Sunday, 5/24/2020

They are corrupt and not his children; to their shame they are a warped and crooked generation. 
(Deuteronomy 32:5)

The Harder They Try to Grasp Control,

the more they'll find it slipping between their fingers.

It was reported, some time back, that - behind the scenes at the White House - a certain someone was yelling at the help: "Why isn't it working?"

Consider this:

When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different; liberty, sir, was then the primary object... We drew the spirit of liberty from our British ancestors; by that spirit we have triumphed over every difficulty. But now, sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire. If you make the citizens of this country agree to become the subjects of one great consolidated empire of America, your government will not have sufficient energy to keep them together. Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism.

~ Patrick Henry (1788) while debating whether to include the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution

I think the current administration is finding out what happens when you go too far. The economy - American society - and the American people themselves will not go willingly.

We have liberty in our very bones, and what this administration has done is to awaken a sleeping giant.

The Slightly-Varnished Truth: Squeaky Clean?

The weekend paper reported that Mr. Whitekeys, a local entertainer who's been poking fun at Alaska, its sometimes-respectable politicians, and all things Alaskana for decades, was fired from Alaska magazine. He's been writing a column for them for the last five years.

Apparently, the owners and management of the magazine have recently become aware that Whitekeys' pieces were sarcastic in nature, and that he lampoons public figures and public policy.  (Insert shocked faces, here.)

For those of you Outside, Mr. Whitekeys is doing now the same thing that he's done for decades. His musical review, The Whalefat Follies, has been playing in the Fly By Night Club or another for 25 or 30 years. Billed as "The Alaskan Show the Department of Tourism does NOT want you to see!", it is a hilarious look at all things Alaskan, our frontier past and our sometimes sordid present.

Since Alaska Magazine just became aware of this, they let him go, saying that his writing doesn't reflect the vision or purpose (I forget their exact wording) of the magazine. Since he tells the unvarnished - or sometimes lightly varnished - truth about life in the Last Frontier, that leads us to conclude that the magazine is presenting a different view of Alaska.

I've recently bemoaned the fact that Anchorage's population has long-since been thinned by Outside arrivals to the point that it's not really an "Alaskan" city anymore. The left-coast transplants want to turn this place into their vision of what Portland or Seattle should have been, it seems. All they've really accomplished, though, is to strip much of our city of its Alaskan heritage ... leaving it without much of a soul or personality.

Don't believe me? Ask Princess Cruise Lines why they don't bring their passengers through Anchorage any longer. They told us, some years ago while I still worked in the tourism industry, that Anchorage "isn't Alaskan enough".

In their ongoing attempts to turn Anchorage into a Progressive paradise, they've managed to make it, like the city of Toledo in the old song, "like being nowhere at all".

It's sad.

Progressivism Explained

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility."

 ~ Sigmund Freud

Dear Congress, We Know You Don't Understand Us...

The Problem, Explained

Over 100 years ago, the Progressive Movement decided that the nation's school curriculum emphasized history, the Founders, and the Constitution too much. Made the proletariat all feisty & such.

So they deliberately dumbed it down, started teaching case law instead of Constitutional law, and so forth. The proles won't know to protest, if they don't know what the law says the elitists can/can't do.

The problem is that the nation's schoolchildren included the kids of the elitists. Now the bobbleheads in Congress are just as ignorant as the voters they're supposed to represent. And now the voters are starting to wise up, studying the Constitution, the Founders, and such.

The elected elite continues look down from their personal & self-appointed Mt. Olympus, disdaining the protests of the electorate. Ignorance may be pandemic, but stupidity is a personal choice.

Quote of the Day

Progressives are really only interested in control. Control over your lives and your livelihood. Such power is the only thing that will satisfies the progressives' insatiable power lust. 

~ Left Coast Rebel

Going Galt?

If you're like most of the readers of this and other conservative blogs, you're painfully aware of the ongoing fight for the soul of this country.

The stirrings of the latest conservative revolution began in 2008 - too late to have any impact on the national elections - and exploded onto the national awareness in 2009. The Tea Parties and town hall meetings, where average citizens finally got fed up and decided they'd had enough, made it very clear that the political winds were changing ... not that the elitist politicians paid any attention, but that's another story.

Earlier this year, it seemed that this new conservative movement - which was really a fierce longing to return to our roots, to the original intent, to the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution - was a juggernaut which would crush all opposition.

The primary elections have borne that out, but only to an extent. There are several states where Tea Party-backed candidates are struggling. (You know which ones they are, don't you?) Where is the fervor of even a few months ago?

I know, I know. The progressives at both local and national levels have bombarded us with so many far-reaching plans, proposals, laws, regulations, taxes and fees that many of us are reeling and overwhelmed.

But this is not the time to back off or give up.  It's still necessary to slug it out in the trenches. It's too soon to step back and wash your hands of the fight; too soon to "rise above the fray". You want to see the bigger picture?  That's fine; we must take the long view, just as the progressives have been doing since Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson* and FDR. You know that to which you want to see us return, don't you?  Do you know what life would be like under a truly free, Constitutionally-limited government?

No, you don't. Frankly, none of us do. We have an idea, but that's all. The bureaucracy has been growing beyond need, beyond reason, for well over 100 years. No one alive remembers what it was like to be truly free, in the way our Founders intended.

But while you imagine and desire life under such a system, we must also understand that one election is NOT going to turn this thing around. It took a long time for us to wander so far off track; it will take a long time to return. Many a Himalayan mountain of red tape would have to be untangled, and there are hundreds of thousands of employees who would lose their jobs. Such a dismantling would be ugly, and unpleasant, for a time.

Will we actually be able to do it? I don't know. But it's certain if we try to distance ourselves from the fight, we will lose.

I know you're tired. But the battle is already joined, and this one's quite probably for keeps.


* Glenn Beck hates that guy.

Friday Morning Thoughts

It was clear, 19 degrees & frosty at 5 a.m., a perfectly normal March morning. The gurus & weather wonks at AccuHunch predict we'll have low 40s and rain, this weekend. That's normal, too.

* * * * *

So after the Seattle Times cleans the egg off its collectivist face, and after they admitted no one threw a brick through a Congressperson's 30th floor window*, perhaps it should consider a name change. "Post-Intelligence" comes to mind.

* * * * *

Speaking of collectivists, the Anchorage Birdcage Liner-Glass Polisher reports:

As 48 other states are participating in a national re-writing of their state education standards, Alaska is taking a look at its own and wondering if it should get on board and raise the bar for the state's students. But while some educators say Alaska kids deserve to be held to the same standard as the rest of the country, others are saying we are different and the current, laxer standards are just fine.

Earlier this month, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the draft of sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across the country using the same math and English textbooks.

~snip~

Among the things that the national standards would call for: middle-schoolers will be ready to read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and letters from John Adams; 10th graders will be up to mastering John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

The state standards don't mention specific reading material. Instead they say that middle schoolers should be able to identify foreshadowing in literature, and that by the 10th grade a student should be able to do things like identify syntax...

I don't know why not; I had to learn those things, and I seem to be able to string more than two words together without drooling.

After the NEA and various governmental entities (you know who you dare, Dept. of Lowering Our Educational Standards) have been dumbing the kids down for the better part of a century, I think it's high time to actually, you know, teach the kids something.

Besides, this move comes from the States, and that's the way it ought to be. I keep harking back to that silly ol' Constitution ... and it doesn't say anything about the General Gov't. setting standards for education. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned.

* * * * *

There are a lot of things to discuss, stuffed shirts to puncture, and inflated egos to pop ... so many progressives; so little time ... (sighs). But work beckons.

Y'all come back, hear?

*"Threw it through the window" is confusing to many, with so many homonyms. Perhaps, as Lewis Grizzard once suggested, we should switch to southern spelling. "He thowed it thew the window" is more clear, no?

Common Sense

Over at Washington Rebel, there's a "must-read" about the political climate today. Excerpt:

Glenn Beck is rapidly emerging as the most polarizing figure in American culture. His speech closing last week's Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C. brought down the house, inspiring an ovation even for his ubiquitous blackboard. Tracing the history of "Progressivism" in American political thought, Beck didn't spare Republicans, making it clear that the 20th century had a long and shameful record of the adoption of the the "principles" of Karl Marx, all in an attempt to curry favor among those who would be rescued by Government. The spectacle of a Conservative crowd erupting in applause at criticism of Theodore Roosevelt's contention, that wealth should be judged according to its demonstrated social value, amounted to cognitive dissonance. Are there really that many people willing to re-examine the positions of the hallowed Bull Moose?

Republicans are these days exhibiting what amounts to schizophrenia regarding their principles. On the one hand are those who would have it that winning is everything; on the other there are an increasing number of people who would appear to be asking with St. Mark, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" The "pragmatists" fear that the splintering of the Right will lead to the inevitable triumph of madness, while the popular movement exemplified by the Tea Party activists views the current uproar as the first evidence of a return to sanity, and the healthiest development in the national dialogue in over a century.

~snip~

The triumph of the greatest unknown ever to gain the Oval Office has been almost universally regarded as a mandate by the Enlightened. The pundits of the world-wide Left continue to congratulate themselves on their prescience, and glory in the long-delayed vindication of their ideals. Their suicidal embrace of both Communism and Islam is dismissed with the justification "We won." In their hasty celebrations, they now expose themselves to a degree previously unthinkable to their greatest tacticians. By so doing, they have put the essential corruption that is Leftist politics on daily display, manifestly convinced that no one is listening. The resounding embrace of Glenn Beck should be sufficient evidence that the overstep may prove fatal.

For the first time in my life I regret not being younger. This will probably not play out in my lifetime, but it seems unavoidable that politics has been changed forever.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Quote of the Day: the Progressive Movement

The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others – with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.

~ Henry Grady Weaver, The Mainspring of Human Progress

The Maritime Sentry: Who Knew?

Abstinence Education Works Better Than Sex Ed

Excerpt:

Why would any sane person take a piece of machinery that works with harmonious precision and throw a wrench into it and expect that it would cause anything but destruction and havoc? A sane person would not, but a progressive would only be convinced that they did not use the right kind of wrench.

RTWT.

A Revolution or Just a Blip?

Senator Scott Brown (R!!-MA) ... man, it feels good to type that.

Now we watch as the progressives (hereinafter progs) take off the gloves & begin to fight viciously. They've been within arm's length of the prize, and were only slowed down by the massive public uprising.

The real fight will be as the progs in Congress try to invoke the so-called "nuclear option" and pass their Republic-ending bills (healthcare control, cap-and-tax, net neutrality & control, etc) with a simple majority ... which they already have.

Disclaimer:
Glenn Beck talked about this on his program today. I'm not trying to plagiarize, so here's my point: we'll find out very quickly who the real conservatives are, regardless of political party, when the in-fighting gets down & dirty.

We MUST keep the pressure on. Do NOT let them forget who they're supposed to be working for. Do NOT let them forget that we control their futures.

We must redouble our efforts to make our voices heard. Let's not be the generation that watched the Republic die.