Canadian Blather. I received an email today that ticked me off.

To Whom it May Concern:

I am an American by birth who immigrated to Canada with my family in a time of peace. There were no ulterior reasons. I faced the immigrant experience, learned French in a Francophone university, became a Canadian Citizen, while still retaining my American Citizenship, yes it can be done. I graduated from a notable Canadian University having taken a Master's in regional Canadian History, I returned to the United States gained another university degree in education. I taught in Northern Manitoba in fly-in First Nation communities. I am by law and birth recognized as an Aboriginal person in the United States, and in turn it is ironic that many of my father's family had earlier settled in Canada just after the American Revolution. While his branch of the family remained settled in the United States. It would be a distant cousin Sir William C Van Horne who would build and act as general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railroad that helped bring about both good and bad an identity to British North America, the forerunners of the RCMP, Canadian Identity etc., my links to the American historical aspect is just as strong and entrenched. My father was in the U.S. Navy attached to the Marines and fought fascism in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War seeing action at Iwo Jima, Tinian, and Saipan. My ancestors also fought on both sides of the American Civil War which initially had been a catalyst for the creation of Canada as a sovereign nation in 1867 after the recommendations of the report of Lord Durham in 1840 after the Rebellions of Upper and Lower Canada. I can see Canada from so many different aspects. That this seems integral to take my educated view on your stand on Canada becoming part of the United States as nothing more than the destruction of the Canadian Nation.

These are the same sentiments used as an excuse by the Lawrence the Governor of the Bay Colony to expel the Acadians from their homeland. It diminishes the ideals of Trudeau's new Constitution and everything Canada has been a part of that made it uniquely Canadian. Even in 1911 from the Curling rink in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, by not-so-distant cousin Sir William C. Van Horne slammed his fist down at a local convention of the Progressive Conservative Party and state that the bill joining The United States to Canada in a state of Free Trade was unacceptable and that he would do his best to smash the deal. The man who had gained his railroad experience from his service to the Union during the American Civil War.

By giving you a background on historical factors how can you think such nonsense. What would you do with the Canadian First Nation people, further screw them over like what has occurred to the indigenous population of the United States? The removal of the Branch Plant system prior to the NAFTA gutted Canada's protected country because unlike the United States we too need jobs. Not further push and pull factors to demolish what is left of Canada's unique economy which often had to be protected because of peculiar demographic truths. What will you do with Quebec and their insistence in maintaining their language compared to the many Hispanic Americans?

Canada became a country despite so much American influence and while it was maritime money never really to be re invested in the Maritimes again built Chicago, the stockyards and the infrastructure. Mind you the Bank of Nova Scotia by the year 1910 was being run from Toronto, not Halifax as one might think. And as far as the regional development of the Atlantic provinces goes during the Free Trade debate between the two countries this region which is no doubt an extension of New England was slammed during the 1911 election as forcing the Maritimes to be a little further down the road from Maine. Mind you one of the poorest areas is in the Calais area which borders St. Stephen, New Brunswick. I would be glad to debate you on this issue as I find your opinions faulted. It would have meant that the mere idea of the American Revolution was needles. Canada because of the 1 Canadian to every 10 Americans, what is left of the protected economy and social reforms of Canada which act as a social network could not replace the benefits of joining the United States especially in these times.

Just a thought,

MVH

I replied:

Canadian Indians are NO better off than American Indians; quite the contrary, many tribes in the U.S. are profiting handily from rights to run casinos and sell cigarets without state taxes, and the sad state of many of Canada's "First Nations" people is a disgrace. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave Amerinds/Eskimos (yes, we use "Eskimo" in the U.S., which is more correct for Alaskans than "Inuit"; so Alaska Eskimos call themselves "Eskimos") control over 1/9 of the total area of Alaska, a very large state:

ANCSA and related legislation produced changes in ownership of about 148,500,000 acres (601,000 km2) of land in Alaska once controlled by the Federal Government. That is larger by 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km2) than the combined areas of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

So let's cut the crap about "screwing the Indians over". Relations between Indians (including Metis) and whites in CANADA weren't always peaceful, you know; in the period before the creation of the United States there were Indian clashes even with the Dutch, my father's people, in the 1650s (which injured one of my ancestors); and the British cynically USED the Indians to attack Americans not just during the Revolutionary War but also after it in the Mississippi Valley and then again in the War of 1812 in large areas farther east, so a lot of the bad blood between Americans and Indians was the doing of the people you absolve of all guilt in all things relating to the idiotic division of this part of the American continent into two countries that should be one.
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States have wider, and greater, powers to protect and advance their local interests than have Canadian provinces. And the U.S. Federal Government has done a great deal to protect various regions' specific interests that differed from other regions' interests. States don't have to wait for Federal action either. They have the power to create compacts across state boundaries to deal with things like watersheds that affect more than one state.
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Quebec can perfectly well continue to treat French as an official language. Whether Congress would consent to admit Quebec if English is not co-official remains to be seen. But both the U.S. Federal Government and the State government in a State of Quebec would be required to provide services in English throughout Quebec, wherever there is a significant English-speaking population, just as many present States provide services in Spanish. Spanish is, for instance, on the ballot, with English, in large parts of the United States (including both States I have lived in, NJ and NY) . We don't have a problem with minorities speaking their own language, as long as they are also educated well in English. Indeed, Hispanics blazed the trail for Quebec to maintain its own language within the United States. And French is still co-official in Louisiana! after more than 200 years.
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You plainly do not understand that regional development is a huge part of what the United States is all about. Trillions of dollars have been moved from rich States to poor States, much of it from the North to the South. The Maritimes would not be neglected in the United States. Quite the contrary, that region would almost certainly profit hugely from increased investment and tourism. And as a single state, it would have far greater resources and local powers with which to promote its people's interests.
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The American Revolution was, unfortunately, indeed needed. You seem to think that the Revolution was against Canada! No, it was against tyrannical misbehavior of BRITAIN. I will remind you that Canada too had to escape British arrogance and refusal to admit representatives into the Parliament in London. Canadians are proud to speak of Canada's "Loyalist" history — when Canada too 'betrayed' the Empire. So what was needless? The American Revolution to escape the Empire? Or Canadian independence from the U.S. when it too left the Empire?
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Canada is a nice country, but totally needless. The interests of individual people in that part of the world would be much better served by participation in a United States that included Canada than in Canada alone. Canada would be RAVAGED if the United States were to decide it is tired of subsidizing Canadian independence, and so moved to seal the border against Canadian imports and deport Canadians now resident, legally or illegally, in the United States. Canada gets a free ride in NAFTA, and NAFTA underwrites Canadian independence against the United States. The U.S. benefits in NO WAY from NAFTA [as regards Canada] nor Canadian independence.
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We have heavy burdens in the world that Canada helps with in no significant way. Canada pretends to be morally high-and-mighty, but leaves us to do the actual work of trying to keep the peace, defend democratic values, advance human rights, defend women from the Taliban and other regressive forces, etc., etc., etc. Lecturing is no substitute for votes in Congress or for President. To take just one example, Darfur, Canadian posturing is meaningless. Canada can't do anything about Darfur. The United States could, but isn't acting, despite having a black President. If Canadians were genuinely concerned about the atrocities in Darfur and were in CONGRESS, they could force the President to act. Let's take another example, Rwanda. A Canadian general warned about a possible violent intertribal incident in that landlocked country thousands of miles away, but there was only one power on Earth that could have prevented the horrendous genocide he rightly foresaw. And it wasn't Canada. A Canadian general had no influence in the United States Government. On and on we see that Canada pretends to be good, but stands aside doing NOTHING, nothing but telling the United States what IT should be doing and should not be doing. No one on Earth needs that. What the world really needs is REALLY good people who ACT, not lecture. Canadians cannot act in the wide world without the United States. They could, however, have huge influence inside the United States. Would George Bush have been elected if Canada had voted in 2000? Would the U.S. have invaded Iraq if Al Gore had been President? In area after area of world affairs, the presence or absence of Canada, and thus Canadian VOTES, in Congress, for President, could have made an enormous difference. But Canada is too pure for that. No, it would much rather lecture than act.

By the way, the claim about Maritimes money building Chicago, etc., sounds very suspicious, but I was not inclined to research it. Canadians have always invested heavily in the United States, because that's where they were most likely to get a good return on investment.
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As regards the overall thrust of that writer's message, the pretense that Canada's existence somehow is a moral good, and that the preservation of Canadian independence is somehow important, is outrageous. Exactly the opposite is true. Canada could do no greater good, for its own people and the planet, than by merging into the United States and changing the political balance and thus behavior of the United States from that point onward for the rest of history.
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I cannot STAND moral posturing by Canadian nationalists, who are perhaps the most selfish and irresponsible people on Earth.
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This is the time for the United States to act on geographic expansion. Annexing Puerto Rico (and the U.S. Virgin Islands as part of a State of Puerto Rico) would at once remove the moral stain of colonialism from the United states and almost certainly give Democrats that veto-proof majority it so desperately needs in the Senate. That would also empower Dems to ABOLISH THE FILIBUSTER, as most desperately needs doing.
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MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said, after Obama's enthusiastic reception in Ottawa on his first 'foreign' trip, that if the U.S. were ever to want to annex Canada, this would be the time to act. Indeed.
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The current Era of Good Feeling toward the United States in much of the world is the time to act to welcome as many areas of the planet into our Union as we can amass, as states or parts of existing states.
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Mexico is overwhelmed by problems produced not only by its dire internal failings but also by its geographic location next to the United States, as has, for instance, produced massive lawlessness connected to the insatiable appetite for drugs of stupid, spoiled Americans who have far more dollars than sense. It's time to remedy the mistake of taking only half of Mexico after the Mexican War, and make Mexico up to 10 states of the Great American Union: total free trade, total free movement of people in both directions over the unenforceable border. Massive development in Mexico to give people the things, at home, the absence of which drives them to move thousands of miles, when most would RATHER stay home.
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The Caribbean Basin Initiative has not lifted the Caribbean to prosperity, and Central America continues to send large numbers of illegal migrants into the U.S. in search of a better life. In the 1840s, the United States had the chance to bring most or all of Central America into the Union, but passed, in part because the British Empire, our longest and worst enemy, co-opted us into leaving those nonviable ministates independent — so British economic interests could profit from trade that a U.S. external tariff barrier might end.
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The Panama Canal is too small for the world's largest ships, and should ideally be replaced by a sea-level canal thru Central America. That region is too risky for an investment of that scale, as long as it remains independent. We need to annex Central America, for the benefit of its poorest and world trade. The rich may not need annexation, but the poor do.
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Small, island territories might not have the population to be accepted as states to themselves, but they could join existing states, or merge to form a single state large enuf to warrant equality in the U.S. Senate with older states. The Bahamas, for instance, at only 309,000 people scattered over 30 islands, could plainly become part of Florida. Or it could join a new State of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico could indeed serve as core of a wider, Antillean state, to incorporate the present Dominican Republic, Haiti — without whose slave rebellion against the French, Napoleon might not have sold Lousiana to the United States — the Cayman Islands (that thorn in our side, as offshore tax haven), and that entire string of English-speaking microstates down to Trinidad and Tobago, including Nevis, birthplace of one of the Nation's greatest men, Alexander Hamilton. In due course, Cuba might join that bilingual state, tho the capital should remain in San Juan, with its well-established democratic tradition, rather than shift to Havana, with its unfortunate totalitarian history.
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Farther afield, the Amazon rainforest, a world heritage of immense importance that is now in grave distress and even mortal danger, could best be preserved by annexation of the countries among which it is divided and by which it is inadequately protected.
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The Philippines, a former U.S. colony, has not profited from its unhappy experiment in independence. The former tie should be restored, this time in statehood rather than colonialism, with three states (the natural divisions of Luzon, Mindanao, and the Visayas) to be created from that archipelago of 98 million people. Not only would that very large population provide welcome markets for U.S. goods and services, but it could also, for decades, provide us a low-cost center of manufacturing under U.S. control and inspection. We wouldn't have to send trillions of dollars to Communist China, nor risk our health to uninspected imports from that backward and untrustworthy country.
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There are many parts of the world that would benefit from annexation to the United States, and from whose annexation we would benefit as well, in win-win fashion. The website of the Expansionist Party of the United States discusses a large number of them, including another Asian island nation, Taiwan, with a well-developed manufacturing base.
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To people who say that such annexation is both impossible and undesirable, for both potential annexees and the Nation, I offer two examples: the British Empire and the European Union.
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The British Empire stitched together a host of trading posts into a huge and economically dynamic entity. It fathered the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand from old-line settlement colonies, and imparted the English language, some democratic values, and education in free-market economics to areas that took less of the British example than did the settlement colonies, in a wide range of present-day countries, from the Indian subcontinent to much of Africa, to physical and cultural islands on the American continent. The U.S. should have fallen heir to that "Commonwealth" and drawn it together into a superdynamic single federal Union by means of that brilliant combination of self-government and shared national sovereignty that started with 13 states on the East Coast of central North America, then extended organically to the West Coast of North America, the northwest corner or North America, and 2,400 miles out into the Pacific Ocean. The "Mother Country" of the original 13 colonies (Britain and, early on, Ireland) should as well have joined the Union, in that many of the major ideas of the Revolution were British in origin.
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The British Empire fell apart because Britain refused to convert it into a federal union, and refused to admit representatives from the colonies into the central Parliament to govern the whole of the empire, including the home islands. That is a mistake the United States did not make. Rather, we converted our internal empire into a Union by accepting representatives from all areas once they were organized into states on a basis of equality, new states with old. It is that pattern that is infinitely expandable.
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The other example I offer, the European Union, started as a few timid steps to build inter-country economic ties to smooth over past animosities, as had resulted not so long before the European Coal & Steel Community was founded as the first such move, in the worst war in history. The aim was to prevent there ever being a general European war again, by making the different countries dependent upon each other's wellbeing for their own. That six-nation group metamorphosed into the present 27-nation European Union (which many people suspect its key leaders wish to make into a "United States of Europe").
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The EU has a present population of almost exactly 500 million. The present U.S., 307 million. With Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (4M) ,Mexico (111M), Canada (33M), and the Philippines (98M), the U.S. would have 553 million people, only 53 million more than the EU at its present size. But the EU keeps expanding. Among present candidates for membership, wholly within Europe, there are another 24.5 million people. And if Turkey, only a small part of which is in Europe, is admitted, that would add another 76.8M, for a total of over 600 million. (There are still parts of Europe that are not (yet) part of the EU, such as the Ukraine and Belarus on the east, and Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway, that have, together, another 68 million people.) So we are not talking about unprecedented numbers in speaking of an enlarged United States with 553 million people.
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Consider, that the first census showed the U.S. population to be 3.9 million, so we have, over our history, increased in population by 7,781%. 553M would be an increase of only 80%. I think we can handle that.
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Altho the U.S. is, at its current size, the third most populous country on Earth, India has 1.2 BILLION people, and China, 1.3 BILLION. India's population is growing at a rate of 1.548%; China's by 0.655%; the United States', by 0.975%. Were it not for immigration, the U.S. would actually be losing population.

Immigration is now what keeps America growing. According to the UN the typical American woman today bears 1.93 children. That is below the 2.1 "replacement" rate required to keep a population stable over time, absent immigration. The Census Bureau estimates the US population will grow from 281 million in 2000 to 397 mil in 2050 with expected immigration, but only to 328 mil with zero immigration. "If we have zero immigration with today's low birthrates the American population would eventually begin to shrink."

By contrast, Mexico's population is increasing at a rate of 1.13%, without immigration, indeed, despite EMigration. The Philippines', at 1.957% . (All these figures other than proportion of U.S. increase from immigration are from the CIA World Factbook.)
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Even without geographic enlargement, the United States is projected to grow hugely by 2050:

New figures released by the Pew Research Center, a US-based, non-partisan think thank, show that the population of the United States will rise to 438 million by 2050 from the current 296 million estimated in 2005. 82 percent of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their US-born descendants.

That projection differs from the 397M in the Wikipedia passage above, but the very next paragraph in that same Wikipedia article speaks to the Pew projection:

A new report from the Pew Research Center projects that by 2050, non-Hispanic whites will account for 47% of the population, down from the 2005 figure of 67%. Non-Hispanic whites made up 85% of the population in 1960. It foresees the Hispanic population rising from 14% in 2005 to 29% by 2050. The Asian population is expected to more than triple by 2050. Overall, the population of the United States is due to rise from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million, with 82% of the increase coming from immigrants.

The Census Bureau's own website shows a projection of about 420M by 2050.
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China's population in 2050 is projected by one source to be 1.484 billion. India's is expected to be even greater:

India would have surpassed China's population by 2050, the two countries accounting for about 50 per cent of the world's population, the United Nations has projected in its 2004 Revision of the World Population Prospects released [February 25th, 2005]. India's population will swell to 1.592 billion in 2050, while China's will be contained at 1.392 billion.

The United States is expected to increase in population by 131 million, to perhaps 438 million in 2050; China's is expected to grow by at least 92 million and India's by 392 million. If China's population becomes 1.484 billion, it will have 3.4 TIMES as many people as the U.S. If China grows to 'only' 1.392 billion, it will still have over three times as many people as we. If India grows to 1.592 billion, it will have over 3.6 times as many people as we. And these figures are based on the higher estimate of U.S. population, 438M, not the lower, 420M, nor the lowest, 397M. If the U.S. population grows to only 397M, China would have 3.5 times as many people as we, and India, over 4 times. China today has 4.35 times as many people as the United States, but the great preponderance are still very poor. 40 years of economic growth should change that, and make China much more of a challenge.
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China and India are not the only countries whose projected populations should cause us concern. A story in Britain's Guardian newspaper from August 18, 2004 says:

Africa and Asia will inevitably be transformed. Western Asian nations are expected to gain about 186 million people by 2050 and sub-Saharan African countries more than one billion people....

How some countries will cope with the changes is debatable. Bangladesh, one of the poorest, most crowded and disaster-prone countries, may have doubled numbers to more than 280 million.

Overall, ... world population is growing by about 70 million people a year, and will likely reach 9.3 billion by mid-century from 6.3 billion today.

If these numbers have not themselves brought home this realization, let me stress that the United States is falling behind other areas of the world both as to population and potential power. We are already too small for our burdens abroad, and some people claim that we cannot, today, adequately respond to any further international crisis because our military is stretched too thin with the Iraq and Afghan wars. The world isn't getting any safer, more democratic, or more prosperous overall. Misery produces desperate measures, including violent measures. Some of those measures are undertaken by individuals or small groups, such as Somali pirates or the warlords that have taken much of Somalia out of the control of the central government and laid the groundwork for massive piracy.
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Communist China has aspirations to force the United States out of Asia, even to replace it as the world's dominant power — and U.S. trade deficits are providing it with the money for that rise to superpowerdom. I have mentioned, most comprehensively on September 21st, 2005 and most recently on February 28th of this year that China is constantly probing weaknesses in U.S. computer systems. Finally, yesterday, a U.S. President spoke out formally, albeit without naming China specifically, about the need to work on cybersecurity. News coverage of the issue yesterday was extremely cowardly in naming China, and interviewers had to drag the word "China" out of experts, as the main menace in this whole area. Even then, they had to mention "Russia" in the same utterance, even tho Russia's cyberattacks were, last I knew, not remotely of the scale of China's.
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In any case, for the United States to have even a chance of keeping ahead of its challenges, it will have to be bigger and have more resources, both human and natural. Staying at our current size is a virtual guarantee that we will be carried along, buffeted, and seriously adversely affected by horrible events, not ride above them nor prevent them from happening in the first place.
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The United States at its current size is like a bonsai tree. It needs to be a sequoia.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,304 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:07 PM

 
Honoring Treason. President Obama has disgraced himself and the Nation is sending a wreath to honor the people who killed hundreds of thousands of genuine, loyal Americans in the Civil War. All the Confederate dead deserved to die, as punishment for high treason and for mass murder of Americans, all in the service of SLAVERY — BLACK slavery. What next, a wreath to Al-Qaeda's 19 "heroes" who died on 9/11?
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It is due to the refusal of what should be moral leaders in this country to condemn the glorification of the Confederacy, that we have traitors like Texas Governor Rick Perry talking about attempting to secede again! Obama should have ended the practice of honoring the Confederacy and urged the entire Nation to destroy all Confederate monuments and rename highways and other physical landmarks now named for Confederate traitors: no more "Robert E. Lee Highways" and "Jefferson Davis Avenues". No more "Daughters of the Confederacy" or "Sons of Confederate Veterans". No more falsification of reality by calling the Civil War the "War Between the States" or, as an Associated Press story today did, "Between the North and the South". The war was never between states but between federal unions, one called the "United States of America", the other called the "Confederate States of America". It wasn't a bunch of separate states in a wild melee, but an organized insurrection of a group of states against the "Perpetual Union" they had all joined, voluntarily, during the Revolutionary War. They had an opportunity after the terrors of that war had passed, to leave that union but instead voluntarily, all, joined the subsequent "more perfect union" created by the Constitution of 1787. That rededication to a permanent union left them without a single legal leg to stand on. What existed in 1861 was not an aggregation of sovereign states that then fought among themselves but an honorable Union fiting a dishonorable Confederacy fiting for the "states' right" of slavery.
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It's time for that mythical "New South" we have been hearing about for decades to finally appear and renounce the treason of the past. Let Southerners now patriotically unite to tear down and melt all those bronze statues to Confederate generals or officeholders, just as the people of Iraq tore down that statue to Saddam. Tear down and crush into gravel all those stone statues to Confederate soldiers and politicians, and chisel off the bas-relief carving in Stone Mountain, Georgia that practically deifies Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. That appalling, defiant treason was not just permitted but actually in part FUNDED by the Federal Government, which has all too long been timid about condemning as unrepentant, outrite TREASON all honors bestowed upon the Confederacy. Wikipedia says:

Because of their deep involvement with the early fund-raising and their increasing political clout in Georgia, the [Ku Klux] Klan, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, were able to influence the ideology of the carving, and they strongly supported an explicitly Confederate memorial. Of the $250,000 raised, part came directly from the Ku Klux Klan but part came from the federal government, which in 1924 issued special fifty-cent coins with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on them.

This was in the era when the KKK actually paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., capital of the Nation that they and their spiritual antecedents, the "Confederate States of America" and its "heroes", tried to destroy.

South Carolina, the President declared, stood on "the brink of insurrection and treason," .... "The Constitution ... forms a government not a league .... To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation."

I have no doubt that had South Carolina — where Jackson himself said he was born (tho there is some uncertainty about that) — attempted to secede during Jackson's tenure, he would have CRUSHED it with overwhelming force, perhaps starting with a massive naval bombardment, followed by a massive marine and army landing from naval vessels and the destruction of all of South Carolina's major cities. And Jackson would have HANGED Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, the mass murderer Nathan Bedford Forrest, and every other Confederate "hero" he could get his hands on.
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What did the Nation actually do to them? It put a statue of Robert E. Lee, the worst traitor any country has ever had the misfortune to suffer, in Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building of the Nation he tried his damnedest to destroy! And we wonder why anyone is talking about secession again?
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The way to deal with high treason is high hanging. If any state, be it Texas, Alaska, Hawaii, or any other, tries to secede, thinking we will be as gentle this time as the last, and the would-be secessionists can pose as honorable people, "heroes" entitled to be enshrined in U.S. literature and Statuary Hall, let us make plain that we will raze all their cities to the ground and kill every last soldier in any secessionist army — surrender will merely win lethal injection rather than hanging — then burn their bodies and scatter the ashes in some undisclosed location so no one can honor their "final resting place". And then, to make sure their descendants — if we do not simply kill them off too — do not spitefully establish organizations (including violent, insurrectionary organizations) to honor them, we should first sterilize, then exile to foreign countries every descendant of any secessionist soldier or politician and replace them all, every last one, with immigrants. Governor Perry, how difficult do you think it would be to replace you and all your ilk with MEXICANS willing to swear allegiance unto the seventh generation in exchange for being allowed to enter this golden land?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,300 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:44 AM

 
More Junk Science from Keith Olbermann. I have mentioned that I hate when liberals are wrong. I especially hate when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who is a great champion of liberal causes, is wrong. But he IS wrong, repeatedly, on the whole issue of "man-made global warming", a passion of Group-Think Pop Science. Olbermann, like so many people in media, has the timeframe of the journalist: today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Ten years ago is an eternity; 30,000 years or a million years is a span beyond anyone's real comprehension, so is irrelevant. But it's not.
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"Geologic time" is what we need to bear in mind when we talk of "climate change". Not the past 50 years. Not even the past 300 years (which is longer than the entire Industrial Era). Geologic time suggests, hugely powerfully, that Earth's climate changes for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with that gnat — no, mite on the leg of the gnat — on the face of this planet, Man (and Woman).
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There was a "Little Ice Age" not so long ago. Indeed, it is so recent that we can't be sure we're even out of it yet, no matter what 'experts' say. The fact is, according to Wikipedia, that 'experts' cannot agree when the Little Ice Age began, but allow for dates as much as 400 years apart. Curiously, these same experts are, however, able to say that it ended in the middle of the 19th Century. Hm. It might have started at any point in a 400-year range, but ended abruptly, quickly, in about 1850? What if its end were as unclear as its beginning, and instead of 1850, it might still be receding, 150 years later, and might continue to recede for another 250 years (thus to equal the 400-year period of uncertainty as to its start)?
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Interestingly, there wasn't a single thermometer on the whole of planet Earth until at earliest 1611. So how the f*k do we claim to know, what temperatures were in the medieval period? It's all conjecture and interpolation from questionable measurements of glaciers and such, not direct observation at all. And tho "science" is infinitely arrogant about the rightness of its assertions of the day, the reality is that "science" (the collective body of people who call themselves "scientists" at any given moment) are wrong all the time. They don't make flat-out mistakes, of course, these superhumanly wise, all-knowing, all-powerful masters of the universe we dare not doubt. No, they merely 'adjust their projections'. There was one such adjusted projection this week, in which the rise in planetary ocean levels if the western Antarctic ice sheet were to melt was CUT BY HALF! And, curiously, these 'experts' claim that ocean levels would rise more in some places than others. My goodness! And I thought that water flowed to find a single level. The claim is made that some parts of the world will be more impacted by a rise of the oceans than others, and that the U.S. is among the areas potentially most affected:

However, they add, the maximum increase is expected along the East and West Coasts of the United States, where the water could rise as much as 25 percent more than in other regions.

How, pray, could that happen? Water famously finds its own, uniform, level. The two largest bodies of water on Earth, separated by an enormous land mass running 10,000 miles* between them, are remarkably uniform in height. The Pacific Ocean is only 20cm (8 inches) higher than the Atlantic. So we see, again, junk science, mob science, the "science" of the approved idea. Scientists are rewarded for toeing the line and mouthing the official line. Conversely, they are punished if they do NOT toe the line. They do not get funding. They don't even graduate from college unless they recite back what they have been told. The supposed protections of peer review don't work. For instance, the AOL News item about a recent change in the projected rise in sea levels IS NOT FOUND in a Google search of "ocean-level rise may 2009". Google is still finding the old projection, double the new. How are we to believe the Group Think of the "man-made global warming" crowd when climatologists can admit that, as regards ocean-level rise, they might have been off by 100%! What else might they be wrong about?
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Wikipedia says that the Little Ice Age was preceded by a warmer time known as the "Medieval Warm Period", running some 500 years, which was warmer than today! But experts don't all agree on either the MWP or the LIA. Astonishingly, however, all the experts seem to agree that the current warming is decidedly caused by human activity. The MWP wasn't. The LIA wasn't. But this one is.
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Paleoclimatologists also believe not only that there were catastrophic Ice Ages in this planet's past but that there were also periods in the long-prehistoric past in which there was no polar ice whatsoever (at least during summer) — none. This would have been tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in the past. Interestingly, tho I have seen maps of the outlines of the continents, including an Asia-Alaska land bridge, during the last Ice Age, I have never, in my 64 and more years, seen a map of what the world might have looked like when there was no ice at the poles. Do we have any idea of that map? We know, supposedly, how low the seas went. Do we know anything at all about how high they went? Is the present coastline about the same as then? If not, how far inland did the oceans invade? Isn't this information NECESSARY to any intelligent discussion of whether we should be concerned about "man-made global warming"? And if it is, why don't we see such maps? A Google search on "map of earth when there was no polar ice" produces NOTHING useful.
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Ice Ages and periods when there was no polar ice at all managed to occur without any human intervention whatsoever, as did the MWP and LIA. But now, all of a sudden, everything is different, and everything that happens today is due to Man. No, dear simplistic believer in the infallibility of human "science", Man is NOTHING in planetary terms, nothing but an insignificant blite upon the most superficial layer of the planet's skin, with some pollution of the atmosphere. People are too tiny, too rare (occupying in quantity at most 12% of the planet's surface), to affect climate in ANY degree whatsoever, much less to cause calamitous "global warming".
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How insignificant is Man? On a 16-inch globe, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai, at 2,824 feet (818 meters), over a half mile tall, could not be seen with a magnifying glass, nor, indeed, with anything less than a powerful microscope. On a 16-foot globe, Burj Dubai could barely be seen with the naked eye, for being less than 1/80th of an inch high. That is less than a capital-I in 1pt type! People are THAT insignificant.
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Nor, I repeat, do we REALLY know that there is any global warming whatsoever. Wikipedia says:

A radiocarbon-dated box core in the Sargasso Sea shows that the sea surface temperature was approximately 1̊C (1.8̊F) cooler than today approximately 400 years ago (the Little Ice Age) and 1700 years ago, and approximately 1̊C warmer than today 1000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period).

Do I really need to say that there was no vast outpouring of "greenhouse gases" from human activity a THOUSAND YEARS AGO? But Earth is thought to have been WARMER when William the Conqueror invaded Britain than it is today. How is that possible if human activity regulates this planet's temperature? The concept of "man-made global warming" is RIDICULOUS.
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Keith Olbermann has recently introduced a "WTF" segment to his show, for "What The F*k?" Perhaps I need to introduce a GTFU segment to this blog, for "Grow The F*k Up". Man is NOTHING as regards climate. NOTHING. Nothing at all. GTFU, Mr. Olbermann. Stick to things you understand. Paleoclimatology is not among them. I love you passionately, politically. But GTFU climatologically.
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* It used to be that if you typed into Google a search term like "distance nome to tierra del fuego" or "length american continent nome to tierra del fuego", you would get results that told you that distance in miles or kilometers. No longer. Google isn't as good as it used to be, and people should say this openly, to force Google to fix the problems that have developed due to its changes in "algorithms" or whatever it is that has made Google increasingly USELESS. I have been reduced to guessing that if the circumference of the Earth is some 25,000 miles, the American landmass (or continent, if you, as I, conceive of the Americas as a single continent) is the largest part of half that distance, or about 10,000 miles between Atlantic and Pacific.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,296 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:52 AM

 
Kissing Israel's Ass. Barack Obama has humiliated the United States once again, in bowing down to our Zionist overlord, the people who own the U.S. Government lock, stock, and barrel. Once more, a U.S. President has made a public spectacle of french-kissing Israel's ass. His tongue was so far up Israel's butthole today that it's more than a little surprising that he was able to speak at all. But he did manage to get out the obligatory, endless tripe about U.S. dedication to the pursuit of peace.
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There is no peace without justice. Obama should know that. There has long been a chant among civil-rights activists, "No justice, no peace." Israel will NEVER do justice to the Palestinians. Ergo, there will never be peace.
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Nor will the United States ever put any real pressure on Israel. All it will do is pose as devoted to peace and equal treatment of Palestinians with Israelis, while secretly pressing money into the hands of the Netanyahu government and telling them, "This is what I really mean. But you know that, don't you?
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When will Americans end this charade, and keep our money home or give it to the Palestinians to create a country that can give some dignity and opportunity to people whom we have so long wronged? It's time for Americans to rise in indignation and tell this so-called President of Change that it's time for massive, fundamental change in U.S. policy in the Middle East. Tell Obama:

You pretend to be opposed to the expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestine but will continue to send Israel 3 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars a year — at a time when we are in appalling deficits — to fund the very expansion of settlements you pretend to oppose! You pretend to be concerned about saving the taxpayer money we don't have to spend, and brag about demanding your Administration find $17 billion in savings. How about saving $3 billion a year by ending the U.S. subsidy of Israel?

No one on Earth is so stupid as to believe that the U.S. Government is even-handed in the Middle East, or is in the slitest serious about peace. You talk the talk but money speaks louder than words. When you CUT ISRAEL OFF WITHOUT A CENT, then the world might believe you're different. Until then, you are just GEORGE BUSH, JR., arch-Zionist enemy of Palestinians and all other Arabs, and of human rights and equal treatment of all human beings without regard to race, CREED, or any other of the long laundry list of things that we PRETEND to be blind to.

Don't you ever get tired of being a HYPOCRITE?

Two states is no solution — unless they were U.S. states, which would be forbidden to discriminate on the basis of religion or race; and there'd be no need for two states in so tiny an area if discrimination were forbidden; one would do very nicely: the State of Palestine.

Israel insists on a "right of return" for Jews who NEVER lived in Palestine, and indeed, who have no ancestor who ever lived in Palestine, but refuses to Palestinians who were actually born in Palestine the right to return to the land stolen from them by Jews. And that's just fine with you. It's not fine with us. If Jews have a right of return, so do Palestinians. That's what is meant by equal treament under law, a fundamental principle of American civilization and of human rights across the globe.

There is only one solution that will actually produce peace: DISSOLVE Israel into Palestine — the One-State Solution, the single state of United Palestine. "UP" with peace. Let Jews remain in Palestine only as equals with Moslem and Christian Palestinians, not their superiors, not their overlords, not their oppressors nor concentration-camp guards.

"No justice, no peace." Do justice. Then we will have peace. But if you won't do justice, stop talking about peace. Blather, palaver, yodda yodda yodda. We don't need more noise pollution. Actions speak louder than words. Conform your actions to your words — or shut the f*k up.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,296 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:44 PM

 
Rad Fem Prop Crap in Horseracing. There has been an explosion of Radical Feminist nonsense about the extremely rare win of the Preakness by a filly. NBC Nitely News actually said, "It's not a man's world" anymore, as the leadup to its coverage. Huh? The winner of the race was a horse, not a woman. The jockey was a man. Indeed, every single jockey in the race was a man. (Well, I didn't hear of any female jockeys, so must assume that all the jockeys were men.) Remember the Rad Fem excitement when women were 'invading the male preserve' of professional jockeys? What ever happened to that? In reality, then, today's Preakness still was indeed a man's world. As to the horses, that's another matter altogether.
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Horses are not people; racehorses take performance-enhancng drugs, legally; and fillies are generally slower than male horses. There's a reason for that, in biology. If a filly cannot be caught by the stallions in breeding season, she does not reproduce. So the genes that gave rise to her excessively high speed are eliminated from the gene pool. There's a message there for all the Radical Feminists glorying in this silly, humanly-meaningless triumph of one filly in one race. A lot of Radical Feminists don't reproduce either, so any genes that might explain their deviant sexual attitudes are eliminated from the human gene pool.
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Absent genetic predisposition, Radical Feminism may be doomed to failure among girls and women in general, for we have assuredly seen the failure of Radical Feminist propaganda to remake girls into men with vaginas. Baby girls respond more favorably to pink than to blue; little girls prefer dolls to toy trucks or guns; older girls like to dress up and wear makeup. Four decades and more of endless Rad Fem prop crap have failed to do more than increase the popularity of pants, somewhat, among women — tho often of distinctly feminine sorts, wider, flowing, in softer fabrics and colors — and produce a delusion of self-sufficiency that has induced many women to throw away stable relationships and find their lives infinitely harder for having to provide, by themselves, for the children they self-determinedly insisted on having outside marriage. Their financial burdens are greater, and they have little or no emotional support or companionship. Unfortunately, by the time they realize they have made a terrible mistake, it's too late, and they have to live with the consequences for 18 and more years.
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So glory on, Rad Fem propagandists. You have it all. Good thing, too, because you have to do it all, all by yourself. You get to enjoy the daily grind of a job you need rather than love. Then go home to an empty house, or a hard life as a single mother. And after your 18-hour day, you get to sleep the sleep of the just (just exhausted, that is). And you have the whole bed to yourself! Ah, it's a wonderful life, isn't it? And today capped it all off. You won the Preakness! Ain't life grand? Who said the best revenge is living well? Must be some stupid man.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,296 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:50 PM

 
Trans-Atlantic Conversation. A colleague in northern England engaged me in conversation about something I wrote some time ago.

XPUS@aol.com wrote in 2006:

YES, that is the effect of propaganda. Normal women love to look feminine. American- and other Western-style insistence that women should wear men's clothing is definitely Communist in origin — remember the Mao look of unisex drabness? This madness is part of what women in places like India reject about the West. They do not see the loss of their femininity as an advance for human rights but as a terrible attack upon women. They are right.

My assumption that feminine dress is a mark of oppression was based on the logic:

1. The vast majority of women wear trousers (pants) today, while they wore dresses and skirts in the 1950s
2. The '50s are regarded as a patriarchal time, while today's women are seen as more liberated
3. Therefore, it is clear that women prefer to wear trousers, and will do so unless forced by men to wear skirts or dresses

If you're right though (and are not falling prey to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy when writing of "normal women"), that implies that women today are less free than they were in the '50s. Would you agree with this statement, and if so, what do you think is responsible?

Barbara Ehrenreich suggested in her book The Hearts of Men that men, not women, were to blame for the end of traditional gender roles. The introduction of fast food, laundromats and household gadgets in the postwar era meant that for the first time, men could enjoy hot food and clean clothes without needing to support a wife. The bachelor lifestyle was strongly promoted by Playboy magazine, and led to new products targeted at this new category of consumer (such as the Ford Thunderbird, and later the pony cars of the '60s). In addition, there were the Beatniks (which later evolved into hippies), which rejected not only marriage, but also the work ethic.

Ehrenreich implied that with the economic security of the housewife thus shattered, women had no choice but to seek employment of their own. Perhaps the decline in feminine dress is because the workplace is a very hostile environment for the feminine woman?

Is femininity rejected because modest feminine dress suggests antiquated values and excessive religiosity, while immodest feminine dress makes its wearer a target for sexual harrassment?

Do you also think that some women dress in a drab, mannish manner because propaganda emanating from the dieting industry has made them too insecure about their bodies?

Any more thoughts?

I replied:

NO, men did not produce the masculinization / defeminization of women, and no, marriage has not vanished under the attacks of immature people. By far most people do marry at least once, and some marry time after time, not backing away despite bad — and costly — experiences. Gay men and lesbians now want in on marriage!
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Women were lured into the workforce by a number of factors, not least being LESBIAN-feminist propaganda that a woman is fully as entitled to a "career" as a man, and that the traditional roles of women are just not satisfying. As I say, this was LESBIAN propaganda at a time when lesbians weren't eager to have kids of their own and become stay-at-home mommies themselves. Another key factor in pushing women into the workforce was the gradual diminution of men's pay, such that a typical family could no longer live on one income. I don't know how that happened, and why people didn't realize it was happening and fite it. Perhaps it was so gradual as to be imperceptible. Perhaps materialism got out of control, and people weren't content to live within their one-income means. Certainly the willful destruction of unions and introduction of low-cost competition thru globalization had something to do with it.
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Suburbanization also had something to do with it, as did the related disappearance of the extended family. The nuclear family moved away from The Old Neighborhood and all the family supports they once had. A woman staying at home in the typical suburb would be totally isolated with the children, wholly responsible for their care, devoid of friends and family to provide adult company and help when they needed a break. Anomie set in for these uprooted people, and a job became socially appealing as a way to escape the grind and achieve adult companionship.
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There are still lots of dresses being worn, at least in the United States. (Mostly by women.) Some women have "snapped out of it", and seen that a lot of the (lesbian-)feminist propaganda was just plain "sour-grapes" crap. Even lesbians have backed off, with the proliferation of sperm banks and normalization of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, etc.
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Many normal women have realized that the workplace is at least as much of a grind as the home, and their relationships on the job are transitory, superficial, and unsatisfying. The boss doesn't love them, and will fire them for any number of infractions. Few women really have a "career"; almost all just have a "job". And some have done calculations that when all the expenses of having a job are factored in (childcare, commuting, a larger wardrobe, dry-cleaning, lunch, collections and extorted sponsorship of "Walk for..." this and "Run for..." that, taxes, prepared foods because they can't take the time to cook from scratch, and on, and on), they might actually be adding only a pittance to the family's support. For that, they have to leave their children in the care of strangers, with all the risks that entails. I'm not just talking about child physical and even sexual abuse, but also about a child's becoming estranged from the parents and taking up values that the parents would not want them to embrace.
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Unfortunately, things have gone so far out of whack that getting back to sanity is a long haul. Suburbs need to be altered or abandoned. Towns and cities need to be backfilled-in. Extended families need to be regrouped. People need to be able to walk to the store, library, school. Competition from China and other dreadfully poor places that undercuts wages needs to be dealt with. If more women withdraw from the labor market, labor supply-and-demand dynamics SHOULD produce a rise in incomes, but CAN'T if China/India/you-name-it replaces the domestic workforce at dirt-cheap wage rates. And, of course, the drone of Radical Feminist propaganda has to be stilled or countered effectively. As I have said, original feminism strove to make "women's work" legitimate and appreciated equally with "men's work". Lesbian-influenced Radical Feminism, to the contrary, concedes that only men's work has value, then tells women they have to take up men's work, men's attitudes, men's clothes, men's haircuts, etc. Not all young women and teenage girls have yet seen thru that nonsense.
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The workplace really is not hostile to feminine attire, just to provocative attire. Women in some industries, such as law, tend to wear feminine things, and many companies have dress codes that forbid the more mannish types of attire, as well as décolleté or skin-tite outfits that might produce sexual tension in the office. But sexual "harassment" happens even with the most unisex attire — there are, after all, a lot of pregnancies in the military (despite a self-selection in favor of lesbianism there).
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As for the relative frequency of dresses vs. pants, I just reviewed pix in one of my Newark blog's posts that shows the attire of people in a typical art event here (http://newarkusa.blogspot.com/2009/04/1-among-first-artworks-i-saw-on.html), and there are lots of dresses/skirts on these young women. Pants too, but not so many as one might expect after 40 years of Radical Feminism.

[As for the influence of concerns about being fat] Certainly there is some of that, but there is the countervailing propaganda of "big is beautiful", "plus-size models", and "see me, not my weight". Long before there was a substantial diet industry, women wanted to look good = thin. I don't know how long ago the comic's line about women, "Does this make me look fat?", became commonplace, since I'm not heterosexual, but I suspect it has been a long time since the fat babes of Michelangelo's time were in vogue. Remember the waspwaist achieved by corsets? On a recent guided tour of part of the Newark Museum, the guide said that sometimes the corsets were so tite that the dresses had to be sewn shut, and the seams opened to let the woman out!

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:22 PM

 
Helping Scammers. I saw an astonishing thing today, an article hilited on AOL that warns people about work-from-home job scams that is littered at the end with comments from scammers! The exact thing that the article warns about is placed at the end of that very article by work-from-home scammers! Doesn't anybody review or moderate comments at the AOL Find a Job area "in partnership with CareerBuilder.com"? The appearance of these "job offers" at the end of an article about scams constitutes a signal that they are legitimate, but they can't be legitimate. They have all the earmarks of the cons the article above warned about.
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The chutzpah is astounding. The scammers plainly believe that many people who read their scam right under an article warning about scams will of course believe every word they say. And nobody checks the comments and deletes the scams? What is wrong with AOL and CareerBuilder.com?
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Nor does the article above those scams tell people whom to contact in the event they have been scammed.
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Once again, people are conned out of their hard cash right in front of Government, and Government does nothing! Scores of millions of Americans are ROBBED via the Internet every year, and lose tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, but Government maintains an absolute hands-off attitude: 'if people are so stupid as to fall for these obvious scams, they deserve to be robbed'. No. They don't.
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We need a way to remove officials who don't do their duty. We need popular impeachment. Recall is not enuf, and carries no consequence but removal from office. We need a means by which the people can IMPRISON officials whose dereliction of duty is so heinous and unforgivable that they need at the least to be sent to prison, or be flogged, or, in extraordinary cases, executed. Give some thought to how we can do that, and let me know: xpus{at-sign}aol.com.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,284 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:21 PM