A path of conquest and violence was startedby Mohammed shortly after he created his new religion in the 7th century.

 

The jihadist first attempt to conquer Europe was finally stopped at Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel.

 

The first Crusade was called in 1095 to defend against the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor as well as the earlier Arab conquest of what until then had been the Christian Holy Land.  Pilgrims made pilgrimages to Jerusalem throughout the Middle Ages.  When the Saracens conquered the Middle East, pilgrims were granted safe passage to visit.  In 1065, Jerusalem along with most of the Middle East was taken by the Turks.  Worshippers in the Temple of the Mount were barricaded in and the building set on fire.  3000 pilgrims were massacred; churches and temples were destroyed or made into stables.  A reign of persecution was initiated against all remaining non-Moslems in the Holy Land.

 

The second Crusade developed as a response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third resulted from the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and a number of other Christian lands in 1187.

 

The second Muslim European surge halted at Vienna in 1683.

 

In each case, Christians went to war to defend Christians, to combat the attackers, and to rectify egregious wrongs.  Freedom of religion, speech, assembly, press.  Equality of women. None of these are the goals of the jihadist, but they enjoy them while they seek to overthrow them.  Maybe this time, they will appreciate all of the efforts and appeasement on the part of the president.   Maybe they are misunderstood and we have been too imperious and demanding and they really have our interests at heart and will reciprocate our plea to join us in creating a joint peaceful world.

 

In 2009, at least 80 Muslim men in America have been charged, convicted, or sentenced on terrorism-related charges.

Generally the approximate accepted dates of the Little Ice Age start around 1500 and extend to 1850.  The actual time of start may be earlier as records indicate that north Atlantic and Artic pack ice began to grow about 1250;  in 1350, warm summers stopped being able to be counted on regularly in Europe; 1550 was the noted time of glacial expansion worldwide which greatly expanded glacier size to the levels that they were at the turn of the last century and from which they are retreating today.  The glacier advance in Europe during those 500 years swallowed farms and crushed established villages.  Crops failed.  Marie Antoinette got bad press for suggesting that the populace contain themselves with cheaper, lower protein cake flour.

We began our recovery from that cooler period in 1850.  Records show that sea levels have been rising 7" a century since that time as the ice accumulation from the Little Ice Age melted back towards normal.  Mr. Gore skipped over this.  Glacier shortening also began at about this time, well before the SUV and well before 84% of all of the hydrocarbon burning that has ever been done by man.  No mention again.  Probably just a coincidence.

The unknown_whether the current efforts are nefarious or just misguided.  When the (inevitable) shortfall occurs, since the current spending trend is unsustainable and there aren't enough rich people to tax, what happens?  Actually, there aren't even enough working people to tax at anything close to a rate that will not bring either stasis or revolt.  At some point, China will say "No mas!" Then it gets really interesting whether the dilitants in control will be able to titrate our decline at anything close to a controllable fall. 

Certainly there are arguements that this is the grand plan anyway.  Cloward-Pivenesque collapse of the system, then just declare martial law and start dictating. Such a hassle trying to set up a planned utopia with that pesky Constitution trying to guarantee freedom.  Remains to be seen how quickly the current steerers get replaced with folks who will try to do some damage control, or if the current deviation away from the concepts of America's founders are too severe to be undone.  Of course, its so inspiring making the big decisions that there will probably be an attempt to shut down our countries planned built-in option of turning over the compost without having to shoot people.

Interesting times coming.  Isn't that a Chinese curse?  Seems appropriate.

Despots stay in power by fighting wars.  Foreign wars.  Only by continually sending the most capable, patriotic young males off to fight and die elsewhere do they avert an eventual uprising at home. At least until enough inculcation has occured in the educational system.  For years and years Castro sent his youth off to wars elsewhere.  Chavez is gearing up to do the same in Columbia.  The patriotic ones, the ones that are willing to stand for something are the ones that need to be kept occupied, bled off, distracted, rendered ineffectual.  The slackers, the dopers, the ones that don't have enough gumption to do anything but complain are not to be feared. 
Orwell presaged dumbing down the general populace by removing words to conceptualize radical or threatening ideas. Argueably we have done the same with our educational system that produces students who finish near the bottom in international comparisons.
That's not change.

Never before in our history has the government presumed to mandate an activity and to tax inactivity.  If this were constitutional, then there is no iota of activity that would not be under the control of the federal government, Every single dollar spent would be able to be mandated as spent per the govenment"s desires.  Remains to be seen if the Supremes would dare to rubberstamp such a concept which so flies in the face of the clearly intended limitation of federal authority so specified by the founders.  If there is truly no activity that the federal government cannot control, then there are no powers at all left to the states or to the people and it is time for a 2nd revolution.  Who would need a Cash for Clunkers program if people can be mandated to each buy a car every ( ) years from the government owned car company.  We have almost reached this point by fiat with the pending regulation of every aspect of American life that consumes any energy and therebye generates CO2 which the Congress has given control of to the EPA.  Extra fees for keeping your car too many years.  Forgot to adjust your thermostat?  Don't worry.  The smart grid will shut it off for ( ) extra hours and automatically bill (fine) you for your carelessness.  How long before we have an environmental impact tax on a Big Mac?   For the children.  For the planet.  For the friends of the currrent career politicians.  For the reelecton campaign.  Pick a reason.  Just keep producing so that taxes can be collected and the gravy train continue.
In Atlas Shrugged, the producers all escaped to a hidden valley and did for themselves.   In socialist countries, the producers all throttle back and do the minimum necessary to coast through life, and the economy takes a major hit and nothing works right as the country declines, while the corrupt and connected are the only ones that prosper..  Why do we need to go through those lessons already so painfully learned elswhere?

Nasa reported in 2007 that the 5 top warmest years were 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921 and 1931. Since then they’ve juggled the data twice but the top three are statistically still the same. Three of the top 3 were 80 years ago, well before the CO2 levels had risen to their present level. Temporality does not imply causality but you’ve got to wonder. NASA has been dragging their feet in providing its data to the public (wonder on whose orders).

While the UN’s 2001 graphs show the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, the graphs they have done since then show those periods to have disappeared. They also show that CO@ lags behind rises in temperature, for the last 110 years, which are the only years we have records for. There’s no doubt that CO2 levels have risen markedly in recent years (still at levels far lower than the Earth has experienced in the past – without runaway global warming). CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere. Water vapor molecules absorb heat energy from sunlight six times better and there are 200 times as many of them for a net 1200X effect. Water vapor is responsible for 99.99% of all atmospheric heating. Normal understanding of physics should make it obvious that the CO2 effect is insignificant in comparison.

Why is the EPA focusing on the insignificant emission of CO@ instead of the significant water vapor generation? Cars generate way more water vapor than they do CO2. So do all methods of burning anything to generate energy. This is like the Goreites focusing on Cap and Trade and regulating CO2 from industries instead of meat consumption when the CO2 released due to meat consumption easily surpasses the CO2 released by all of the transportation and industry combined. Big Al likes his steak, Tofu for you.

Inconvenient facts:
1.Current total population of polar bears is now 5 times what it was when they first started measuring them.
2.Total sea ice is actually slightly greater than when they first started measuring/last year they figured out that they had missed a little area the size of California in their calculations
3.Total polar ice, both poles together, is now slightly thicker than when they first started measuring.
4.CO2 level, up to about 380 from 280 in the last hundred years, are still a third the level that it was when mammals first got established on earth, and there was no global warming at the time.
5.CO2 level changes actually lag behind fluctuations in global temperature that they are supposed to be causing.
6.No global warming in the past 11 years, according to the climatologists that the UN based their conclusions on and based on the actual measurements and none of the computer models that the climatelologists used were good enough to predict this.

It says in Article 1, Section 8
"To lay and Collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the Common defence and general welfare" with no other qualifications than that "all duties, imposts and excises, shall be UNIFORM throughout the United states, that no capitation or other direct tax shall be laid unless in proportion to numbers ascertained by a census or enumeration taken on the principles prescribed in the Constitution, and that "no tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."

 U.S. Treasury Dept’s International Trade Data System http://www.itds.treas.gov/printglossaryfrm.html defines excise taxes as “taxes on the manufacture, sale, or CONSUMPTION of goods, or upon licenses to pursue certain occupations, or upon corporate privileges,” which, they explain, in current usage covers about everything besides income taxes.

If we are "required" to buy insurance, this mandate is essentially then a 100% tax on a a good that we have to consume, an excise tax.  We are mandated to consume it and mandated that we have to expend the cost of doing so.  If the government then gives some families a credit for the same mandated consumption, then it is not uniform as stated in our Constitution.

Obamadon'tcare.

Now that we know about Climategate, as detailed so well by Robert Tracinski, at RealClearPolitics, is there any possibility of President Obama acknowledging and decrying the deception and abandoning Cap and Trade to go back to leading the country in a direction we really want to go?  The conservatives are aching for a leader and will fall all over themselves supporting one when one arises, and they outnumber the self-described Democrats and Republicans.  Why can't President Obama be THAT leader?

And, unfortunately, over ours.
One problem may be the limitations of our language.  We inadvertently misuse the appellation "leaders" for appointed representatives who are busy trying to keep up with the shifting political winds instead of providing any semblance of actual leadership.
Alinsky wrote, "An organizer - does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing. He (community organizer) is a political relativist."  Relatively speaking, we have "leaders" who are spending most of their inherited political capital trying to lead us in a direction we do not want to go. 
Marx said that the workers had to first be educated about their discomfiture. Otherwise they would not realize that they were unhappy.  Next the bourgeois (the producers) had to be prevented from escaping. No good having a revolution if the productive folks take their ball and go play somewhere else.  Lastly, there needs to be enforcement.  Jail, persecution, confiscation, etcetera for those who try to disrupt the delicate balance of the worker's paradise.
Of course, since society can't actually function on a planned course, there has to be a blind eye for the corrupt, shadow economy that develops in parallel as a way to actually get anything done. Not an ideal future, but the way it has always worked every time it has been tried in the past.  People don't change.
The socialist democrats, progressives, self-styled "modern", are no different than those in the past.  Nor are the motivations of people.  And our free society can very easily be damaged by a radical minority. Radical minorities have always been able to wrest control away from a stable society.  Only a third of the country was "for" the American Revolution.  They were a radical minority. 

The districts don't exist but the money was real.  So who ended up pocketing these wads of cash?  Whose freezer is it hiding in?  Why is no one being held accountable?  The Chicago familia said "the fish stinks from the head". 

Cloward and Piven strategized that to collapse the system and make way for the utopia, all one had to do was to sign everybody up on all the possible welfare that was available.  Unfortunately, we had that damnable drive to get people off welfare.  Wrong direction.  The more modern mode is to expand the federal spending under the guise of political correctness until the system likewise collapses.  At some point the tax and spend obligations cause an Atlas Shrugged response by the producers, who scale back and curtail their lifestyle to a maintenance level, coasting along on their savings while the obligations go through the roof. 

Living a middle-class lifestyle is easy if you are wealthy.  Not so easy if you are really middle-class and the only remaining target for the the government to fund the gravy train.  It really is like Ms. Rand predicted except that the producers do not need to find an isolated valley to hide in.  It is enough for them to just scale back to idle through the pending collapse and chaos.  In the meantime, don't be expecting any new entrepreneurs or industries to show up to pull us back into competitive manufacturing. The government collective will be running the show for a while and it will require regular infusions of cash to keep it afloat(ala GM).

Julius Genachowski is now the chairman of the FCC.

His press secretary is Jen Howard, the former spokeswoman for the private organization Free Press.  The Free Press is an organization (self professed) predicated on tenets of Marxist communism and is having a large influence and holding great sway in the development of policy for the Obama administration. Van Jones, the (self professed) communist who was kicked out of the Obama administration after having his leanings made public, is on the board of the Free Press.

Mr. Genachowski, our FCC chairman, has said the following:

"Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself."

In a December '08 op-ed piece regarding the U.S. economic crisis, he said:

"There is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles."

The FCC won’t allow Mark Lloyd, Obama’s “FCC Diversity Czar”, to be interviewed.

There is no language in the Constitution implying that government licensees abdicate their First Amendment rights. The Federal Communications Commission Chairman now is endorsing reduced license terms and increased "public interest obligations" for broadcasters. Recently  the government started in to regulate advertising with bloggers.  Did you know that bloggers could take any kind of advertising without having to meet government approval? 

 The next step is "net neutrality".  The goal is to regulate the entire Internet.  You will no longer be able to select just for yourself what you see. The government will do some of the choosing for you whether you like it or not.  Orwell presaged this when he wrote of "newspeak" where the government eliminated words so that people could not conceptualize ideas that the government decided were undesirable.  How different will it be if websites are forced to present ideas that the government finds acceptable, or if popular sites are suddenly burdened with the extra tax cost to subsidize alternative sites that promote more acceptable ideas but that aren't getting enough viewing in the opinion of the government.  

How can any press be free if its taxed and mandated by the government? 

Unfortunately, this is not the system that the Founders envisioned and designed.  We were to have a House and a Senate and the Senate was to be responsible to the States.  The 17th amendment, well meant and in response to partial gridlock, created two Houses with different names.  The way our system now functions, we end up with a system that has no accountability.  The corruption of power is in that absence. 

Our Congress has a greater than 98% odds of being reelected.  This in a country where the approval rating for Congress hovers in the teens and where is it is universally evident that our country is in trouble because of the direction that Congress has taken us.  In the USSR, before it's collapse, a country where the people had little voice in the process and the communist party decided who was to be in office, a fait accompli, the Politburo members had only a 96% chance of being reelected.

 Despite the humanistic desire to personalize blame, no president can take our country in a direction that Congress does not allow it to go.  Our current debacle can be attributed to messing with the original design. Most of our current problems are a result of either the federal government doing things that are unconstitutional, or things that may have been interpreted as being constitutional but that our Founders had recommended against. 

Washington warned against the natural human tendency to put faith in parties: "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty." This distraction keeps us from addressing the current problems.