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Watching Evolution Happen: UN dying like League of Nations & dinosaurs

Before the United Nations there was a League of Nations, spawned by the savage destruction of World War One.

The League of Nations was initially built by the victorious Allies (Britain, France, America) and later began to accept other minor nations, many of whom had been opposed to the Allies. Collective security, and an international court for settling disputes before they turned into warfare, were supposed to prevent wars either through large alliances, or through legal mechanisms.

All that great intention came crashing down in the 1930s, when Japan, Germany, and Italy dispensed with the notion of playing nice, and each pursued their own national interests with the bayonet. The League of Nations was powerless to stop them, powerless to prevent World War Two, and to some degree is to blame for not allowing Western nations to directly threaten military force against rogue nations like Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan before they got up a head of steam.

It was a classic situation where the moral people were constrained by their own laws, while the lawless people ignored those laws and in fact used them to buy the time they needed for territorial acquisition. Kind of like gun control: The good guys were disarmed, the bad guys were not, and the bad guys did what they wanted.

During the incredible destruction of World War Two, the League of Nations ceased to function altogether, and fell into disrepute, but afterwards the new United Nations took its place. Using a lot of the same concepts and mechanisms, the UN was supposed to bring order to international relations and prevent wars.

Anyone watching international relations today realizes that the UN is an utter failure. It is a monstrous and corrupt bureaucracy, wherein rogue nations like Iran are actually able to gain cover and a foothold in diplomacy, instead of being held accountable for their military threats. Anti-Americanism is the dominant theme there.

On the personal level, consider the many continuous media reports of UN diplomats gone wild in America, leaving personal wakes of rapine and property destruction. These diplomats cannot be held accountable because of their “diplomatic immunity,” and so they enjoy wild lifestyles at the expense of American citizens’ safety and wellbeing that they could never get away with in their own countries, and nor could any American, here or there.

Spies, too, get lots of cover in the UN, damaging American interests and blocking the spread of democracy and universal human rights. Judging the UN by its own charter, it is a total failure. Judging its leaders by their ridiculous, empty, and sanctimonious statements, the UN is an object of derision among the most dangerous nations in the world. It is a joke. It does and stands for nothing, at least nothing good.

When evil people use the UN to advance their goals, it has failed in its basic mission.

It is time to do what is so painfully obviously needed, and end the UN, as its predecessor died. This is natural and healthy evolution. The idea that the dinosaurs get to dictate how the modern humans live is crazy.

Sorry to be cliché here, but it is time to get the US out of the UN, and get the UN out of the US. Whatever new relationships the US can and should pursue with like-minded democracies like Britain, France, and Israel, let’s build them. Without all the hokum and artificial blocks of the Useless Nations.

Going where no Western man has gone before

Each day this past week I have waited for the other-other shoe to drop.  And sure enough, each day some new incomprehensible surprise greeted us.

Obama’s most endearing trait is his public persona.  His smoothness.  His likeability.  But what has come out more in the past week than in the past six years is how treacherous Obama is, how deliberately two-faced he is, how big of a blatant liar he is, how evil he is and how intent he is upon tearing down America and replacing it with…God knows what.

In his rapprochement with genocidal Iran and his war on Western Civilization Israel, Obama is dragging the United States into a place no Western human has ever gone before: Down.

Obama is dragging all of us into an abyss from which our nation will not climb out, if Iran gets to own nuclear bombs.  And it is clear that Obama wants Iran to have them, just as it is clear that he resents Israel having them (note the release of Israel’s deepest nuclear secrets by Obama’s Pentagon this week).

Odd as it is, Obama’s supporters still include most American Jews, whose recent brushes with genocide would under normal circumstances remind them to place their sympathies elsewhere.  However, political correctness is the new religion of the people formerly known as American Jews, and political correctness demands utter fealty to The Human One, whomever that may be at any given time, not The One who created Heaven and Earth.  This is a sad development because so much of America’s intelligentsia is represented by the people formerly known as American Jews, such as academia and the media.

In going Down, instead of on the Upward trajectory Western Civilization has carried all of us over the past thousand years, minorities are most likely to suffer badly, one way or the other.  One of the largest minorities in America today are Caucasians.  How will they fare under the new America?  Will there be a place for them?  Will faux “White Guilt” force them to become willing slaves? Are they becoming that already, working as they do to support a tax-heavy government intent on wiping away their free speech and self-defense rights?

So many have placed their trust in a Muslim Marxist, whose mask is beginning to fall away, and yet they hope, in vain, that the dirty deeds he does now will not really exist later on. That’s the hope they voted for.

Just as surely as you can keep your doctor and your health plan, you can bet on everything working out just fine, folks. That’s the change we got.

A man who loves his nation

How refreshing to witness a leader who loves his country speak passionately about protecting his people.

Netanyahu was speaking for Israel, and also for America, which is leaderless.

One just hopes that enough elected officials can get up enough steam to stop America’s current administration from facilitating Iran getting the nuclear bomb.

Otherwise, the next 9-11 attack won’t be about planes into buildings; it’ll be about entire American cities being vaporized.

A Severance Tax, now?

Talk about an addiction to spending other people’s money.

Yesterday in southeast PA, far away from the communities where this issue is most important and the citizens might not be so welcoming, Governor Tom Wolf staked out his position on creating a new 5% “severance tax” on natural gas from the Marcellus shale feature.

Right now, natural gas is selling at historic low prices, especially here in Pennsylvania.  The financial incentive to drill more or spend more money to get more gas is very low, and drill rigs have been disappearing from across the region for a year.

The Saudis began dumping oil months ago, in an effort to punish competing oil producers Iran and Russia, with the secondary effect of dropping gasoline prices so low that the natural gas industry got hit from that side, too.

So now is not only a bad time for the gas industry, it is also a time of greatly diminished returns on investment and on royalties received.  Scalping 5% off the top of that is punishing to everyone, including gas consumers, who will see their rates increase proportionally.

Here’s the biggest problem with a severance tax: Pennsylvania already has a 3% impact fee on Marcellus gas, and a Corporate Net Income Tax of 9.99% (let’s call it ten percent, OK?).  Most of the other gas and oil producing states have no such additional taxes; their severance taxes are the one and only tax their oil and gas producers pay, not the multiple high taxes and fees drillers in PA pay.

Pennsylvania government is therefore already reaping much higher revenue from the gas industry than other gas producing states.  That means that the companies doing business here are already burdened much more than elsewhere.

So adding a severance tax now, at this economically bad time, without commensurately lowering other taxes, or the existing Impact Fee, makes no sense.  Unless the people promoting this have an infantile view of how America and business work.

And that right there is the problem.  Way too many advocates for tax-and-spend policies like an additional severance tax have a Marxist view of business; essentially, to them, business exists to pour money into liberal schemes.

And speaking of spending, who believes that spending more and more and more taxpayer dollars on public schools, public teachers unions, and public teachers’ pensions, actually equates with better education?

So many studies disprove that (see the Mercatus Center), but it is a liberal mantra that taxpayers must spend ever more of their money to support public unions that support political liberals.  And both parents of students and taxpayers alike now correctly see that system for what it is – simple, legalized political graft to fund one political party.

Public schools are mostly a disaster, yet teacher’s unions and their political buddies continue to pound on the table for more and more money.  Homeowners are essentially now renting their houses from the teacher’s unions, and proposed laws like Act 76 seek to fix that unfair situation by removing the vampire fangs from homeowners and letting the larger society pay for its expenditure.

Going door-to-door for political races year after year, property tax has been the number one issue I have encountered among elderly homeowners.  So many of them can no longer afford to pay the taxes on their houses, that they must sell them and move, despite a lifetime of investing in them.  This is patently un-American and unfair.

So Tom Wolf is moving in exactly the opposite direction we need on this subject, and instead of trying to fix the tax situation, he seeks to make it worse.  To be fair, Wolf campaigned on raising taxes.  He just needs to remember that he did not get elected by voters who want higher taxes, they wanted to fire former governor Tom Corbett.

 

Obama: We are all ISIS, so give Iran the bomb

Nearly every time some more interesting subject begs to be written about, say, Pennsylvania’s farmland preservation program, Mr Obama inserts himself and requires an essay.

So last week, Obama had two known African murderers at his national prayer breakfast, but because they are Muslim leaders they are exonerated.

Then Obama gave a speech equating Christianity and people of all faiths today with the sadistic cruelties of ISIS, the muslim terror group of Syria and Iraq. Plenty of moral equivalence, no leadership. No criticism of Islam is allowed by Obama.

Then it turned out that the Obama administration is doing everything possible to appease Iran and enable it to manufacture its own nuclear bomb. Secret meetings with Iranian leaders, including some who are known to rape, torture, and then murder female political prisoners.

Then it turned out the Obama administration is spending American taxpayer money to fund V15, an electioneering effort to get Israel’s Netanyahu voted out of power.

Netanyahu is one of the few leaders strong enough to stand up to Obama’s appeasement policies, because he knows that Iran is not just a threat to America, it is a threat to Israel.

Now, for many years people claimed that Obama was and is a Christian. Why is that important? Because we don’t like being lied to, and we deserve to know who our leaders are. And it was important that Obama at least appear to be a Christian, to get the votes necessary to become president.

Six years later, we see a man determined to criticize Christianity, criticize Western Civilization, block all fair criticism of Islam, install the Muslim Brotherhood in powerful positions throughout American government, dramatically weaken Israel, dramatically weaken America, and facilitate Iran getting nuclear bombs which without question will be used against America and Israel.

And people wondered why so many not only didn’t trust Obama in 2008, but utterly hate him today…My God, our government has been taken over by a determined destroyer.

Long live Kurdistan!

The Kurds are an old ethnic and linguistic group in the Middle East, and they are the largest ethnic group in the region to not have had a homeland in the modern era.

The Kurdish homeland was broken up in the 1920s by the winners of World War I, and the various pieces were rudely tossed into the aggregated melting pots that became Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel.

But as Iraq and Syria have disintegrated, the Kurds there have naturally coalesced into their historic homeland, bolstering their communities.  And they are motivated, powerful warriors, whose culture is highly secularized and pro-West.

The result is that Kurdistan exists in all but name, and this week the Kurds took formal control of Mosul, a huge and symbolic city formerly in Iraq.  Congratulations, Kurds!

What is so intriguing is the Kurds have received zero support from the political Left, who are in love with the murderous culture of hate and evil developed by the so-called “Palestinians,” an ad-hoc ethnically and linguistically diverse group of people mostly emanating from the regional Bedouin.

More or less the Arabs in and around Israel have been turned into international heroes for murdering children and opposing the only indigenous ethnic group there – the Jews.  Never was there a “Palestine,” never was there a “Palestinian people,” and the egregious lying necessary to invent this anti-Israel movement prompted Newt Gingrich to call these Arabs “the invented people” in 2012.

In fact, the so-called “Palestinians” are the best representatives of Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism, two forces on a collision course with America.

So once again, the Left (the American Friends Service Committee being the worst; how is it that the Quakers of all religious groups became so radicalized that they promote murder and mayhem?) is supporting the bad guys, the violent evil people, the inhuman butchers, and again doing nothing to support the good guys, the Kurds, or the Tibetans for that matter.  When Kurdistan is finally recognized as the free, stand-alone nation it is, it will be a big step forward for the good guys.

Long Live Kurdistan.

Simple formula about life on Earth escapes many people

After World War I, “the war to end all wars,” antipathy towards anything military related ran so deep in England and France, that both countries practically disarmed to both cut costs and to symbolize their break with “militarization.”  America followed suit to some extent.

England’s Neville Chamberlain was famous for his “peace in our time” mis-statement, as he allowed the alligator of German aggression to eat more and more of Europe, in the hopes that eventually the alligator would become full and not go after England, too.

Obviously Chamberlain’s approach of appeasing evil tyrants Hitler and Stalin did nothing to stop them, and barely delayed their ambitions.  England suffered terribly from German attacks, and only survived because America awakened from her slumber and engaged.  Militarily.  As in, sending troops, boats, bombs, bullets, planes, guns, and tanks to England to both defend England and to use England as a launching ground to take the fight back to Germany.

Winston Churchill holding the very American Thompson submachine gun is a famous icon of Western resolve to withstand tyranny.

Fast forward to Ukraine, now being invaded by a reinvigorated Russian empire…like the old evil Soviet empire.  You know, the one that fell apart from sustained Western military, economic, and diplomatic pressure.

Now, where is that pressure?  Obama is using appeasement and laughingly empty threats against a tyrannical, militaristic, imperialistic would-be emperor, Vlad Putin.  It won’t work.  All that appeasement does is make the inevitable military clash all the worse, because it gives the bad guys all the time they need to build up their military strength, while the good guys wring their hands, and dither.

Question here is, Do people learn from history, so that they can survive?  Answer here is, No, not those people whose ideology or religion (sometimes it is impossible to tell the two apart) inclines them to ignore what is in front of their faces.  To wit:

Yesterday I was in the Washington, DC, area for an event, and had plenty of opportunities to talk with long-time liberal politicians and activists gathered there.  Yes, I was one of the few conservatives/ traditionalists present.  So the liberals felt comfortable speaking from their hearts, and it was a fascinating experience.  One man, Hal, presently on a large city council and deeply involved in Congressional oversight, asked me what my number one problem with Obama was, from a functional perspective, not values or ideological view.  “A lack of accountability for Obama’s actions and misdeeds,” was my response.

Naturally, Hal asked me what those were, and I could not get past pointing out that ObamaCare has received thousands of politically -based waivers from the White House, not to mention the many delays in implementing it, so that the pain felt by Americans would not be translated into punishing Democrats at the polls.  When I pointed out that none of these waivers or delays are permitted by the law, Hal simply and repeatedly said “Yes, but it is his signature effort, his defining law.”

As if that excuses unconstitutional actions by an out-of-control, out-of-bounds executive.  But in Hal’s mind, it does excuse Obama.  And I am positive Hal is representative of liberals everywhere: The ends justify the means.  Because the ends are pure (they think), any means of achieving those ends is acceptable, including violating the Constitution.  A young student named Ms. Korn, now being indoctrinated at Harvard, recently wrote an essay in the Harvard Crimson where she declared that the First Amendment rights of conservatives are getting in the way of her (and Obama’s) version of “justice,” and that in the name of achieving that justice, the First Amendment should be vacated.  Ms. Korn is probably representative of her generation, having been indoctrinated by people like Hal.

And thus we see the deficiency of liberalism going inter-generational.  Pragmatism is something used only if it advances the liberal agenda, not if it defends Americans or democracy.  And seeing what is going on in Ukraine (and Syria, and Iran, and and and…), one must wonder what Obama’s agenda is?  And do a majority of Americans care, even if the basic rules of successful life on this planet are violated?

 

Ukraine: Obama batting zero, his cheering section still loud

Math was not always my strongest interest (although I did self-learn calculus in graduate school), so disregard the headline here. Obama’s foreign policy is such a catastrophic failure that he is way in the negatives; he is not at zero.  Being at Zero would actually be a success.

Here is a partial list of countries and peoples seeking freedom from tyranny who have had the rug of American promises pulled out from underneath them by Obama:

Poland (defensive missiles).

Georgia (South Ossetia, invaded by Russia).

Israel.

Iranian citizens.

Syrian citizens.

And now it’s Ukraine that has learned the hard lesson of Obama’s recklessness. Whatever promises were made to get Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, like protecting Ukraine from Russian imperialism, have been openly tossed out the window by an Obama administration bent on destroying America from within.  Wrecking America’s international standing is one way to destroy America at home.

Allowing aggressive imperial powers like Russia, China, and Iran to  willfully expand their spheres of influence and domination lets Obama off the “aggressor” hook.  He can claim he’s no “warmonger.”  But his inaction and failure to live up to his own red lines and promises of American protection have created a vacuum into which the aggressors, the real warmongers, have stepped.

Growing up in a pacifist household, I used to ask the hard questions that no one could answer, like Why should someone not actively oppose an Adolph Hitler and a Nazi Germany?  Answers were hard to come by, because there are no substantive answers to these questions.

Pacifism is evil because it legitimizes evil.  Pacifism equates doing nothing with active aggression, imperialism, domination, subjugation, tyranny and all the barbaric cruelty that goes along with them.  By failing to act, by failing to confront evil in a meaningful way, pacifists lend credibility to the aggressors.  If Russian imperialism in the form of subjugating Ukraine is not confronted and thwarted, then it must not be so bad. Such is the message from Obama and other pacifists, intended or unintended.

This unwillingness to act creates a vacuum, and this vacuum is seen correctly as  weakness.  It invites even more aggression.  History is replete with examples, so an Obama would have to willfully ignore the obvious historical truth in order to do what he is doing (and not doing) now.

I know Obama has his cheering section.  That is the greatest sadness of all, because those same people claim to be ethical, humane, loving.  So strong is the messianic love for this charlatan among his believers, that they will forgive and forget his greatest deceptions, his greatest failures, the trail of destruction and misery in his wake.  Other people, other families, then pay with their lives, at best to be the subjects of pity by groups like OxFam and Rotary, intent on picking up the few broken pieces later on.

For shame.

Questions you’re not supposed to ask #2

Does Islam have a peace movement?

Is Iran representative of Islam? If so, the many barbaric, unjust public hanging videos  there that I’ve now watched speak for themselves, and for Islam.

Obama abandons western civilization

If anyone had any questions left about Obama’s loyalties, tonight’s state of the union speech should have clarified that this man is at war with western civilization.

Pledging to veto stronger sanctions on Iran means that Obama is now openly aiding and protecting Iran in its rush to build nuclear bombs.

Obama has now openly broken his pledge to faithfully defend America.  Time is now for this dangerous charlatan to go.