What now, Google?

Whilst the US Federal Government is locked in shutdown, something unexplained has happened to this blog: it's gone viral. Unlike before, it's not a single post that has gone viral, but viewership of the blog in general has shot up from one or two per day to dozens--and in the past few days, hundreds. I can't imagine why, other than that Google is no longer suppressing me in their search results. For example, a search on the phrase "white man blog" brings up a link to this blog in the very first line, something that hasn't been the case for many years.
I'll let my readers know if and when I figure out just what happened to bring this about. And, since I now have so many more readers, I'll make a point of posting more frequently than I have been for these last few months.

Going dark?

I'm certainly not done posting on this forum, but I'm not sure how much longer I will be able to do so. The platform host is making it almost impossible to carry forward as an anomymous blog: they no longer allow me to log in just using my password, which means that I have to compromise my anonymity every time I post. Unless I can find a secure way of signing in, I won't be posting anything controversial here from now on out. So I may as well add now, that a comment which subsequently disappeared before I could approve it, noted that Donn Ketchum has quietly passed away.

To my nineteen followers, and the thousands of others who read this blog

Well, the handwriting is on the wall. Google had already taken over this platform when I started this blog in 2004, but it took a few years for the new paradigm to take effect. Then, overnight, I dropped from 25 hits a day to 12, and from second or third hit on a search to second or third page.
I always use Bing for searches now, and I've recently noticed that a lot of my lost hits from Google are being replaced by Bing; for one recent search, my website was the fifth one down the page.
So for now, I'll limp along, and maybe even see a brief resurgence; but sooner or later the powers that be will see fit to shut me down. By then I hope to have transferred these hundreds of pages of content back down to my computer, so they won't be lost forever. I may even end up making a book out of some of them; fat chance, though, of Amazon letting me use them to sell it.

Or maybe, just maybe, this may turn out to be another one of my famous failed prophecies. We hope.

Persecution Update: of Produce and Pronouns

It's been two and a half years since the bulk of my Indiana Revival Reports, but I've continued to follow Kyle Lance Martin and Time to Revive, as they held extended meetings in Florida, Ohio, Dallas, and now Wisconsin. An interesting update came out in a recent sermon in Wausau: at about 1:40:40 in this video, Kyle Martin tells about the Michiana farmer who lost a majority of his wholesale business after putting peel-away gospel stickers on 600,000 of his watermelons. I saw some of those rejected watermelons, donated by the crate to a local food pantry, the sticker still on them. They tasted just fine.
Like a frog in a teakettle, American Christians are experiencing such a gradual loss of their liberty that most young adults have no idea how much their country has changed just in their lifetimes. Thirty years ago, for example, women were typically addressed as either Mrs. or Miss; those titles have almost universally been replaced by Ms.--not, as far as I know, due to a single court decision--definitely not to an act of Congress--but the social pressure to conform to the new normal has sufficed to snuff out two words that were, not all that long ago, among the most commonly spoken ones in our vocabulary. And now, a six-year-old is investigated for calling a friend 'he' when he now prefers 'she'. Two even more common words are in immanent danger of disappearing themselves.

Elizabeth Elliot lived among naked savages in Ecuador--well, they were still naked savages when she met them, but contact with incarnated Christianity was rapidly changing that. She ate what they ate, lived where they lived, spake as they spake, and even let her daughter run wild with their children--but she drew the line at dressing as they dressed: a single cotton string around the waist, or--if they really wanted to dress up--one around the upper arm as well. She didn't want to just identify with their culture--she wanted to uplift it. And as they saw the three incarnate Christians wearing clothes, they all started wearing them too--and have ever since.

Christians just aren't going to be socially acceptable to a depraved and fallen culture. They needn't bother to even try to keep up with the decline. Any who continue trying to comply with the culture's escalating demands are just hoping that the crocodile they feed will eat them last.

The most embarrassing article in National Geographic--and a nice poem

In a past post, I mentioned that the National Geographic Magazine had become a propaganda arm of the US Military by 1943. Today I discovered that only about five years earlier, in what National Geographic is now calling "among the most embarrassing [article] in National Geographic’s history," NGM had served as a mouthpiece for Hitler. Free-lance American correspondent and photographer Douglas Chandler provided for the February 1937 issue a 9000-word article entitled "Changing Berlin," with "47 pages of dramatic images showing swastika-draped buildings and reverential descriptions of a city under Nazi rule."

But note, his submission was fully in conformance to NGM editorial standards: to include only stories “of a kindly nature” and strictly apolitical. One wonders where those standards had gone only five years later, and if perhaps a misplaced sense of guilt was behind the change.

During the War in Europe, Chandler became a literal mouthpiece for Hitler, railing against Jews and Bolsheviks on short-wave broadcasts aimed at America. After the war ended, he was hunted down and brought back to the US to stand trial for treason. Convicted, he served a fifteen-year "life sentence" before being released to return to Europe.

The editors at the National Geographic Society had a lot of explaining to do when irate letters began to pour in from listeners who had heard Mr. Chandler repeatedly mention his connection to the National Geographic Society during his propaganda broadcasts. Apparently no such apologies were ever made in defense of their pro-USA propaganda articles.

Now, while I am at making this month's post, I want to share with my readers a poem published over half a century ago (perhaps written a quarter-century before that), and apparently never yet posted to the Internet. I say apparently, because in recent years search engines have become so sure of what their customers are looking for that simply entering in a character string no longer ensures that any or all online sources containing that string will come up in the results. But here it is:

In the solemn stillness of an early dawn is heard
The crystal-throated reveille of a waking bird.
Donning golden slippers arises then the Day
And flings across the morning sky her crimson negligee.

Enchanting now, she saunters forth to spread abroad her charm
And shakes perfume from every flower to smooth upon her arm.
She paints the children's bodies brown, their faces rosy fair,
And with soft fluting of the wind breathes kisses through their hair.

Shrill piccolo of the cricket warns that night at last has come!
She gathers up her flowing skirts and hastens quickly home.
But looking up into the sky, a wary child might find--
She left her veil of mauve chiffon trailing far behind.

--Helen Wessel, Natural Childbirth and the Christian Family. pp. 3-4. Fourth Revised Edition, (c) 1983, Harper & Row Publishers

P.S. Sure enough, this poem in the same form can be found online in the original 1963 edition--IF one knows where, and how, to look. The book was contemporaneously published under a similar title, Natural Childbirth and the Family, as well as under the later and even more innocuous title The Joy of Childbirth. All likewise online, but apparently now out of print.

P.P.S. I just noticed, in proofreading this prior to publication, that, in addition to omitting the final letter of 'early', resulting in the nonsense reading of "earl dawn," I had committed the scribal error of homeoteleuton, skipping from 'up' in the antepenultimate line, to 'into' in the penultimate, with the resultant loss of the end of one line and the beginning of the next. Note that this was probably influenced by the plausibility of the new reading, "gathers up into the sky."

Why I won't be buying any of Pat Williams' books

Although it was fast eclipsed by my opening post on albinism, my expression of opposition to Arthur Blessitt's divorce and second marriage has stayed in a strong second place ever since.

Now, I have a similar sad story to relate--I speak of the divorce and second marriage of Pat Williams.

Recently, my own marriage was helped by reading a book written by Pat and his wife Jill--a book I'd heard about when it first came out but had never read. I remembered that I hadn't heard from them since they were given a big magazine spread featuring them and their 18 children (14 of whom were adopted). I found, to my dismay, that--only 10 years after publishing a book sharing how Pat was able to singlehandedly save their marriage--Jill once again felt estranged from him, but this time, unlike before, she saw divorce as the solution. Their divorce wasn't even final yet when Pat fell in love with a single mother of one, whom his website now says, "Pat and his wife, Ruth, are the parents of 19 children, including 14 adopted from four nations, ranging in age from 26 to 40." As in the case of Arthur and Sherry, there is not a single mention of the woman with whom he posed with all 18 children. The woman with whom he coauthored at least three books. The woman who pushed him to adopt all those children in the first place.

Pat, on the other hand, had gone on with nary a glitch. Like Arthur, he's very close to the children and now their children. He's even had the temerity to coauthor, with new item Ruth, a book on raising a megafamily (he and Jill coauthored one back when they had only 10 children).

This adds to the considerable list of people who have appeared on Focus on the Family to talk about how God's hand was upon their marriage--only to disappear off the radar later on when, apparently, it wasn't.

ADDED MARCH 28, 2014
This post is a big hit today. In trying to find out why, I've found a few other articles on the story And--dreadful. He's written another book with his latest item, "Happy Spouse, Happy House."

UPDATE May 2021

In response to a recent reader (most recent comment) I've added a link to his website (the page has, of course, long been deleted, but whoever did so wasn't quite successful at erasing its existence entirely), and edited this post to more precisely quote the websites I linked to. I've even taken a look at the book he subsequently wrote, in which he does open up quite a bit about how his marriage unraveled. Jill moved out on him in early 1994--pretty interesting given that they released a commemorative edition of their "Rekindled' book in August 1995! 

Not a good week for the "natural-born citizen" conspiracy

Why is it that just about every single time I stick my neck out to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt as to the legitimacy of his presidency, I end up having to retract it? This just in--There are no State Department records showing that Barack Obama Sr. traveled to Kenya for his son's birth. There are, in fact, no immigration records at all, for that entire week. They are ALL missing. Do you realize the magnitude of this scam? There is absolutely no evidence, whether documentary, court testimony, or forensic, to disprove Barack Obama's legend. It's all either sealed or missing. In its place we have only anecdotal evidence, and it is contradictory. This man has something MASSIVE to hide.

Murdoch the Octopus: The money trail behind the media smears of vaccine truthers

It's been over a year since I posted an article on vaccines, and new information continues to come out, both from the US government and vaccine pushers on the one hand, and media investigators on the other. This article in the Vaccine Truth Newsletter reveals that there was corporate pressure directly behind the smearing in The London Times of Dr. Andrew Wakefield's research into effects from the MMR triple vaccine. It also reveals that vaccines now incorporate DNA in a way that suggests genetic modification of an entire populace through the mandatory vaccination of their children.

The medical side of the argument is highly controversial, but no one can deny what happens when you "follow the money." Summing up the article is this excerpt from near the bottom of the piece:

Now here’s where all the above ties up into a huge red bow: Rupert Murdoch has hefty financial interests and ties to the pharmaceutical industry, international banking connections, and stock market power brokers who hold the world’s financial interests in their ‘covetous’ hands. Newton says that Members of this group, along with George Soros-directed assets, virtually monopolized the genetics industry during the 1990s, culminating in the corporate privatization of the Human Genome Project. Of course, everyone knows that George Soros is a backer of U.S. President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Topping off all this is the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s son, James—heir apparent, according to Newton, oversees GlaxoSmithKline, another major H1N1 vaccine maker. Many more of Rupert Murdoch’s business associates sit as members of the boards of directors of Merck & Company; Kolberg, Kravitz, Robertz & Company (KKR); and even one of KKR’s top echelon personnel was one of the founders of the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform (CAHR) now known as “ObamaCare.”

It sounds like Rupert Murdoch is akin to an octopus with tentacles far reaching and some very deeply, especially in pharmaceuticals and the global media, i.e., radio, television, newspapers, and other print media. Let’s see how far the inquiry goes into the British cell hacking fiasco and if it will cross the pond into the United States. If what we are hearing about what went on at his newspapers multiplies, we can only imagine what has been going on behind closed doors in the world of pharmaceuticals.

And, I suppose that it is neither here nor there that Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire is also behind the latest edition of the NIV.

Another one-term president--but how?

According to Snopes, Proctor & Gamble Former Executive Lou Pritchett really did write an open letter to the newly elected President Obama in which he stated the following:

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America ' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaugh's, Hannitys, O'Reillys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

According to Pritchett, he "sent it to the NY Times but they never acknowledged or published it."

Well, the writing is on the wall: President Obama's chances of being re-elected are slim to none. Rather than let a Republican take over the White House, however, it appears that the Democratic National Committee has an ace up their sleeve: Hilary Clinton.

It's been over a decade since a Clinton lived in the White House, and there's still a lot of pent-up support for The First Woman President. Having already passed the milestone of The First Black President, there's little incentive in keeping Obama on retainer; and Hilary is likely to be too old to run if she waits another 4 years.

I will admit, the idea's not original with me, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama announce in the next couple months that he won't be running for re-election, but will instead throw all his support behind Hillary and get on with the job of running the country for the last year of his single term.

By the way, there is quite a precedent for such a move. The following presidents failed to be nominated by their parties to serve a second term:

John Tyler*
James Polk
Milliard Fillmore*
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Andrew Johnson*
Rutherford Hayes
Chester Arthur*

*(these were former vice-presidents who took over upon the death of the former president, but were never nominated by their party to the presidency itself)

These former vice-presidents served more than one term as president, but failed to be nominated for a third, for which they were eligible:

Theodore Roosevelt
Calvin Coolidge
Harry Truman
Lyndon Johnson

And this president served two full terms in his own right, but was twice denied nomination to a third:

Ulysses S. Grant, who--as Obama is expected to do--successfully campaigned for the winner of his party's nomination.

Monowi, Nebraska: Requiem for the small town

Monowi had always been a small town. But it contained, within living memory, a school, a church, and a general store. And a tavern, of course--the only business still operating. Elsie Eiler, the proprietor, is also the town's mayor. This gives her the unique privilege of renewing her own liquor licence every year.

You see, in addition to being Monowi's mayor, she's also the town treasurer and tax collector. As well as being the only resident taxpayer. She is, in short, the sole resident of Monowi, and has been ever since her husband died several years ago.

What happened to the thriving town of Monowi to shutter its store, its church, and its school? Why are all its streets overgrown with grass? Why have all of its houses been left to collapse, many of them still containing the possessions of their last inhabitants? And why is the only business still standing a tavern?

We can trace the demise of this town back to the excessive regulations that have gradually made everything in town unprofitable, except getting people drunk. And oh--by the way--state regulations make it so unprofitable to transfer Elsie's liquor licence that she's stuck with running the tavern herself until the day she dies. So when she dies, so dies the town. The irony is that her tavern has no lack of customers; they just, for one reason or another, don't happen to live in Monowi.

Nebraska can be a hard place to make a living--especially for farmers. The Amish who followed Yost Yoder from Juniata County, Pennsylvania out to Gosper County, Nebraska 130 years ago found that out. The dry plains just didn't yield the kind of harvests they were used to, and within 25 years they had all packed up and moved back to Pennsylvania, where even to this day their hard-working and simple-living descendants are known as "Nebraska Amish."

They were the first Amish to leave Nebraska, but they weren't the last.

More farmers moved into Nebraska in the years leading up to World War One. Railroads crisscrossed the state, making it possible for farmers to sell their harvests to consumers thousands of miles away. Those who could hang in there through the lean years would make it all back, and more, when they harvested a bumper crop with the latest machinery. But the War brought many changes to Nebraska, including the first in a series of regulations that drove hard-working farmers and merchants from the rural areas, and from the state as a whole.

It started with the decree from the Nebraska State Council of Defense that banned teaching foreign languages in all schools in the state. This draconian measure, unthinkable today, was intended to inspire patriotism in the populace. A year later, they even banned the use of foreign languages in churches.

The Amish had the unfortunate distinction of not only using German in their church services, but also teaching it in their schools (so that their children would know how to read their German Bibles). Despite the fact that they had come to America for the very reason of escaping service in the Kaiser's armies, they were now labeled--for purely linguistic reasons--as enemy sympathisers. When the government moved in to shut down their parochial schools, the peace-loving Amish had had enough. To a man, they left the state--and have never returned, except to visit the graves of their ancestors. No one noticed it at the time, but the depopulation of rural Nebraska had already begun.

The War was now over; the State Council of Defense disbanded--but the regulations, as they always do, continued to mount. With the Amish gone, tractors began moving in. Mechanization now made it possible for one man to do the work of dozens. Children were no longer indispensable farm hands, but liabilities. The country schools that the Amish had left the state to avoid attending withered and died for lack of students to fill them. And as the schools closed, it was no longer feasible for families to live in the rural areas. Commutes to school stretched out to fifty, sixty, even seventy miles.

Back in Washington, D.C., legislators were reaching deeper and deeper into the pockets of Americans across the country, but spending that money disproportionately in urban districts. At the same time, legislators in Lincoln continued, year after year, to add to the ever-burdening list of regulations that everyone in the state, urban or rural, had to follow. It just wasn't cost-effective anymore to operate small stores and groceries. Selling raw milk became illegal, putting small dairies and the farms that supplied them out of business. Before long there was hardly anything that could be done profitably in the sparsely settled rural areas, except for getting people drunk. The demand for that never went away--not even in the cities, where the growing populations depended more and more on the largesse of the population at large. Driven from downtown by the rising crime rate, business and employed citizens moved to the suburbs.

Such is the foreseeable end of the overregulated populace: abandoned, decaying small towns and city centers, inhabited by hopeless drunks. EDIT SEPT 2024: Here is a rare YouTube video featuring Elsie, still the only resident of Monowi.

Hot news! Obama Birth Certificate released! But is it yet another forgery?

We now have two entirely different birth certificates for Barack Hussein Obama II. Both are agreed on the essentials: parentage, date and time of birth, race. But one is from Kenya; the other from Hawaii. Obviously, one was created fraudulently. But which one?
I would be willing to bet a year's allowance that the doctor who signed this form is safely dead.
(I just checked. He is.) And his widow is a consultant to the Hawaiian Heath Department.

Okay, first of all, let me say that releasing this long form birth certificate was a carefully calculated political move. As President Obama himself said when he released it, this won't convince everyone that he's a natural born US Citizen, but he hopes it will convince most people. In other words, he's responding to polls that show a shocking majority of Americans don't believe he was born in the USA. As one of those people, I must admit that I'm still not convinced that he was. He could have settled this issue 2½ years ago by releasing his birth certificate, and stubbornly refused to. Whatever his reasons--whatever he had to hide--haven't changed. As Aesop famously pointed out in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," nobody believes a liar, even when he's telling the truth.

Secondly, I will admit that I was duped. There is no reason now to believe that the short form COLB released in 2008 was a forgery, as I had been led to believe. The information on it is all backed up by the long form. Again, President Obama is responsible for my false belief by refusing to allow the media to actually see the COLB, thus fueling speculation that it was a Photoshop document.

BREAKING NEWS!!! May 17, 2011: This post contains links to sites showing that, when subjected to the same electronic scrutiny, the Long Form Obama Birth Certificate shows even more evidence of forgery than the Short Form. So I take back any concessions made in the previous paragraph: the long form was apparently based on the previously forged short form, so of course it had to contain the same forged information, and then some.

So, the evidence so far resolves into two roughly equal possibilities:

1) The Kenyan certificate is authentic; Stanley gave birth to Barack in Mombasa and traveled to Hawaii three days later, where the family conspired with Dr. Sinclair to file a fraudulent birth certificate form stating that Barack had been born at the Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital three days earlier, in order to guarantee him the U.S. citizenship for which they knew he didn't otherwise qualify. 

2) The Hawaiian certificate is authentic; staffers at the Mombasa Hospital put together a forged birth certificate in 2008/9 to present to the highest bidder to come snooping around looking for it; Lucas Smith turned up at the right time, and took the bait.

Happily, the Kenyan birth certificate is very easy to prove fraudulent. It contains a clear imprint of a child's right foot. All President Obama has to do is get his right footprint taken on live TV at a press conference, and have the camera zoom in on the print as soon as he removes his foot from the paper. Anyone with a computer file of both images can then compare them and, should the Kenyan certificate not have been produced at Obama's birth, it will hopefully be clear that the prints don't match.

The other possibility, should the footprint remain inconclusive, is to produce birth or postnatal records from Hawaii. Any forgers in Kenya would have had to make up the bodily dimensions listed on the certificate they produced, so they can't be expected to match those on Barack Obama II's actual medical record. Any discrepancy would lead to the conclusion that a Kenyan stand-in provided the information and impression on Barack's alleged Kenyan birth certificate.

That, my friends, would bring my puzzlement to an end; I guarantee it. Obama would then be my own president.

Every bit of information brought out into the sunshine makes the picture clearer, so I thank President Obama and his political advisers for taking this important step. It should be obvious, however, that it's still too little, too late to convince me that he's a natural born American. He needs to do more, and I suggest he do it soon.

UPDATE DECEMBER 21, 2011
According to Gallup, a majority of Americans still aren't convinced that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in the United States. I remain one of that number. I really do want to know where my alleged President was born, but yet another forged birth certificate, added to the two already released, won't do anything more to convince me.

As military chaplains are increasingly forbidden to offer actual spiritual counsel, this sort of thing can only increase.

Ex-Marine, advocate kills self after war tour
Yahoo News
By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press – Fri Apr 15, 3:47 am ET
WASHINGTON – Handsome and friendly, Clay Hunt so epitomized a vibrant Iraq veteran that he was chosen for a public service announcement reminding veterans that they aren't alone.
The 28-year-old former Marine corporal earned a Purple Heart after taking a sniper's bullet in his left wrist. He returned to combat in Afghanistan. Upon his return home, he lobbied for veterans on Capitol Hill, road-biked with wounded veterans and performed humanitarian work in Haiti and Chile.
Then, on March 31, Hunt bolted himself in his Houston apartment and shot himself.
Friends and family say he was wracked with survivor's guilt, depression and other emotional struggles after combat.
Hunt's death has shaken many veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who knew him wonder why someone who seemed to be doing all the right things to deal with combat-related issues is now dead.
"We know we have a problem with vets' suicide, but this was really a slap in the face," said Matthew Pelak, 32, an Iraq veteran who worked with Hunt in Haiti as part of the nonprofit group Team Rubicon.
After news of Hunt's death spread, workers from the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors met with veterans visiting Washington for the annual lobbying effort by the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, or IAVA. A year earlier, Hunt had been with other veterans in dark suits calling on Congress to improve the disability claims process.
He had appeared in the group's ads encouraging veterans to seek support from an online network of fellow veterans.
Snapshots posted on Facebook reflect a mostly grinning Hunt. In one, he has a beard and is surrounded by Haitian kids. A second shows him on the Capitol steps with fellow veterans. There's a shot of him from the back on a bike using his right arm to help push another bicyclist who is helping to guide an amputee in a specially modified bike.
Friends and family say Hunt suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But with his boundless energy and countless friends, he came across as an example of how to live life after combat.
"I think everybody saw him as the guy that was battling it, but winning the battle every day," said Jacob Wood, 27, a friend who served with Hunt in the Marines and in Haiti with Team Rubicon.
But some knew he was grieving over several close friends in the Marines who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"He was very despondent about why he was alive and so many people he served with directly were not alive," said John Wordin, 48, the founder of Ride 2 Recovery, a program that uses bicycling to help veterans heal physically and mentally.
In 2007, while in Iraq with the Marine's 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, Hunt heard over the radio that his 20-year-old bunkmate had died in a roadside bombing. Hunt later wrote online about sleeping in his bunkmate's bed. "I just wanted to be closer to him, I guess. But I couldn't — he was gone."
A month later, Hunt was pinned by enemy fire in his truck as a fellow Marine, shot in the throat by a sniper, lay nearby. Hunt wrote that seeing his friend placed in a helicopter, where he died, is "a scene that plays on repeat in my head nearly every day, and most nights as well."
Three days later, a sniper's bullet missed Hunt's head by inches and hit his wrist. He didn't immediately leave Iraq. His parents say Hunt asked to fly to a military hospital in Germany a day later so he could accompany a fellow Marine who was shot in both legs.
"I know he's seen some traumatic stuff in his time and I guess he holds that to himself," said Marine Sgt. Oscar Garza, 26, who served with Hunt in Iraq. "He was a very compassionate Marine, a very passionate person, one of the few people that I know that has a big heart and feels a lot of people's pain and makes it his own."
Hunt's mother, Susan Selke, said after Hunt was wounded, she'd hoped her son would get out of the military. Instead, he went to school to be a scout-sniper and went to Afghanistan. He seemed to do well. He was honorably discharged in 2009, married and enrolled at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
He was frustrated by the Veterans Affairs Department's handling of his disability claim. He also piled up thousands of dollars in credit card debt as he waited for his GI Bill payments. Hunt found an outlet to help improve the system by doing work with IAVA. He helped build bikes for Ride 2 Recovery and participated in long rides.
Using his military training, he went to Haiti several times and Chile once to help with the countries' earthquake relief efforts. He proudly told his parents of splinting an infant's leg, and after meeting a young orphaned boy in Haiti named D'James, tried to persuade his family to adopt him.
"If I had one thing to say to my fellow veterans, it would be this: Continue to serve, even though we have taken off our uniforms," Hunt wrote in an online testimonial for Team Rubicon. "No matter how great or small your service is, it is desired and needed by the world we live in today."
Hunt's friends say he was an idealist and voiced frustration that he couldn't make changes overnight. He also questioned why troops were still dying.
"He really was looking for someone to tell him what it was he went over to do and why those sacrifices were made," Wood said.
Last year, Hunt's life took a downward spiral. His marriage ended, he dropped out of school and he began to have suicidal thoughts, his mother said. She said Hunt sought counseling from the VA and moved in temporarily with Wordin in California.
Things seemed to improve for Hunt in recent months after he returned to his hometown of Houston to be near family.
He got a construction job, leased an apartment, bought a truck and began dating. He called friends to discuss the possibility of re-enlisting. In the days before he died, he hung out with friends, and he had plans the following weekend to do a Ride 2 Recovery bike ride. He even told Garza he couldn't wait to see him at a Fourth of July reunion with other Marines.
Then he was dead.
"Clay was always a fighter," Wordin said. "He was always a guy to stick things out and he basically quit life, and I was mad that he felt he had to do that at that particular time."
Hunt's friends and family count him a casualty of war — just like his buddies who died in the battlefield.

Obama declares National Health Emergency, but with no data to cite for it

Have you received a flu shot? I hope not, because the last time the US Government pushed nationwide vaccination in view of a potential flu pandemic, many people died. Not from the flu--there was not a single confirmed death anywhere in the world at the time the vaccine was released--but from the vaccine itself, and its toxic adjuvants and preservatives.

In 1979, CBS broke the news that the vaccination campaign had not only been a disaster, but that the whole scheme became part of a massive government cover-up. This time around, CBS has disclosed that probably only 1% at best of people diagnosed with swine flu actually have it. And of those who do get it, they are most likely to die of something else--like a reaction to the drugs used to treat it.

The White Man will be staying as far away from his government's flu vaccine as possible, remembering that the worse case of the flu he ever got was the year he received his first flu vaccine. No thanks, Mr. Obama. You can have your National Health Emergency; I'm keeping my health.

Where was Zbigniew Brzezinski on June 8, 1967?

Are we just going to sit there and watch? ... We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a 'Liberty' in reverse."
--Zbigniew Brzezinski, referring to rumors that Israeli jets may overfly Iraq on their way to taking out Iranian nuclear reactors.

There are several things interesting about this quote. Number one, who is Zbigniew Brzezinski? He was National Security Adviser under, of all people, Jimmy Carter. Pat Robertson saw him as the tail that wagged the dog. If he is still being taken seriously 30 years after leaving office, obviously that man has some serious clout far and beyond any government position he's ever held.

Secondly, he's referring to the Liberty incident as one that was 'a deliberate accident'. I've thought this all along, but the official position of both the US and Israel is a) Israeli jets and torpedo boats didn't realize that the ship in international waters flying an American Flag was one of ours until after they tried to sink it, and b) Everything regarding the incident remains sealed under the highest levels of secrecy [until now anyway], even after most of the people involved 42 years ago are already dead.

This also raises the question: Where was Zbigniew Brzezinski on June 8, 1967?

It's interesting that only this year--four decades after the action--was a Silver Star medal finally awarded to Terry Halbardier in which Israel was actually mentioned as the nation whose jets were strafing him as he strung a makeshift antenna so that the Liberty could get out the message that it was under attack. It was only due to his actions that the Sixth Fleet was alerted and Israel was forced to stop shooting the survivors. And this came only 3 years after Halbardier finally received the Purple Heart for injuries suffered in the strafing run.

Inasmuch as Halbardier has always been a "Liberty Incident Truther" about the attack, the fact that he has finally received what should have been virtually automatic recognition for his valor implies that official US attitudes on The Liberty Incident are softening.

If I live long enough--about another 40 years--I expect to find a similar softening of the lid of secrecy that has remain clamped over the 9/11 incidents.

Man without a country

We now know that Barack Hussein Obama II was not born to Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii--this despite many assurances we have received to the affirmative.

How do we know? Because this is the information on the Certificate of Live Birth that his surrogates have posted images of online (he himself has never made any of these claims under oath). Images that have been closely examined and declared without doubt to be fraudulently manipulated. Were this information true, there would be no reason whatsoever to forge it.

There is no reason to doubt that Ann was his mother; and little reason to doubt that Barack was his father. Therefore there is only one line on the forged COLB that can't be true, and that is the date and location of his birth.

The conclusion is inescapable: Barack Obama is America's first African president.

[UPDATE 02 Sept 2011: Subsequent release of another altered birth certificate did not settle the question. But unless information has been stolen from B.H.O. I's INS record, the birth did in fact take place in Hawaii, on or about the date indicated. Something has been altered, however, and we can only guess what it was. Perhaps the baby's last name was not Obama, and it took a retroactive tampering with the certificate to avoid the nasty complexities of a legal name change. Search on "Obama" for the full account on this blog.]

Did Ted Kennedy commit suicide?

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On August 26, 2009, Americans awoke to the news that the senior Senator from Massachusetts had died the day before. The next three days were more or less devoted to extensive coverage of the late Senator's life and career.

Several things about this announcement strike one as suspicious. First of all, the source. The news did not come from a hospital or a coroner, but from the Kennedy family. According to news outlets, the body is being kept in state at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport until it is transported to Boston for the funeral. There was no mention of any funeral home handling the arrangements.

The second suspicious thing about this announcement is the timing. Kennedy's death came only two weeks after the death of his sister at the same Hyannisport estate. And his funeral will come at the end of the Summer Recess, immediately after which Congress is due to vote on the health care takeover that Kennedy championed for the last 45 years.

And lastly, it's suspicious that Kennedy's death came shortly after a letter was released in which he requested the Massachusetts legislature to change the succession law, allowing Governor Patrick to appoint his successor.

It all ties into the conclusion that Kennedy planned for his death to take place at the most advantageous time politically. If it was a suicide, you can be sure that those privy to that fact are sworn on the darkest possible oaths to utmost secrecy.

The ACLU must be reading my posts again!

Attorneys say a rural North Carolina school district will allow a Quaker peace activist to distribute information to high school students about alternatives to joining the military. On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union said that Sally Ferrell's group North Carolina Peace Action now has the same access to the students as military recruiters.

This only makes sense. Even during an all-out mobilization, the military isn't going to be able to accept even half of your typical graduating senior class. That means most students are in need of alternatives to military service. Why not make information about them available?

Apparently somebody is afraid that if students knew what their options were, they wouldn't join the military. Nonsense! Some people are going to join no matter what you tell them, and some, on the same basis, aren't. I'm with the ACLU on this one; or, should I say, for once they are on the side of openness rather than censorship.

How to revive the flagging terror industry: a lesson from the FBI

"The defendants, in their efforts to acquire weapons, dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants.

"In June 2008, Cromitie complained to the informant that his parents had lived in Afghanistan and he was upset about the war there, that many Muslim people were being killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. military forces.

"Cromitie also expressed an interest in 'doing something to America.'"


The FBI has caught on to something here. Find someone with a grudge, nurse it, suggest that an appropriate way to deal with it is to break things and hurt people, then appear to provide the means to do so. As a final wrap-up, arrest the suspect for being a terrorist and an attempted murderer.

The keys to success in this operation were twofold:

First, they controlled the entire operation, using a confidential informer and dummy weapons.
Secondly, everything was carefully recorded on video.

Now what if, instead of a local synagogue, the wannabees had been directed to an imposing set of skyscrapers? And what if, instead of dummy explosives, they had been given a modicum of pilot's training? And what if, instead of recording everything, the powers that be had instead ensured that no witnesses survived, doctored the crash site, and kept the wreckage carefully guarded while all evidence was removed and taken out of the country?

If 'ain't' isn't in the Dictionary, it ought to be

"Ain't ain't in the dictionary!" was an ironic phrase I often heard in grammar school.
"Grammar School," of course, is what they called it in my grandfather's day, at the end of which a boy could leave school for good without ever having learned to 'speak educated'. By my time, as just the first stage in a long educational career, it was then called 'elementary school,' the early years of which were referred to as the 'primary grades.'

All of these educational modifiers are essentially Latin words--as is 'educational' itself. What does that tell you? It tells you that Latin originally had a tyrannical grip on the education of the youngest speakers of the English language. And, as it turns out, English grammar rules were written by men whose education had been in Latin. So it was that the English language was forced to obey the grammatical conventions of a foreign language. And thus the word 'ain't' was banished from the dictionary.

Today, I'm not all that in tune with what goes on in elementary schools (the latter grades of which have been moved to that new invention--with an English name, no less--of 'middle school'). So I don't know if children are still being told that "ain't ain't in the dictionary." But the fact is, it now is. At least in the adult dictionaries, which of course contain a whole lot of words that children use, but aren't in the junior dictionaries. And despite generations of schoolmarms attempting to suppress its use, ain't has continued to grow and thrive. A computer search for the string "If it isn't broke" brought up 29,000 hits; but "If it ain't broke" resulted in 510,000. "If it is not broken" brought forth a paltry 3770. This despite the fact that ain't didn't originally exist as a colloquial contraction for 'is not', but for 'am not'. And, being forbidden to use ain't, schoolchildren end up using the grammatically incorrect but socially acceptable contraction aren't instead.

So, the attempt to suppress the only legitimate contraction for a very common verb form only caused it to go underground, where it spawned an innumerable corpus of uses, including its Black English usage as a contraction of 'did not' and 'have not'.

Well, for the first time in the history of American English, we have a President with close family members who actually speak Black English. And, having used the word ain't as a scripted colloquialism during a campaign speech, President Obama will hopefully ensure that the Department of Education under his oversight will finally ennoble this word with a place in the education of all young Americans--if not in all their dictionaries.

"Woman with sister woman?"

Katharine L. Aller was an American poetess who flourished in the 1940's. She composed this hymn in 1944 to the tune TOULON:

God of a universe within whose bounds
Thy vast creation moves in ordered space;
Sons of a nation born of faith and wounds,
We seek from Thee our true appointed place.

Within Thy purpose, through the ages’ span,
We would discern our country’s destined role:
In all our councils, man with brother man,
We would obey the law of love’s control.

By all the grief man’s strife with man entails,
By all the woe that stalks oppression’s train,
By Thy great sacrifice which still prevails,
Free us from lust for all unworthy gain.

So shall we deal in justice like to Thine;
So shall the love of mercy light our land,
Marking the footprints of the Love Divine,
Where we walk humbly, guided by Thy hand.

Lead us into the light that shines from Thee
For all mankind; for ne’er shall it fulfill
Its pure effulgence till all men are free,
Free through the truth which is th’ eternal will.

©1945 by The Hymn Society of America.

Now, note that while Katharine is obviously a woman, she identifies the corporate entity of which she is a part indifferently as Sons, man with brother man, all mankind, and all men. Yet she is obviously under no delusions that by using such language, she is excluding most of the population, including herself, from the prayer.

But even if the author were a man, only one of these labels would be considered acceptable in these last days, when "Bring Me Men," the opening words of Sam W. Foss' poem The Coming American had to be expunged from a stone arch overlooking the Air Force Academy's parade grounds just to avoid offending the weaker sex. But Katharine Aller--to say nothing of Sam Foss--would be at a loss to account for this removal. And ironically, it was the modern female performer Lamya who finally set Foss' words to music, incorporating its opening lines into the lyrics of her song, "Empires," without altering the gender:

Bring me men to match my mountains,
Bring me men to match my plains;
Men with empires in their purpose
And new eras in their brains.