Pothead calling Pa Kettle black?

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:51 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

Parkway School District and Perversification; Liberal Hypocrisy on Display

Timothy Birdnow

The Parkway School District, wealthy suburban district in West St. Louis County, has rammed a perverted sex curriculum down the throats of parents and students.

According to the article in Missouri Education Watchdog:

"Last night the Parkway School District, despite strong opposition from parents in the district, narrowly approved the new "comprehensive sex education” program being considered for their health curriculum. Board members Deborah Hopper and Sam Sciortino and Board President Chris Jacob voted against the revised curriculum. In addition to promoting inclusion of various sexual identities, the program strayed from teaching sexual abstinence.

Last month I was contacted by a parent in the Parkway School District who was very concerned about the district’s proposed new sex education curriculum. She was looking for help in following the money to find who could be funding the push for the new curriculum. Following the money is particularly difficult. Funding for sex education programs comes through a diverse system but can often be traced back to either the federal government or private wealthy donors. Identifying the original source of funding for such programs can be quite difficult as the money path is (purposely) convoluted."

End

Well, well, well!

Here is more:

"Districts may be looking to change their sexuality education policies and curriculae in response to a 53 page guidance document issued by the US Department of Education in April 2014 which provided guidelines extending federal civil rights protections to transgender students. The letter states:

"Under Title IX, federally funded schools must ensure that students of all ages are not denied or limited in their ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s educational programs or activities on the basis of sex. A school violates a student’s rights under Title IX regarding student-on-student sexual violence when the following conditions are met: (1) the alleged conduct is sufficiently serious to limit or deny a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s educational program, i.e. creates a hostile environment; [emphasis added] and (2) the school, upon notice, fails to take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end the sexual violence, eliminate the hostile environment, prevent its recurrence, and, as appropriate, remedy its effects.”

One method of eliminating what might be perceived as a hostile environment and preventing its recurrence, is to train students to think of LGBTQ as perfectly normal. Accommodations by schools for bathroom or locker room access would further normalize such behavior or choices. This is only one possible response to the federal document, and not necessarily the most legally correct one."

End excerpt.

We have been told that Federal involvement in school curriculum is a good thing. We were promised great benefits from, say, Common Core, which forced Federal guidelines on local schools, effecctively removing the control of parents over what their children learn. But what has this wrought? The perversification of education, that is what. They now want to tell children that it is normal for a boy to put on a dress and lipstick and use the girl's restrooms.

Through most of human history that was considered a mental disorder at minimum, a perversion. Now, we know so much more than we did just ten years ago, our brains have so expanded that we must force everyone to accept this as perfectly normal, even if it violates the First Amendment rights of students.

So, where is this coming from?

According to the article:

Who is funding the new standards?

Since the Nixon administration, we have had Title X which funds the Department of Health and Human Services. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program (TPP) is a HHS program which provides grants to "intermediary organizations that will provide capacity building assistance (CBA) to at least 3 youth-serving organizations to replicate evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) (Tier 1 A) programs in a defined service area with demonstrated need.” Such organizations could include school districts as "state agencies.” In 2015 $5m was allocated to such programs by the federal government.

Private donations from groups like the Rockefeller or Ford Foundation have also been used to fund this type of program. Other individuals who have been known to fund CSE programs are billionaire Paul Singer –wall street vulture capitalist and Daniel Lobe of The Arcus Foundation.

Almost $530m annually is paid to Planned Parenthood from the federal government through Health Services Grants and Reimbursements. PP provides programs like Chat/Text offering free sexual advice to teens and young women. They are advocates for comprehensive sexuality education and promote the National Sex Education Standards which were developed by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in their leadership program. SIECUS’s goal is to eventually extinguish all funding for abstinence based sexuality education.

The UN is also pushing these same standards. Quoting UNESCO‘s ―International Guidelines on Sexuality Education, Dr. MiriamGrossman, author of You’re Teaching My Child What? stated, "One of the learning objectives [of sexuality education] is to ―change social norms. [Those who advocate for comprehensive sexuality education] envision a world without sexual taboos and restrictions—a world free of Judeo/Christian morality where each individual, regardless of age, should be free to make his or her own sexual choices … and no judgment [is] allowed … It‘s an ―anything goes as long as you use a condom philosophy of sex education. You can see how this type of curriculum supports the changes recommended by the USDED for district LGBTQ policies. See Family Watch International’s report Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Sexual Rights vs. Sexual Health

End excerpt.

And indeed this is a top-down movement, one being pushed and fostered by a cadre of elites in Washington and at the U.N. But, as always happens with this sort of thing, the Yuppie pseudo-intellectual class is quick to jump on-board to show how enlightened they are. Parkway is a wealthy school district; it is not one of the poorer districts, the kind that have to shepherd their resources.

This would never happen at Bayless or Lindbergh here in St. Louis because those districts have a lot of Bosnian Muslims in attendance. What would be the outcome? Transgendered children would likely be bullied terribly in such an instance, and the schools would not take actiion because it would be another protected class bumping up against the latest fashionable cause. So we won't see it down in South St. Louis County, but will see it out in the west where Muslims are fewer.

I think that hypocrisy is the most galling thing of all.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 1076 words, total size 8 kb.

Google; the Gatekeeper of the Mind

Timothy Birdnow

For years I have warned of the power of Google and the other major search engines, that these handy gadgets were crushing the Conservative movement by selectively choosing what would appear at the top of any internet search. Wikipedia, for instance, always appears near the top, even though it is a "user generated" encyclopedia, and to a large degree fairly worthless. Oftentimes I have searched for what had been a big story a year or so ago, one that was damaging to liberals, and it is just GONE, or if not gone completely it has been relegated to page 12 or some other digital Siberia.

Case in point; I wrote a post for Pajamas Media a number of years back and wanted to include a story about a kid who committed suicide over global warming. I couldn't find it anywhere on the net. The editor at PJ looked too, and HE couldn't find it, even though both of us remembered the story. This is not an uncommon occurrence.

This is an insidious form of censorship, a way to subtly affect the way people think. Millenials, who have never cracked an actual book for information, assume they are getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when they do an internet search, and that is the power of Google and other search engines. If it's not on Google it must not exist.

And activism has been central to the Google mission. It was a Google executive who started the revolution in Egypt via Facebook. Google is the top corporation in America for political donations, beating out Goldman Sachs for the top spot.

According to the Financial Times:

"Google’s political action committee, NetPAC, has spent more money on political campaigns this year than Goldman, at $1.43m, just edging out the $1.4m by the bank that is famous for its political connections. That is a marked change from the last midterm election in 2010, when Google spent only a third as much as Goldman.

Technology companies are spending big money this year to build political support as Washington debates issues critical to the sector from tax, to increasing the number of visas for skilled migrants to greater oversight of US intelligence agencies."

Why are tech companies so eager to donate money this election cycle? While the article says they are largely evenly split on donations between the two parties, it fails to say who in the Republicans are benefiting. Hint; it isn't Ted Cruz.

The article continues:

"Companies and executives also gave heavily to Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who had, until recently, been pushing for reform to immigration. Tech companies hope such reform could lead to more visas for foreign engineers. Facebook’s PAC, as well as its founder Mark Zuckerberg, donated heavily to Mr. Rubio, as did Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and Tesla founder Elon Musk.

Tech company employees tend to donate to Democrats, according to the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan non-profit group that supports government transparency.

Nearly all the top recipients of donations from Google employees were Democrats, with the exception of Mr. Goodlatte and Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from southern California who sits on the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee for intellectual property and the internet. The breakdown for other companies is similar."

End excerpt.

Any surprise Rubio has stayed in the race, sucking up votes that rightly should have gone to Ted Cruz?

And, despite a clear political agenda, we are supposed to believe that the Google search parameters are incorruptible, that the information that makes the top of the search is somehow the best information out there.

Here is an essay I found via the leftist Drudge Retort about Google's growing power over information flow and the way people think. I find it interesting that the editors of Drudge.com would link to this, as it defeats the very belief system they advocate. Google is THEIR friend, not ours.

At any rate, this essay is fairly lengthy, but it makes some excellent points. For instance:

"To understand how the new forms of mind control work, we need to start by looking at the search engine – one in particular: the biggest and best of them all, namely Google. The Google search engine is so good and so popular that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in languages around the world. To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the Google search engine, and that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide get most of their information about just about everything these days. They Google it. Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.

That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they probably contain lots of good information. Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them. How it decides these things is a deep, dark secret – one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola.

Because people are far more likely to read and click on higher-ranked items, companies now spend billions of dollars every year trying to trick Google’s search algorithm – the computer program that does the selecting and ranking – into boosting them another notch or two. Moving up a notch can mean the difference between success and failure for a business, and moving into the top slots can be the key to fat profits."

[...]

"Does the company ever favour particular candidates? In the 2012 US presidential election, Google and its top executives donated more than $800,000 to President Barack Obama and just $37,000 to his opponent, Mitt Romney. And in 2015, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland and elsewhere showed that Google’s search results routinely favoured Democratic candidates. Are Google’s search rankings really biased? An internal report issued by the US Federal Trade Commission in 2012 concluded that Google’s search rankings routinely put Google’s financial interests ahead of those of their competitors, and anti-trust actions currently under way against Google in both the European Union and India are based on similar findings.

In most countries, 90 per cent of online search is conducted on Google, which gives the company even more power to flip elections than it has in the US and, with internet penetration increasing rapidly worldwide, this power is growing. In our PNAS article, Robertson and I calculated that Google now has the power to flip upwards of 25 per cent of the national elections in the world with no one knowing this is occurring. In fact, we estimate that, with or without deliberate planning on the part of company executives, Google’s search rankings have been impacting elections for years, with growing impact each year. And because search rankings are ephemeral, they leave no paper trail, which gives the company complete deniability.

Power on this scale and with this level of invisibility is unprecedented in human history. But it turns out that our discovery about SEME was just the tip of a very large iceberg."

End excerpts.

The article discusses original research done by the author and others showing that most people take the first ten entries as Gospel and rarely dig deeper.

He also makes this point:

"s so powerful and how, to some extent, it can be suppressed.

We have also learned something very disturbing – that search engines are influencing far more than what people buy and whom they vote for. We now have evidence suggesting that on virtually all issues where people are initially undecided, search rankings are impacting almost every decision that people make. They are having an impact on the opinions, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of internet users worldwide – entirely without people’s knowledge that this is occurring. This is happening with or without deliberate intervention by company officials; even so-called ‘organic’ search processes regularly generate search results that favour one point of view, and that in turn has the potential to tip the opinions of millions of people who are undecided on an issue. In one of our recent experiments, biased search results shifted people’s opinions about the value of fracking by 33.9 per cent.

Perhaps even more disturbing is that the handful of people who do show awareness that they are viewing biased search rankings shift even further in the predicted direction; simply knowing that a list is biased doesn’t necessarily protect you from SEME’s power.

Remember what the search algorithm is doing: in response to your query, it is selecting a handful of webpages from among the billions that are available, and it is ordering those webpages using secret criteria. Seconds later, the decision you make or the opinion you form – about the best toothpaste to use, whether fracking is safe, where you should go on your next vacation, who would make the best president, or whether global warming is real – is determined by that short list you are shown, even though you have no idea how the list was generated."

End excerpt.

I have argued that the Conservative movement will not get anywhere as long as liberals control the search engines, because they can simply "disappear" information critical to making informed opinions. The ability to determine what people know is the ultimate power, one that we cannot compete against - particularly since the television networks, the entertainment industry, and the educational system are biased against us. The internet gave us a chance to educate people by going around the gatekeepers. Now we have a new, more powerful gatekeeper, and it is as leftist as the old order.

Beware the beast Google.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:36 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 1711 words, total size 11 kb.

Lib author answers his own question about Kansas

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 759 words, total size 6 kb.

Judge Overturns Ohio Voting Age Restriction

Timothy Birdnow

A judge in Ohio has ruled in favor of Bernie Sanders, declaring that 17 year old children may vote in the primary elections provided they will turn 18 by the general.

According to The Hill:

"Sanders's team sued to change the state law, but a judge decided Friday on a different state-level case that effectively provided the same outcome.

The Vermont senator's White House campaign has been boosted by strong support from younger voters, so the decision could prove important in the crucial state of Ohio, which has 143 delegates up for grabs.

Ohio had barred 17-year-olds from voting on primary day regardless of if they would be eligible for the general election.

But the timing of the decision, just days before the Tuesday primary, could dampen any potential gains.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted bashed the ruling in a statement released after the decision.

"This last minute legislating from the bench on election law has to stop. Our system cannot give one county court the power to change 30 years of election law for the entire state of Ohio, 23 days into early voting and only four days before an election," he said. "

End excerpt.

So a low level judge has simply overturned state law immediately prior to the election so it cannot be appealed.

First, the state government should refuse to follow this judicial decree. The Secretary of State has a duty to tell this activist judge to go pound sand. If he wants this order enforced he can bloody do it himself.

Second, one must ask how a deadline of any sort can simply be overturned without then opening the door to overturning any sort of deadline. Why have laws that set legal drinking ages, or legal driving ages, or where you can sign a legal contract if a judge can overturn it at his whim?

Writing in American Thinker Rick Moran makes an astonishingly myopic argument:

"Should 17 year olds be allowed to vote at all? Younger voters are less informed than older voters, but when did the level of knowledge about the issues become a factor in whether someone should be allowed to vote? There are seniors who are equally clueless about the issues who cast their ballots anyway. Perhaps a 17 year old lacks the judgment of their elders but that seems a subjective reason not to allow young people to vote."

End excerpt.

??????

And younger children may be better drivers than elderly people, but we still do not let them drive until they are 16. There is a reason for that, the same reason that applies to voting. There has to be an age of majority, an age where we feel confident that a person is mature enough to take on adult responsibilities. We don't let 13 year olds drive cars, we do not allow 12 year olds to engage in carnal relations, we do not enlist 13 year olds in the military. There are milestone ages required for all of these rites of passage, and the idea that somehow it doesn't matter is, uh, well let us say not exactly Conservative.

We have an age of majority and the deadline is the deadline. There is no way to determine that a 17 year old is competent to vote, and the fact that Rick Moran makes this argument at all is astonishing - considering he is an editor at a very conservative website.

So why is 17 suddenly the magic number? Kids can drive at age 16, why not make that the voting age? Then, after that becomes standard, we can move it down to 15, the age when a child can get a learner's permit for driving. Then down from there.

It is a slippery slope. And it can be applied to all manner of things that currently define adulthood. This is no accident; the Left has sought to destroy the concept of childhood, of a period where children are sheltered from some of the harsher aspects of life until they are deemed ready. Childhood was a merciful concept, a construct of the Judeo-Christian culture that gave us Western Civilization, and as such is at the root of exaclty what we are fighting to preserve. Liberals hate it; they want people to be material and carnal and to accomplish this they need to break the personality of the child early, to train them, to awaken their lusts before they have mastery of themselves. That is why the Left is forever trying to reduce the age of majority, the age where children are allowed to make their own decisions. In the end children CAN'T make good decisions, and the State will step in.

Look how well this has worked in other areas; the sexual revolution has destroyed society, and that based on teen sexuality, which we were told could not be stopped and that we had to live with it. Kids began having kids, and the State raised them into good little liberals.

So now they want to extend the vote, the most important duty of any citizen, to people who know nothing and whose opinions are largely formed by social media and entertainment. What could go wrong with that?

In the William F. Nolan novel Logan's Run the hero sets out to find "Sanctuary" - a mythical place where people over the age of 21 can live. In the novel you were euthanized on your 21st birthday to maintain "sustainable" population growth. Logan, a "sandman" or hunter of people who live past their alloted time, decides to "run" when the atomic clock in his hand starts blinking. At first Logan simply uses this as a way to get past the tight security of the underground railroad that gets runners to Sanctuary, but eventually he comes to realize the stupidity of his own civilization. He notices everything is breaking down and the young - indolent and self-gratifying - neither know nor care about keeping society alive. He is eventually caught by Francis, his former partner, and he makes a desperate appeal "the young don't create, they use. Our civilization is dying." As it turns out Francis was Ballard, the man who ran Sanctuary and who, through a mistake, had an atomic clock in his hand that never went black.

The point is, Logan was correct; the young use and enjoy but rarely do the hard work of life. And that includes understanding politics.

Granted, Moran is correct in that there are many who have the vote who also do not understand or who are too venial to vote for the betterment of the greater society, but that is an unfortunate result of having a democratic system. In point of fact, the Founding Fathers tried to limit this by placing restrictions on voting; you had to be a landholder, a male, and you had to register. There were other restrictions; the College of Electors prevented a demogugue from seducing the public, the individual states created their own election schemes. In fact, South Carolina did not have a popular vote in 1860 because they followed the old way and had the state legislature choose the candidate. The Senate was similarly chosen until the 20th Century. All of these restrictions were intended to reduce the power of passion in voting. Bringing young people into the fray in large quantities is a return to the pure democracy that the Founders were so concerned with.

It is an absolutely terrible idea. And Rick Moran should really know better.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1261 words, total size 8 kb.

Mizzou U. Going Broke!

Jack Kemp

Give me an M!

Give me an I!

Give me a...ehh? Gee, our teachers never taught us how to spell Missouri....

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/mizzou-loses-1500-students-and-going-broke-after-campus-protest-debacle

Mizzou Loses 1500 Students and Going Broke After Campus Protest Debacle
There is some justice in this world.

Let this be a cautionary tale to other institutions of higher learning across the West. There is a price to be paid for kowtowing to petulant children and shredding our First Amendment rights.  

The University of Missouri ("Mizzou") is slated to lose some 1500 students comprising mainly incoming freshmen -- and suffer a staggering $32 million budget shortfall in the wake of its spineless capitulation to campus social justice warriors. To put that in perspective, the school is seeing a 20% decrease in its freshman enrollment in just one year alone. 

"I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall. I wish I had better news," said Mizzou chancellor Hank Foley in a letter sent to school staff on Wednesday.

In his letter, Foley speaks about the budget shortfall and how it will impact the school -- namely calling for a hiring freeze and no faculty raises. While Foley did not openly state lay-offs might ensue, untenured professors beware. 

Foley’s letter, which was obtained by Fox, follows in part below:

"Dear university community,

I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall. I wish I had better news.

The anticipated declines, Â”which total about 1,500 fewer students than current enrollment at MU's” in addition to a small number of necessary investments are expected to leave us with an approximate $32 million budget gap for next year. A smaller entering freshman class will have continuing impact on finances as they progress toward their degrees at MU... 

Given that these declines are the result of drops in first-time student enrollments and retention of enrolled students, there are a number of initiatives and projects currently underway to stem the tide in both the short- and long-term. We are reaching out to admitted students who have not yet enrolled and to their parents with phone calls, Skype calls, videos and a text campaign, all of which involve current students, faculty and administrators throughout the university. We also are in the process of adding more out-of-state recruiters and we are redesigning all our Admissions materials to ensure they meet the expectations and needs of prospective students. I have also asked Admissions to develop a new web-based admissions platform that is streamlined and that will involve live feedback to prospective students. The goal is to make it easy to apply and to know very quickly what their prospects are for admission to MU. The key is to be faster, more personal and much more interactive. 

To this end, we are implementing the following guidelines for FY17 budget planning. We will:

Impose a cut of 5 percent to all annual recurring general revenue budgets (rate dollars) without exception. Should the current assumptions that led to a $32 million gap be absolutely accurate, we will be $10 million short of balancing our recurring budget. A gap of that nature will be addressed in FY17 with reserves (cost dollars), and then any additional cuts necessary to balance the recurring budget will be carried into the following year.

We are implementing an across-the-board hiring freeze for all units on campus. We urge all campus administrators to carefully review their staffing levels and to not refill any positions unless they are absolutely necessary to the mission. Decisions to add faculty or staff must be exceptional, but will be left to the discretion of the deans, vice chancellors, vice provosts and the director of athletics.

We will not have an annual merit increase program this year. Effectively that means merit increases are at zero for the entire campus. Promotional increases for faculty will still be provided.

So outraged were they by this year's campus protests and the gross misconduct of faculty members like Melissa Click (the disgraced communications professor who called for "muscle" against a journalist covering the campus protests), Missouri Republican leadership refused to increase the school's budget and even threatened budget cuts on top of that.  

Perhaps there is a little justice in this world.

A NOTE FROM TIM:

These budget cuts are moving throught he whole University of Missouri system, I might add; my brother Brian lost the classes he taught at UMSL as a result of the cuts.

Still, it's worth it in the long run. Political correctness and bullying, stifling of free speech and racial glorification have run rampant on college campuses, and parents are forced to fund these things with sky-hi9h tuition, tuition that would be much lower were it not for the expense of these radical ideas. It is high time that parents stop ruining their children's minds and emptying their wallets for the dubious benefit of a college education, which may or may not lead to greater success later in life. As things now stand, college degrees serve the pur;pose that once high school diplomas did, but they are much, much more expensive. This is a racket, a scam designed to empower arrogant leftists.

And college graduates are coming out with less general knowlege than grade school graduates did seventy five years ago. Why? They aren't being taught anything except grievance and race theory and gender studies.

While I do not think the drop in enrollment - and the subsequent budget shortfall - will have any permanent effect on the downward spiral of our higher education system, I do think it is a good start. Mizzou created an atmosphere that promoted this racial grievance thing, and then they cravenly gave in to demands by football players. What would a forfeited game have cost them compared to what they are losing now? Of course, the Administration was tacitly behind the protesters all along.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1018 words, total size 7 kb.

Adults don't know "Who is our US captial named after?"

Jack Kemp

White, black, Hispanics...all the Millenials don't know. 4 min. 36 sec. on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGEx0gRI3AY

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

Student Senator to be Impeached at USC for being Conservative

Dana Mathewson

The only way you could call USC an institution of higher learning anymore is due to the liberal potheads that go there. Seriously, though, this is a serious issue. Liberals believe their "stuff" is "received truth" and doesn't even need to be discussed. How sad!

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/03/09/student-senator-faces-impeachment-for-conservative-beliefs.html.

There’s a witch hunt underway for conservatives at the University of Southern California – and Jacob Ellenhorn appears to be Public Enemy No. 1. Ellenhorn is a student senator at USC and president of the College Republicans.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 95 words, total size 1 kb.

Illegal Alien Murder and Mayhem in Missouri

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 03:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 251 words, total size 2 kb.

Revenge of the 'Bitter Clingers'

By Fay Voshell

Observers of all things political will recall the backlash from voters when President Obama, campaigning for president in 2008, talked about small-town and rural Pennsylvanians in the following way (emphasis added):

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In a few sentences, Harvard-educated Obama managed to delegitimize just about every concern shared by small-town and rural residents in America by stereotyping them as ignorant rednecks. Obama managed to imply that if Americans were worrying about runaway immigration, loss of jobs due to outsourcing, and deterioration of their communities, they were inherently racist, latently violent gun freaks, and ignorant Bible-thumpers.

They were just bitter clingers.

Then-candidate Obama probably didn't foresee how his policies of the last seven years have enraged the people whose votes he was courting. If small-town and rural Americans, along with other groups despised by the elite of both the Democrat and Republican parties, weren't bitter in 2008, they surely are bitter and angry now.

They are "grab the pitch forks, tear down the ramparts, storm the Bastille, and throw all the bums into the tumbrels" infuriated. They are so angry that they don't care if their own political party burns to the ground.

They want revenge.

It's the stuff of revolutions.

Revolts happen when the political paradigms that once were vital enough to attract millions of people become corrupted, exhausted, and/or so extremist that they no longer have popular support. Millions become essentially disenfranchised because they either feel or actually are no long represented. Meanwhile, those in power continue not only to hold onto power, but to continue to attempt to effectuate change from the top down – change that a huge number of people have neither wanted nor voted for.

Eventually the tension between those in still in power and those who are not being listened to or whose interests are not being represented in any meaningful way becomes so great that patience runs out. The angry response is to want to tear the entire system down to the foundations.

Adding to the frustration and bitterness of citizens, American society, once so flexible that anyone with grit and ambition could climb the social and economic ladder and achieve success, has become increasingly stratified. Onerous regulations have ossified the process of gaining wealth by one's own efforts, and tens of millions are now dependent on the government teat. The economy is still languishing, America is almost 20 trillion dollars in debt, 93 million Americans are basically out of the work force, the nation's borders are unprotected, and there is a rising contempt for law and order.

In the meantime, both parties are seen as colluding with power brokers and serpentine underground sub-governments run by puppeteers who pull strings that leave Joe Average Citizen completely out of the political equation.

Is it any wonder that millions of voters in the United States have come to the conclusion that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are hearing their voices in meaningful ways?

The result?

Both parties now have candidates who embrace extremism that is at least temporarily supported by enraged voters. Extremism is what happens when people perceive, rightly or wrongly, that there are no meaningful channels through which to effectuate reform.

The current situation may share a few similarities with the Bull Moose revolt of 1912, in which Theodore Roosevelt's unhappiness with William Howard Taft's policies led Roosevelt to challenge Taft for the Republican Party's nomination. Party leadership stuck with Taft, and Roosevelt walked out of the convention to form his own Progressive Party in protest. The result was the election of Woodrow Wilson, who won because the Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote.

There are also echoes of the election of 1968. George Wallace, infamous for his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" speech, attracted a huge number of Americans who wanted a tough-talking strong man. As the PBS website relates the story:

Wallace's tirades against hippies, the Supreme Court, and big government, and his ennobling of the white working class – 'this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this barber, this beautician, the policeman on the beat,' as the candidate said in one speech – traveled better than the pundits had predicted. About a month before the election, polls showed that as much as 23 percent of the electorate supported George Wallace for president.

Wallace hoped to throw the election into the House of Representatives. That didn't happen, but he surely gave Republicans a scare, carrying five states in the Deep South.

Are we seeing history repeat itself?

Perhaps. Certainly the anger is there.

The rage felt by "bitter clingers," many but not all of whom support Donald Trump, will certainly not be ameliorated if Republican leadership attempts to go for a brokered convention. Trump supporters would not tolerate it, and Trump would probably revolt, much as Roosevelt and Wallace did. A political revolution would ensue, one from which the Democrats would reap enormous benefits, such as capturing the presidency and the Senate.

The result? Revenge-motivated "bitter clinger" Republicans, much of whose anger is justified, might get exactly what they do not want. They may get the sort of revolution that happens when anger and "strong man" rhetoric alone dictate policy.

Do Republicans who are (legitimately) angry about the policies of the Obama and, yes, the Bush administrations really want what amounts to the destruction of their own party and conservatism just at the moment they were on the cusp of effectuating a peaceful revolution that could set the compass of this nation for generations to come? Conservatives have worked for over thirty years to gain both houses and the presidency. Now the vengeful, who because rage creates addiction to immediacy are always without foresight, are about to hand victory over to leftists.

How ironic is it that many of the "bitter clingers" are exhibiting characteristics the left has described as inherent to them? How satisfactory must it be for Democrats to feel ratified in their suspicions that a huge number of Republicans are just as they thought they were all along? How Obama and Hillary must be licking their chops to see at least a third of Republicans champion someone who fits the very worst stereotypes of conservatives. What a triumph for the opposition to think they were right all along. There are few things more satisfying.

If the acutely disaffected among the Republican Party don't get a grip on their rage, if they insist on picking an extremist candidate, things may reach the point where the Republican Party and reformist impulses of conservatism itself go down in flames just at the exact time progressive insanity was about to collapse the Democratic Party.

It would not be the first time conservative Republicans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But if wiser, calmer, and more seasoned voices do not prevail, it may be the last.

True conservatives must step up to take the platform.

To quote – ironically – someone whose policies are inimical to conservatives and who would be overjoyed to see the demolition of conservatism:

"This is not who we are."

Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her thoughts have appeared in many other online magazines, including National Review, RealClearReligion, CNS, and Fox News. Selected as one of the Delaware GOP's "Winning Women" of 2008, she has discussed her ideas on radio and television talk shows. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.

Observers of all things political will recall the backlash from voters when President Obama, campaigning for president in 2008, talked about small-town and rural Pennsylvanians in the following way (emphasis added):

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In a few sentences, Harvard-educated Obama managed to delegitimize just about every concern shared by small-town and rural residents in America by stereotyping them as ignorant rednecks. Obama managed to imply that if Americans were worrying about runaway immigration, loss of jobs due to outsourcing, and deterioration of their communities, they were inherently racist, latently violent gun freaks, and ignorant Bible-thumpers.

They were just bitter clingers.

Then-candidate Obama probably didn't foresee how his policies of the last seven years have enraged the people whose votes he was courting. If small-town and rural Americans, along with other groups despised by the elite of both the Democrat and Republican parties, weren't bitter in 2008, they surely are bitter and angry now.

They are "grab the pitch forks, tear down the ramparts, storm the Bastille, and throw all the bums into the tumbrels" infuriated. They are so angry that they don't care if their own political party burns to the ground.

They want revenge.

It's the stuff of revolutions.

Revolts happen when the political paradigms that once were vital enough to attract millions of people become corrupted, exhausted, and/or so extremist that they no longer have popular support. Millions become essentially disenfranchised because they either feel or actually are no long represented. Meanwhile, those in power continue not only to hold onto power, but to continue to attempt to effectuate change from the top down – change that a huge number of people have neither wanted nor voted for.

Eventually the tension between those in still in power and those who are not being listened to or whose interests are not being represented in any meaningful way becomes so great that patience runs out. The angry response is to want to tear the entire system down to the foundations.

Adding to the frustration and bitterness of citizens, American society, once so flexible that anyone with grit and ambition could climb the social and economic ladder and achieve success, has become increasingly stratified. Onerous regulations have ossified the process of gaining wealth by one's own efforts, and tens of millions are now dependent on the government teat. The economy is still languishing, America is almost 20 trillion dollars in debt, 93 million Americans are basically out of the work force, the nation's borders are unprotected, and there is a rising contempt for law and order.

In the meantime, both parties are seen as colluding with power brokers and serpentine underground sub-governments run by puppeteers who pull strings that leave Joe Average Citizen completely out of the political equation.

Is it any wonder that millions of voters in the United States have come to the conclusion that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are hearing their voices in meaningful ways?

The result?

Both parties now have candidates who embrace extremism that is at least temporarily supported by enraged voters. Extremism is what happens when people perceive, rightly or wrongly, that there are no meaningful channels through which to effectuate reform.

The current situation may share a few similarities with the Bull Moose revolt of 1912, in which Theodore Roosevelt's unhappiness with William Howard Taft's policies led Roosevelt to challenge Taft for the Republican Party's nomination. Party leadership stuck with Taft, and Roosevelt walked out of the convention to form his own Progressive Party in protest. The result was the election of Woodrow Wilson, who won because the Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote.

There are also echoes of the election of 1968. George Wallace, infamous for his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" speech, attracted a huge number of Americans who wanted a tough-talking strong man. As the PBS website relates the story:

Wallace's tirades against hippies, the Supreme Court, and big government, and his ennobling of the white working class – 'this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this barber, this beautician, the policeman on the beat,' as the candidate said in one speech – traveled better than the pundits had predicted. About a month before the election, polls showed that as much as 23 percent of the electorate supported George Wallace for president.

Wallace hoped to throw the election into the House of Representatives. That didn't happen, but he surely gave Republicans a scare, carrying five states in the Deep South.

Are we seeing history repeat itself?

Perhaps. Certainly the anger is there.

The rage felt by "bitter clingers," many but not all of whom support Donald Trump, will certainly not be ameliorated if Republican leadership attempts to go for a brokered convention. Trump supporters would not tolerate it, and Trump would probably revolt, much as Roosevelt and Wallace did. A political revolution would ensue, one from which the Democrats would reap enormous benefits, such as capturing the presidency and the Senate.

The result? Revenge-motivated "bitter clinger" Republicans, much of whose anger is justified, might get exactly what they do not want. They may get the sort of revolution that happens when anger and "strong man" rhetoric alone dictate policy.

Do Republicans who are (legitimately) angry about the policies of the Obama and, yes, the Bush administrations really want what amounts to the destruction of their own party and conservatism just at the moment they were on the cusp of effectuating a peaceful revolution that could set the compass of this nation for generations to come? Conservatives have worked for over thirty years to gain both houses and the presidency. Now the vengeful, who because rage creates addiction to immediacy are always without foresight, are about to hand victory over to leftists.

How ironic is it that many of the "bitter clingers" are exhibiting characteristics the left has described as inherent to them? How satisfactory must it be for Democrats to feel ratified in their suspicions that a huge number of Republicans are just as they thought they were all along? How Obama and Hillary must be licking their chops to see at least a third of Republicans champion someone who fits the very worst stereotypes of conservatives. What a triumph for the opposition to think they were right all along. There are few things more satisfying.

If the acutely disaffected among the Republican Party don't get a grip on their rage, if they insist on picking an extremist candidate, things may reach the point where the Republican Party and reformist impulses of conservatism itself go down in flames just at the exact time progressive insanity was about to collapse the Democratic Party.

It would not be the first time conservative Republicans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But if wiser, calmer, and more seasoned voices do not prevail, it may be the last.

True conservatives must step up to take the platform.

To quote – ironically – someone whose policies are inimical to conservatives and who would be overjoyed to see the demolition of conservatism:

"This is not who we are."

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 2604 words, total size 17 kb.

Understanding Chaos Theory

Dana Mathewson forwards this:

"Understanding "Chaos Theory
In Chaos Theory, the "butterfly effect” is the name given to the sensitive connection between initial conditions in which an insignificant event in one state in non-linear systems, can result in sometimes catastrophic events in the universal state.
In other words, although unlikely, it is possible for a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas to cause a typhoon in the Japanese Sea.
Case in point, in mid-20th Century America, an 18-year-old hippie freshman in a Honolulu college had sex with an older, alcoholic Kenyan on a student visa, who had a wife and child back in Africa. And this less than significant event started the collapse and dissolution of the United States of America.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 124 words, total size 1 kb.

Last-ditch assaults on affordable energy

Paul Driessen

Fracking has unleashed a gusher of oil and natural gas … sent oil, gas and gasoline prices downward … improved US manufacturing competiveness … saved many family budgets – and infuriated "peak oil” and "dangerous manmade climate change” proponents. For his part, President Obama has chosen to ignore the enormous benefits of carbon-based fuels, and instead is doubling down on his climate change and renewable energy agendas.

My article examines this situation and the stakes involved. Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.

Now you know that's not what I said or advocate. Defeating Hillary is our number 1 priority. Avoiding a divisive fight over what to do with illegals only gets in the way of that goal. I suggested that as long as we elect someone who opposes citizenship, we have time for this debate after the election. Meanwhile we can talk about less divisive issues. Somehow that make me a villain or a moron. Or maybe there are a lot of trolls here. Not you, of course, Do any of the GOP candidates favor the Muslim Brotherhood?

Last-ditch assaults on affordable energy

Obama and allies double down on biofuels and climate, and against carbon-based fuels

Paul Driessen

Separating reality from ideology and political agendas is difficult, but essential, if we are to revitalize our economy and help the world’s poorest families take their rightful places among Earth’s prosperous people. Energy reality is certainly in our favor. But ideological forces are powerful and persistent.

Right now, 82% of all US energy and 87% of world energy comes from oil, natural gas and coal. Less than 3% is non-hydroelectric renewable energy – and globally half of that is traditional biomass: wood, grass and animal dung that cause millions of respiratory infections and deaths every year. Thankfully, the transition to fossil fuels and electricity continues apace, replacing biomass and lifting billions out of abject poverty, with wind and solar meeting basic needs in remote areas until electricity grids arrive.

In the USA, hydraulic fracturing has taken petroleum production to its highest level since 1972, and oil imports to their lowest level since 1995. America now exports crude oil, natural gas and refined products.

The fracking genie cannot be put back in the bottle. In fact, it is being adopted all over the world, opening new shale oil and gas fields, prolonging the life of conventional fields, leaving less energy in the ground, and giving the world another century or more of abundant, reliable, affordable petroleum. That’s plenty of time to develop new energy technologies that actually work without mandates and enormous subsidies.

So much for the "peak oil” scare. Indeed, in some ways, the world’s current problem is too much oil.

In the face of this global abundance and tepid American, European, Chinese and world economies, Saudi Arabia has increased its oil production, to maintain market share and try to drive more US oil companies out of business. Oil prices have plummeted from $136 per barrel in 2008 to less than $35 or even $30 today. Natural gas has gone from $13.50 per million Btu in 2009 to $3 or less today.

Those low prices are saving families billions of dollars a year, and spurring investments in new US petrochemical and other manufacturing facilities. However, they have also cost thousands of oil patch jobs, left many energy companies near bankruptcy, and sent shockwaves through states and countries that depend on energy production and revenues for their tax base, government programs and public assistance. Prices will eventually rise again, but nowhere close to those record highs.

Amid this turmoil, as if to ensure more petroleum industry bankruptcies, President Obama wants to slap a $10.25 tax on every barrel of produced oil, and use the revenues to bolster his climate change and renewable energy agenda. Under her presidency, says Hillary Clinton, a ban on oil, gas and coal production from federal lands would be a "done deal” and the United States would have "at least 50% clean or carbon-free energy by 2050.”

Such policies would kill millions of jobs, torpedo the manufacturing renaissance, eliminate the assumed revenues by strangling the oil production that generates them, impact croplands and wildlife habitats, and prolong America’s economic doldrums. They would hammer poor, minority and blue-collar families, which spend much higher portions of their budgets on energy than do wealthy households.

Renewable energy schemes defy the laws of nature and economics. Government commands cannot make apples fall upward from Newton’s tree – or turn economic losers into success stories.

As a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study explains, without government mandates and massive taxpayer subsidies, "green” energy simply cannot compete with conventional fuels and power plants. Wind, solar and biofuel "alternatives” work only when traditional energy prices are extremely high – which in the absence of a major Middle East or global war is not likely to happen for some time.

Similarly, a brand-new University of Chicago study found that oil prices would have to top $350 a barrel before Tesla and other electric cars become cheaper to operate than gasoline-powered vehicles! That’s because battery and charging costs are $325 per kilowatt-hour for plug-in models. No wonder Americans bought only 116,099 electric cars in 2015 – out of a record 17,500,000 cars and light trucks sold – despite huge rebates, free charging stations and single-occupant access to express lanes for electric cars.

Nevertheless, renewable energy mandates have a lot going for them. They reward political cronies. They put unelected, unaccountable activists and bureaucrats in charge of our energy decisions and living standards. They redistribute wealth: from taxpayers to politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, wealthy investors, and workers and senior management in lucky greenback green industries and corporations.

By virtue of their wealth, political power, or employment by government agencies that operate under different rules than those they enforce on citizens and businesses, these chosen few are also shielded from the consequences of policies and decisions they impose on the rest of us.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elon Musk, EPA and DOE officials, and climate researchers who receive millions in taxpayer funding insist that manmade global warming threatens the world, and renewable energy is the solution. But for them to lecture us and dictate our livelihoods and living standards – while enjoying their mansions, yachts, limousines and jet-setter lifestyles – strikes many as hypocritical and intolerable.

Moreover, less developed countries signed the Paris treaty to get trillions of dollars in climate change "adaptation” and "compensation” funds; they have no intention of curbing their economic growth, fossil fuel use or CO2 emissions anytime soon. Non-elite Americans’ energy and economic sacrifices will thus bring no global benefits. It is also true that a then healthier oil industry generated the only economic and employment bright spots that (in conjunction with lies about Benghazi) got President Obama reelected.

But none of this is preventing the president from launching a final regulatory assault, to carve his policy agenda in stone, reward his allies, and pummel states and companies on his "enemies of nature” list. Nor does it prevent him from telling Africans to develop only to the extent enabled by "sustainable” wind, solar and biofuel energy because, if each of you "has got a car and a big house, the planet will boil over.”

While bridges and defense languish, he dedicates billions of dollars in his last budget for "clean” energy research, such as E. coli bacteria for next-generation biofuels; billions for climate cataclysm studies; and $2 billion for "vulnerable” Alaskan and Lower 48 communities "threatened” by oceans that are rising at barely seven inches per century. (He ignores the fact that Arctic warming and cooling cycles go back centuries, and scientists still cannot differentiate between natural and human factors in climate change.)

Mr. Obama wants his BLM, EPA, USFS, USFWS, BOEM, OSHA and other alphabet-soup agencies to implement dozens of costly but environmentally meaningless rules on energy production from federal lands. That will further cripple western state economies, just as his administration did to West Virginia.

Meanwhile, in another rubberstamp of heavy-handed government actions, the post-Scalia Supreme Court just ruled that EPA may continue forcing states and utility companies to spend billions of dollars trying to comply with coal-fired power plant rules, while lower courts spend years reviewing challenges to them.

And still erudite "experts” ponder why the US economy is stagnant. Here’s part of the answer: Crushing tax rates and an impenetrable Tax Code. Regulations that cost companies and families nearly $2 trillion a year. Bureaucrats who impose costly agendas with no accountability for blatant incompetence, outright fraud or intentional harm. Too many programs that reward people for not working, not looking for work, not finishing school, and having children they can’t care for with guys who can’t bother to be fathers.

The 2016 election year stakes are huge. Candidates need to end the insults, and start focusing on issues that matter, amid Mr. Obama’s ongoing efforts to "fundamentally transform” the United States. Voters need to ask tough questions – and demand to know exactly how candidates intend to "make America great again,” control the federal behemoth and pay for all these "essential” government programs.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1569 words, total size 11 kb.

Run Amok PC on Campus

Brian Birdnow

I got this from an old female friend this morning and thought you all might want to see it. It is worth a look and shows the American university system for what it really is, at heart!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/03/pc-hysteria-claims-another-professor.html

PC Hysteria Claims Another Professor

PC Hysteria Claims Another Professor
A University of Kansas professor was turned in by her students after using the ‘n-word’ in class to discuss her own white privilege.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 05:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 78 words, total size 1 kb.