My Beauty Best Teacher

Via Fox News:

A leaked partial document produced by the Bureau of Land Management and obtained by Fox News suggests the Obama administration is considering a plan to lock up 13 million acres of land -- and the Department of Interior is refusing to answer questions.

First, a little background: The federal government owns about one-third of the land in the United States -- most of it in western states. For example, 84 percent of Nevada is owned by Uncle Sam. But the government leases large parcels of federal land for all sorts of things -- grazing, mining, exploration, recreation.

Those commercial activities create jobs and tax revenue for the states. Tax revenues from commercial activity on federal lands often pays for local schools. However, with the single stroke of his pen, President Obama can use the Antiquities of Act of 1906 to turn federal land into National Monuments. That would effectively lock up the land from any kind of private use or development.

The plan may actually be more than 13 million acres. Republican members of the House have asked for the rest of the memo, but the Department of the Interior is refusing to hand it over.

It is not really a surprise that the leftists running the Obama machine want to put declare more areas of the United States ceremonial grounds, and it isn't a surprise that these plots by greenies will have the real effect of hurting every aspect of our society. It isn't even that surprising that leftists in the administration are trying to do this in secret and are refusing to answer any questions on it.

What is surprising to me is that you or your friends or your family are voting for Democrats who agree with this, who support it, and who are working to block every effort to bring this proposal to the light of day. Oh, I know Republicans are saints and that when big-government Bush and compassionate conservatives ran things in DC it wasn't perfect, but the alternative is clear- by voting Democrat, you are supporting secret proposals to unilaterally put large areas of the US off-limits for economic development all in the name of some green religion.

Mviwata's aim is "...to strengthen farmers’ groups and networks, facilitate communication and learning through exchanges among farmers for the purpose of defending the interests of small scale farmers in Tanzania..." A member speaking to the large scale land acquisitions in Tanzania, stated in Farm Land Grab that:

(Photo: REDD.net)

In my view, the solution to this problem is not money; rather, the government should obligate large-scale investors to give a part of their shares to us in exchange for our land,” -Ahmed Simba, a Kigoma-based farmer

continuing:

He said the investors should give villagers time to relocate to new places close to such investments. He added that the land lease agreement should cover a few years but be subject to renewal under certain conditions.“We can benefit from large-scale investment in agriculture if we stop leaders from imposing their ideas on farmers, believing that what is in their interests (leaders) is in the interest of the nation,”

More here

Franklin Cudjoe writes "...Famine in the fertile climes of southern and eastern Africa, however, seems more shocking. But there's a common thread: centralized state rule -- incompetent at best -- marked by corruption and sustained by aid...more temperate southern and eastern African countries are on the edge of famine, too, with 10 million affected in southern Africa alone. Again, we find the same economic profile: Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho all lack economic freedom and property rights; all have economies mismanaged by the state; all depend on aid...Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi believes that allowing Ethiopians to own their land would make them sell out to multinationals. He seems to have overlooked a basic market principle: It demands a willing seller and a willing buyer at an agreed price. If that price is worth selling for, the farmer might have some money to reinvest elsewhere; if that price is worth buying for, the purchaser must have plans to make the land profitable. If there is no sale, owners might have an incentive to invest in their own land and future, having, at last, the collateral of the land on which to get a loan.After decades of socialism, Ethiopia's agricultural sector -- the mainstay of the economy -- is less productive per capita than 20 years ago when Band Aid tried to defeat famine. Although 60% of the country is arable, only 10% has been cultivated. Ethiopia is entirely dependent on donations; but instead of grasping reality, Mr. Zenawi, a member of Tony Blair's "Commission for Africa," is forcing resettlement on 2.2 million people..."
Also covered at PSD Blog

As I am reading the Bible to one of my children, I read the following passage from the Book of Genesis, passages 47:23-47:26-

Then Joseph said to the people, 'See, I have bought you and your land for Pharaoh. Here is grain. Go and sow the land. And when you harvest it, a fifth of everything you get belongs to Pharaoh. Keep four parts for yourselves to be used for next year's seed, and as food for yourselves and for your households and little ones.

'You have saved our lives' they said. 'We will gladly be serfs of the Pharaoh.'

So Joseph made it a law throughout the land of Egypt- and it is still the law- that Pharaoh should have as his tax twenty percent of all the crops except those produced on the land owned by the temples.

I may be wrong in my interpretation of this, and I am not a trained Biblical scholar, but it seems to me that the deal was that the government would feed them in exchange for a 20% tax and slavery. A couple things come to mind- really, all questions that I leave unanswered here.

First, 20% taxes are very low compared to what we pay now days. Is 20% taxes, complete welfare, and slavery comparable at all to 40% taxes, no welfare, but no slavery? What is going to happen when we do have a total welfare state- how far behind is slavery after that? Wait, is the Pharaoh the good guy or the bad guy for centrally planning the economy, lording over us, and taxing us so?

Lastly, is this the vision that our Founding Fathers had for our nation? Is this the vision that our grandparents had? Our great-grandparents? Is it me, or has something gone wrong, and instead of low taxes and freedom, we now live in a state of high taxes and increasing tyranny? Is this really the best way to do things?

The United Nations wants to be the one who aliens get taken too. Mazlan Othman, the head of the U.N.'s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa) was recently named  "Chief Alien Ambassador". In this role, she will lobby for funding and assistants and office space so that if aliens ever do land on our planet and ask to see our leader, the UN can claim that it has in place the bureaucracy to handle the negotiations. She will set out the details of her proposed new role at a Royal Society conference in Buckinghamshire next week.

The truth of the matter is that your tax money is going to the United Nations who have people working diligently on how they can take power and voice and authority from you and your elected Representatives and rule over you. Don't forget, the UN is in reality a collection of despots and tyrants with only a few truly elected and limited executives scattered in, and one has to be very careful about ceding to that body future negotiations with alien races. The UN gave Iran the chair of the Council on Human Rights- they'd probably select North Korea to negotiate with the aliens because Kim Jung Il is a moonbat.

The good thing is that in all likelihood this plan will just siphon money from hard working people and give it to appointed academics who will sit around living nicely on your income. I highly doubt it will be the blunder that will end the entire human race. Rest safely- if aliens do land and plan on destroying us, the Lightmaker will part the seas and save humanity with the musical sounds of himself.

UPDATE: If movies are accurate, it is unlikely that aliens will land somewhere where residents recognize the United Nations as any sort of authority on anything- they tend to like trailer parks (see The Last Starfighter) and stuff.

Jeremy Cronin writes in Pambazuka News:

"We are told, for instance, that ‘land reform’(in Zimbabwe) did not succeed because the British failed to meet their financial obligations as agreed in the Lancaster House negotiations. But what kind of heroic anti-imperialist liberation movement is this? Can you imagine the Cubans arguing two decades after their revolutionary breakthrough that they had not implemented land reform because the US refused to subsidise it? President Mugabe’s demagogic ‘anti-imperialism’ is not an anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the interests of the peasantry, the workers (insofar as any remain employed) and the progressive professional and middle strata of Zimbabwe’s society (and indeed of our region). It is a pseudo anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the narrow interests of a rentier capitalist elite within Zanu-PF and the upper echelons of the state. It is a stratum that is entirely parasitic on state power. State power is used to pillage for the purposes of primitive accumulation. And remember, much of the recent socio-economic crisis in Zimbabwe dates back to the pillaging ‘peace mission’ to the DRC in the mid-1990s, which ended in bankruptcy and defeat for a once professional and proud Zimbabwean army."

There are certain ideas, certain beliefs, that should be the basis of every political conversation that you have, that mark your every political speech. These ideas came to us from our ancestors, who fought the most powerful nation in the world and through the grace of God won, winning more land, richer land, than any nation has ever won before or since. And it was the generations before us who toiled on this land, expanding it, enriching it, all while following the ideas of our founders.

We must never forget that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God with rights which can not be taken away, and that some of these rights- the most important ones perhaps- are the right to live, the right to live in freedom, and the right to keep and own property.

These rights existed before government, and government has no moral claim on them- only a tyrannical government can ask you to kill your unborn baby or not seek medical care when you are old, only a despotic government will take away your personal responsibility and ability to make choices, and only a bad government will pretend that it is entitled to your property.

It is very important that we remember these things, because if we stray from our founding beliefs, than our prosperity and safety will disappear. As our nation does stray into these bitter times, many our once again remembering how bold, how controversial, how radical our founding fathers were, believing those ideals so enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. It is in our hearts and souls that we know these words were correct when spoken, and we know that government is put among men only to protect life, liberty, and property, and not to provide homes, healthcare, education, welfare, or consumer goods.

Our ancestors established America and gave it to us, so that their descendants could enjoy the dream that they had won. They did not really want us adding or subtracting to the meaning and intent of their dreams- they wanted us to stick closely to the dream, the freedom, the liberty, the protection that they had won with the grace of God.

This is still a great nation, and we can keep in great, but only if we keep the Declaration of Independence in our hearts and speak it often. When in public meetings or when making a public comment, try to work in the words "all men are created equal," or "right to life, liberty, and property," or "government's purpose is to secure these rights". There is no need to re-invent the wheel- there is only the need to re-remember our Founding.

These comments were inspired by The Bible, Deuteronomy 4.

Until 1980, the United States was the world's leading producer of uranium, but today there are only three operating uranium mines left. This may have been due to the fall in uranium prices, which hit a low of $7.92 per pound in 2001. But with the price climbing to over $50 today, there is renewed interest in mining uranium, which is essential to powering nuclear power plants and important for national security- and it gets even better, because there are still considerable deposits of uranium in the United States, including fairly large deposits that were discovered in northern Arizona over recent years.

Uranium mining leads to cheaper nuclear power which leads to cleaner domestic energy production and a better environment- its just the sort of win-win-win scenario that only someone like Barack Obama could reject.

Via RadioViceOnline:

Last week, without much media attention, President Obama, this time via Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, put the nix on certain uranium mining on federal lands in northern Arizona. Sadly, this too, is political pandering, as, apparently nuclear power is as toxic to the left as is coal and oil power. And, per this fiat, the land in question is off limits to uranium mining for the next 20 years.

Let’s look at the process. The Bureau of Land Management is in charge of analyzing whether uranium mining is good or bad for the environment in this area. It found that the

mining would have ‘no direct impacts’ on protected wilderness areas. The impact on drinking-water supply in the Colorado River was also found to be ‘negligible’... The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the northern Arizona parcels [withdrawn from mining] contain uranium that, mined to capacity, would generate enough electricity to power Los Angeles for 154 years.... [t]he land bureau’s impact statement estimates that [the administration's decision] will cost the region $160 million in average annual economic output…

Northern Arizona currently has an unemployment rate of 17%. But, then again, Arizona in general, and northern Arizona in particular, is “red”. Let me suggest an ugly Presidential thought- "I’m not going to win Arizona anyway, so, it makes more sense to appease the left and perhaps pick up some votes."

One of the earlier actions undertaken by the Obama administration was to put in place bans on mining for a range of precious resources. It was bans such as these that have delayed the recovery in our nation and led to tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes and jobs- and even if the economy revives over the next couple months that does not take away from the fact that policy actions such as bans on mining hurt Americans lives, liberty, and property.

One such ban was a ban on mining for uranium in northern Arizona, which was originally put in place for 2 years so that officials could study the situation further. Obama officials were hoping that their meme that energy mining was destructive and bad and wrong would be proved true and so they could stop mining permanently, but then when the report came back that the mining wasn't in any way bad, they just shrugged their shoulders and banned it anyways.

And the cherry on to- President Obama then has the audacity to argue that they did this to SAVE JOBS and ENCOURAGE ECONOMIC GROWTH, and that now he is going to campaign on this theme- that by stopping the extracting of valuable resources he actually made our nation more wealthy; that by stopping thousands from being employed to extract these minerals he created more jobs; and that he has protected the environment even though the environmental impact from the mining was declared to be 'negligible' by liberal bureaucratic agencies which were likely pressured by Obama administration officials.

This double-speak, hypocrisy, and lying is characteristic of this administration, and the quicker it is gone, the quicker its actions can be reversed, we can begin to safely and responsibly mine valuable minerals, produce cheaper domestic energy, lower the costs of electricity for poor people, and help the working man to get ahead.

A sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority within its jurisdiction. When the Pilgrims left England and came to America, in their hearts they didn't recognize as their sovereign lord the King of England, realizing that anyone who could make it wrong to practice your religion could not truly be the real authority over your actions. The Pilgrims didn't recognize themselves as sovereign lords over themselves, able to determine what was right and wrong for themselves, knowing that this sort of selfishness and vanity would lead away from morality and create an absence of law. When the Pilgrims came to America, they didn't recognize 'no one' as sovereign, realizing that someone had to be responsible for their actions and had to provide law over them or else their community would dissolve into anarchy.

When the Pilgrims arrived in America, they knew in their hearts who their sovereign lord was- they knew who was the real lawmaking authority who watched over them and governed their behavior. Even on the shores of a faraway world, far from the British military or the power of the crown, far beyond the reach of any monarch, in a hostile land filled with potentially hostile people, the Pilgrims sat down and gave thanks to their sovereign lord and savior, to the authority which governed their society, to the source of law and rules and power, and to the one person who could possibly guarantee their safety and salvation. The Pilgrims gave thanks to God and his son, Jesus Christ, recognizing him as their sovereign.

Nolan Finley, writing in the Detroit News today, wrote in Editing God out of history distorts truth:

Ask any grade school kid who the Pilgrims were giving thanks to on the first Thanksgiving and I'll lay you three-to-one odds that the answer you get is, "the Indians." Public education is so obsessed with separation and so uncomfortable with discussions of religion that it has sanitized the unbreakable link between faith and America's founding. Now children are taught that the Pilgrims set the first Thanksgiving dinner for the Native Americans who helped keep them alive during their first harsh year in the New World.

This is more than just a small distortion in the name of political correctness. And it's not one of those Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays issues. Whether you're a believer or non-believer, you should be concerned that God is being written out of this nation's history because doing so will limit our understanding of who we are as a people.

Faith was the driving force in the lives of the Pilgrims. Certainly the Indians helped them through the deprivations of that first year. But the settlers believed it was their prayers that accounted for their survival. And despite the starvation and sickness, they saw this new land as a great gift from God, a place where they were free to practice their religion.

The freedom to worship sparked a hunger for other liberties and created a culture that chafed at submission to arbitrary authority.

The words they used matter. When you edit out "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" from the Declaration of Independence, as President Barack Obama has been doing lately, you lose the understanding that the early Americans were able to take the extraordinary risk of breaking way from their king and taking responsibility for their own governance because they believed God was the only sovereign they were answerable to.

It was a remarkable proposition at a time when the entire rest of the world was under the rule of monarchs.

The belief in America's divine destiny and its providential partnership fueled the nation's sea-to-sea expansion and sparked a missionary zeal for spreading freedom. It gave rise to the notion of America's large and unique place in the world and the theory of American exceptionalism that is also now considered quaint in many quarters.

The irony here is that schools have no problem exposing our flaws in the name of getting history right. It almost relishes defrocking our heroes — Jefferson owned slaves, and so did Washington; Jackson practiced genocide; the pioneers ravaged the land. They do so even to the point of challenging the nation's legitimacy.

But when it comes to discussing the very complex and integral ways religion shaped our history, educators lose their nerve. So they invent more convenient scenarios, such as Pilgrims cooking up the idea of a huge Thanksgiving dinner to honor their Indian benefactors, instead of the God whom they ardently believed led them to this New World and controlled every aspect of their fate.

There's both good and bad in the nation's religious history. Americans have done some noble things in the name of serving God, and they've made some tragic mistakes doing the same. It's not proselytizing to explore that relationship between God and country. It's just telling the truth.

Truth is largely being scrubbed from public schools today, especially in the social studies, in ways big and small, and the fact that almost every single one of my students thinks that Thanksgiving was held to give thanks to the Native-Americans and not God is just one more piece of evidence that our nation is losing its history and its soul, and soon when people ask you who your sovereign is, your answer of "The President of the United States" will not be the same as the Pilgrim's reply of "God and Jesus."

Image via Wikipedia

In Tree Hugger:

The Rights and Resources Initiative says that while about one-third of forest in Latin America and Asia are under community control, in Africa that rate drops to just 2%. With such a low rate of land tenure, and the current slow rates of reform, the report says it would take the countries in the Congo Basin 260 years to reach the level of land ownership reform achieved in the Amazon.

Why is this important? A number of reports, this on included, point out that without effective community involvement, protection of indigenous people's rights, and those of women, programs to stop deforestation and decrease poverty are seriously compromised.

More Here

Back in the hellish years of Republican domination of our nation, back when economic growth was a respectable number, unemployment was low, and things generally were happier, there was a period of time for several months when our nation debated rules regarding whether or not public lands should be developed and how that development should work. Columnists wrote about it, policy advisers debated it, talking heads discussed it, and a rousing public debate was held in an open and free society on the issue. Ultimately, in 2003 Bush decided to order the Bureau of Land Management to allow more forests and wilderness lands to be open to road building, so that firefighters could more easily fight deadly forest fires that destroyed these forests and wilderness lands, and to restore the power to manage wilderness areas and forests back to the states, which had held this power from 1866 to 1979.

Look back at the historical record- go to http://www.google.com/, type in search terms like 'wilderness' or 'public lands' or 'Bush', customize your search by date, and narrow it down from the years 2002 to 2004, and you'll see this debate, see the analysis, see all the time and effort and due thought that a guy like Bush put into this small but important change on federal policy.

Today, with no discussion, analysis, thought, regard, public debate, open forum, editorials, round-table discussions, or any real analysis, the Obama administration decided to suddenly announce that the federal government was claiming once again the sole power to decide how all lands in our nation should be managed, including lands that environmentalists and fanatics think about pretending to claim are 'wilderness' or 'forest land', and in doing so will result in lower economic development of these lands, less jobs, less prosperity, more forest fires, less access to these lands for citizens enjoyment, less ability to manage them, and a general worsening of society. As is usual with Obama, his attempts through this policy to make the world a better place will in the end result in the world a far worse place, and as is usual with Obama, his actions were conducted in a manner more fitting of a despot or dictator than the leader of a free nation.

By contrast, type in http://www.google.com/, type in search terms like 'wilderness' or 'public lands' or 'Obama', customize your search by date, and narrow it down from the years 2009 to 2010, and you'll see the lack of debate, the absence of analysis, no time and effort and due thought that a guy like Obama put into this small but important change on federal policy- par for the course for a despotic dictator, but not at all what a nation of free people should tolerate from our President. Of course, liberals and Democrats cheer this, but then again, they cheer and support and like it when unelected bureaucrats, life-time appoint judges, and dictators make choices for free people, usurp their authority, and violate their sovereignty.

Our nation slips bit by bit into tyranny, and the damage to our Republic is growing so great I fear that we will never again be able to recover from it. The damage comes in ways large and known, such as Obamacare or the Porkulus bills, and in ways small and hidden, such as the EPA unilaterally rejecting Congress' role in our system of government and deciding that it will install cap-and-tax on us, or the EPA violating the 10th amendment and attacking Texas, or the FCC seizing control of the internet in violation of a liberal Congress' will. Obama is a Democrat, his actions can not be checked because citizens of some states voted Democrat in the last election, and our only hope that actions such as these can be mitigated is because some residents of some states voted Republican. Republicans have their problems and commit their fair share of blunders and bad decisions to, but it is the Democratic Party and their elected officials who today represent the greatest threat to your life, liberty, and property.

Not sure if this was one of the decisions that made it in Bush's book- I still need to read Decision Points.

Glenn Hubbard writes in FP:

In all rich countries, the development of a thriving business sector came before physical and social infrastructure. In fact, the Marshall Plan worked because it made loans to European businesses first, which then paid money back into a national pot to fund commercial infrastructure. Africa has already demonstrated its potential for achieving the same. In telecommunications, for example, Africa has become the first continent where cell phones outnumber land lines, thanks to many excellent African entrepreneurs (and the many terrible government land-line systems). Besides, businesses that have a stake in the maintenance and viability of a given project are bound to be far more apt at building and maintaining infrastructure than aid agencies, which have been trying to do it and failing for the past 40 years. Given that many parts of the continent still lack basic roads, water systems, electrical grids, and more, isn't it time to retire the current, aid-driven system?

More here

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Cities Feeding People: a book published by IDRC highlights:

The importance of urban food production as a source of both income and food. It stresses the wide socioeconomic spectrum of urban farmers and the critical importance of self-grown food for the poorest urban dwellers, particularly those living in households headed by women. The studies also emphasize the growing commercial importance of certain foods such as vegetables, poultry, and eggs.

It goes on to say that:

Government response to urban food production has generally been one of neglect if not harassment. Land-use regulations for both public and private land are needed for urban food production to flourish. Improved information about crops and fertilizers, water, and pesticides could greatly increase crop production while immunization and advice on feeding would improve livestock and reduce the wastage by premature death. To encourage such governmental reconsideration of policies toward urban and peri-urban farming, however, careful quantitative comparative studies must be completed to understand current practices.

photo courtesy of RUAF foundation

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Here is a poem I wrote in honor of our Dear Leader:

Emanuel wished on an Obama scale,
And that’s what started Obama Tales.
Around the room the dollars flew,
But Emanuel and George knew what to do.
They climbed on the backs of their Obama friends,
Now the adventures never end!

Obama Tales, Obama Tales
It’s almost time for Obama Tales.
Come along and take my hand,
Let’s all go to Obama Land.

There’s Joe he’s the biggest,
Not so brave of heart.
There’s Hillary,
So shy, but so very smart.
There’s Eric and Elena and their tales of fun,
Cause you know two heads are better than one.

Obama Tales, Obama Tales
It’s almost time for Obama Tales.
Come along and take my hand,
Let’s all go to Obama Land.

Okay, so maybe this is better set to music. Click here to see what I was thinking for the tune.

Mahmood Mamdani writes in LRB:

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact...[continue reading]

via 3QuarksDaily

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Fatimata Ly reports from Gourounsi Land in Burkina Faso:

Not far from Pô is located the famous city of Tiébélé composed of spectacular semi-circular shaped traditional houses. In Tiébélé like in Pô, the facades are decorated with black, white and brown geometric signs and symbols. The black is obtained from graphite, the white from kaolin and the brown is a mixture of earthy tones and nere (Parkia Biglobosa) also used to colorize and seal ceramics. The regular patterns symbolize the culture, the history of the Kassena community part of the Gourounsi people.

More here

Fred Meijer, the Chairmen and co-founder of Meijer, passed away last month, and although I am hesitant to politicize his death, I really think that in his life and death there are important lessons for voters and citizens of our great nation.

Dutch immigrants Hendrik Meijer and his son, Frederik Gerhard Hendrik Meijer (Fred Meijer), founded the grocery superstore Meijer's in Greenville, Michigan during the height of the Great Depression in 1934. After studying trends in the grocery industry, Meijer was among the first store to offer self-service shopping and shopping carts, giving customers more freedom to choose the products that they wanted to buy without waiting for a helping hand from a friendly grocer. Meijer also worked hard to find and offer staple items at bargain prices, saving his customer money.

In 1962, the modern format of Meijer was started, with a store at the corner of 28th Street and Kalamazoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that set the standard for hypermarkets today. Unlike other grocers of the day, this store was large (180,000 square feet) and combined grocery shopping and department store shopping into a single large store, pioneering one-stop shopping. When Hendrik died, Fred Meijer took over a company that had dozens of stand-alone grocery stores and several large stores and expanded the company over the next several decades until it had over 190 stores spread between several states in the Midwest, revenues approaching $15 billion, 72,000 employees, and was rated as one of the biggest retailers in America.

Fred Meijer became very wealthy, and because of this, many in our nation might feel that he should have been taxed more, that he should have done more to help out others, or that we needed a government to confiscate his ill-gotten wealth from him and redistribute it to people who were somehow more deserving. He was one of the so-called 1%, and lived in a very nice community when he died.

But Meijer worked hard for his wealth and did more with it to benefit our society than government ever could redistributing it to others. To earn his wealth, he worked hard and used his talents in ways that benefited people greatly. For example, Wal-mart initially failed because Sam Walton thought that you could just tack on a grocery store to a discount store- but Fred Meijer knew that quality was important too, and so his stores were successful because of the quality produce and meat in them. Wal-Mart figured this out, improved its quality, and has been a success since. The success that Meijer earned through his hard work benefited all of us in higher quality foods in hyperstores, sold at cheap prices so that even poor people can now eat quality meats, cheeses, and produce.

Fred Meijer also gave back to his community in ways that government employees seizing his wealth and giving it to others could never understand. Perhaps his most significant contribution has been the land and sculpture collection for the 132-acre Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, a botanic garden and sculpture park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But he also donated land for a Grand Valley State University campus in Holland, Michigan, donated a section of the Berlin Wall (which now stands in the Meijer Lobby of the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids) personally offered a donation of $25 million and property to fund a relocation and expansion of the historic John Ball Zoo (voters voted against the proposal), donated $1 million to Michigan's White Pine Trail State Park for improvements, helped renovate Grand Rapids' downtown Civic Theatre, and has done many more projects too. He even bought a big-screen TV for residents of his retirement community so they could watch the Super Bowl better.

And perhaps most important, for nearly 80 years Meijer has contributed to the tax base of the states and communities where it has a presence.

Mr. Meijer worked hard for his wealth and had a right to do with it as he pleased- unlike a national government which believes that it has a right to his wealth simply because it has the power to take it from him. His hard work, innovation, and lifetime achievements created this wealth and it is to him to determine how it should be spent- and we should be grateful that we have people like him around. This class-warfare and envy that is engulfing our nation needs to stop, and we must once again celebrate success, achievement, and greatness, and not let the government encourage us to fight over the scraps and carcass of a failing nation.

Here is an excellent article from the Times of London:

Understanding America means realising that John McCain could yet be the next president of the United States. America is a huge and lonely country. Beyond the familiar cities lies a massive expanse of suburbs and ex-urbs and flat plains and rural land. Here live the millions who fill the churches, serve the military, man the factories and till the land. These people are the constituency of Mr McCain and Sarah Palin. They underpin the resilience of the American Right

In middle America, talking about the military is talking about their lives. For middle America, it is not a joke to hunt moose, it is not kooky to believe in biblical truth, and the phrase “Hockey Mom” needs no translation.

From the beginning of the presidential campaign the appeal of John McCain, this authentic American hero, has been underestimated. He has proven that his rebel streak, his independence and his maverick spirit strike a real chord with voters. He has been underestimated and he should not be.

The Democratic convention was a showcase for America's ideals, appealing to voters to back the future rather than the past. The Republicans appealed to the heartland, pitting the people against the powerful. It has worked before.

Good insight from across the pond- this election might not be about change or race or hope, but rather about the identity of America.