I didn’t know any Vietnamese farmers and wouldn’t be coerced into harming any of them. It was their choice if they wanted to be communists. Besides that, returning servicemen I met said it was a living hell over there and often quoted Eisenhower’s farewell address (a warning to beware of the military/industrial complex).

The choice was to be for war and against communism or be anti-war and for communism. Being anti-war and anti-communism didn’t suit either the communists or the crony-capitalist war-mongers running the country.

Being pro-life, I joined the commies in order to oppose the war. I was one of them. I wrote a letter to the Piedmont Times (suburban Oakland) defending outspoken communist, Angela Davis. That was the first letter to the editor I ever wrote. I lived a block from Oakland Tech High, where Clint Eastwood went and also Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party.

I recently read a report describing a program at William D. Kelley Elementary School in Philadelphia where fifth grade students were forced to celebrate “black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally to “Free Angela!”

These students are being taught that the United States is a “settler colony built on white supremacy and capitalism” which has created a “system that lifts up white people over everyone else.”

Even if that is true, what is this school doing for its students? By sixth grade, only

3% of students are proficient in math, and 9% are proficient in reading. By the time they go on to high school only 13% have achieved basic literacy.

What is the outlook for these kids’ future? Even in my history of menial work, mostly logging and farming, I would have fallen back to my beginnings as a dishwasher if I couldn’t do math or read. Take a look at education and you see small communities like ours doing fairly well because it is a community. I graduated in a class of 500 in California. I saw first-hand students being left behind because they were simply lost in the shuffle.

One teacher at William Kelley, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, said, “I’ve come to realize that no policy hurts African-Americans more than the public school system and the teachers’ union.” Students in Philadelphia are being denied the tools to lift them out of a culture of victimhood, poverty, and crime.

Less than half of adult Philadelphians are functionally literate in a city where the schools employ 18,000 people and spend $3.4 billion per year. Those billions of dollars were not generated by slogans about systemic racism. They are available because thousands of people pursued a dream of being of use to their communities. The relationship of all those people is called capitalism.

Recent calls to “Support Public Schools!” (as an anti-privatization slogan), and “No Vouchers!” are direct attacks on choice. They show a lack of confidence in the competitiveness of the public school system. What parent would not relish the option of getting their kid out of William D. Kelley School and on to a good life?

22,000 of them

FDR meets a Saudi King

Regarding the article by Robert Paarlberg, “The Environmental Upside of Modern Farming” (Feb. 6 WSJ), The views expressed from an ivory tower academic with an anti-meat agenda should be taken with a grain of salt.

He assumes livestock are evil because they produce methane and manure? Where is the proof, real proof, not computer models, that methane can change the weather? In confinement operations we are beginning to capture methane to use for energy, by the way.

As a cattle farmer, I question his assertion that manure is a bad thing. It is highly prized, not just for known elements like in the chemical fertilizers his utopia would have us use, but for obviously undiscovered benefits to crop production. Well managed farms prevent pollution from manure because it is a valuable resource.

Although pigs and chickens do not flourish on pasture, cattle have the ability to utilize unusable flood prone and otherwise useless land and convert it to food.

I remember, as a kid, the prospect that we will all be eating food from a toothpaste tube. Mr. Paarlberg can have it. I just hope his “School of Government” can leave the rest of us alone in it’s crusade for a “sustainable” world.

I saw him in this band at the Berkley Greek Theater in 1970

I haven’t done a movie review for a while so here goes.

“Little Pink House” is a 2017 film about Susette Kelo and her fight with the city of New London, Connecticut concerning Pfizer’s intention to build a factory on her land. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

The president of a local college was hired to push the idea of locating a drug company facility in New London as an economic development scheme. They declared a neighborhood to be blighted and used eminent domain to evict the homeowners.

Susette Kelo had left a failed marriage and bought a house, restored it all by herself, and painted it pink. The movie is captivating and moves along well. Sorta like the sports movies we escape with every so often, you know who to root for. Raise your hand if you are rooting for Pfizer.

The reason for this so-called review is to equate the issues raised in the movie with what is going on today. The idea of private property is being challenged.

Property is usually only referred to as real estate. But property is actually whatever we own. Our wages, our dog, our car, ourselves; it’s all solely our property. The concept of private property is basic to our luxurious lifestyle. We create a better mousetrap because we are rewarded by people who use it to keep their wiring safe. We fix up our house because we live there. We work our jobs because our wages, being private property, can be used by us to make a better life for our families, or even a preferred charity or friend. It’s our choice.

New London saw that a few little houses with a nice view had limited tax income, and cities always need more taxes. There’s also the matter of pride or image. From the governor on down, a big fancy drug company, hotel, condo, and retail “urban village” was basically something to show off.

The Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 in favor of the city and Pfizer. Those great champions of “the people,” Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, David Souter, and Steven Breyer voted for the big corporation. Justice O’Connor, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas voted for the homeowners. That’s pretty interesting. The conservative justices opposed the big corporation. How ’bout that?

The site of Susette Kelo’s house is still a vacant lot, as is the rest of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood. After the Supreme Court gave the homeowners the shaft, the city sent them bills for rent totaling tens of thousands of dollars. All that changed after the governor went to prison for unrelated issues. This intervention ended up costing the city and state $78 million. Pfizer never used the land, never hired the promised 3,169 employees, and the $1.2 million in tax revenues never materialized. When the tax breaks expired for their facility across the river, they moved away leaving 1,500 employees unemployed.

In her spiels trying to convince the homeowners to sell, the college president / promoter often says, “Social justice and economic development go hand in hand.”

The meanings of these words have evolved to benefit those in power, that is, organized groups who can take advantage of unorganized, yet productive individuals.

Social justice has become much greater than those two simple words. It no longer means a community of fairness. It now stands for the law engineering society for outcomes, while bypassing the process of natural selection according to our individual skills and passions.

Economic development ultimately has used theft facilitated by ignorance of people who are too busy being valuable to society to pay attention. Law originally came to be to intervene in situations like this.

Social justice and economic development have become sugar-coated thievery. They go hand in hand.

A reader told me he wouldn’t read this column until I wrote about January 6th. With the risk of exposing my hard right bias, here goes.

Right off the bat, this is an opinion piece. How about that? As I peruse media of all kinds I find new life for old words stating opinions. Regarding the election we have “false claims, unsubstantiated, baseless, misinformation, fraud, conspiracy,” and “stolen.”

The courts’ refusal to look into allegations of hanky-panky regarding the vote goes along with a general history of courts for people paying attention. People who generally consider themselves to be more compassionate toward minorities couldn’t be woke if they overlook stolen freedoms of poor and minority suspects who are convinced by courts to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit to avoid the “sure thing” of a longer sentence. Ha!

Have you ever seen the documentary, “Hacking Democracy?” It was an Emmy nominated HBO film that irrefutably exposed election fraud through electronic voting machines in the 2000 and 2004 elections. The company, Diebold, has since changed its name but its voting machines are in use yet today.

I make these points, not to justify the riot at the Capitol, January 6, but to counter the blatant editorializing roundly accepted as journalism. People who have a life, a family, and a job can’t take the time to do their own investigations into all these omissions and alterations called news A few curious people dig a little deeper and are shocked at what a crooked world has been created by the courts’ enabling of the executive and legislative branches’ transgressions regarding their job descriptions in the Constitution.

The importance of the vote is what causes riots. The vote is like blood is to sharks. The vote as a way to acquire needs and wants undervalues and replaces cooperation with others.

It is not surprising that some Trump supporters turned into a mob like their counterparts of last summer. Neither group had a chance of turning the tide their way. Both groups made more enemies than friends. That’s what anger does and that’s why far reaching decisions should never be made during a crisis.

Government officials solemnly gathered to honor Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick this week. The cause of death has yet to be determined, although you wouldn’t know it from some accounts that had him murdered by Trump supporters.

Sicknick was an interesting guy. He was a National Guardsman who had been deployed to the Middle East by the Bush regime. He often wrote that our involvement in the Middle East was a mistake. He even questioned the holy grail of big government, the space program, saying the money is needed elsewhere and called for regime change in America.

As with September 11, January 6 will grow big government with the Domestic Terrorism Act of 2021. It will shrink our privacy and freedom. Crises are handy that way. Russia and China are way worse, of course.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

• Aldus Huxley, Brave New World [1946]

Weaponizing Weather

“Operation Popeye” was a classified U.S. program that deployed cloud-seeding during the Vietnam War. The aim was to hinder North Vietnamese troops and suppress anti-aircraft fire. Whether the program worked remains in question. But after it became public in 1972, it prompted a congressional investigation and, eventually a United Nations treaty forbidding military action intended to cause “earthquakes, tsunamis [or] changes in weather patterns.”

Well this is great. Bombs are fine but don’t go seeding clouds. The program could have had huge benefits for society except for the fact that there are still going to be politicians and national governments, which cause more famine than any drought.

Doesn’t the U.N. treaty show that war is a game played by our so-called leaders, and we are mere disposable pieces on a chess board? If a threat is real, all rules would go out the window. The so-called threats are only inspiration to prop-up an economy based on a death culture.