Ivory Dome

We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his thoughts are particularly poignant. Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington , DC , filled to capacity by many of America ’s finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, “Mexifornia,” explaining how immigration – both legal and illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.

Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America

The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States . He said, “If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America . It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.’”

“Here is how they do it,” Lamm said:

” First, to destroy America , turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour Lipset, put it this way: ‘The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy.’ Canada , Belgium , Malaysia, and Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, Corsicans and Muslims.”

Lamm went on:

” Second, to destroy America , invent ‘multiculturalism’ and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture. Make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal; that there are no cultural differences. Make it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds.

” Third, we could make the United States an ‘Hispanic Quebec’ without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: ‘The apparent success of our own multi-ethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentriy and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.’ Lamm said, “I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to ensure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities.”

“Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high school.”

” My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of ‘Victimology.’ I would get all minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority plation.”

” My sixth plan for America ’s downfall would include dual citizenship, and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other – that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precet. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games. A common enemy, Persia , threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. “E. Pluribus Unum” — From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on the ‘pluribus’ instead of the ‘Unum,’ we will ” Balkanize ” America as surely as Kosovo. ‘

” Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits. Make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of ‘diversity.’ I would find a word similar to ‘heretic’ in the 16th century – that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobe’ halt discussion and debate. Having made America a bilingual/bicultural country, having established multi-cultum, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of ‘Victimology,’ I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America , it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them.”

In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound silence followed. Finally he said, “Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis’s book ‘Mexifornia.’ His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America . If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don’t read that book.”

There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate ‘diversity.’ American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a Third World in America Take note of California and other states. To date, ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell’s book “1984.” In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of Truth building: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.”

Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don’t get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.

Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D.-W.V.) says he is “a substantial skeptic of human spaceflight” and that not all outlets for American exploration are “glorious.”

Rockefeller made his remarks during a hearing last week where astronauts Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and Eugene Cernan, the last man on the moon, testified against President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget because it would cancel NASA’s Constellation manned space program.

“I am not a huge, but I am a substantial, skeptic of human spaceflight,” Rockefeller told Armstrong, Cernan, and Norman R. Augustine, the chairman of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

“We’re approximately the same generation, but that’s where I am,” Rockefeller said. “I cannot support going into space as an end in and of itself. I agree with the president that we need a measured, nationally, globally relevant and sustainable human space flight program–not one solely bound by place and time in space.”

Chairman Rockefeller then said to the astronauts, “I want to understand the value of human space flight.”

Cernan responded to Rockefeller by saying that today’s communications technology was born from space exploration.

“The technology that I have in my iPhone today is technology that was given birth to 30, 40, 50 years ago,” said Cernan.

“Exploration drives technology, innovation, not the reverse,” he said. “You can’t lock a group of the most smartest young men and women in the world in a room — engineers, scientists, technicians — and say, ‘go develop technology,’ for what? There has to be a purpose, just like there has to be a purpose in life.”

Wasn’t the freak in the White house now, the one who while campaining said he would return science to its rightful place?

I read an essay this week that gave me a whole new framework for observing popular culture and understanding why, as Chilean author Armando Zegri once noted, “Joy is a fruit that Americans eat green.”

The essay is entitled, “How ‘The Karate Kid’ Ruined The Modern World” and the author is David Wong, Senior Editor of cracked.com, the website of Cracked, the satirical magazine that many of us read as kids.

The message of the title is that movies like “The Karate Kid” and “Rocky” instill in people the false security that if you just give it your best shot, you can achieve anything in a relatively short period of time.

Wong takes issue with this conventional wisdom, introducing the concept of “Effort Shock”:

It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious. Every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.

Like sticker shock, Effort Shock is that rude awakening that the “price” a person needs to pay (in terms of discipline, hard work and self-sacrifice) for accomplishing something worthwhile far exceeds what’s anticipated at the outset. And like the consumer who’s unwilling to pay what he perceives to be an inflated price, many, if not most, people faced with a higher than expected price for success simply walk away.

Effort Shock goes a long ways in explaining the subprime mortgage crisis, reality television, and the “American Idol” phenomenon. Whether it’s owning a home that’s clearly beyond your means, being “famous” rather than accomplished, or taking the fast track to stardom, society’s obsession with “self-esteem” dictates that we’re all “special” and have a birthright to have whatever we want without having to pay our dues. When the first bill comes due, we’re stunned. It can’t possibly cost that much!

Politics is not immune from Effort Shock. Back in April 2007, when the junior senator from Illinois was being heralded as the great hope of the Democratic Party for winning back the White House the next year, I wrote a post on this blog entitled Coincidence? – I think not!, in which I jokingly implied that the resemblences between “Barrack” Obama (few people could spell his first name back then) and American Idol flash-in-the-pan Sanjaya Malakar were so great that they might very well be the same person.

Fast forward three years. Aside from a brief run on the reality show “Survivor,” Sanjaya has faded into obscurity, either unwilling or incapable of paying the price needed to succeed. And what became of Sanjaya’s “twin”? Like the rest of us, I think he may be reeling from Effort Shock.

It can’t possibly cost that much to be Leader of the Free World!

Can it?

This article kind of reminded me of Bo’s famous sign at the lib anti-war rally. War is bad unless your a democrat. Seems the same goes for torture. Its bad unless your a democrat. Anyone recall any great outcry from the left over this?

http://volokh.com/2010/04/19/waco/

Waco
Kenneth Anderson • April 19, 2010 11:48 pm

Bill Clinton’s invocation of Timothy McVeigh in connection with the Tea Party movement caused me to recall my review of a book on the Waco massacre that was a motivation for McVeigh. The book under review was Reavis, The Ashes of Waco, and it appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995. Re-reading it for the first time in many years, I was struck by this section:

[T]here is the post hoc justification for the use of CS tear-gas in the raid offered by the US Justice Department and senior Clinton administration officials. The public generally, and even the Congressional hearings, seem to have accepted that the children at Waco were gassed and then died as, in effect, “collateral damage” in the course of a raid aimed at their parents.

This is not quite the case, however, by the Clinton administration’s own admissions. CS gas was used at the compound, in order, as senior White House adviser George Stephanopoulos said, echoing senior Justice Department statements, to “try and pressure” those in the compound. It was hoped, he said, that as this “pressure was increased, the maternal instincts of the mothers might take over and they might try to leave with their kids” (Washington Times, April 23, 1995).

But the FBI knew beforehand that adults in the compound had gas masks; the gas therefore would not put pressure on them. On whom, then? If the FBI knew that the adults had gas masks, but went ahead with the gas attack anyway, it is plain that this “pressure” was brought directly against the children because, as the FBI knew, they could not fit into adult– size gas masks. “Maternal feelings”, the FBI hoped, would be unleashed in the mothers by watching their children choking, gasping and blistering from the gas.

The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them. [Emphasis added.]

An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it “is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours”. Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan.

The effect of CS gas on an unprotected infant exposed for only two to three hours is discussed in the report; in that case report, dating from the early 1970s, the child’s symptoms during the first twenty-four hours were upper respiratory; but, within forty-eight hours his face showed evidence of first degree burns, and he was in severe respiratory distress typical of chemical pneumonia. The infant had cyanosis, required urgent positive pressure pulmonary care, and was hospitalized for twenty– eight days. Other signs of toxicity appeared, including an enlarged liver.

Professor Stone’s report is measured, careful and damning. It is hard to know whether Heymann’s courage in commissioning it was a reason for his subsequent departure from the Justice Department. In the mean time, questions about the performance of the Justice Department are treated by the Clinton administration not as serious allegations of criminal activity, but as little more than a below-the-belt salvo in the culture wars.

I was shocked to read in Stone’s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

This is anouther of those e-mails that go around.

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn`t eat meat.
If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it’s a foreign religion, of course!)

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

When I first heard the news of the tragic airplane crash that took the life of Lech Kaczynski, the President of Poland, on his way to the commemoration of the massacre of some 22,000 military officers, intelligentsia and other “undesirables” by the Soviets in Katyn Forest on April 3, 1940, one of my first thoughts was, “Not again!”

The Katyn massacre, like so many other historical events,  is etched in the collective memory of the Polish people.  In the 1980’s, I worked for a naturalized American whose father was among the Polish officers who was murdered there.  But for decades, the Soviets tried to cover up their role in this atrocity.  The heavy handed way that they attempted to shift blame to the Nazis, by using German ammunition, is well documented. 

It has only been in recent years that the Russians have been willing to admit to having commited this vile act (although the government has yet to issue an apology).  A formal ceremony, attended by Putin, Medvedev and Polish Prime Minister Tusk, had already taken place in the Katyn Forest on the Wednesday before the crash.

But the “not again” doesn’t have anything to do with the actual massacre of 70 years ago.  In early 1943, Polish Prime Minister in Exile Wladyslaw Sikorski unilaterally sought the aid of the International Red Cross to investigate the Katyn Massacre.  Bear in mind that this was still during World War II, and the Soviet Union was allied with the United States and Great Britain in their fight against fascism.  Any revelations about the Soviet’s role in Katyn would have been not only an embarrassment for the USSR, the USA and the UK, but also a propaganda coup for the Germans.

On July 4, 1943, General Sikorski flew out of Gibraltar (a British colony at the time – now part of Spain).  His plane crashed shortly after takeoff under very suspicious circumstances, killing Sikorski.  But unlike the latest crash that took the life of President Kaczynski, the pilot of Sikorski’s plane, a Czech, survived.  His survival was due at least in part to the fact that he was wearing a so-called “Mae West life jacket.”  The irony of this is that the pilot was notorious for refusing to wear such a device.  When he was interrogated later, he claimed to have no recollection of having donned the life jacket.  There are other questions involving who might have had access to the plane shortly before takeoff.  After years of speculation over who, if anyone, was responsible for this crash, an investigation concluded just last year indicated that there was no foul play involved.

Although I’m always fascinated by a good conspiracy theory, I’m not ready to claim that the recent crash that killed the Polish President, First Lady and numerous government officials was anything but a tragic accident brought on by the error of an arrogant pilot that refused to heed the advice of the air traffic controllers in Smolensk.  But the coincidence of the Katyn massacre and the deaths of Sikorski and now Kaczynski seem to fit into a long string of misfortunate that has befallen the Polish people for centuries, going back at least to the partitions of this country in the late eighteenth century that lead to its disappearence from the map of Europe for 123 years.

The opening lines of the Polish national anthem can be translated as follows:  Poland still hasn’t perished as long as we live (Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła póki my żyjemy).  Poland will survive this tragedy, but one has to wonder why the Poles have suffered so much over the centuries.  My heart goes out to them at this time of national mourning.