Category Archives: America

Celebrate Private Property & Personhood Today

America, Colonialism, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History, Private Property, Propaganda

If I hear the likes of Michele Bachmann demand that we pay homage to a wonderful country and thank our lucky stars for the wages we are allowed to work for, I’ll hit the roof. If you want to be thankful on Thanksgiving, it is not “The Country” collective—whatever that means—that you should thank. A country is a composite of individuals. To the extent that a preponderance of Americans practice a respect for America’s founding documents—to that extent the collective will reflect this country’s great philosophy. Sadly, the number of individuals who practice our wonderful American creed is diminishing daily.

The Real Story Behind Thanksgiving is the “celebration of the triumph of private property and individual initiative.” Writes Paul Schmidt at Freedomkeys.com:

William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony, founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” precept.
The results were disastrous. Communism didn’t work any better 400 years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious losses. Starvation was imminent.
Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early and farm as individuals, not collectively.
The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving — on August 9th.
Unfortunately, William Bradford’s diaries — in which he recorded the failure of the collectivist system and the triumph of private enterprise — were lost for many years. When Thanksgiving was later made a national holiday, the present November date was chosen. And the lesson the Pilgrims so painfully learned was, alas, not made a part of the holiday.
Happily, Bradford’s diaries were later rediscovered. They’re available today in paperback. They tell the real story of Thanksgiving — how private property and individual initiative saved the Pilgrims.
This Thanksgiving season, one of the many things I’m thankful for is our free market system (imperfectly realized as it is). And I’m also grateful that there are increasing numbers of Americans who are learning the importance of free markets, and who are working to replace government coercion with marketplace cooperation here in America and around the world.

Juxtapose the truth with the official historical version of the Thanksgiving celebration.

It might pique your curiosity to know that Thanksgiving was proclaimed by Diablo himself, in 1863. Read more about “The Most Cynical and Hypocritical Speech Ever Delivered” on that holiday.

My weekly WND.COM column will return next week. Happy private property and personhood day.

UPDATED: The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower’ (The Sanctity of Life)

America, Colonialism, Crime, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, Nationhood, Race, Racism, South-Africa

The following is excerpted from “The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower,'” now on WND.COM:

“Whites will become a minority in 2042 and will fall to 46 percent of the population by 2050, comprising only 38 percent of U.S. population under 18. So writes Patrick J. Buchanan in his formidable new book, ‘Suicide of A Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?’

Every immigration worrywart recalls the ‘astonishing episode’ Mr. Buchanan recounts next. In 1998, Bill Clinton brought tidings of ‘their coming minority status’ to a ‘largely white student body’ at Portland State University.

‘In a little more than 50 years,’ rejoiced President Clinton, ‘there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through a demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.’ Taking their cue from their ‘enthnomasochistic’ president, the students erupted in cheers.

‘Ethnomasochism,’ laments Mr. Buchanan—who is surely one of the great patriots of our time—is ‘the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group.’ It is ‘a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower.’

In this writer’s latest book, the example of post-apartheid South Africa is used to deconstruct the effects of such a shift in a country’s majority/minority power structure.

Granted, the shift underway in the U.S.A. is incremental. But as is clear from the facts unfurled in ‘Suicide of A Superpower,’ the transformation of America will be as detrimental as the almost-overnight shift orchestrated in South Africa. …”

Read the complete column, “The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower.'” It’s now on WND.COM.

The aforementioned book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Barnes and Noble is always well-stocked and ships within 24 hours.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

UPDATE (Nov. 4): THE SANCTITY OF LIFE. Here is a statistic from the book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot.” It might edify the Facebook writer (on this column’s WND page) who cavalierly compares the devastation of crime in the New South Africa to the devastation inflicted by the National Party (the apartheid regime): More people are murdered in one week under African rule (plus/minus 420) than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades (approximately the same). But, left-liberals do not consider the sanctity of life in a society as a measure of justice; only democracy—the might of the majority–rights all wrong.

UPDATED: American-Mediated Lynching In Libya (Cackling Hildebeest)

America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Just War, Justice, Middle East

Backed by American and French (NATO) sorties up above, our buddies the rebels, bless them, apprehended the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. With barbaric, blood-curdling harangues of “Allahu Akbar,” the revolutionaries proceed to lynch him on camera. Sophisticated enough to film their “justice,” these animals are sufficiently in touch with their atavistic selves to tear to pieces a helpless individual. Secular democracy rising.

Invigorated by killing a 16-year old boy (Abdel-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki) because related to an American the president had ordered assassinated (Anwar al-Awlaki), without due process, Obama, a worthy disciple of Bush the Barbarian, is celebrating the murder: “You’ve won your revolution,” obama tells Libya.

Once again, the US has supervised and given imprimatur to a French-Revolution like upheaval in a Muslim country.

Below is footage of what we’ve become and who we befriend:

Here are stories that flesh out the gory details from Al Jazeera, the MailOnline, and the AP.

UPDATE: THE CACKLING HILDEBEEST. Even the pro-Bush Allahpundit of “Hot Air” recoils at Hillary Clinton’s “We came, we saw, he died,” vis-a-vis Gaddafi’s death. (Although Bush’s barbarians did plenty laughing and looting. I believe Bush took Saddam’s sword, but Google seems to have wiped all evidence of the Shrub’s crime. Looting goes against Just War doctrine, not that Bush prosecuted a just war.) http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/20/hillary-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died/

Steve Jobs (1955–2011)

America, Business, Capitalism, Celebrity, Ethics, Human Accomplishment, Morality, Pop-Culture, Technology

Ryan McMaken at Mises.org eulogizes Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs, one of the most important entrepreneurs and innovators of both the 20th and 21st centuries, has died. Will he receive the sort of veneration reserved to politicians when they die? That’s unlikely, although Steve Jobs typically did more good for humanity every day before lunch time than any politician has ever done in his whole life.
Jobs should be considered a great American icon in the same way that Michelangelo is associated with Italy or Mozart with Austria.
When foreigners walk into “American-themed” gift shops in America, they should be greeted with commemorative plates bearing Jobs’s face.
Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen since we have to honor great humanitarians like nuker-in-chief Harry Truman instead.
And of course, Jobs did great things for all humans, and not just Americans.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs.

APPLE–Remembering Steve Jobs: “… Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built…”

Playboy before “The Girls Next Door”. Via LewRockwell.com, here is the definitive Playboy interview with Steven Jobs.