That is Thomas Lister, 4th Baron Ribbesdale. He lived from 1854 to 1925. The painting was by John Singer Sargent and it is – or at least, was – very famous as it captured perfectly the 19th century British aristocracy. Just look at it – the man is serene. He knows he’s in the master class of the world’s master nation.
As a person, he didn’t cut a great swath in the world – a Liberal member of the House of Lords back when it was entirely hereditary and actually had some power, he was just a solid member of society. He had several children but his Barony died with him as both of his sons died as soldiers – one in a colonial campaign in 1904, the other at Gallipoli in 1915. Essentially, all that he was is gone, now. His line became extinct because of its devotion to duty and now the world looks upon him and his like with hatred and contempt. Why bring him up?
Because yesterday X was afire for a while with an allegation that the Pope had decreed it a moral obligation for us to accept migrants. As per usual with statements by Pope Francis, he didn’t actually say that. He merely reiterated long-standing Catholic teaching that migrants can’t be abused. No duh. But it caused quite a bit of heartache and the tail end of it had a video of a Spanish coast guard vessel apparently running over a small boat filled with migrants trying to break into Spain. The horror and all that – we were supposed to say, “I am in favor of border security, but this can’t happen.” Which is kinda dumb because if it doesn’t happen then you’ll just get more and more of them.
But that got me thinking and the vision of Ribbesdale’s picture came to mind. Here in 2024, we’re supposed to hate the man and all he represented. Imperialism. Colonialism. White Supremacy. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But it should be noted with great care that the descendants of those who were ruled by the likes of Ribbesdale are desperate to get into Ribbesdale’s country…while his descendants (and there are such) aren’t noted for their desire to break into Zimbabwe. It would seem to me that we have the world rather backwards. Or upside down. Or, perhaps, both.
One thinks about Zimbabwe. Known as Rhodesia in days of yore – names after Cecil Rhodes who as an ardent British Imperialist. We are all supposed to abhor Rhodesia. It was a white-minority government! Racist! It had stolen all the farm land from the Africans! It had to go. And it was destroyed. Because of course it had to be. But here’s something to think about – through most of Rhodesia’s existence, the majority of the Rhodesian army was black. Weird, huh? Sorta like the French war in Algeria where far more Algerians fought for France than for Algerian independence. Nobody asks these days why black Rhodesians would fight for a white government. Not allowed to ask. Probably should be asked, though. They had a reason! It wasn’t conscription: all volunteers. Men fully capable and free to choose…who chose to fight for the government that was officially oppressing them because they were black.
Without a deep study it would be impossible to really know the reasons but my guess is that they felt they had a stake in the system. Rhodesia was an island of civilization in a very barbarous area of the world. It was famously called “more English than England”. The government of Rhodesia – colonial and independent – was very selective in immigration. Only the best were allowed to come – and the best came. Certainly, they were taking land which in theory had been black-owned (in the sense that at one point all land in Sub-Saharan Africa was by nature black-owned) but which hadn’t been used for much – or in a lot of cases, used for anything – by anyone since the dawn of time. These people worked hard and built a society of prosperous, sober farmers. They didn’t see themselves as being the white minority rulers of anyone – they saw themselves as an English society ruling itself according to English law…and they did not want this society turned over to non-English people who, when not overtly hostile to English society, simply had no idea how to make it work. My bet is that the black men who joined Rhodesia’s army did so because they had fused themselves to the English society of Rhodesia and feared dispossession if the government fell. Maybe they didn’t like some aspects of white rule, but they liked the overall affect of it and probably bet that if they fought for it, they’d eventually gain full entrance into it.
But, none of that: if whites are in charge, then whites are wrong and gotta go. Off they went. And Rhodesia changed to Zimbabwe. Naturally the new government had to kill tens of thousands of fellow blacks who didn’t understand that the end of white rule didn’t mean the start of all black rule. Just some blacks. Those most juiced in with the new rulers. The white farmers had their land confiscated – and black farmers were given the land (based on political reliability, of course) but they didn’t know how to farm all that well so the breadbasket of southern Africa became a land of poverty and periodic famine. Disease ran rampant. Did you know that 128,000 Zimbabweans live in Britain? 65,000 in Australia? Heck, 50,000 or so in the USA? Kinda funny, huh? Fight to end white rule…only to move to places where…whites rule. Almost as if the whole concept of white rule being bad was…you know, drivel.
Don’t get me wrong here: it is absolutely wrong to exclude people from the political and economic system based on race. Just can’t do that. We are all children of God and have the same certain, unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But how any Republic is to be organized is a matter of prudential judgement and any changes proposed must be studied both for their short and long term effects and provision made against the possibility that a proposed cure will be worse than the disease. The bottom line is that while white minority rule had to come to an end in Rhodesia (just as it did in South Africa) this doesn’t mean it was necessary or wise to do it willy-nilly – to just all at once remove the people who ran things and replace them with people who had never run anything like it. For both Rhodesia and South Africa, change from white to majority rule should have been a process of decades, not an instant. After all, the disaster wasn’t just in Rhodesia-turned-Zimbabwe. There are nearly a million South Africans who have bailed out of South Africa – this diaspora, just like that in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, coming only after the end of white rule and with the overwhelming majority of immigrants being black…moving to white majority nations.
You’ll find, if you care to check, that in all lands formerly ruled by Europeans absolutely gigantic numbers of the natives have bailed out – and continue to bail out. Its why we have a migrant crisis. The former colonies are being drained of people as fast as transport to Europe and the Americas can be arranged. All of these black and brown people fleeing their black and brown lands…to move in with the crackers. Why? I’ll tell you why: because the end of colonial rule was wrong. The end of so-called white rule was wrong. It has killed and ruined far more than colonialism or white rule ever did. Of course, it wasn’t really “white rule”…it was Civilized Rule. It just turned out that the civilized people were white – men like our Lord Ribbesdale who was a kind, decent sort of man who wanted what was best for people as far as could be made in an imperfect world run by Fallen Man. And people like him by and large succeeded. Where there once had been slavery, now there was freedom. Where there once had been pagan ignorance, now there was Christianity and education. Roads and railways replaced dirt tracks. Water was brought to parched cities and farms. New crops were introduced. The cross polonization of cultures led to the improvement of everyone’s lives. It might have been a huge mistake for Europe to go out into the world to conquer – but the bigger mistake was ending that rule over a period of a mere 20 years, long before the ruled were capable running a modern society.
So, what do we do now? How to we cure this failure of the modern world…this asinine idea that the West which everyone is desperate to get into, is wrong? First and foremost, we must control our borders. It wasn’t just our failure – plenty of people of Africa and Asia fell for it, too. They really thought that the only problem was the paleface in charge…get rid of him and paradise will ensue. Now as they live in their tin shacks watching the new ruling class drive by in their Mercedes, they just want to get out…but they had a hand in setting this up and they can’t just evacuate. Nope: it is their bed, and they have to sleep in it. Back they go.
And if they do want our help? Then it comes with our rule. Not going to continue to hold that I have to work a deal with a tribal chief or local strongman. Our aid comes with our laws or it doesn’t come at all. Not talking emergency aid – but things like long term development assistance. More than happy to help…but we’ll be telling them what to do. Think of how much money we’ve tossed into the foreign aid rat hole over the past 75 years and what has it brought to the people of the world? Nearly half the world’s population lacks secure access to clean water and/or sanitation. This is basic stuff. This is something Romans figured out 2,000 years ago…why in heck does anyone lack access to clean water/sanitation? Because having clean water and sanitation comes with civilization. Western civilization. It is the only civilization which has consistently been able to do the whole water/sanitation thing over long periods of time. Westerners aren’t smarter than anyone else…but their overall cultural development built this mindset. You go with what you’ve got and if you want clean water and sanitation, you’ve got to have Western values…even if those values have to be imposed.
We must insist that our civilization is a good thing. We have to stop hating ourselves because some Marxist pinhead says so. If we want to survive – and if we want to help the world – we have to recapture the belief and self confidence of our ancestors.
Blogs For Victory 
Did you ever, in your wildest imagination, think when you were young, say in High School, that the world would be, that this country would be where we are?
My granddaughter was a young teenager when she read The Hunger Games and Divergence trilogies. She’ll be 30 this fall, and she commented the other day that they might end up being documentaries.
It is amazing what we did to ourselves. In fact, lets take a look at the VP here –
Her Dad was the privileged son of the Jamaican elite – descended from a family that owned more than a thousand slaves (and also imported Irish indentured servants as the Irish were actually cheaper to obtain and, of course, the Brits had laws about the treatment of slaves but an Irishman was just another bloody mick, plenty more where that came from). He immigrated to the USA in 1961 and then spent the next nearly 40 years indoctrinating American kids into Marxist drivel and hatred of the USA. Why in hell did we allow him in? What point was there to that? We already had Angela Davis if we felt the need for a black Communist. At least she was one of ours – but we imported an alien idiot to do Marxist drivel Americans wouldn’t do, I guess.
Harris’ mom was the privileged daughter of the Indian elite. To her credit, she was a medical doctor and so at least a useful person. But between the Indian doctor (as if we didn’t have doctors) and the Jamaican Commie (as if we didn’t have Commies) we obtained…Kamala Harris…a mindless Commie who was raised by her parents to hate the USA which welcomed them and gave them good lives.
What in heck were we thinking?
Its not like we needed immigrants. And its not like we were getting Polish coal miners or German mechanics…we were getting…a Commie and a doctor. This improved America? How?
But its like that, isn’t it? We’re just destroying ourselves day by day making one stupid decision after another and all predicated on the proposition that somehow we’re the bad guys…but do keep in mind that Harris’ parents both showed up while Jim Crow was the law in the USA…IOW, this supposedly racist nation still in the grip of Jim Crow still was a land that black and brown people wanted to come to…to get out of their own black and brown countries which were supposedly so much more enlightened than White AmeriKKKa.
We really need to stop being stupid – and stop pretending that our critics have anything relevant or true to say.
I truly believe another generation will come along and restore the United States. It might even be my great granddaughter’s generation. I’m amazed at her knowledge of things at the age of 10, not just her knowledge, but her THIRST for knowledge. And I think God is making a comeback as well. I was talking to a young couple (mid-20s) at my church. I asked them what brought someone their age to church. They said there is a hunger among many people their age for something greater than themselves.
While there is no obligation to believe in spiritual apparitions, the apparitions of our Blessed Mother to 4 young girls in Garabandal Spain back in 1961 – 1965, it was foretold of 3 things that were to come.
Those who witness the miracle firsthand will be healed. Many people will be converted and Russia will also be converted. When the girls first witnessed the apparitions they were between 11 – 12 years of age. That makes Conchita approximately 75 years old now. How long do you suppose it will be before the Warning and her announcement of the coming miracle?
As I understand it, the Vatican’s official stance on the apparitions is to neither confirm or deny them. For anyone who has reviewed the photographs, films and writings of many priests, doctors, & scientist who gave testimony related to these apparitions, there is no doubt in my mind.
So yes, I too believe there will be a restoration, but not just for the US. Whether we keep it or not depends on people returning to God.
Trump threatens to jail Mark Zuckerberg if he illegally interferes in 2024 presidential race
In a new book coming out, Donald Trump said the Meta founder is being watched ‘closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison – as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.’
In an effort to scare people away from Trump, the left has already made many suggestions that Trump would use the power of the office to “attack” the opposition. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from. The reality is, there are many people who need to be held accountable for their illegal actions. Whether Trump (if elected) or the DOJ carries out their responsibilities regarding the past transgressions is yet to be seen. I imagine at least some will be prosecuted, but that depends greatly on holding / increasing the House and to some extent, regaining the Senate.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trump-threatens-to-jail-mark-zuckerberg-if-he-illegally-interferes-in-2024-presidential-race/?utm_source=daily-usa-2024-08-31&utm_medium=email
Trump campaign adds ex-Democrats RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard to presidential transition team
While Kennedy and Gabbard have earned conservative praise for breaking with leftists on several issues, both remain avowed liberals. Throughout his own ill-fated presidential campaign, Kennedy remained supportive of abortion-on-demand (though eventually reaching a viability cutoff), affirmative action, and reparations for slavery, and did not disavow his past as a far-left environmental activist.
Gabbard, meanwhile, voted in lockstep with the abortion and LGBT lobbies for most of her House tenure, advocated codifying abortion “rights” in federal law prior to the third trimester, favored decriminalizing prostitution, and endorsed socialist Bernie Sanders for president in 2016.
While Trump is miles in front of Harris in terms of how to best govern, I hope he’s learned a great deal from his first presidency so as to not repeat the problems that repeatedly plagued him, such as bringing in the wrong people to help with running the country. While I have absolutely no idea about multifaceted dynamics of what it takes to run the country, selecting the right people from the get-go is imperative to fully utilize the 4 years afforded to him. This makes it challenging deciding on where to place trust in filling the many positions. While I have no problem in having Kennedy & Gabbard on board and lending them an ear, their continued professed leftist ideologies are certainly concerning. Though they’ve clearly broken from the democrat party, that does not mean they’re on board with many of the issues we on the right are fighting for.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trump-campaign-adds-ex-democrats-rfk-jr-tulsi-gabbard-to-presidential-transition-team/?utm_source=daily-usa-2024-08-31&utm_medium=email
Though they’ve clearly broken from the democrat party, that does not mean they’re on board with many of the issues we on the right are fighting for.
As Amazona has stated countless times, as long as they have both come to the realization that the best way to govern the country is through the Founders’ vision as expressed in the Constitution that the Federal Government is strictly limited in both size and scope, and that all other issues must be addressed at the state or local level. As long as they follow that template, I don’t care what their stand is on the “issues.”
And that is exactly what I was going to say.
I would have two questions of Kennedy, and Gabbard, and Manchin, and any other Democrat who has indicated a willingness to step outside the bubble:
(1) No matter what your ISSUES might be, are you committed to addressing them within the restrictions of the 10th Amendment? and
(2) Will you please explain why you believe the nation is best governed by a massively powerful Central Authority with power consolidated in a few elites rather than the Constitutional model of a federal government with restricted powers and most authority left to the states or to the people?
I guess that’s my point. Their “issues” is in adherence to socialist ideologies which is not consistent with what the founding Fathers envisioned. For example, wanting to codify abortion up to birth into federal law goes against the US constitution.
wanting to codify abortion up to birth into federal law goes against the US constitution. and so does wanting to outlaw it.
… and so does wanting to outlaw it.
But, there is a much higher moral code the far exceeds the US Constitution. However, even the Constitution states; “The pursuit of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Now there’s a difference in recognition of when “Life” begins for those on the left and those on the right. If recognized at conception as science has clearly demonstrated (as opposed to strictly being a religious view), then abortion is certainly among those things that should be condemned at all levels.
I am in complete agreement with you on this. However, unless and until there is a firm legal definition of “life” regarding the status of the unborn, we are stuck with the lack of Constitutional authority over what is argued as a medical or personal matter.
For now I think all we can do is work to reinstate the stigma of abortion as an immoral act, an act of pathological selfishness, and fight Left’s efforts to sanitize it, and make sure that states have not just the right but the ability to legislate it.
Sorry, that should read;
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
One may then wish to quibble the definition of Life, but we all know the real answer to that and how the left will position the argument.
Multiculturalism, without assimilation, does not work. And it is killing this country.
Yep. As I’ve said before, civilization is a learned thing. What went out of Europe to conquer the world was the result of a thousand years of education and training.
One of the complaints lodged against the British Empire is that in West Africa, black colonial subjects would be caned by colonial officials like they were unruly schoolboys. This is supposed to be an example of British racism and cruelty. But, it wasn’t. They were caned like unruly schoolboys because they were acting like unruly schoolboys. And that was being gentle – the British, to themselves, were much more brutal with civilizational instruction – all that flogging, drawing and quartering and such. It was Africa’s good luck that the Brits didn’t show until 1820…had they gone in 1620 a caning would have been the least of an African’s worry. The Brits weren’t doing what they did to be mean – they were doing what they did because they were determined to bring civilization to their colonial subjects. These colonial subjects didn’t want to become civilized. Much like the Natives of the USA – they liked wandering and raiding and such. They didn’t want to settle down and farm; they held such work in contempt, as barbarians do. But the USA couldn’t have bands of Natives raiding isolated settlements because that was a cultural imperative of the Natives…they Natives had to stop that and had to settle down an farm. There was no other way to go. Thus the conflict. But it wasn’t wrong for the USA to say, “hey, this wandering around and raiding other settlements has to stop.” Just as the Brits weren’t wrong to say, “this nonsense with raiding for slaves has to stop” in Nigeria.
The Psalm for today (you all did go to church, right?) has the response: The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord (Ps 15). Oh, yes, indeed! But most people don’t really want to contemplate that…doing justice covers a lot of ground and most would like to avoid. But one of the things of justice is to get people who are living wrong to stop doing that.
The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord (Ps 15).
I have often thought of this and wondered how the Lord does feel about exacting justice. INMO, not exacting justice is equally a sin. So when I know that human trafficking is happening just 100 miles south of me and I don’t do anything about it, am I sinning? I feel like I am. When I see reports out of Aurora, CO. and I don’t do anything about it, am I sinning?
I think we have become too soft in western civilization with all the trappings of consumerism and comfort, and I do think that the reason we are in such chaos, is because good men have yet to rise up. It’s time to take the bull by the horns, and whether or not there is violence, depends entirely on how the bad men react.
I like MAHA but I’d also like some attention paid to MOFA—–Make Orwell Fiction Again
Ooooh! MediaBias “fact checkers” really don’t like Health Ranger. As a matter of fact, they are downright snippy about him.
Overall, we rate The Health Ranger an extreme right biased Quackery Level Pseudoscience website that also publishes conspiracy theories. This source is associated with Natural News, which is one of the most discredited sources on the internet.
They seem especially upset about his reporting on vaccines and AGW.
they routinely publish anti-vaccination propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lastly, this source denies the consensus on climate change without evidence, as seen here: Climate change cultists are now taking over your local weather forecast.
I’m so glad we have some people stirring up the ant hill of the lockstep agenda media.
MediaBias helpfully gives us a list of media outlets it admits might lean, just a wee tad bit, toward the Left: emphasis mine
These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation.
Then they post a very long list of media outlets they admit MIGHT just happen to have a “slight to moderate liberal bias” but which are usually “trustworthy for information”—outlets like ABC, NPR, the Moscow Times, Politifact and Politico, The Lincoln Project and—my favorite—whitehouse.gov
In other words, “MediaBias” waves its bias flag
My granddaughter still remote schools – and some days she’s with us on a school day and I happened to overhear a lecture where they were discussing what is reliable on line and the stark assurance that if the website ends in .gov it is absolutely trustworthy was jarring. Of course, in this case, it was a wasted effort – her father started schooling her in skepticism on official sources when she was like 5. She knows to think and to check. But most kids aren’t given that and so what you’ve got there is going to be considered gospel by a very large number of people.
Just a side note on the .gov thing. I don’t do much social media but I do drop in on NextDoor.com every now and then because it is a source of local news, like ‘what’s that new building over there?” Not long ago as I was going through some posts I saw one about Covid where a woman declared that any doctor who prescribed ivermectin should be jailed because it is POISON. Well, wave a red flag in front of Amazona, why don’t you? So I mildly pointed out that it is a drug developed for human use, received a Nobel Prize for that, and has been used safely and effectively for decades. Oh me oh my the outrage from a couple of the Lefties! I got my post deleted for being “misinformation” and threatened with banishment. But one poster asked if I had any links to information on this. So I posted half a dozen links, all of them gov.com links. No opinion of mine, no fringe elements, no personal commentary, just good old US of A information sites. And I got kicked off the site, for “violation of community standards’ by posting “misinformation”.
Personally, I thought it was pretty funny to see the obvious Faucists who freak out about any divergence from the official government narrative claim that government sources are ‘misinformation”. They do trip all over themselves, don’t they?
If you want to make a liberal or Never Trumper (BIRM) mad, the best thing to do is to tell them that they only believe what TV tells them. They reject it in fury but you’ll find that they have nothing to say but what TV says. It is all very mindless.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a great deal of kookery out there in the anti-vax and anti-GMO camps…but they’re no different from the pro-vax and pro-GMO kooks as far as that goes.
Here’s my take on it – some years back the stepson decided to learn how to cook bread from scratch and he got pretty good at it (still is!) and upon a time the Mrs and I were in Utah and we came across what I can only describe as a “Peasants R Us” store…they just had all sorts of old fashioned products for sale for cooking. Because the stepson was doing a lot of bread we did notice the wheat grain in a bin and decided to get a pound of freshly ground flour. No problem – but as they were doing it and we were discussing the whole thing it came out that it was best to refrigerate the flour as it would go bad.
Go bad?
But, wait, I’ve bought flour before and stored it for many months in the pantry with no problem.
Oh, sure; but that isn’t whole grain.
Not whole grain? I always buy whole grain! Its healthier!
Sure, but the government allows the big boys to call grain that isn’t whole grain, whole grain. They take out this one part of it – the part with the most nutrient – because if its not in the flour, it has a much longer shelf life.
So, wait a sec: you’re telling me that whole grain flour doesn’t have the whole grain?
Nope; it can’t. It would be impossible from a financial standpoint – it would spoil too fast.
So, what did they do in olden days?
They used the flour a lot faster back when.
The bottom line here is that there are plusses and minuses on this – to keep a large supply of food instantly available does require some compromise on quality. And that’s fine. The world has 8 billion people to feed and we’re not going to do that organically. But what we’re getting is a strong effort against organic in favor of processed. That is wrong. The war against raw milk is just the best example of it…there is a furious effort to stop the consumption of what human beings consumed daily until Pasteur came along…and its ridiculous and does make you wonder if there’s a desire for control behind it? And maybe a desire that we do get chronically ill? Not because we consume processed foods…but because we consume nothing but processed foods?
When you read about prepping you are told that all flour contains (along with an accepted level of rodent fecal matter) an accepted level of insect eggs. So for long-term storage the flour (and sugar) must be frozen at very low temperatures for a fairly long period (I am not a serious prepper so I didn’t pay a lot of attention) to kill these eggs and prevent them from hatching, or at some time in a dystopian future the preppers would discover their flour badly contaminated. When you read about old navies you learn that by the end of a voyage the ship’s biscuits had a lot of weevils baked into them, a reference in a Jack Aubrey pun about “The lesser of two weevils”.
As for “organic” and GMO, the problem I see is the increased amount of glysophate (Roundup) in most of our foods, due to GMO tinkering. As all farmers know, weed control is essential to getting productive crops, and is terribly labor-intensive, So good marketing people, like those at Monsanto, came up with the genius idea to tinker with the DNA of some crops to make them glysophate-resistant. This means that farmers can just spray their fields with Roundup to kill the weeds without killing the cash crops. The problem is that after a few cycles of doing this the soil is so saturated with glyphosates that the chemical migrates into the crops being produced. On top of that, glyphosates act as dessicants, or drying agents, so crops more vulnerable to mold after harvest,, like oats, are sprayed with the chemical to dry them out faster. This is why oatmeal, touted as one of the most healthful foods, also has the highest levels of glyphosates in the finished product, sold to us in stores.
Organic foods are supposedly grown and handled without the use of these chemicals, which theoretically makes them safer to eat. I just read, and haven’t had a chance to research, the claim that only raw milk has calcium that can be utilized by the body to make strong bones—that pasteurizing milk alters the chemical bond or something so the body doesn’t process it the way it does raw milk. When I had chickens they were mostly free-range, supplemented with organic commercial feed, and the difference between those eggs and supermarket eggs, even those marketed as “free range” or ‘cage free” and even “organic” is one of night and day.
So my skepticism about organic food is changing.
Just as I note that the USA grew to industrial and financial dominance under Protection, I also note that the USA became the breadbasket of the world long before pesticides and chemical fertilizers became common. I suspect that the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers is…not 100% necessary. Probably a lot easier for large agribusiness concerns, to be sure…but not necessary to actually get the food we need. Could very well be that with various regulations against production – especially for small, local production – to get what we need requires a farming intensity which can only be produced via artificial processes. If we dispensed with these regulations – some of which date to the New Deal attempts to artificially inflate agricultural prices – we might see a burst of small and mid sized farms…perhaps producing fewer bushels per acre but still producing quite a lot. Wheat production in the USA peaked in 1981…and I can’t help but think that a lot of the price rise we’ve seen in food (not just today’s current inflationary times) is because we’re producing far less than we used to. Exporting a lot less too…and this seems to be partially done on purpose to ourselves so that India, Europe and South America could make more money via wheat exports (it was unfair, you see, for the USA to dominate the global wheat market).
It all comes back to a bizarre tax and regulatory environment combined with a commitment to “free trade” which has warped our entire economy and made it serve just monied interests rather than the people.
Weed control depends mostly on what is called “stoop labor’ and used to be a primary source of income for legal foreign workers under the Bracero program. Mostly young people from Mexico and Central America could come to the United States for specified times to do this mostly seasonal hard work. They shared living quarters, lived frugally, and took money back home where their wives and children remained. They used this money to build houses or buy farms or start businesses, and their families got to continue living in their culture and customs and extended family relationships.
Then we got rid of the bracero program, and the confidence it instilled in people who knew they could come back every year, leading to illegally crossing the border and bringing their families with them—and the resulting problems just kept getting worse and worse.
Just one clusterfark after another, isn’t it? If we had just left well enough alone then both Mexico and the USA would be better off.
Exactly. We had a problem and we came up with a pretty good solution to it. But it was a solution that respected liberty, the sovereignty of both nations and didn’t contribute to increasing the power of either country. So the Left had to rush in to “fix” it. And, as usual, the Left is kind of like King Midas, except everything it touches turns to s**t.
Interesting final segment at C&C this morning:
Good new for those posters here who own property in Florida.
Well, I hope he is correct. I am in Florida right now, after flying down here specifically to get my house prepped for hurricanes, given the predictions for the year. I usually do it before leaving for the summer, but this April I got hurt and had to go back without getting my checklist finished. I have been watching the South Atlantic, and wondering why it wasn’t producing the kinds of activity the D&G (Doom and Gloom) contingent had been warning us about.
And crediting that giant furnace in the sky for rising temperatures here! Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, those of us with fireplaces, or have ever sat around a campfire, and had the experience of closer=warmer have had it figured out for a long time, but the pointy-heads with “credentials” seem pretty late to the party. And proximity doesn’t even address the issues of solar activity. But the problem has been that we can’t tax the sun, so we’ve had to look for other, closer, culprits we could identify and then penalize.
I watched the Life on Our Planet documentary and I do recommend it – except for the last bit of the last episode where after giving us a really good story about the development of life on Earth, it goes full Global Warming Retard. Most of it I already knew – and, in fact, most people will have a general idea of the overall development if they’ve ever looked at it but one thing struck me: something you know but you don’t know until someone points it out – for most of Earth’s existence, it has been ice-free. Palm trees grew in Antarctica. This concept that life on Earth can’t exist except in the temperature range of today is just absurd. The world used to be a heck of a lot hotter. There were also periods when both oxygen and co2 levels were vastly higher than today. These changes were caused by myriad forces all of which dwarf anything we’re doing by burning coal and oil.
The world is warming a bit right now – that seems clear…but it still hasn’t reached the warmth that humans have experienced in the past, let alone the torrid heat the world has experienced before while life has flourished. Are humans causing it? Very doubtful. We might be slightly – and I mean very slightly – contributing to it but short of mass suicide there’s not much we can do to seriously reduce our input. And even if we stopped producing any co2, it wouldn’t alter the overall climate trajectory which is controlled by forces outside of our control.
There’s a reason commercial greenhouses artificially increase the amount of CO2 by double to triple the normal atmospheric level.
You know, I hadn’t even thought of that – a greenhouse is artificial global warming to get plants to grow where they can’t normally.
I get a kick out of freaking out AGW hysterics by first hijacking Spook’s question of “What is the “right’ temperature of the Earth, anyway?” and then suggesting that because we don’t have an answer to that question, and because the only way to emerge from an Ice Age (even a little one) is to get warmer, maybe we are just following that rule, and still need to add a few degrees to get back where we belong. Then when smoke is coming out their ears I mildly suggest that efforts to interfere with the natural reset of the planet’s temperature might be harmful.
Then when smoke is coming out their ears I mildly suggest that efforts to interfere with the natural reset of the planet’s temperature might be harmful.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=don%27t+mess+with+mother+nature+commercial&t=chromentp&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DX7DRQUfaFBo
https://twitter.com/BonillaJL/status/1830467194880155718?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1830467194880155718%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsbusters.org%2Fblogs%2Fnb%2Fjorge-bonilla%2F2024%2F09%2F02%2Ftom-cotton-destroys-nbcs-welker-israel-abortion
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1?ui=2&ik=06c110a822&attid=0.4&permmsgid=msg-f:1809096685148696570&th=191b33d9a29feffa&view=fimg&fur=ip&sz=s0-l75-ft&attbid=ANGjdJ-27lzdnzV7nCFhFrbuiNCQaAInSb3Q8zGJE2Vt5giQg7i46JP2iBEggyNEmYcpt5GKZJjMJSIVkubwinLEjiS7KLrgkTHnkRRVFd_jnK3eF4LjP_HoNXvp_jQ&disp=emb&realattid=ii_191b33ca0532bde405d4
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