Author: leeduigon(patty)

So now I’ve got a new book to write, my regular Chalcedon Foundation articles, this blog, and my News With Views column. Help!

Some people seem to think I’m having fun, handing out Greegie Awards and chronicling the purposeful destruction of my country by the very people who are supposed to be protecting it and building it up. Well, trust me, folks–it isn’t fun. Writing my books is fun. Reporting on all this bad stuff isn’t.

Turning to one of the very few remaining sources of good news:

Turn us again, O LORD God of hosts, cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved. (Psalms 80:19)

Pray it again, and again. God is nigh.

In 1860 an expedition led by Robert O’Hara Burke set out to cross Australia, from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria (from south to north, that is). No one had ever crossed the continent before. Earlier expeditions had either turned back or disappeared.

Burke’s expedition made it, sort of (the last three miles to the sea were blocked by impassable swamps), but only as a one-way trip. All but one man died trying to come back.

Alan Moorehead–a heckuva writer of popular histories–told the story of the expedition in 1963. His book, Cooper’s Creek, is a terrific read. If your local library doesn’t have it, or can’t get it, try amazon.com. There was also a movie made about the expedition in 1985, which critics panned for taking some liberties with the facts.

I’m reading Moorehead’s book now, and I can’t help being struck by eerie parallels  between Burke’s expedition and Capt. Robert F. Scott’s one-way journey to the South Pole, in which the entire polar party perished.

Despite knowing its causes, and knowing how to prevent it, both expeditions managed to come down with scurvy. Both wound up relying on transport animals (camels, ponies) in terrain that couldn’t have been less suitable for the animals. Ponies aren’t great in ice wildernesses, and camels aren’t quite the ticket for mangrove swamps. To bring in another English debacle, the Franklin Expedition of the 1840s, after failing to sail the Northwest Passage, found a way to starve to death in inhabited country. The only thing Burke didn’t do wrong was to hire Eskimos to guide him through the Australian desert.

What hubris drove these expeditions to disasters that could have been avoided? The question is worth taking seriously: the same 19th-century upper-class culture that produced these doomed explorers culminated its morbid thirst for self-destruction in the trenches in World War I. The Norwegian Amundsen, who beat Scott to the Pole without losing a man–in fact, his men ate well enough to gain weight during their polar push–thought the British Empire had a penchant for dying. But it wasn’t just the British.

Get yourself a copy of Cooper’s Creek and see what you think of it.

Our town’s municipal budget was released this week: $15 million and change. This pays for a police force and its up-to-date equipment, the Dept. of Public Works and its equipment, street-cleaning, a whole passel of street festivals, and nice salaries and fantastic pensions all around.

Of course, in a small town like ours, taxes have to be pretty high to raise that kind of money. Some of the stores on Main Street are boarded up, and have been for a while. Some of the residents have been chased out of town by taxes. Fifteen million bucks is a lot of money.

But it ain’t as much as $30 million, is it? And $30 million is this year’s budget for our local school district. There are only four schools in it, but the budget is twice as high as the budget for all the rest of the town.

I’ll bet it’s just as bad for your town. And on top of that, our paychecks have to support the county, the state, and the federal governments. Our paychecks are going to get hernias. The higher up you go, the bigger a bite they take out of your dollar.

For what we’re paying for it, we ought at least to live in Paradise.

At the rate it’s going, America is going to run out of money. Gonna go broke. And then what?

Can’t we stop and turn around?

While our glorious ruling class contemplates an “immigration reform” bill that will cost American taxpayers more than $9 trillion (estimated by the Heritage Foundation), with amendments to include special benefits for the same-sex partners/catamites of illegal aliens, a suicidal policy to flood the country and its overburdened economy with millions of illiterate, impoverished persons who will have to go on welfare… While all this is going on in Washington…

The Sixth Circuit federal court yesterday ruled that a German homeschooling family may not have political asylum in America. After all, they only want it because they’re Christians. And doesn’t America already have enough peaceful, law-abiding, educated, and productive Christians? Don’t we need to import more gang members, homosexuals, and drug users?

So the government proposes to deport this one harmless German Christian family, while at the same time amnestying multitudes of persons who cannot benefit America in any way, and whose only calling here will be to vote for Democrats in perpetuity.

Attorney General Eric “Fast ‘n’ Furious” Holder says the Romeike family can’t have asylum because they aren’t really being persecuted. Germany makes homeschooling illegal; the German Supreme Court says it must protect the state from people who might create a “parallel culture”–und zen, kamerad, zey might not do vot der fuhrer tells zem to!  Old Fast ‘n’ Furious says it ain’t persecution as long as Germany stops everybody from homeschooling, not just Christians. As long as the state is an equal opportunity oppressor, it ain’t oppression.

What our pseudo-Christian president and his henchmen want, of course, is to put an end to homeschooling in America. You start by establishing the principle that as long as nobody is allowed to homeschool, you’re not just picking on the Christians–even though in America, as in Germany, it’s the Christians who have the strongest motivation to homeschool their children and the highest likelihood of doing so. The great impetus for homeschooling, in both countries, is the urgent need to remove children from an “educational” environment dedicated to the advance of homosexuality, atheism, abortion, and overall Godlessness: to wit, the public schools.

Bear in mind that in Germany, the Romeikes are apt to be fined, imprisoned, and have their children taken away from them and placed in the custody of the state–all because they want to school their kids at home. Deutschland uber alles, jawohl.

For more information on this travesty of justice, visit the Home School Legal Defense Association website, http://www.hslda.org .

Despite what the nincompoops who misgovern us say, Global Warming is still the all-time biggest fantasy ever perpetrated by the human mind, dwarfing the imaginative fictions of the likes of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

But then where does fantasy end and full-blown delusion begin?

As reported May 12 in The Winnipeg Free Press, huge ice floes have been squeezed out of the water to crush a bunch of lakeside homes in Manitoba (see http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/giant-ice-floes-crunch-homes-207099381.html ). You gotta click the link and see the pictures.

Manitoba is neither the North Pole nor Antarctica. It is contiguous to the U.S. And here, while the whopper-mongers in Washington and Ottawa go on and on about the threat of Global Warming, we have a lot of houses uprooted or smashed flat by… ice.

Duh… hello, hello? Anybody there? Does this look like Global Warming to you? Think there’ll be any tropical rain forests springing up in Manitoba anytime soon?

But who are you going to believe–your own lying eyes, or our glorious and trustworthy ruling class?

An official Greegie Award, for egregious stupidity in high places, to our first Voter Fraud President, who earlier this week told graduating students at Ohio State not to listen one little bit to all those silly persons who warn you to beware of government tyranny.

Nope, not a lick of truth to it–absolutely no grounds to fear our loveable federal government. “Unfortunately,” said President Golfball, “you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems.” Gee–you mean it isn’t? “Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works.” Nobody gums up the works like you do, ace. “They’ll warn that tyranny [is] always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices,” yatta-yatta.

Man, I get paid for writing fantasy, and I can’t compete with this guy. But there he goes again, Mr. Uniter, warning Americans that other Americans are out to get them and he’s their only hope.

But it’s all clear: there is no lurking tyranny. Just the IRS admitting it harassed conservatives. Just the odd “human rights” commission or two, coming down like dynamite on this or that individual who somehow failed to jump when some “gay” told him or her to jump. Just Health & Human Services forcing Christians to pay for abortions. Just the Army deciding that American Christians–that is, the vast majority of the people in America–are a bigger threat to America than bomb-happy jihadists. Just the prez and his henchmen in  Congress trying to confiscate everybody’s guns, trying to amend the Constitution without going through the amendment process… when they’re not forcing you to buy health insurance that you don’t want.

Oh, no–there’s no threat of tyranny from this government!

Besides which, it shows a distinct lack of class to lie to such a credulous audience as college students. Like shooting fish in a barrel.