a fluid climate system subject to abrupt and natural up-and-downturns made unprecedented 20th century warming about as marketable as Florida swampland. And opportunists who depended on the aberrance of post-industrial revolution warming in order to condemn and control mankind’s CO2 emissions soon recognized that perhaps the LIA but most certainly the MWP simply had to go.

And as many of these hucksters were closely connected to the IPCC – both sender and recipient names on those illuminating CRU emails include many of its editors, lead authors and contributors -- that task was far less daunting than one might imagine.

Proxies, Tricks and Hockey Sticks

The first step was taken in the 1995 Second Assessment Report, when the above Figure 7c was replaced with a 1993 reconstruction from RS Bradley and PD Jones that used 1400 AD as its base – effectively wiping the MWP off the radar-screen.

But it wasn’t until the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) that the MWP simply vanished. This multi-proxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies appeared in chapter 2, page 134, of the Working Group 1 (WG1) report.

IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.20

Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that both the MWP and LIA have indeed disappeared. In fact, temperatures appear to trend downward throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century. But if you look closer, you’ll also notice that the “reconstructed” series terminate in 1980. What forms the dramatic blade to the hockey stick shape (yes, this is indeed the famous “Hockey-Stick” graph) is instead the distal segment of the 1902 to 1999 instrumental data series.

Mann has recently claimed that the available proxy data ended in 1980, but even his coconspirators at RealClimate admit that’s nonsense. The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980. And, as the chart plotted temperature anomalies against what the plotters selected as the “normal” period and temperatures of 1961 to 1990, the reconstruction would have been quite unremarkable otherwise. So at the 1980 mark, the actual post-1980 measurements were actually attached to the truncated proxy series to create the illusion they were one.

The figure below, found on the same page of the WG1 report reveals this trick more clearly. This chart plots the original 4 reconstructions used: 2 from Mann et al, 1 from Jones et al and 1 from Briffa et al. Notice how all but the first series continue to trend downward around 1960 while instrumental readings begin to trend upward? And even that series ends abruptly in 1980.

IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.21

So not only did conspirators cherry-pick the one series of the four that approximated measured temperatures the longest, they also terminated that series at the point that it too, began to trend down. They then joined it to the actual 1980-1999 temperatures to “hide the decline” in the final product, as that decline created an inexplicable divergence between the reconstructed and measured temperatures. The existence of which challenges the entire series dating back to 1000 AD.

Remember, all of the temperatures prior to 1850 were estimated by computer algorithms and no actual readings exist to prove or disprove those figures. So a relatively short window of opportunity exists to test the programs against observations. Had 20th century measured temperatures continued to align with those recreated as smoothly after 1960 as they did previously, then the programmers could declare their code and hence their millennial temperatures sound. But the divergence, if allowed to stand, instead revealed serious design flaws in the proxy reconstructions. Which suggests that just as the decline was dealt with through trickery, so was the MWP.

And it seems that each time the trick was used, its involvement would be more deeply concealed.

Every multi-volume IPCC Assessment has been accompanied by a relatively brief and highly-politicized Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This synopsis invariably commands the bulk of the media and political attention. Here’s the version of the graph depicted prominently on page 3 of the 2001 TAR SPM [PDF], the only version of the report most policymakers and reporters would ever actually see. Notice how they further obscured their chicanery by omitting the series defining legend and the “1988 instrumental value” declaration:

IPCC 2001 SPM Fig 1b

And despite the fact that the only confirmable segment of the series failed that very test, which should have declared the entire series null and void, the chart’s caption informed policymakers that:

“the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries. Similarly, it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium.”

And it’s this highly fraudulent version that has become the poster child of the equally fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement.

Thanks in large part to the trick that hides the decline.

Trick or Cheat

Now we'll take a closer look at exactly what Jones meant when he wrote that he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Why did Jones refer to the ruse as “Mike’s Nature Trick?”

As die-hard Hockey Team opponents and fans alike already know – the original 600-year version of the now infamous “Hockey-Stick” graph was dubbed MBH98 because it first appeared in the Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes paper Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries [PDF], originally published in the science journal Nature in 1998. And “Mike’s Nature Trick” received its dubious designation among CRU insiders for the very same reason.

As to the rest of the sentence -- It seems Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, when he wrote the email. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, he was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann’s series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.

And what I uncovered in the source code told the tale why. While Mann used multiple proxy sources, Briffa’s reconstructions were based solely on a property of annual tree ring growth known as maximum latewood density (MXD). And the MXD-only-driven plots began to diverge from actual temperatures as early as 1960. In fact, while many of CRU’s programs are designed to exclude all data after 1960 for later manual splicing with instrumental data, others employ “fudge factors” to force the generated plot to more closely adhere to measured temperatures as far back as 1930.

And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.

Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:

Notice how Briffa’s series (green) begins to trend sharply downward around the mid-20th Century. Jones’s series (red) soon follows but less sharply and then begins to trend higher. Mann’s (blue) appears to flatten out around the same year that Jones’s begins to fall. Meanwhile, all three have broken with the measured rising temperatures of the late 20th Century.

Now take a look at the chart actually published by the WMO, with all three proxy series having been surreptitiously subjected to MNT:

Since the release of CRU’s FOI2009, alarmists have continued their claim that there’s nothing deceptive about the “trick” and that it has been openly discussed in scientific journals like Nature since 1998.

But I defy anyone to compare the above chart – the one Jones wrote he had applied MNT to – to the unadulterated version above it, and tell me there’s been no deception committed. At least with MBH98, a sharp eye might recognize the ruse. Here -- there is no indication given whatsoever that the graph represents an amalgam of proxy and measured temperatures. This, my friends, is fraud.

And I hope that those investigating the fraud will carefully consider this explanation of his WMO cheating given last week by Jones: [my emphasis]

“One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

And they’ll immediately recognize the dishonest denial they’re dealing with when they read the WMO Statement figure from the inside cover Jones referred to:

“Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal. Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).”

Even if MNT had been explained as Jones claimed -- which it wasn’t -- just how was the observer expected to differentiate the reconstructed from the actual data? And good luck finding that newsletter.

Spin it anyway you want – Mike’s Nature Trick is Phil’s WMO cheat.

More Tricks of the Charade

While suddenly the most famous, Mike’s is not the only in CRU’s bag of tricks.

Many of the programs I reviewed contained routines to exclude proxy data that demonstrated poor correlations with local temperature, which of course explains why CRU’s 19th through mid-20th century proxy temperatures appeared to be observationally accurate. Others “estimated” values for missing data.

And then there’s the Yamal matter – also a popular subject of the CRU emails.

In an October 5th email to climatologist Tom Wigley, Jones took issue with a piece I had written that day exposing the lies in CRU-based UN climate reports, which included a section on Keith Briffa’s mistreatment of Polar Ural data in order to exaggerate 20th century warming. That email prompted the reply from Wigley -- now familiar to AT readers -- in which he admitted it was “distressing to read that American Stinker item,” before offering to help Briffa, who “does seem to have got himself into a mess,” write an “explanation” for his deceitful cherry-picking of Yamal peninsula data.

Indeed, Keith’s Yamal Trick also “fudged” proxy reconstructions, not by overwriting them with instrumental data ala Mike, but rather by underhandedly stacking the actual dataset with trees hand-picked to assure his predetermined outcome. Yet both methods intentionally corrupted reconstruction results for the same devious purpose -- to skew late 20th century temperatures higher in order to artificially create the dreaded hockey stick effect.

Now, you might be wondering why all this fuss is being made over late 20th century temperatures when even we realists accept that they did rise until 1998. Hopefully, you now understand why the divergence between proxy and measured temperatures betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. And that any reconstruction demonstrating such a flaw-revealing divergence should be dismissed outright, not presented as policy fodder.

But there’s another issue at stake here.

Anthony Watts has surveyed over 75% of the 1200-plus U.S weather stations from which national temperatures are accumulated. Most of those were found to be inaccurate by more than 2°C, largely due to being located within 10 meters of an artificial heating source. In fact, less than 10% met strict placement guidelines set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not to worry -- NOAA claims it has methods to “adjust” for such bias, including the use of “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations.

Unpublished computer programs artificially adjusting the data -- what could possibly go wrong with that?

Would you be shocked to learn that at ICCC 3, Watts told us he had calculated such adjustments to raw temperature data between 1940 and 1999 to be 0.5°F to the positive? That accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century.

And that’s here in America. Try to imagine what kind of shenanigans might be going on elsewhere in the world.

Consequently, even the “instrumental” temperatures the CRU crooks were fudging their results to align with were likely themselves fudged. So they were pumping the incline while hiding the decline

Hold the Fudge and the MWP won’t budge

In a June 2003 email to Jones and company, Mann discussed the notion of expanding CRU charts to 2 millennia, in an effort to ‘try to "contain" the putative "MWP."’ No deception in that, I suppose. Of course, an honest 2000 year reconstruction, such as this one from CO2Science.org, adapted from a 2005 Moberg et al. temperature history derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments, would actually emphasize rather than “contain” the MWP:

Any questions why Mann and friends work so diligently to “contain” (hide) the MWP?

As you can see, the post-LIA warming that began around 1850 is neither unprecedented nor spectacular. And certainly not worth rewiring the economic circuitry of the planet over.

And the CRU/IPCC reconstructions have been counterfeited for the express purpose of hiding that very fact.

After all, the stakes are enormous – perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties. Tomorrow, over 20,000 delegates from 193 nations will gather in Copenhagen to craft an agreement which would not only force American power consumption to levels equal to those of about 1910, but would also have us pay reparations for an imaginary “climate debt” we’ve accumulated by building the world’s greatest economy of all time. That debt is based on the amount of CO2 our financial growth has purportedly pumped into the atmosphere, which, according to the conclusions of the IPCC, based largely upon reports from the CRU, has selfishly imperiled the planet by inducing climate change.

Of course, asking Americans to pay reparations based on the claim they’ve done harm to other nations by spoiling the climate is like asking me to pay damages to my neighbor based on his claim that he can’t sell his house because my great-grandmother’s ghost is haunting it.

As many have known and Climategate has proven, either would be equally preposterous.

But at least belief in ghosts is only marginally inspired by fraud.

Lowdown on the Wilding of Sarah Palin

2009-11-25T10:18:00.000-08:00

Some think that the sliming of Sarah Palin and of her husband and of her children by those on the left has just been normal, political name-calling. If this is what you think, read on.

The Wilding of Sarah Palin

By Robin of Berkeley November 24, 2009 American Thinker

I finally beheld what my eyes had refused to see: that leftists are Mr. and Ms. Misogyny. Neither the males nor the females care a whit about women.

Women are continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. If under radical Islam women are enshrouded and stoned and beheaded, so be it.

My other epiphanies: those ponytailed guys were marching for abortion rights not because they cherished women's reproductive freedom, but to keep women available for free and easy sex.

And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don't have to.

Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it's far worse: many are perpetuators.
The Left's behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.

They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.

The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat.

A strong, self-sufficient woman, Palin eschews liberal protection. Drop her off in the Alaskan bush and she'll survive just fine, thank you very much. Palin doesn't need or want anything from liberals -- not hate crimes legislation that coddles her, and not abortion, which she abhors.

Palin is a woman of deep and abiding faith. She takes no marching orders from messiah-like wannabes like Obama.

And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways: by symbolically raping her.
Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.

They turn her into a piece of ass.

Liberals do this by calling her a c__t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like "slutty flight attendant" and "Trailer Park Barbie," and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.

And from Atlantic Magazine's Andrew Sullivan: "Sarah Palin's vagina is the font of all evil in the galaxy."

Nothing is off-limits, not actress Sandra Bernhard's wish that Palin be gang-raped or the sexualization of Palin's daughters.

As every woman knows, leering looks, lurid words, and veiled threats are intended to evoke terror. Sexual violence is a form of terrorism.

The American Left has a long history of defiling people to control and break them. The hard core '60s leftists were masters of guerrilla warfare, like the Symbionese Liberation Army repeatedly raping Patty Hearst. Huey P. Newton sent a male Black Panther to the hospital, bloodied and damaged from a punishment of sodomy.

The extreme Left still consider themselves warriors, righteous soldiers for their Marxist cause. With Palin, they use sexual violence as part of their military arsenal.

Palin is not the only intended victim. As Against Our Will described, the brutality is also aimed at men. By forcing men to witness Palin's violation, the Left tries to emasculate conservative men and render them powerless.

The wilding of any woman is reprehensible. But defiling a mother of five with a babe in her arms, and a grandmother to boot, is particularly obscene. It is, of course, Palin's unapologetic motherhood that fuels the leftist fire.

Because as a mother and a fertile woman, Palin is as close to the sacred as a person gets. She is not just politically pro-life. Her whole being emanates life, which is a stark contrast to the darkness of the Left, the life-despoilers.

These "progressives" are so alienated from the sacred that they perceive nothing as sacred. And they will destroy anyone whose goodness shines a mirror on their pathology. The spiritually barren must annihilate the vital and the fertile.

It has been almost two years since I woke up and broke up with liberalism. During these many months, I've discovered that everything I believed was wrong.

But the biggest shock of all has been realizing that the Democratic Party is hardly an oasis for women. Now that it has been infiltrated by the hard Left, it's a dangerous place for women, children, and other living things.

In the wilding of Sarah Palin, the Left shows its true colors. Rather than sheild the vulnerable, leftists will mow down any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Instead of a movement of hope and change, it is a cauldron of hate.

From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

In these dark times, with spiritually bankrupt people at the helm, thank God we have bright lights like Sarah Palin to illuminate the darkness.

A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal in Berkeley

You oh-so-reasonable and good-hearted supporters of liberal politicians should be ashamed of yourselves. When Nixon erred, conservatives got rid of him; when Foley erred, conservatives got rid of him; it is conservatives who are getting rid of the slimeball governor of South Carolina. If it weren't for the support of you silent, well-meaning liberals, these slimers of Sarah Palin would be out of business.

Mmm, mmm, mmm

2009-10-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

If video doesn't load, go here.
When Saturday Night Live starts making fun of Obama, there emerges some Hope for Change.

A Tea Party Cartoon and Two Videos

2009-09-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

A Tea Party Cartoon and Two Videos

There were a few more people there than Katie Couric reported - about 2 Million more!

Lessons Learned and Forgotten Re Housing

2009-09-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

Lessons Learned and Forgotten On Housing
Whatever faults the Republican Party has had, the basic problem has been that many Republican politicians forgot what they were supposed to stand for once they gained office.

The program of the Democratic Party, however, is entirely based on lies and deceptions. Most of the time they are afraid to let voters know what they really stand for. Right now they are trying hard to pass a "public option" disguised as something else so voters won't realize what they are doing.

It is against this backdrop that concerned Americans not forget the origins of the housing and financial crisis that brought us the pain of a deep recession and the winning of the White House by a group of unabashed radicals.

Do not let them succeed in blaming President Bush and the Republicans for a crisis brought on by the likes of Carter, Clinton, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Do not let them succeed in burying the role of liberal legislation and regulations that forced banks to lend to deadbeats, which was the underlying cause of the crisis.

Blaming George Bush and the Republicans, as the left has done with some success, is like blaming the police for crime.

The 2008/09 Housing Crisis and lessons learned forgotten

August 06, 2009 American Thinker (Excerpt)

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government. - Milton Friedman

“In late 2009, our economy was dramatically impeded by the paired conundrums of a full fledged financial crisis brought about partially by a housing crisis. This pairing is referred to as a "black swan" by some in the financial community because of the extreme unlikelihood and unpredictability of two crisis meeting at the same time.

If fact, it might have been easier to predict the downturn than the followers of "black swan" theory would allow. Mean regression theory states (loosely) that if an occurrence or observation of a variable is measured at an extreme (or trends away) from the mean (or average) the next observation will tend to be closer to the mean.

Armed with "Mean Regression Theory" let us critically evaluate the history of government intervention into the free market -- in particular the housing market -- that enjoyed all around support; "The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977." The "Community Reinvestment Act" mandated that all F.D.I.C. insured banks give more loans to lower income households (or less credit worthy borrowers). The act was significantly broadened by Clinton in 1993 .

In his memoir "My Life," Bill Clinton states;

"One of the most effective things we did was to reform the regulations governing financial institutions under the 1977 Community Reinvestment act. The law required federally insured lenders to make an extra effort to give loans to low and modest income borrowers.... After the changes we made between 1993-2000, banks would offer more than $800 billion in (loans) to borrowers covered by the law. A staggering figure that amounted to well over 90% of all loans made in the 23 years of (the act)."

Before the Community Investment Act was amended in 1993, the rate of home ownership was always near 64%.

You might argue that it was this amendment that caused the significant increase in demand that artificially drove up the value of homes, nudging us towards the current housing crisis.

The simple laws of supply and demand tell us that if there are more buyers in the market place competing for the same number of houses than the home prices will increase. This is exactly what happened.

In this chart, the mean is the inflation rate. Under normal market conditions, home prices rise in step with inflation because a house is a merely a composition of lumber and other raw materials and because the inflation rate takes housing costs into consideration. Notice that the deviation from the inflation rate starts about the time of the original act and takes off after President Clinton spurs the act forward.

In the above graphs we can note a significant "progression" or deviation from the mean. It would have been logical to assume that at some point these increases would reverse, or regress to the mean.

While there are many variables that led to the economic crisis that we are still mired in, had the government not acted to artificially increase housing demand through the Community Reinvestment Act, the crisis would not have been nearly as deep.

In all things, and especially government intervention into the free market, we must remember the law of unintended consequences. There can be no doubt that the "Cash for Clunkers" program is artificially increasing demand, which will in turn cause the auto manufactures to increase output. Certainly these manufacturers are not good at predicting consumer demand (as we've seen this year) and will stall. As before, the government will ignore the lessons of the past and plant the seeds for another future crisis." American Thinker

Palin Stuff

2009-06-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

Maps of Israel at Various Times in Recent History

2009-01-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

The mindless support for the so-called Palestinians who are experiencing some retribution for their constant attacks on Israel mainly shows one thing - the ignorance of the protesters. Thanks to the StoptheACLU website, the following sequence of maps and history may prove of interest:

The original Mandate for Palestine, agreed to unanimously by the League of Nations in 1920, designated 124,466 sq. km. for the Jewish National Homeland, to be known as Israel. Here’s the map of that area:

Two years later, that 120,466 sq. km. had been reduced to 28,166 sq. km., as requested by the British trustees and approved by the League of Nation. The remaining 77% of the land originally proposed for the Jewish homeland was to become the Arab state of Jordan.

The creation of an Arab state in eastern Palestine (today Jordan) on 77 percent of the landmass of the original Mandate intended for a Jewish National Home in no way changed the status of Jews west of the Jordan River, nor did it inhibit their right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

These documents are the last legally binding documents regarding the status of what is commonly called “the West Bank and Gaza.”

The Jewish homeland was to consist of all the land west of the Jordan River, stretching to the Mediterranean Sea - and including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Arabs would not have it. The League of Nations dissolved into the United Nations and the problem was handed over to the U.N., including the trusteeship of the British mandate to make a Jewish state a reality. The Mandate stood.

U.N. Resolution 181, known also as the U.N. 1947 Partition Resolution, was passed by the U.N. General Assembly, and implemented but never accepted by the Arabs. The Iraq spokesman took to the podium and put on record “Iraq does not recognize the validity of this decision.” From Syria: “My country will never recognize such a decision [Partition]. It will never agree to be responsible for it.” From Yemen: “…the Government of Yemen does not consider itself bound by such a decision,…”

The Partition Plan was met not only by verbal rejection on the Arab side but also by concrete, bellicose steps to block its implementation and destroy the Jewish polity by force of arms, a goal the Arabs publicly declared even before Resolution 181 was brought to a vote.

Arabs not only rejected the compromise and took action to prevent establishment of a Jewish state but also blocked establishment of an Arab state under the partition plan not just before the Israel War of Independence, but also after the war when they themselves controlled the West Bank (1948-1967), rendering the recommendation ‘a still birth.’

The UN itself recognized that 181 had not been accepted by the Arab side, rendering it a dead issue:
…
The U.N. partition began. More land was taken from the Jewish homeland.

The partition plan took on a checkerboard appearance. This was largely because Jewish towns and villages were spread throughout Palestine. This did not complicate the plan as much as the fact that the high living standards in Jewish cities and towns had attracted large Arab populations. This demographic factor insured that any partition would result in a Jewish state that included a substantial Arab population. Recognizing the need to allow for additional Jewish settlement, the majority proposal allotted the Jews land in the northern part of the country, Galilee, and the large, arid Negev desert in the south. The remainder was to form the Arab state.

The map now looked like this:

These boundaries were based solely on demographics. The borders of the Jewish State were arranged with no consideration of security; hence, the new state’s frontiers were virtually indefensible. Overall, the Jewish State was to be comprised of roughly 5,500 square miles and the population was to be 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. The Arab State was to be 4,500 square miles with a population of 804,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Though the Jews were allotted more total land, the majority of that land was in the desert.

Israel’s land which was originally mandated at 126,000+ sq. km., was now to be a mere 14,245 sq. kms. In addition to limiting Jewish lands, the immigration of Jews was also limited so that a majority of Jews in the land would never be accomplished.

Arab immigration had no immigration restrictions.

Israel accepted the partition, but in reality, it did not change or diminish the legality of the lands mandated for Israel - which still included the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - BECAUSE, the Arabs would agree to nothing which facilitated Jews in Palestine.

Creating the Arab state of Jordan in no way affected or “changed the status of Jews west of the Jordan River, nor did it inhibit their right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Nothing from the time of the Mandate until today, changes the fact that under international law, the West Bank and Gaza is open to Jewish settlement.

Under international law, neither Jordan nor the Palestinian Arab ‘people’ of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have a substantial claim to the sovereign possession of the occupied territories.

The UN Charter’s Article 80 implicitly recognizes the “Mandate for Palestine” of the League of Nations. The International Court of Justice has reaffirmed the validity of Article of 80.

In other words, neither the ICJ nor the UN General Assembly can arbitrarily change the status of Jewish settlement as set forth in the “Mandate for Palestine,” an international accord that has never been amended.

All of western Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the West Bank and Gaza, remains open to Jewish settlement under international law.

The new Jewish state was to have the right to self-determination of political, civil and religious rights. “Not once are Arabs as a people mentioned in the Mandate for Palestine. At no point in the entire document is there any granting of political rights to non-Jewish entities (i.e., Arabs).”

The Arabs accepted nothing. They wanted no Jews in Palestine, under any circumstance - there would be, to this day, no acceptable plan to which Arabs would agree to living next door to Jews.

On May 14th, 1948, a temporary legislature of the soon-to-be Israel, accepted the U.N. partition and declared statehood.

Eleven minutes after, the United States recognized the State of Israel. On May 15th, 1948 Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria invaded the sovereign nation of Israel, crossing international frontiers, and the Arab-Israeli War (Israeli War of Independence) began.

By July 24, 1949, Syria had signed an armistice agreement and Israel had increased it’s land area by almost 50% over the U.N. partition plan. The resulting armistice determined Israel’s borders for nineteen years. Egypt gained Gaza in the armistice.

By Fall 1949, Jordan had control of Gaza and East Jerusalem.

The odd and secretive 1956 War began. The short but incomplete story is that Israel took Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and then under threat by the U.S., gave it back.

Then came the 1967 Six Day War. In the Spring, Syria conducted terrorist raids against Israel, water was diverted by Syria from Israel and from irrigation projects for south and central Israel, although approved by Arab engineers as non-detrimental to Arab lands, were not approved by the Arab governments. In May, Egypt blocked the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships. “Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all activated their militaries. Iraqi troops reportedly approached the Syrian and Jordanian borders while Jordan moved tanks towards the West Bank.”

Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia formed a “defense pact.” Egyptian President Nasser said “Our basic objective will be the destruction if Israel. The Arab people want to fight….” The tiny nation of Israel was surrounded by “some 500,000 troops, more than 5,000 tanks, and almost 1,000 fighter planes.” France, Israel’s major arms supplier, issued a “complete ban on weapons sales and transfers to Israel.”

Under the leadership of Moyshe Dayan, Israel decided to go to war on June 5, 1967.

After a three days of fierce fighting, especially in and around Jerusalem, Israeli forces defeated the Jordanians and gained control of all of Jerusalem as well as the West Bank, the historical heartland of the Jewish people known to Israelis as Judea and Samaria. Following an air attack by the Syrians on the first day of the war, Israel dealt a shattering blow to the Syrian air force. …on fifth day of the war, the Israelis mustered enough forces to remove the Syrian threat from the Golan Heights. This difficult operation was completed the following day, bringing the active phase of the war to a close.

Israel now looked like this:

The areas shown in bright green (Sinai, Golan Heights, Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem) were occupied by Israel during the 6-day war. Israel has since returned all of Sinai to Egypt in return for peace. Most of Gaza is currently under the jurisdiction of the autonomous Palestinian Authority (2002). Parts of the West Bank (see Map of Israel and Palestinian territories following Oslo II) had been ceded to the Palestinian authority, but these areas are currently re-occupied by Israel.

Following the 6 day war, Israel began building settlements in these areas.

The aftermath of the war was complicated, but one fact was all too simple: Arabs rejected all diplomatic attempts.

Some of [the] displaced people were able to return to Israeli-controlled West Bank and, along with their neighbors, witnessed unprecedented economic growth over the course of the next two decades. Israeli investment into the infrastructure of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, coupled with policies that allowed Arabs to move freely increased the standard of living of Palestinians, who were now able to work both in Israel and in the oil rich countries in the Middle East.

After years of relative prosperity followed, but Palestinians and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) insisted that they would replace Israel, not co-exist with her.

With continued PLO agitation of the people, violence became common. Israel made peace with Egypt and returned the Sinai. The 1993 failed Oslo Peace Accord had Israel giving up the Gaza Strip and the West Bank - which was accomplished with Israel’s withdrawal, including the ejection of Jewish residents in the area in 2005.

Once out of Gaza, nothing changed. The terrorists of Gaza Strip became slumlords and violence against Israel has continued.

Palestinian militants—with the support of their Hamas-led government—have used the evacuated territory to launch rockets into Israel’s pre-1967 borders, shelling residents of Sderot and other neighboring communities and causing death, injuries and damage within Israel. Since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the territory has also become the site of deadly internecine violence among Palestinian factions, kidnapping of journalists, vandalism, looting and general mayhem. Far from bringing peace to the Gaza Strip, the withdrawal has resulted in less secure borders for Israel.

In the 1973 War (Yom Kippur War), again the Arab world came against Israel, as Egypt sought to regain territories lost to Israel in 1967. After two days of trying to recover from the surprise attack, Israel’s IDF blocked Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi assaults and once again took the Golan Heights. By the time a U.N. ceasefire was implemented, “Israel had completely surrounded the Egyptian Third Army.”

How could they succeed when Palestinian leadership remained and remains committed to the destruction of Israel? For those deluded into thinking that Palestinians will accept “peace” with Israel, and co-exist next door to her - if only Israel will remove all settlements from wherever they may be…that just doesn’t wash. The issue is not the Jews in the settlements. The issue is the Jews in Palestine.

No discussion of the Israeli-Arab conflict is complete without taking a look at the Palestinian people. Who are they? Who did they evolve from?

The area known as Palestine was and is a geographic area, not an ethnic people. In other words, Arabs living in the area are not ethnically Palestinian. To say it another way: Palestinians are not a native people. “The word Palestine is not even Arabic.”

Palestine is a name coined by the Romans around 135 CE from the name of a seagoing Aegean people who settled on the coast of Canaan in antiquity – the Philistines. The name was chosen to replace Judea, as a sign that Jewish sovereignty had been eradicated following the Jewish Revolts against Rome.

In the course of time, the Latin name Philistia was further bastardized into Palistina or Palestine. During the next 2,000 years Palestine was never an independent state belonging to any people, nor did a Palestinian people distinct from other Arabs appear during 1,300 years of Muslim hegemony in Palestine under Arab and Ottoman rule. During that rule, local Arabs were actually considered part of, and subject to, the authority of Greater Syria ( Suriyya al-Kubra).

Archeologists explain that the Philistines were a Mediterranean people who settled along the coast of Canaan in 1100 BCE. They have no connection to the Arab nation, a desert people who emerged from the Arabian Peninsula.

Tagging the Arabs in Palestine as Palestinian was a mission fabricated by Arabs to attempt to assert the Arab right to the Jewish holy lands at the time when Jewish statehood was becoming a reality - but history shows that Arabs were never identified as Palestinians:

This is substantiated in countless official British Mandate-vintage documents that speak of the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine – not Jews and Palestinians.
Other examples:

The Jerusalem Post, founded in 1932, was called The Palestine Post until 1948. Bank Leumi L’Israel, incorporated in 1902, was called the “Anglo-Palestine Company” until 1948.

The Jewish Agency – an arm of the Zionist movement engaged in Jewish settlement since 1929 – was initially called the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936 by German Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, was originally called the “Palestine Symphony Orchestra,” composed of some 70 Palestinian Jews.

The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was established in 1939 as a merger of the United Palestine Appeal and the fund-raising arm of the Joint Distribution Committee.
Fifty-one countries acknowledged that Israel had an historic connection to the land eventually known as Palestine:

Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.

Furthermore:

The rhetoric by Arab leaders on behalf of the Palestinians rings hollow. Arabs in neighboring states, who control 99.9 percent of the Middle East land, have never recognized a Palestinian entity. They have always considered Palestine and its inhabitants part of the great “Arab nation,” historically and politically as an integral part of Greater Syria…

The Arabs never established a Palestinian state when the UN in 1947 recommended to partition Palestine, and to establish “an Arab and a Jewish state” (not a Palestinian state, it should be noted). Nor did the Arabs recognize or establish a Palestinian state during the two decades prior to the Six-Day War when the West Bank was under Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control; nor did the Palestinian Arabs clamor for autonomy or independence during those years under Jordanian and Egyptian rule.

The population of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq did not “evolve,” but were created by “colonial powers.” No “Palestinian DNA exists!

Unlike nation-states in Europe, modern Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi nationalities did not evolve. They were arbitrarily created by colonial powers.

In 1919, in the wake of World War I, England and France as Mandatory (e.g., official administrators and mentors) carved up the former Ottoman Empire, which had collapsed a year earlier, into geographic spheres of influence. This divided the Mideast into new political entities with new names and frontiers.

The prevailing rationale behind these artificially created states was how they served the imperial and commercial needs of their colonial masters. Iraq and Jordan, for instance, were created as emirates to reward the noble Hashemite family from Saudi Arabia for its loyalty to the British against the Ottoman Turks during World War I, under the leadership of Lawrence of Arabia. Iraq was given to Faisal bin Hussein, son of the sheriff of Mecca, in 1918. To reward his younger brother Abdullah with an emirate, Britain cut away 77 percent of its mandate over Palestine earmarked for the Jews and gave it to Abdullah in 1922, creating the new country of Trans-Jordan or Jordan, as it was later named.

The conclusion: don’t waste your energy and your angst blaming Israel for stealing the homeland of the Palestinians. Don’t obsess over the dead and dying in Palestine.

The time has come to recognize that Palestinian leaders have gravely failed their own. The millions of dollars of aid to feed and clothe the poor and oppressed seldom get to the people. Philanthropy buys weapons and means to attack Israel.

Westerners supporting Palestine believe that if Israel will only turn over their settlements to Palestine, Israel and Palestine will live side-by-side in peace. This is inane and vacuous thinking. It is the willing suspension of disbelief. It is pure anti-semitism. Serious thought cannot arrive at such a conclusion.

The Fatah Constitution Articles 12 and 19: Complete liberation of Palestine and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People’s armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.”

The PLO Charter Article 15 calls the liberation of Palestine a national (qawmi) duty to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the “liquidation of the Zionist presence” in Palestine.

The Hamas Charter: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees….Hamas Charter Article 15 (a portion): “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised. To do this requires the diffusion of Islamic consciousness among the masses, both on the regional, Arab and Islamic levels. It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters.”

THIS IS A TEST SITE; NOT MY REAL BLOG.

2008-12-31T19:59:00.000-08:00

This is a test site where I try out things and compose complex articles. when I get them right, I publish them on my real blog.

PLEASE GO TO THIS SITE.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

2008-12-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

This is still my favorite Christmas video(the best ever Budweiser commercial); turn up your sound and click this:
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How Marxists Take Over

2008-11-03T06:54:00.001-08:00

Yuri Bezmenov
Uploaded by onmyway02

Adventures After a Hurricane Disaster

2008-09-09T08:29:00.001-07:00

Adventures After a Hurricane Disaster
With so many hurricanes swirling around the coasts of the U.S. these days, I thought some readers might be interested in a personal story of the aftermath of one of the biggest to hit, Hurricane Charley in 2004. As I tell this story keep in mind that a great deal of good luck was involved in the success of the efforts we made at that time.

I was spending the summer in Rhode Island when, on Friday afternoon, August 13, I got news that Hurricane Charley had decimated the condo I owned in Florida, part of a modest, 32 unit complex. The irony was that the previous day I had offered the use of my condo (which is on high ground not near the water) to two friends who lived on the water, and were afraid of the storm surge, and it was they who called me on a cell phone. I was told, “Your roof has come off”. I said, “You mean some shingles blew off?”. No, they said, the roof is off, the water is pouring in and the place is a shambles.

I then traced the route of Charley and called a motel about 25 miles away in a city that had not been affected and rented a room for three weeks. I loaded my Grand Caravan with canned food, bottled water, tarps, battery lights and a porta-potty from my boat. Because of other situations I could not leave right away, but I managed to leave Tuesday morning and arrived Thursday afternoon to quite a scene: pieces of the roof, insulation, downed wires and cables, and shredded aluminum fragments everywhere. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

At that time I was a director, but not an officer of the complex. I had no management duties other than to attend a board meeting from time to time. When I pulled in that first time, I found that the Managing Director was in shock and entering the first stages of a breakdown, and two other directors were sitting on their front steps crying, completely exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally. Someone had to step up, and I decided it had to be me. There was no electricity, no phone service (not even cell phones), no sewerage because the pumps weren’t working, and no gasoline for the same reason. Every day for several days the temperature was in the 90’s with high humidity, and it rained every afternoon. Twice a day I drove around for a few minutes to get some relief from the AC in my car.

That night, in the motel room I luxuriated in air conditioning, got on the internet, watched television and took a shower; almost everyone else still at the condo complex was forced to face stifling heat and rain water still coming in. While at the motel I found from the internet that the Belfor Company was the world’s leading water-damage specialists, and the Alex Sill Company was the top rated private insurance adjuster firm in the U.S. I called their emergency numbers, found they had people already in our area and got their cell phone numbers.

The next day I rose at 5:00 AM, filled up my gas tank and had breakfast at Denny’s. I did this every day that I was there. My cell phone wouldn’t work at home, but while visiting my friends, I was told that if I stood on the diving board of their pool and faced southwest, sometimes their cell phone worked. Somehow they had found that out. I borrowed it and called a moving and storage company to remove my furniture and put it in AC storage in another city. They came the next day and did just that. The rest of that day was spent dealing with my personal homeowners insurance company, getting our stuff ready to go into storage and a thousand other things.

On Saturday my cell phone started working and I got in touch with the Belfor people and the Alex Sill people, who both agreed to meet with us immediately. I also called FEMA and arranged for one of their people to come. Within a day, we met with both companies and hired them. Sill was hired to represent us with our condominium insurance company. They were to receive a small percentage of the payout for their service, which would also include drawing up a master plan for reconstruction. The Belfor representatives said they could have a crew on site within 24 hours if we hired them and gave them a $25,000 deposit. Our treasurer wrote out the check, and Belfor said they would hold it until she told them she had transferred funds from our reserve accounts to cover it (not legal, but we did it anyway). I was also appointed Managing Director and asked to run the restoration efforts.

The FEMA guy showed up as our Belfor meeting started and agreed to hang around until it ended. I met with him later and signed contracts to have the U.S. Corps of Engineers install blue tarpaulins over our roofs, which they did. Interestingly, the FEMA drill was to make me sign an individual, multi-part form for each of the 32 units in the complex. It took me an hour just to sign all the forms, and I never heard from or saw a FEMA person again.

The next day things began to change in a hurry. Belfor put 30 workers and equipment on our site to begin the cleanup and take steps to mitigate the damage. Every unit had drenched carpeting, and one of Belfor’s first acts was to remove it to stave off mold, which is the big destroyer. They also had electronic instruments that measured the moisture content of areas of the drywall ceilings and walls, and they cut out and removed areas that failed their test standard, for the same reason. The morale of the residents improved overnight, and everyone was working together. People there realized that we were one of the few sites where work was actually going on, but now we had a new problem.

Hurricane Charley was followed by three more hurricanes, Frances, Jeanne and Ivan. Each hurricane brought more wind, which lifted the tarps, and more rain, which poured in every afternoon and evening. I had gotten my furniture out, and hadn’t waited for the Belfor people to remove my own carpeting, but this caused more misery for everyone else, and also required the successive evacuations of the work crews.

There was some comic relief in the situation. So much scrap aluminum was lying around the whole area, the remnants of carports, sheds and pool cages, that lots of people with trucks went into the business of collecting it and selling it at scrap yards. We had piles of it all around and in our pool. One day a truck pulled in, and I was asked if they could pick up the aluminum at no cost to us. I said “yes, if you start with what is in the pool”. Their crew cleaned out the pool and removed a little of what was lying on the ground, and then told me that they would be back tomorrow. Several days then went by with no sign of this original crew, when another truck and crew pulled in to see if they could have the aluminum. I said yes. After they started working, the original truck pulled in, and that guy was so incensed because he had done the real dirty work, that the two crews got in a fist-fight over the aluminum that was left. I let them sort it out.

The Sill people came in handy. We had, literally, dozens of meetings with various insurance company people – meetings that would drive a person to insanity. They issued inch-thick reports every month and kept changing the form of how they presented the data and the dollars, so that it was almost impossible to follow from one report to the next. They offered a final settlement of $248,000 early on, and we rejected it. We ended up settling for $993,000, which paid all the bills with $12,000 left over after we paid Sill. We might have survived and prevailed in these negotiations without Sill, but I doubt it. I believe the basic strategy of the insurance company was to wear us down, but they found that they couldn’t.

There were many other developments along the way, but I’ll end my story here. I flew back and forth between RI and Florida once a month from September through January, staying about a week each time, and went down full-time in January. By February, my unit was livable, and by March the whole complex was restored like new. Excuse me, I have to see what Ike is doing.

Constantly Updated Map of Worldwide Terrorism

2007-12-09T16:21:00.001-08:00

To view map of terrorist activities happening now, click here.

The End of Multiculturalism

2005-11-11T11:25:00.000-08:00

Grandma Was a Corker; Grandpa Was No Slouch Either

2005-11-05T03:33:00.000-08:00

Before the turn of the 20th century, at the age of 17, my grandmother, Isabella (Corvese) Montanaro left the dirt-poor area of Italy called Caserta, and traveled by boat to the United States. She came here all alone, with a couple of dollars in her pocket, and with no-one here to greet her or to help her. Just imagine, as you fume because the batteries in your remote have expired, just what courage, determination and just plain grit and strength of character that took. She made her way to Providence, RI, where she had heard that there was a factory job she could get. Over the course of several years, she earned and sent back enough money to bring over her parents and all her brothers and sisters; eventually, the entire family emigrated to the USA from Italy.

She met and married Grandpa Franchesco Montanaro, who had come here from the same area of Italy, and probably met her at the Holy Ghost Roman Catholic Church in Providence. In those days, particularly for Irish, French and Italian immigrants, the Catholic Church was a protector and a source of help and comfort along with providing spiritual guidance. Grandpa had found work in a foundry in the Olneyville area of Providence, and together they produced and raised 12 children in the days when a couple usually needed to have several children so that some would survive the terrible childhood diseases that killed many of them. Early in the Great Depression of the 1920’s and 30’s, Grandpa lost his job at the foundry and could find no other work. He then made a wooden pushcart, and supported his family until jobs became available again by purchasing fruit and vegetables at the farmers’ market every morning, and reselling them throughout the neighborhoods. There was no such thing as Welfare in those days.

Meanwhile Grandpa and Grandma Wilcox (Leslie Wilcox and Maud Wood) met in Fairfield Center, Maine, in the far-northern part of the state, she an immigrant from New Brunswick, and he a native Yankee farmer’s son. They married and went on to raise 6 children, of whom one died as a youngster. They could not feed their family by farming in the area, so they pulled up stakes and moved to Fairfield, Maine, in the middle of the state, where they settled a farm principally growing potatoes and beans for baking.

Over the next few years, Grandpa Wilcox built and rebuilt five houses, mostly by himself, as over and over again chimney fires kept destroying homes he had built. Perhaps Grandpa understood nature and spiritual matters (he became famous in Maine for his faith-healing powers and his ability to foretell the future), but mechanical and scientific matters were not his forte. I remember as a young child Grandpa blowing himself up in the methane pit out back that fed the gas lights in the house. He shouldn’t have lit that match. I also remember seeing, when I was a child, that when an automobile or a truck stopped running, he would hitch a team of horses to it, pull it into the woods, and then go and get another one.

In the height of the same depression that put Grandpa Montanaro behind a fruit peddler’s pushcart, potato farmers could no longer sell their crops. This was in the days when disconsolate farmers died their potatoes blue to take them off the market in a desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt to raise prices above their costs. (Dairy farmers were also pouring milk down the drain for the same purpose.) Grandpa then hired out his team and himself and his sons to the railroad to pull and place railroad ties on new rail beds throughout Maine, and both he and Grandma became undertakers, laying out and dressing the dead for immediate funerals or for temporary storage in frozen vaults. At the same time, of course, all their vegetables, butter, eggs and preserves were home grown and home made.

The point of all of this is not to belittle the comforts and affluence of modern life, but to point out with pride the stuff my children and grandchildren should know they are made of; and to remind them that others have proven over and over again that almost any obstacle can be overcome if you don’t ever give up or give in – and that there is always an answer somewhere if you look hard enough for it.